Part Time - Vegan

A while ago, I went on a vegan diet and while I was avoiding all forms of animal products I noticed a few things about how food affected me.

First, a true vegan eats nothing that comes from a animal, so I really wasn't a true vegan, because I did eat fish during this time, but all other animal products were gone from my diet. I learned a lot about myself and my food for the almost three months that I was without any “land animal” products.

I started off with a good positive can do attitude and then I went through my pantry and cleared out all of the animal tainted products. As my pre-vegan diet wasn't that dependent on meat I didn't so much miss that, but there were other things that I missed. Mayonnaise has eggs, out. Butter, out. Margarine, has milk fat in it. Some butter substitutes are worse than the real thing. No milk, cheese or any other dairy tainted product, like massed potatoes or other things we don't always think of as dairy, might have dairy in it. All of that was out. No chicken broth based soups. The list goes on and on.

So what do you eat when you are a vegan. Tons of soy and soy based products ( only non- gm soy).
Fruits and all kinds of vegetables.

I'm a decent cook and I love fruits and veggies, but it didn't take long before the options seemed to close in on me and I stopped looking forward to eating. At lease the way I used to. That is when I discovered an important thing about veganism.

When so much is off limits, food becomes a less and less important part of your day. I found myself eating when I was starving, not because it was lunch or dinner time. I began to crave certain fruit and the taste of steamed broccoli with lemon and pepper delighted my taste buds like any steak or anything else ever had. The process took about a month, but once I arrived at this point of not thinking about food until I was being disturbed by the growl in my belly I understood how food had been seducing me before.

Commercial TV is the worst. I had to stop watching so much TV, the ads were driving me nuts. I love cheese pizza, not pepperoni not sausage, just plain old cheese pizza with ample amounts of garlic on it.
You can't believe how much the pizza industry must spends on advertising. Then every fast food place in the world has six or seven different ads running all the time. They are seducing us to eat their foods.
When you are a vegan, you are no longer their target market and the ads seem silly and corny. But when a double bacon cheese burger is your thing, it's hard to ignore the 1080i close up of a dripping pile of flesh, bacon and cheese.

While I was on this diet, my taste buds rejected anything processed or containing any chemical additives or what ever else they put in the dipping sauce for fried zucchini.

One night, late, I , realized that I hadn't eaten all day, other than a fruit smoothie in the morning, I stopped and ordered the only thing a vegan can, at a fast food establishment, fries and onion rings. Not a bright idea. The dipping sauces tasted like a mixture of cough syrup and motor oil and they left me feeling like a bag of rocks had been installed into my belly.

Soon, I could go all day with two peaches a wedge of watermelon. Or two fruit smoothies and sometimes less.

Then it became perfectly clear that I couldn't eat as much as I used to, and after a meal, rather than having a weighed down feeling, I was energized. Strange, but it turns out less is more.
One of my favorite meals was so simple and satisfying that I'm going to share it.

Super Berry Smoothie

½ cup each of :
Strawberries
Blueberries
Raspberries
2 tlb spoons of honey
1 cup of soy milk
Ice.

Combine and blend until you can't take the sound of the blender another second.

Veggie Sandwich

9 Grain thick sliced wholewheat bread
Hummus
Cucumbers
Tomatoes
White Onion
Alfalfa sprouts
Lemon Juice

Toast the bread, use hummus like you would mayonnaise and top with sprouts and a squeeze of lemon juice. Slice the Cucumbers, tomatoes, and Onions, and pile them on.

Sounds lame, but it's incredible how you feel after such a simple meal.

Try it, and tell me what you think.