Day 1 - Or... Why Go Veg?

The leftover pepperoni pizza mocks me every time I open the refrigerator door. It reminds me that this is day one. Day one without meat.

How has the day been? Different, yet excellent.

My beautiful wife, Carolyn, teases that I’m already going a little crazy from a lack of meat, but it’s probably just because I’m sincerely excited about this project and the next 40 days. But if she turns out to be right, be sure to get together and stage some kind of intervention for the sake of my sanity.

Allow me to answer the most pressing question in detail.

Why go vegetarian? Well, there are a lot of answers really.

The idea of being vegetarian has long fascinated me, perhaps because it was all too mysterious. More than it should have been at least. I didn’t really know any vegetarians growing up. I had heard of a woman in my hometown that would go to Burger King and order a Whopper with everything but meat. I always thought that was a horrible waste and quite pointless. It sounded like the equivalent of ordering a Happy Meal without the toy.

Reason #1. For the challenge. In 2007, a week or so before Carolyn and I were married, a bunch of my closest friends and I gathered at an all you can eat barbeque joint, so we could have the manliest entree possible, ribs. There’s something very satisfying about getting together with the guys and acting like cavemen by ripping meat off the bone to calm our hunger. This particular dinner happened to occur during Lent and I had forgotten that one of my friends, Keith, had given up meat for the season. I remember joking with him that we all make mistakes. And while a dozen of us were enjoying meat, meat, and more meat, and Keith, kept going back to the salad bar over and over, determined but relatively unfazed by our carnivore habits. I can’t describe the pity I felt for him as I plunged into yet another rack of ribs. But I wondered if I could ever give up meat, even for a little while. By going veg, I’ll find out.

As for other reasons, there are plenty of reasons why other people choose to make the switch to a vegetarian lifestyle. After doing a little research before beginning this project, I realize that there’s so much that has already been said about why someone might want to consider a major diet change. I do know that PETA has several horribly distributing and unsettling videos that urge people to stop eating meat as a way to fight animal cruelty. I’m certainly not for animal cruelty and I certainly don’t really want to think about what goes on in factory farms. However, I’d be lying if that was one of my biggest reasons to even temporarily become a vegetarian. Still, I came across a few other great reasons to go veg that I absolutely must attribute to Vegetarian Times.

Reason #2. So my dinner plate will be full of color. Do you remember the “Eat 5 A Day The Color Way” campaign? I do, only because it was a topic of discussion in my mass media research methods class. And given the subject matter, it was much easier to wrap my head around the discussion of the simple premise behind the ad campaign than it was to understand the importance of p-values in analyzing the effectiveness of quantitative research. I tried incorporating at least five serving of fruits and/or veggies on my plate each day for a while, but always found my plates looking a little too dull and brown... unless you count the ketchup or cheese. As it turns out, disease-fighting phytochemicals called carotenoids and anthocyanins give fruits and vegetables their rich, varied hues. This diet will be a good way to help me eat a variety of fruits and veggies that could boost my immunity and prevent a range of illnesses.

Reason #3. I could lose some weight. Have you heard of sympathy weight gain? A 2009 BBC report claims that the average father to be can gain about 14 pounds of sympathy weight during his partner’s pregnancy. That study, in a sense, makes me feel better, because when Carolyn was pregnant with our son Isaiah, I gained almost 20 pounds. 20 pounds! Over the past 16 months, my gorgeous wife has lost of her pregnancy weight gain and then some… and I’ve lost about 5 pounds of my sympathy weight. A study conducted from 1986 to 1992 by Dean Ornish, MD, president and director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, found that overweight people who followed a low-fat, vegetarian diet lost an average of 24 pounds in the first year and kept off that weight 5 years later. They lost the weight without counting calories or carbs and without measuring portions or feeling hungry. I’m not expecting much, and I know this experiment is only lasting 40 days, but I’ll let you know if any weight loss develops.

Reason #4. I could save money. Despite the fact that I love my job, I’m not exactly rolling in the dough or going home after work to swim in a pool of money like Scrooge McDuck. Meat accounts for about 10 percent of Americans’ food spending. Vegetarian Times says that eating vegetables, grains and fruits in place of the 200 pounds of beef, chicken and fish each nonvegetarian eats annually would cut individual food bills by hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year. Sheesh.

Reason #5. A vegetarian diet helps reduce famine. Did you know more than two-thirds of grain produced in the U.S. is fed to animals, so that Americans can then turn around and eat those animals? The 7 billion livestock animals in the United States consume five times as much grain as is consumed directly by the American population. “If all the grain currently fed to livestock were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology at Cornell University. While I’m a huge supporter of charities and relief organizations like Compassion International, it’s really amazing that a vegetarian diet is indeed a baby step toward fighting world hunger.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell you why I’ve chosen to blog about this and why I’ve chosen 40 days as the length of this experiment. I may even explain what it means to be a ovolactovegetarian. But if you’re still reading, you probably want to know what I ate today.

- What did I eat on Day 1?

Breakfast. For breakfast, I’ve almost always enjoyed a vegetarian meal. Mostly, because of my Jerry Seinfeld-esque love for cereal. Today was no exception, Cheerios and an apple.

Lunch. Carolyn, Isaiah, and I had a great lunch today with our good friend Hope and our very new friends, the Copes, and Hope’s sister Heidi. Only about 12 hours into this vegetarian diet and I had to turn down part of a meal at a social gathering and explain that I wasn’t eating meat. Luckily, these people were really supportive and even seemed to be sincerely interested. No chicken tortilla soup for me. Instead, loads of salad with added walnuts and northern Italian dressing. And, to be honest, later a peanut butter sandwich.

Dinner. My first vegetarian recipe for the Go Veg project: California Grilled Veggie Sandwich. I trusted the recipe because it was listed among the top 20 vegetarian recipes on allrecipes.com. It also had over 300 five star reviews, which would sure seem to make me an oddball if I disliked it. Carolyn was more than afraid, and I was a little fearful myself. But you could probably put anything on focaccia bread and I’d eat it. While grilling the bell peppers, onions, squash, cucumbers, and zucchini, I inexplicably filled the house with an embarrassing amount of smoke, but the result was tasty. That’s right; tasty. The recipe’s tangy mayo mixture added a lot to the enjoyable mix of crispy veggies and grilling focaccia bread made it even better. And with that, I survived day one. I ate “5 A Day the Color Way.”

I even enjoyed it; despite the teasing the leftover pizza continues to give me when I reach for a soda. 1 day down. 39 to go.

As always, I encourage you to leave comments!