So Why'd Ya Do It?

So why'd I do it? I get the "why" and "how" all the time. I always get asked how did this traditional Greek girl who came from a lamb crunching family manage to do something completely unorthodox and stop eating meat? Well, let me answer the first question: Why?

I always have been a huge animal lover. I've always had pets who loved me back just as much as I loved them. I always felt conflicted to have such a great love for animals and then eat them at the same time. It just didn't seem right to me. It was a conflict of interest. I felt like such a hypocrite saying "I LOVE animals" and then eat some with practically every meal. Did I really love them? Or just love eating them? It was unsettling and was an internal conflict I had with myself.

Not only was it my love for animals that gave the desire to change, but I am always looking for a long life and to be consistently healthy. I didn't have the greatest of role models as a kid. My mom made a lot of homemade meals, but none of which seemed to be healthy once you break down the ingredients. And like many Greek households, she has a pantry filled with sweets.

My dad has been overweight/obese since as long as I could remember. McDonald's, Burger King, Portillo's Hot Dogs, Lou Malnati's Pizza, Dunkin Doughnuts made weekly visits to my house. Not to mention the fast food would be mingling with the Greek cooking which involved tons of meat and my food swimming in olive oil. While olive oil is the healthiest of oils, it is still a fat. It's like saying "well I'm eating the low-fat cookie." At the end of the day, you still eat a cookie. It's better than the regular cookie, but still not great for you.

I didnt want to end up like my parents and other relatives in my family who have diabetes, died of heart attacks, and be overweight. I always stuck to lean meats like chicken, fish, and turkey...but I always felt sluggish. I would sleep between 8-10 hours a night, work out, and after I ate, want to pass out. I did some research and thought 'ok, I need to go organic' which was the next step.

I was always suspicious about our meat. There is a reason I think why in the 5th grade when we bought our lunches from the school cafeteria we would call it mystery meat. You really dont know what you are being fed. You dont know if you really are eating beef, chicken, etc. and more realistically, you dont know the quality of the meat you are eating. Think about it. They always say "fresh" when you buy the meat. Ok. Fine. It is blood red and looks like it was killed yesterday. Fair enough. Now....what was the quality of the meat when the animal was alive? How do we know that cow didnt die of natural causes? How do we know that cow didnt have cancer or moreso, mad cow disease? How do we know for sure, we are eating a healthy animal? Most of the time, you're not. A lot of the animals are sick, dying, or already dead before they are brought on your plate. It's gross. Take a look at some of the peta videos on their website. Like this one here: http://www.goveg.com/factoryFarming_cows.asp

I dont really want to feed on something that is wearing it's own feces. This happens all the time due to the tight spaces in the, I like to call, kennels. If you were sitting in your own poop all day, I highly doubt you would be all that healthy. So it's like really....how good of a condition is your meat in? Are a lot of these extreme cases? Yes. But they're true. And to be honest, this goes for organic meats too. Sure, they are stripped of the hormones and are fed organic products as well, but, how do we know that the animal itself is healthy? Again, we dont. When it comes to my life, Im not going to gamble.

We have so much crap in our meat we dont realize it because we dont see it. The animals are fed so many antibiotics and steriods, that stuff goes into our system and messes us up (mentally AND physically). Feeling depressed but nothing is causing it? It could very well be all the meat you're eating.

Along with not knowing what the condition of the food you're eating, I didn't like knowing something died for me to eat it. I didnt like thinking that veal, or baby cow, couldnt live it's life because I got hungry. Just seemed wrong.

I also didnt like that I was eating a dead body. Just seemed sickening once I thought of it that way. We call it "food" and have been told that's what it was for a while. It's not food. It's a dead body. I started to question eating a dead body. In "Skinny Bitch" they ask you "Do you get hungry when you see roadkill?" No, I don't. You see the tounge hanging out, guts everywhere, appendages scattered about. That's not appetizing. So what do why do we eat meat? We dont see the whole package. We dont see the brains smashed and the tounge hanging out. We just see a square chunck of meat nicely furnished on a plate. So I pretty much did a lot of my own research, checked out more of those peta videos, and decided I didnt want to eat decomposing, rotting, ill, diseased, cancer-filled, fece covered flesh.

Another reason ( I know, I had a lot of reasons), I loved my pets. I have a pet bird, named Cloud, who chirps, sings, whistles, and flies to me. I'd sit there, play with him and see the love in his eyes, but then whip out some bird out of the oven. Notice how I use the term, bird. Cloud is a parakeet, a type of bird. But so is chicken. They are all bird. How could I be playing with this bird and telling it I love it, when Im about to eat bird? It didnt make sense.

I had so many internal conflicts, I felt the only way to resolve it would be to stop eating it. So, that's exactly what I did. Whatever the reason may be for you: personal, religious, love for animals, health, etc., people go vegetarian/vegan.