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-spacemermaid~
Feb 9th, 2013, 05:48 AM
Thats a question i think about quite abit and to be honet i actully don't know. i just wasn't as empthetic as i am now i think. i mean, ofcourse i always knew meat and other animal products ome from animals (hence the name "animal " products :p) but it didn't bother me until about a year ago where i thought, theres no way i can be happy and carry on doing this . and well now i'm aot happier. I feel i know it sounds slightly ( i feel wrong sying "cheesy" here" but ) more complete shal i say :). but me as a whole has changed alot in the last few years. i don't know i think i was just imature. i'm not saying hat everyone who does choose to eat animal products is, but i mean i think a non vegan me was an imature me. its hard to explain :/ xx

Rue
Feb 9th, 2013, 02:10 PM
Hello! This is my first post and such a inspiring thread - I have secretly not eaten meat for a year. Secretly. After ordering veggie options going un-noticed for all that time i called my best friend and told her i was going Vegan, who in turn called me a dumb hippy. Which has been the reaction of pretty much everyone i know...

I suppose i have wanted to make this change for a long time. Convienence always used to be my biggest battle, why make yummy food when i can go to a fast food place? (i know, i know, awful) But it always used to make me feel sick. Ive always had these ideas about animal rights, this real love for all animals and i just had enough of ignoring how i felt for the sake of my own selfish convienence.

I have only been eating Vegan for two months & the change has already been drastic, 8 pounds lighter - my skin is glowing, no breakouts, no dry patches, nothing. Im walking around feeling lighter inside too. Not physically lighter - mentally lighter if that makes sense. Guilt free?

I hope this makes sense! x

Blueberries
Feb 9th, 2013, 05:45 PM
Hi Rue and welcome to the forum! :)

Rue
Feb 9th, 2013, 05:58 PM
Thank youuuu <3 :)

-spacemermaid~
Feb 10th, 2013, 01:48 AM
ocd sucks so bad. ..

Clueless Git
Feb 10th, 2013, 10:23 AM
.. but i mean i think a non vegan me was an imature me. its hard to explain :/ xx


Im walking around feeling lighter inside too. Not physically lighter - mentally lighter if that makes sense. Guilt free?

I hope this makes sense! x

Hi Rue, Mermaid, and welcome to the forum :)

For whatever it's worth you both make sense to me.

-spacemermaid~
Feb 10th, 2013, 03:03 PM
thanks . most people on this foum seem to make sense to me..i wander why . not that i think vegans can't disagree. but i most people experience it probably makes things abit easier :). i definitly agreee with Rue about feeling mentally lighter , but i do feel physically lighter too. the though of something like cheese and milk in my system is ( well obviously gross to mea and wuld probabbly make me throw up :/ not just becaause i haven't eaten those things for about a year now and but i couldn't cope with teh guilt on me head so..

-spacemermaid~
Feb 11th, 2013, 05:14 PM
yeah, i feel angry when i see my fmily drinking milk. my little sisters so..indifferent to it all. :/ and i just think. how the fuck doesn't this bother y

Roxi
Feb 18th, 2013, 04:03 PM
I wasn't vegan because I thought it'd be too hard to stay away from cheese. Now just the thought of it makes me sick to my stomach.

Leaf
Feb 19th, 2013, 05:11 PM
I wasn't vegan due to a mix of misinformation and ignorance.

As many others I thought cheese and egg would be a problem. I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I haven't had a single problem with my transition. On the contrary, my transition from vegetarian to vegan has only opened up doors for what I can eat, rather than what I can't eat. So many awesome products! I never look at milk or cheese and think "Yuuum", but I definitely get cravings from oat milk or melted soy cheese :).

vj
Feb 24th, 2013, 12:19 AM
I went vegan about 5 months ago now, and really the main reason for making the switch was that I watched Forks over Knives. I had never really given much thought to it before watching that movie, and had always maintained the thought of "I could never go vegan". I always thought I might give up meat, because I never really cared about it much before. I was never a huge meat-eater growing up, so it was the dairy that was the hardest thing for me to give up in my diet. I don't have any vegan friends, and really know only one vegetarian. So the reason why I was never vegan before then, was mostly because I was under the assumption that I 'was' eating healthily enough. You can check out a chronicling of how the transition has been on my daily blog at www.veganjulia.com (http://www.veganjulia.com).

Tabbycat
Feb 24th, 2013, 01:47 AM
I hadn't really given it much thought for a long time. And then one day I was looking at a video of a rescued dairy cow and it just clicked. My two favorite animals are horses and cows. Why do I think it's OK to eat one but totally wrong to eat the other? Why am I OK with eating pigs but couldn't stand to eat an adorable bunny rabbit? I really questioned my beliefs about eating animals. After that, meat just wasn't palatable anymore.

KnittinMama
Mar 4th, 2013, 08:40 PM
I'll be really honest - laziness and selfishness. That was it. I knew about factory farms. I knew about how eating animal products causes cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other degenerative diseases like Osteoporosis. The thing was, I didn't have the gumption to figure out how to make all of the things my family loves without meat or dairy. My husband is the sort of man who used to say every time I cranked up the Vita-Mix, "can you make me a beer, bacon and chocolate smoothie?" Now he's also vegan, after watching some documentaries like "Forks Over Knives", "Food, Inc." and "Vegucated". Anyway, I didn't know how to make meals out of what we would traditionally, in the Standard American Diet, consider "side dishes". I didn't want to give up my beloved homemade bread, which called for milk, eggs, honey and butter.

As a knitter, I had a particular love for wooly things. If it came from a sheep or Alpaca, I loved it. The problem was that I assumed about wool what a lot of people assume about the meat industry - that fleece sheep were hanging out in a pretty pasture somewhere and sheering was a natural process to keep them comfortable. We just got to enjoy the aftermath of such a necessary procedure. I never would have guessed that the wool market was just as industrialized as meat. That sheep were kept in cramped, filthy, frightening conditions,subjected to the same cruel treatment as meat animals, castrated without anesthesia, genetically modified to produce a denser fleece, and sheered in the cruelest of ways only to be shipped off for slaughter once they're no longer needed. I had heard of the procedure called mulesing for Merino sheep (which was my favorite fleece to work with), but I assumed it was a necessary evil to prevent fly strike. What I didn't know was that if those Merino sheep hadn't been tampered with, genetically, they would have shed their fleece on their own and not be subjected to maggots eating their flesh. Giving up wool fiber to knit and spin with was more difficult than giving up animal products for food. I was never into leather or fur, but wool was my go-to fiber for knitting.

Having the tools and information to make vegan versions of our favorite foods and alternative fibers for knitting and spinning has given me a sense of accomplishment and peace of mind. I can be at peace when I eat and when I knit, knowing a living thing hasn't had to suffer for my choices.

s_am
Mar 9th, 2013, 08:12 PM
I hadn't really given it much thought for a long time. And then one day I was looking at a video of a rescued dairy cow and it just clicked. My two favorite animals are horses and cows. Why do I think it's OK to eat one but totally wrong to eat the other? Why am I OK with eating pigs but couldn't stand to eat an adorable bunny rabbit? I really questioned my beliefs about eating animals. After that, meat just wasn't palatable anymore.

Totally agree. This started me off being vegetarian before I was vegan. All the horse meat scandal here in the UK (horse meat found in beef burgers etc) and everyone saying "I would never eat a horse, only beef" and it really made me angry. Why is one animal more sacred than another? Far better to remove yourself from all that :)

misosoup
Mar 10th, 2013, 12:18 AM
I was vegetarian from the age of 10 and only turned vegan last year.
I wish every day I had turned vegan sooner. I was ignorant. I didn't eat meat or fish, but wasn't that into animal rights. Not like I am now.
As soon as I realised what happens to cows I stopped consuming dairy and eggs. Just wanted to part in it. I felt I was a criminal or something.

I think as well I was scared off by how hard and expensive veganism looked. I found this amazing Italian vegan site that saved my sanity and it didnt seem so overwhelming.

I actually think people would be more shocked at how the cows are impregnated and then their calves taken away, than animals being killed. Because you can argue that meat is natural or whatever, but there is nothing natural about stealing a mother's baby away from her. And then the ball starts rolling and people start to question. Any industry that is built on a power dynamic of human vs animal, nothing about it will ever be ethical.

It's like a parent deciding what is and isn't abuse. When the person with the most power is deciding what is ethical, then we're in trouble.

VeganEsthie
Apr 17th, 2013, 05:27 AM
I think before I went vegan I mostly bounced back and forth between vegan and vegetarian. I would try to cut out cheese and fail. I was already drinking soymilk, replacing other dairy with animal free alternatives but it was cheese that kept drawing me back in. That addiction, you know? I struggled for about a year or two before I did a juice fast for the first time. It was as if it flushed out all of my addictions, haven't eaten dairy since. Someone in the thread also said something about it's easier to go vegan if you know someone who is vegan. I think a lot of my friends are now open to the idea or are already converting because of me. I never got preachy or said much about it, but that fact that I was vegan made them curious. They did their own research and also became vegan.

Peabrain
Apr 17th, 2013, 10:13 AM
I was incredibly naive and uninformed. I'd never personally met any vegans, or at least if I did, they didn't tell me/talk to me about it. No-one ever told me the real issues with the uses of animals. I'd seen occasional reports on animal cruelty, but stupidly thought it was an anomoly, and by far not the norm. I fell for all the "happy cow" "free range eggs" crap, and as I got older and started to have the intelligence needed to refute such diabolical marketing ploys, I didn't use it, because by then it was entrenched.

I thought vegans were fanatics and although I could understand vegetarians, I totally didn't get what was wrong with milk and eggs. Even so, the fact that vegetarians chose not to eat meat, was, in my uneducated opinion, an emotional one and wasn't ethically or morally necessary. I understood some people didn't want to, but still believed we needed it and it never clicked that those vegetarians were not just healthy by pure luck, thinking maybe they didn't need it as much, but I certainly did... I absolutely did not know that calcium was available anywhere else but milk, and it never occurred to question how it was that we were taking it from a different species. I certainly didn't think anything bad happened to the cows.

I was an idiot. It all makes sense to me now, but damn, I just didn't ever connect the dots.

What changed was when my son asked me to help him transition to vegetarianism, and I started looking into things for him. Bit by bit every false belief got challenged and the real gut wrencher was when I suddenly woke up to the fact that humans make milk for their babies, so what on Earth did I think cows made it for? Us? I realised that was completely erroneous and then I looked into what happened to the babies, and that was it. I saw that vegans were right, and I didn't want anything to do with using animals ever again.

Nemesiah
Aug 20th, 2013, 09:09 PM
I buyed into the lie that being Vegan (or vegetarian for that matter) was both too hard and unnatural, that it was a shame that animals had to suffer but that it was a necesary pain. I will be ashamed of having been that imbecile for the rest of my life.

scwendy
Aug 21st, 2013, 05:28 PM
I was honestly partly just following the status quo of our culture and partly just didn't value ALL animals.

I am ashamed to type that, but it is true. I thought everything in moderation was a good philosophy and the whole circle of life/pecking order kind of thing.

As horrible of a person as that makes me sound, I feel better having typed it out. I was, myself, justifying eating "some" meat until this summer:cry:

herbert
Aug 21st, 2013, 08:20 PM
I had the typically entrenched views of the majority that it was a necessary part of our consumption but continued to profess my love for animals without making the connection. I became vegetarian about 13 years ago after developing an auto-immune disease and reading about the benefits of eradicating meat and then not long after started to inform myself of the realities of the meat industry. Shamefully and ignorantly I did not view dairy consumption in the same category and believed that cow's milk was an essential part of our diet with dairy cows leading happy lives. I looked on veganism has weird and extreme. Then by chance I stopped at an local animal rights stall and gathered all the shocking information that I had been ignorant about for so long and this soon lead me into A/R activism and the connection with other vegans. It was at this point that I could no longer justify the 'necessary evil' and my contribution towards suffering of other living beings for my own selfish and ill-informed choices and became vegan. That was 7 years ago ; I would never go back but I just wish the realisation had been there a lot sooner .

Michael4422
Sep 6th, 2013, 02:24 AM
I stopped eating meat because my emotional disconnection to the animals lessoned to a point that made the "meat" appalling to me. Then a few months later, I looked into Veganism, lost my ignorance of the ideology of carnivism and was set free. I'll never go back. Been 3 months. I'm 39. And I'm only now living in accordance to my values. Better late than never.