Vegan-Zen

I can't, I can't cut out meat, cheese, EGGS! I love eggs! It would be too hard and I don't want to set myself up to fail!

Before I began my new Vegan journey, I would say this or some variation of it, all day long. I could not visualize myself, making such drastic changes and being successful. I had been indoctrinated with the way I was eating, I, a young black girl from Chicago, was taught to eat while you could! Food was scarce when I was coming up, so nothing went to waste, our left overs, had left overs, and we were told to clean our plates! People were starving all over the world and we were lucky to have this meal. I knew the kindness of strangers, before I knew what the word "stranger" meant.

The necessity of food, and the worry of not having it, filled my life. I sought out every occasion to eat, even when I wasn't hungry, then I would eat way more than my share. This lead to a long list of health issues, all of which, I am tryng to correct now. Needless to say, I love food, but the food I loved was killing me, what I was choosing to eat anyway. Dealing with Diabetes, High Blood Pressure and High Cholesterol, all because of what I chose to eat.

We all need to eat, I needed to eat, I just needed to change the amounts and types of food I was eating. Then while searching YouTube for any help on losing weight, I stumbled upon on a video on being Vegan. Mic the Vegan, the thumbnail to his video was a woman with a small waist, so he had me at "hello! His videos are very informative, and it was easy for me to verify on my own, what he was saying. It all sounded good, all those benefits, I needed all the benefits, but was I strong enough to do it? I didn't think so! I thought I would fail and succumb to one my many ailments, I became very depressed and felt sorry for myself, for about 1 second. Then I said NO! Not now, not ever, will I give up that easily. I was stronger than that, I just needed to prove it to myself!

So, I began to set myself up to succeed, I began by removing the meat from my diet. Believe it or not, that was the easiest part of this journey! I just stopped eating meat, I replaced it with Mushrooms and Tofu, and some meat substitutes, to get me over the hump. Then came the true test, the one no girl should ever have to go through, my cheeses! Why, oh why, did I decide to do this? Not my delicious creamy cheeses! Please, please don't leave me! I literally mourned the loss of cheese, not meat, cheese! So the moral of that entire rant is, you may think meat is going to be the thing that will break you, and it may not be. I can turn down meat on my plate, like a bed spread, but come by with a cheeses platter, and I will be talking to my ancestors for strength.

Then I come to realize, while researching all the foods I could no longer enjoy. That if I was going to fail, it was going to be because of the way I looked at my new diet. First, I had to stop calling it a "diet", this journey was to save my life, so I accepted the phrase "life style change", until a sutable replacement comes along. And this is that, a life style change, I have literally changed my life, by changing what I put in my mouth.

I have been taken off one of my diabetic medications and being weened off the other. My resting heart rate is an average of 59, at this point I lost 26 lbs (not in 42 days, includes weening period). My edema is practically non-existent now, and my diabetic sores, have healed in recored time, I have never healed from injury as quickly as I can now, that alone says a lot. I have been a vegan for 42days! I can't wait to see what the next 42 days bring!

These milestones, are all because I changed my attitude. Instead off looking up foods I could not have (and lets be honest, I already knew what foods I could not have, did I really need to research that?) I needed to research what foods I could have, cause that I did not know. Once, I made that simple mind tweek, I became unstoppable! It is so easy to say, "naw, I'm good", when offered something on my "ya crazy" list. The "ya crazy" list, is a list of foods, that I would be crazy to put to my lips again! We all have one, I just wrote mine down, makes it easier to remember.

The point being, my attitude was the only thing holding me back, I had to accept this lifestyle in order for me to be successful. It was not that hard for me to convince myself, if I continued on my current path, I would lose this life! All of the dreams, I have, gone! All because I love decadence of certain foods! And I do still miss that orgasmic reaction, of me throwing my head back when I would bite into something nauty. Instead, I'll stay on this current path and live long enough to enjoy some actual...