Going Greener

The vegan experiment is a smashing success. While I can hardly claim to be vegan today, I spent 8 weeks strictly vegan with amazing sideways outcomes that are changing my daily life.

I'll explain. My choice to go vegan in January became the first of a string of actions making me more sustainable. For those 8 weeks, I challenged everything I had taken for granted in the grocery store, and in my habits at large. I started re-educating myself. I've always been a label reader, but reading it for vegan ethics is a whole other ball game. I looked for all sorts of hidden animal products, consulted many vegan websites, tasted lots of nondiary, meat-free replacement products (of which Tofutti is now one of my staples), and had to completely rethink how I eat.

My diet became my new research project. I found out pretty quickly how my body and my own chemistry reacted to the changes. I know that getting rid of dairy is part of the vegan change I'm staying with, because I metabolize food so much better without it in my system. Funny, I thought that would be the most difficult group of food to give up! A number of years ago I adopted a vegetarian diet for 6 months, but I didn't like it. It didn't feel good. I can see now that it was probably the fact that dairy was still a huge part of what I was eating - it was likely an even larger part since I used it to replace meat at the time.

I'll short cut all the details and just say that from the vegan diet I've added back eggs and fish. So, whatever you call that, it's how I eat today. I do occasionally eat other things, like when I'm eating at someone else's house. And the eggs I purchase are from local farms or are organic/free range. I need to explore the details about fish. I'll save that for another blog entry.

Going vegan opened up my eyes to the things I can do every day to help lighten my impact on the earth. I'm very excited to say that I'm spending the next year figuring out and trying out the many sustainable and earth-friendly ways I can change my life and my home. As I explore ideas and avenues for change, I'll share what I find out here, on our Red Eft blog.

Stay in touch - and let us know what you're doing to be more sustainable in your world.