It takes a village…

At the beginning of this challenge, I thought eating less meat would be easy. Once I started having to choose between a meat and a vegetarian option, I realized how hard it would be.  Having Hailey there to encourage me to eat less meat really helped to keep me on track.  Even though it was just little things, a sentence here and a suggestion there, it really helped to keep me focused.  Having a support system is essential to keeping up a behavior.  If there is no motivation, either internal or social, there is no way the behavior will stick.  When you are fighting societal norms, it can be very difficult to stay on track.

Once I found out all of the struggles that everyone else was going through, it helped me to see that the difficulties I was facing were not simply me failing at changing.  They are normal part of change.  It was also really great to have other people weigh in on the experience.  Not everyone views things the same way.  Learning how other people were attacking the challenge of eating less or no meat was really helpful in preventing a failure of this challenge.  After a while the same tactics can become very repetitive and can make keeping on track difficult.  It helped me to mix up the tactics I was using to eat less meat and help me enjoy eating less meat and not have it just be a chore.

Now that I have become more accustomed to eating less meat, I see the food I am eating differently.  I think about food holistically versus its face value.  Meat is not meat anymore. It is a protein source.  Meat is not the only protein source there is, which means it’s not necessary at every meal, or even at all.  Once  I realized that, it became much easier to cut it out and meat is now a food that I enjoy much more than I did before.