Story-time | My Vegan Story

HAPPY NEW YEAR ERRYBAHDY!! It's hard to believe it's almost been a year since Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars was released in Australia... the radio be playin that for days. Today, to celebrate day 2 of what will we all hope will be a great year, I'm going to share with you my vegan journey and how I came to be in the place I am now.

I've always been a pretty optimistic person, maybe a little overly-optimistic. I love planning. Dreaming. Creating. I have an imagination that kinda goes beyond the end of the earth and this is my little space on the internet where maybe some of you will get to see it all. Or maybe not. No lock in contracts or expectations. Just me. (and a shit tonne of food pictures)

Quick new years resolution leak: I want to build a vegan platform to educate and share just how awesome a vegan lifestyle is, through this website and by meeting people, doing interviews, getting out an about to places where I can meet people that have been at this a lot longer than me. I want to learn so I can help other people learn. And I can't wait!

Goal #1 is to blog every.single.day. Even if they're little baby blogs or just a quick recipe of the day or an awesome video I watched recently :) coz I am NOT ready to make videos myself let's be honest here...

--In the mean time check out my Vegan Inspirations page for heaps of cool vegan stuff--

~Without further adieu... this is ma vegan story yo~

It's funny how, looking back on your life, you wonder how you functioned without the knowledge you have now. Imagining not being able to ride a bike. Imagining not being able to count without your fingers (though lets be real, we still do that). It sounds like the corniest shiz ever, but I'm constantly telling people, especially people I've grown up with (close family etc.) that I was always bound to become a vegan.

From a young, sassy age (just look at me! :P ) I was never a fan of meat. Something about it grossed me out and I wouldn't eat lunch or dinner if there was a bone poking out of it, fat lining my steak or bacon, gristle in my potpie or skin on my chicken. Oh and don't even get me started on blood leaking into my mashed potatoes from whatever meat waa served with it. Aw hell no.

My mum is a very talented and passionate cook. Everyone loves her food and everyone who meets her soon comes to know her by name for the treats she'll bring to a gathering or to work or to the lunch parties she hosts once a year. I was indulged in a childhood of incredibly well-cooked meals which developed my appreciation for fine tastes and I was spared of any 'rubbish foods' like processed snacks, Mcdonalds and too much candy. I wasn't even allowed to have processed cheese singles! (though I'm definiely better off...)

Having said all that, I have many memories centred around food. If I don't remember what we saw on our road trip to Tin Can Bay when I was three, clear as day I remember the tiramisu cake my mum gave me with the blue bunny rabbit sugar-decoration. Food shapes most of my childhood memories and it's still a huge part of my life today-- it's how I make memories still!

So I was blessed with good food from the moment I could take solids and I'll forever be grateful for that, because although my mum wasn't a health foodie, I pretty much ate a wholesome diet of veggies, fruit, rice, pasta, grains, lentils...plus the unfortunate dairy and meats. But I wasn't exactly a healthy child. Not at all.

{From a very young age I have been a bit of a chubby child (my family called me LilyPig because I was always eating!) but I've also suffered from asthma and always been a slow, unfit child that was 'just not meant to be the sporty type', which SUCKED because all my friends in primary school were sporty and I'd always be the last one picked for sports.}

We'd never had a vegetarian in the family. Even when my cousin went 'vegetarian' when I was about 8, she still ate chicken so up until a few weeks ago my family still did not understand a plant based way of eating. Until the vegan landed in Queensland last month, of course ;)

It didn't make sense to me either.

Why would you give up meat? That's just silly.

Vegans don't even eat HONEY?? Jeez. No one I know would be a veeeeegaaan.

Vegetarians are just skinny and weak.

If you don't have milk you won't have calcium. I drink at least 2 glasses a day. Plus cheese.

I just didn't understand.

{Some vegans I have met since wonder why I am so lenient toward non-vegans and why I don't take a more aggressive, 'no-bullshit' approach like others in the vegan movement, and that's simply because I believe in having the patience in others that the world had in me before I became a passionate vegan. I was an ignorant kid, too. Drawn in by propoganda and manipulation. We're part of a brainwashed society and a lifetime of these lies aren't going to come undone in a matter of seconds if we're raised with this. Be kind!}

So a life without meat was a foreign concept for me and my fam. And a bother for my chicken-eating 'vegetarian' cousin, who we usually made felafel balls for or veggie curry or something. But as I grew older something struck a chord in me every time I sat down to a meal (which almost always included meat). I'd ask all these really random questions at the table, like:

"Mum, where exactly does the meat come from? Which part of the cow is the beef?"

The horror I experienced when I learned the truth was real.

"Mum, I think I like vegetables better than meat coz veggies don't have skin or fat or gristle or bones or scales"

Cha ching?

"Mum, what makes meat 'juicy'?" --"Blood." *spits out and cries*

DING DING DING DING DING.

SO I first went vegetarian around the age of 12, but I had no idea how to do it and no idea what 'healthy' was, so I had pretty much swapped all meat products with fake meat products made of wheat and oil and salt. It was expensive, not so healthy and I had no values behind going vegetarian other than meat being off putting so you can imagine it lasted barely as long as Kim K and Kris Humphries' marriage. Not cool.

In high school, I eventually became a girl obsessed with 'health'. I began to get my first few pimples, my weight didn't stay down as easy as it had been (I took up taekwondo in primary school which was pretty intense) and I just wasn't feeling good under a new load of stress.

I would read Body and Soul cover to cover every Sunday from the newspaper in desperate attempt to feel healthy. I followed The Wellness Warrior religiously. David Wolfe was my superstar. Sugar was the enemy. Protein was the answer. It was the beginning of an epic downward spiral that would eventually lead me to the best thing I've ever discovered.

At 14 I still wasn't eating much meat. I eliminated red meat (beef, lamb) at around 13 and pork was off my fork (see what I did there ey) before I finished primary school. I was eating truckloads of fish and eggs and dairy to 'make up for it' though, believing I needed it for protein. How wrong I was.

I did, however, notice how I didn't feel as good when I was eating meats etc or rich foods with dairy in them as they'd give me a 'heavy' feeling and my skin would feel all thick and gross, yet fruit and juices would make me feel fresh and awake. At this age my favourite salad was one with baby spinach, apples, raw beetroot and raw carrot. I ate it nearly every night.

By the time I was in year 10, I'd cut out all animal products except fish. And occasionally I'd let myself have something with dairy or chicken in it if I was feeling 'cheeky', but I was feeling amazing without these animal products. My athletic performance skyrocketed (I started Aerobic Gymnastics/Sport Aerobics in year 9), my running times improved and for the first time in high school my SKIN WAS CLEAR. I was on such a high I couldn't help telling my year 10 science teacher about it, who recommended a book for me called Skinny Bitch to help me transition to full vegan. To this day it is the best book I will ever recommend if you want to educate yourself about the truth behind slaughterhouse walls and how the government don't give two shits about your health where money is concerned. Why have a healthy population when you can have a Maserati parked in your 2.4 million dollar pad?

After reading Skinny Bitch I almost immediately went vegan for ethical reasons. The grief was real and intense. I was so moved and shocked by what I had learned that I wrote an essay on it as my 'expository' piece in English and based my end of year presentation on the concept of 'No More Old Macdonalds Farm' which you can read here

{My skin was the clearest it has ever been when I first went vegan, but more on that soon!}

The one thing Skinny Bitch didn't teach me, however, was how to be a HEALTHY VEGAN!

It definitely points out the health costs of eating a highly acidic animal based diet, but the recommendations for food are obviously catering to transitioning vegans with plenty of mock meat options included in the meal plans. One problem I experienced when I first went vegan is that I was still stuck in a very paleo-orientated way of living, which my old blog was based on, where I ate a lot of calorically dense nuts, coconut oil and avocado with little to no sugar or grains.

I got to a point where I was eating SO much fat and no carbohydrates that my skin was breaking out again, I felt slow and sick, I was heavily constipated (TMI, late apology) and I was so so so unhappy because guess what? I was calorie restricting.

I think it's great when people make that first step to going plant based, for whatever reason, but there's definitely a right and a wrong way to go about it, and it's okay to make mistakes because I made a ton! Coming from a 'healthy' paleo/superfood background, I was still scared of a lot of the foods that a vegan diet should be centred around: rice, potatoes, pastas, fruit.

But I was NOT feeling good eating a low carb diet and I eventually stumbled across a book called Fit For Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, which explained a lot of concepts about 'natural hygiene' and keeping the body cleansed internally with food (similarly to how Rawtill4 works), where fresh raw fruit and juice is taken unlimitedly most of the day with a heavier meal at night to allow the body to be cleansed and not blocked up by heaps of heavy foods which impairs digestion.

Good read!

So now?

I am happily living a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle that makes me so so happy and I feel the best I think I have felt in my entire life.

Though this is a pretty quick summary of how I slowly became a vegan, I hope it will become more detailed as I share more stories along the way through Glowing Green Peace and maybe I'll make a video on this...one day :P

What's your vegan story? What made you go vegan?

Thanks for reading peeps.

Lily Green

#MyLife #EasyVeganStuff #Thoughts #myveganstory #VeganTips #rawtill4