Becoming a Vegan??!

Becoming a Vegan??

I'm thinking about becoming a vegetarian, but not sure what all I would have to give up. I know meat products, but other than that I am clueless. Also, what do I have to do in order to stay healthy, keep all the regular vitamins that meat products supply me with? (Protein, etc.)

1 day ago
Thank you all so far. I will probably stick with dairy products as I rarely eat a lot of them anyway as i'm already pretty much lactose intolerant. (I had gastric bypass in 2002) If any of you could provide websites that I could look at, that would be helpful, thank you!!

As far as what you need to give up that depends on whether you want to become a vegan or a vegetarian; becoming a vegan is the stricter of the two. Vegans do not eat ANYTHING that comes from animals (that means no meat, cheese, eggs, milk etc etc). Vegetarians however can vary immensely, most diets are based on your person beliefs or goals. As a vegetarian, you can eat all diary products, poultry, and fish. Whether you want to cut out any of these from your diet is your own choice (for example, I do not eat chicken but I will eat fish and all diary products).

In order to stay healthy, you should try to keep your diet as diverse as possible. Eating what you would normally eat as a meat eater just without the meat is the one mistake many new vegetarians make; a book or web reference of vegetarian recipes is probably your best bet if you don't already have foods in mind. Another thing to keep in mind is that if you like the meat recipes, you can always substitute the meat for vegi-meat. If you get the right brands it tastes just as good as the actual meat. One of my family members is a die hard meat eater, but when we served him a sloppy joe with ground meatless on it he didn't even notice is wasn't meat until we told him afterwards.

Vitamins are a good thing to take as well. I personally take Vitamin C and D pills. I get sufficient amounts of protein from other foods such as beans, eggs, and seafood.

I've been a vegetarian for a good majority of my life and I can tell you this much: it ends up being a lot healthier than a meat diet if you pay attention to what you do.