Joy and Self Loathing on the Bruce Peninsula
Not self-loathing, exactly, but you gotta go with the title you gotta go with.
Today is day 9 of being a Vegan. I wish I could say it was primarily driven by my ethics, but this decision was not a decision based on ethics.
If you were to ask me my ethics around eating animals, I'd probably say that I believed that if I were to have my own animals, I wouldn't be able to 'kill to process' anything higher than a chicken or rabbit. That leaves out beef and pork which means that I was actively eating the meat of an animal I would not be able to process myself. That's still something I'm chewing on, because I currently still see myself eating meat on rare occasion in my future, but we'll see how things develop.
I made the leap to veganism purely out of the self-interest of losing weight and living longer. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence appears to side with whole plant less/no processed food as the best source of nutrition. Fancy that.
I couldn't tell you why I was able to make the leap this time. It has something to do with the open ended nature of the constraints I've put on myself maybe. Something to do with my two children, my wife, my fear of death, my discomfort with my self image. It is more likely the whole kit-and-kaboodle that led me down the garden path towards this method of structuring my food.
I think if I explored my ethics I would wind up deep in the valley of not even being able to eat plants, which would cause me to look at myself and say that's silly, and then I'd probably draw a line with chicken and fish which would make me question what my ethihcs entail exactly about eating something? And I'd say that my line is structured around percieved intelligence or anthropomoprhisation of the animal. Which would make me question why not exclude fish and chicken as well then? Do I purely value life in tha way of preservation only when it has a certain intelligence?
I'm not going to draw a line right now. I'm still processing all of that. I'm not going to deny my future self anything right now. I'm working on my current self. Right now I'm structuring my intake in the following way, and it very much follows Dr. Greger's science-based take on nutrition and his combative nature with the food industry and the many many dollars on which it stands.
His take is that whole plant nutrition is best. He's not alone. Dr. Fuhrman is along for that ride, really. Though currently I find the recipes I've found in Dr. Greger's How not to Die cookbook to be a notch above the Eat to Live fare.
The idea is the same. The bounty of plants is your food bar. No oil, no salt. Let me tell you, that's hard. Many vegan cookbooks definitely dip into all sorts of things I'm currenly trying to avoid in an effort to add lots of variation and flare to vegetarian cuissine, and it would. Soy sauce, sauces in general, oils, salt, all that fun stuff. Vegan doesn't necessarily mean healthy, though it probably means healthier than meat-eating.
So I'm trying for this most extreme version of dietary veganism, with minimal processed foods, and I'm going to share my experiences as I go. It might help people make up their minds. It might help me to keep going.
My goal is to lose weight and live longer than I woul have otherwise. My goal is to dodge a descent into Type II diabetes that afflicted my father, though he's done a good job with his self correction and continues to do so. My goal is to spend as much time walking the earth with my family, throwing my arrow of time as far forward as I can.
Before I started, I clocked myself at 275lbs, I'm 5'7''. That's deep in the 'oh no' territory of any BMI chart real or imagined. Even forgetting BMI, just how I feel about myself and the weight I carry is uncomfortable.
So, wish me luck, I'll probably chart progression week by week likely. Seems like the best time-slice.
Peace,
Shane