I’m not a vegan
I just don’t eat meat or dairy
A while ago, I had to accept the fact I was dairy intolerant. I didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was overwhelming. If I stopped eating dairy for a few days, the symptoms would clear up*. As soon as I started eating pizza and ice cream, the symptoms came back. In my bid to prove each experiment was a fluke, I repeated the above cycle 6 or 7 times. Tsk!
I wasn’t happy about giving up dairy. My diet contained a lot of it — in fact, I started keeping a note of what I was eating and was horrified at how much cheese I was eating every day. Apart from thinking I would miss it, I wondered what I’d replace cheese with, and worst of all…. I hated the notion of being the problem diner in a restaurant.
I’d spent every group dinner in graduate school listening to people interrogate waiters about dishes on the menu. Some of these folk took being vegan to the extreme. They wanted to check the utensils used to cook their meal hadn’t been used previously to cook meat. As if molecules in the flesh would irreversibly contaminate kitchen spoons.
I really didn’t want to be that person.
Once I accepted I had to stop eating dairy, I realized I should also stop eating meat. It’s relatively easy to get meat-free vegetarian dishes in a restaurant — mac ‘n cheese! But, getting dairy-fee meat dishes is way more difficult means checking with the server that there is no cheese in the pasta, or the sauce on the steak wasn’t butter-based, and so on. Eating meat would mean I risked becoming that person.
Intolerance doesn’t need to mean intolerable.
Requesting meat/dairy-free dishes is much lower key than checking for ‘bad’ ingredients and can be done discretely.
Changing my diet was much easier than I expected. I read somewhere the way to do it painlessly is to only make the change for one day in the first week, two days in the second, three in the third, etc. By the time the sixth week rolled around, I really didn’t even think to eat meat or dairy. The advice I’d picked up on the internet had really worked!
Now, close to a decade has passed. I still don’t eat meat 99.9% of the time or dairy ever. I’ve discovered I do still need to eat some meat a few times a year. Even though I’m pretty careful to eat a healthy, non-meat diet, I must still miss some critical nutritional components. I start feeling ‘odd.’ It’s difficult to explain precisely; I just don’t feel ‘right.’ At which point I know I need to eat some meat. Sure enough, it takes the feeling away almost instantly. So, although some people can appear to exist on a completely animal-free diet, I don’t think I can. It’s clearly something that meat delivers, and I only need in small quantities — I eat meat perhaps once or twice a year — but it feels essential.
Symptoms: Mucus. Lots and lots of mucus. No matter how many times I blew my nose, it still wasn’t enough. I was pretty miserable. Plus, eating a bowl of ice cream left me feeling tired and listless for a couple of hours.
