Veganism. Chances are you're hearing that word with a negative connotation so this is a slightly more contoversial topic for today and I guess I should state the usual disclaimer that I'm not trying to ram veganism down anyones throats or come accross as agressive I'm just simply sharing what I've learned,why I think it makes sense and the misinterepretation the majority of people have about it.
So it's been nearly 5 months so far, not that long in the grand scheme of things but still since making the change I've noticed the similarlities in people's responses once I tell them I don't eat anything from an animal. "So what do you eat?" " Isn't that really hard?" or the most bizarre of all "So where do you get your protein?". Never have I ever heard more people concerned about the possibility of me developing a "protein deficieny" -which to be honest doesn't really exist, if anything the world eats too much
protein or at least from the wrong sources but thats another story..
So with this in mind I've gathered some images that set out clearly where you an get iron, protein, calcium, and all your other vitamins and nutrients from plants in case people don't believe me. Alongside this though, I should point out that the reasons for why one should go vegan are endless. Love animals? - dont eat them, Care about the environment? - stop adding to it's destruction, Want to lose weight, tone up and be healthy LONGTERM?.. these are just the basic foundation reasons as to why most people go vegan but not the only ones of course.
Health
I cannot stress enough the importamce of looking at the long term when wanting to be healthy. Everyone knows that juice cleanses, eating vast abouts of fat in a bid to burn more of it, cutting out carbs, the "80/20 diet" or anything else you're doing to restrict your food intake, is not sustanible long term and never will be and are pretty determental to your health. Sure you'll lose weight- no question but it won't be long untill the pounds have climbed back on and then some.
The "everything in moderation" rule is another one, one that I actually used to tell myself. While I can see why it sounds like it makes sense, if you're being healthy during the week and binging on the week end you're not really being healthy are you? You're not only wasting your time,you're also reaking havoc on your digestive system and your metablism and your body in general. Your body was made to take in 2000 calories a day or more if you wish.Carbs and glucose are what your brain and cells run on, if you cut them out you're obviously going to be litargic, irritable, and lazy?! and besides carbs are the best thing since sliced bread! You aren't eating "clean" if you're plate is full of dead animals now are you?!
It shouldn't be about the amount of calories you consume but rather the food sources of them.
Animals and us
Specisim is something that society tends to forget about or leave out of the list of injustices and
prejugudice of today, so to put it simply I'm going to list various animal products with my reasoning for not eating it.
* Milk-
What many may not know is cows milk is in fact breastmilk. It is produced by a female cow when she is pregnant and like any other mammal, is to be feed to her calf. However, in order for us to consume it we must strip the mother and calf away from eachother once he/she is born in order to get the milk from the mother for ourselves. That alone, is pretty sickening to think about. The calf is then used for veal- if it's male whereby it lives for a few months before being slaughtered and if female, the calf will suffer the same fate as it's mother- milked to death before being killed for it's meat and most likely inseminated/ raped at some stage too in order to produce more milk to supply demand.
Now once you let that cruelty sink in, you realise that this milk is intented to make a 500 pund calf into a 1500 pound fully grown cow, right? Therefore it's got to be loaded with hormones and chemicals to grow the CALF, just like our own mother's did with us when we were babies. Along with this you have the bacteria and contamination that spreads during the milking process which tends to produc e pus, scientifically called stomatic cells. These are produced when there's an infection that the body trys to fight by producing this pus. Just like when we have a cut or indeed a spot. So basically you're drinking bactera, hormone infected pimple breast milk! Yuk!
*Cheese & Butter-
These are just additional products to milk, seriously high in fat with no health benefits that can't be gotten from a plant source.
*Eggs-
The result of the menstration cycle in the female hen, the egg is the same egg that women pass during that time of the month. The fact in itself stopped me from eating them. On top of that the process of producing the egg is just as devastating, with appalling conditions for chickens even "free range eggs." Not to mention that eggs contain 12 times the amount of colesterol needed, when the body makes it own colestorol so theres really no need to eat them.
*Pork, Beef, Duck etc-
I could go on a lot about this but instead I'll leave links below to documentaries that are far more telling than I could be. One thing I will say is that there is no "humane slaughtering". The two words contradict eachother- halal or any other system can't possibly kill the animal nicely or without them knowing, also all animals must be alive when being murdered, it's how the blood is drained from them so we can comsume their meat- there is no system or country that eats meat from animals that died of natural causes or anything else.
*Chicken & Fish-
For whatever reason society seems to be taking longer to see that chickens and fish don't escape the pain or slaughter either despite being sliced up on your plate as well as being unhealthy.Chickens have as much of a cruel death as any other farm animal with most being hung upside down, have their nails and beaks clipped before being electricuted on a conveyor belt. Meanwhile fish are collected in their droves and suffocated as they're picked up from nets in their dozens. As for anyone who thinks the seas they live in make them healthy- where do you think all the slurry and feaces from the factor farms goes?
Environment
Again, I could go on about this until next year but the damage animal agricultture does to the earth is staggering. As someone who was never particularly interested in the environment or being "green" the facts from these videos and research I've done is still astonishing. In fact, it is said that if aliens were real and if they were to look at earth from space, the first tthing they would see is all of the land we use for agriculture!
VIDEOS
* "The best speech ever by Gary Yourgovsky" - Genuinely one of the best speeches I've ever heard
* Cowspirarcy- directed by Leonardo Dicaprio, it's available on Netflix and really focuses on the environmental side of it all. -
Link
*Earthlings- first hand insight into these factories, how they handle the animals and the conditions. A hard one to watch. - Link
*101 reasons to go Vegan- Super informative and not aggresive at all! - Link
* The Friendly Activist- really well made, shorter video such a good watch -Link
Youtuber love:
*BonnyRebecca
*CheapLazyVegan
*TheFriendlyActivist
*NaturallyStephanie
*Freelee the banana girl
*Vegan Gains
To see what exactly it is that I eat, I've written two posts on "what I eat in a day"- Here and Here!
EDUCATE YO'SELF PEOPLE!
x
