Vegan for a Week

Pocket of Bolts and I have decided to be vegan for a week. We've talked about it occasionally--it's part of our great long-term food experiment project, namely, trying to find the diet that makes us feel the best and also allows us to lose weight. We tried Diet for a Small Planet type eating, complementary proteins, etc.--what we tended to call Malthusian vegetaraianism, being a vegetarian because it's more ecologically responsible to be lower on the food chain. It was tasty, but unbelievably fattening! Lots of milk and cheese.

One of these weeks, we're going to try being straight-up healthful omnivores (chicken breast etc.), but we decided to try being vegans first. Believe it or not, it's not actually all that hard. We eat a lot of Asian food anyway, which is readily vegan-able. I also bought a vegan cookbook, Garden of Vegan, from our favorite bookstore, Unabridged. Our weekly menu planning, which we've been doing for several months, really helps. We have meals lined up already. We just don't line up anything that has milk or cheese in it.

Lunch is tricky, because if we don't pack one we are really stuck. Also it's hard giving up milk in my tea. We both miss cheese a lot. But overall, it's not nearly as hard as I had imagined it would be. And we are losing weight, despite gorging ourselves at every meal. I think part of the thing is that all of the usual snacks are off limits! And when you're exercising will-power as part of a larger project, it's somehow easier than exercising will-power on a case-by-case basis.

I think ultimately our ideal diet (socially, financially, and health-wise) is probably a slightly flexible one--largely vegetarian or vegan at home, milk/cheese/eggs/meat with company or in restaurants. But in some ways it's only easy giving up cheese and milk chocolate because it's a) temporary and b) absolute. As I said, the case-by-case decisions are more difficult.

One think about the vegan experiment--it sure does feel clean. Not to say I'm eating all organic or natural or anything. There is an incredible variety of chemicals in Coffee-mate, my milk substitute in tea, and in some of the other things we eat. Still, overall I feel cleaner. And although my metabolism seems a little lower than normal (and much lower than when I eat meat), I don't feel like I have less energy. It's more like the reserves are spread more evenly, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, more on this later!