Why the sudden desire to become a vegan?
I made a friend through the internet. She is an animal rights activist. On her facebook page, she has posted a series of photos and videos depicting some of the horror of modern farms. Some of the photos anthropomorphize (my god, what a word) the animals. This annoys me. No one likes feeling manipulated. But the suffering she documents is very real. It has given me pause.
For her birthday, I went a day without eating meat or consuming dairy in her honor. I had my latte with soy, and hummus for dinner. It wasn’t easy, but I made it. It got me thinking.
Also, and there is no polite way to say this, but I’m fat. Not horribly so. I am a mother, and I look like a lot of mothers. Which in America at the turn of the 21st century means, I’m fat.
I was thinking about the fat thing yesterday. There is a woman at work who greatly annoys me. She plays her music in her cubicle for all to hear, and gives you a nasty look when you ask her to turn it off. In a passive aggressive moment, I turned on NPR. She turned her music up, and I turned up Talk of the Nation.
Turns out, NPR is pretty interesting. Yesterday, they had on Tara Parker-Poke who wrote the Fat Trap for New York Times Magazine. The long and the short of it was that it is very hard to lose weight permanently. Her assertion is that once you are fat, your body kind of likes you that way and you will never be able to eat like a regular person. A caller came on and said that she had converted to a vegan lifestyle and had kept the weight off. Tara Parker-Poke pointed out that most people are not vegans. I also remembered that a woman in my Weight Watchers group had lost 75 lbs and kept it off for years by becoming vegan. I am not going to get pregnant again or breastfeed, so I started to think about the vegan lifestyle for me.
Lastly, I have become convinced that the consumption of meat is very hard on the planet. Tomorrow, I will talk about some of my reservations about giving up meat and dairy.
