Vegetarian Diet – Day 5

A whole bunch of people replied to me in the Pavlina forums about the vegetarian diet mentoring thing. Almost all of them had practical advice to share.

One person really got to the crux of it. What was my diet like before? Did I eat meat every day?

Yes, I ate meat pretty much every day, so this is quitting cold-turkey (ok, yes, even I have to roll my eyes at that pun).

My diet and cooking vary tremendously depending on my location. I spend a lot of time with my parents, and my mom loves to cook good hearty Midwest meals (key elements being a meat, a vegetable, and some type of potatoes), which my dad loves to eat. I think it is going to be exceedingly difficult to maintain the vegetarian thing at their house for Thanksgiving. I’m a bit afraid of telling my mom I’m trying vegetarianism, actually, because she’ll get all stressed out wondering what the heck to cook if I’m not eating meat.

Other than with my parents, I’m pretty much an on-the-go person, always working or doing something, cooking not being a something I make much time to do. I don’t think there’s a single meal I prepare for myself that involves more than 30 minutes of effort.

So, though all the recipes and stuff people are recommending seem really useful, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t find a more simple focus, since converting to spending any significant amount of time cooking involves a much more complicated 30-day trial adjusting all kinds of points of time-consumption that I would surely fail from trying to change too many things at once.

Darn. You would not think this would be a difficult trial, but it’s only been what, five or six days, and I’m definitely having difficulty with what has turned out to actually be a pretty massive diet shift. I may have to break this down into baby steps. I didn’t put a lot of thought into the “how” on this one, I was mostly acting on inspiration in the moment.