As we approached year’s end 2005, I had a conversation with my son about what he might like to have as a gift for the coming holidays. It seems to be a long-held tradition in my family; my dad had always asked me the very same question. This, of course, puts the burden on the son as now he must contrive some kind of wish list that is reasonable and which won’t place a burden on the parent.
So we hemmed and hawed for a while on this and other subjects upon where he finally said, “Dad, I’d like to have you try my vegan diet for a month”. I swallowed hard as I thought about the prospect of not having turkey or ham dinners in the months soon to arrive. He softened the blow a bit by saying, “It doesn’t have to be November or December. You pick the month.” I thought, well… I have a couple of months to think this over, devise a plan, come up with something other than PB&J sandwiches to eat. I mean, peanut butter is vegan, right? And so far as I know, so is wine and beer [not all of this is strictly true, as I would learn later]. So, we agreed to the plan. Of course, as a loving dad, I still wasn’t off the hook for figuring out his Christmas gift, but that’s another subject…
During the following weeks, I read a lot of books and had many conversations with him and others on how to approach this change of lifestyle for 30 days. My number one concern was: What to do about cheese?! I mean, pizza?! Without cheese?! That was a tough one. And after all, I do live in the BBQ capital of the world (another hot topic for debate). What to do about that?!
In the weeks that followed, I learned about substitute products for butter, milk, eggs, and protein. Yes, I learned about protein. And vitamin B-12. And a whole bunch of other things. And I even tried living mostly vegan for the month of December, 2005.
As the promised adventure was about to begin for the month of January, I thought I’m going to celebrate one last time. I’ll have a good ol’ fashioned pizza with lots of thick, gooey, stretchy whole milk mozzarella cheese. And pepperoni. Oh. My. God. I’d gone to Heaven…
Until it started…
My stomach growled. It churned. I broke out into sweats. I thought I was going to die and was afraid I wouldn’t. It turns out that after consuming a largely vegan diet for a month, when you revert to old ways, the system does not like that.
That was now over 15 years ago. I did try the 30 day vegan diet as promised. And then stayed on it for another 30 days. And another year. And to this day, still vegan. I don’t preach to others about it. I have lots of non-vegan friends. I don’t condemn them. If they ask, I send them here to learn what I did, if they choose to do so.
This blog chronicles my experiences along with some tips, tricks, references, books, other blogs, etc. The blog was originally on Blogger, and I’ve recently ported it over to WordPress. As with any blog, read the early chapters (posts) first if you want to get a sense of the chronology.