We did it!

Reading through the rest of the vegan/vegetarian posts and comments, I realized that our common experiences far outweigh our differences. I wrote down things I noticed about my experience being vegan (more energy, empowerment, use of social reminders, use of visual reminders) and put a star next to each when I read that another one of us also mentioned one of these aspects. Every one of these things has at least one star next to it. We’ve all implemented very similar strategies and experienced similar changes in our physical and mental health. Most of us also experienced the same barriers, the two most prominent being forgetfulness and eating meat/dairy because of habit and being in a rush. After realizing how similar our small community is, I realized the power of sharing experiences with each other. Extrapolating from this assignment, one could suggest that the key to widespread sustainable behavior change is talking about individual sustainable behavior change.

One of the members of my vegan community even used my suggestion to make vegan/vegetarian food readily available! She maybe would have had a more difficult time sticking with her diet change if we had not communicated about our experience with veganism/vegetarianism.

The biggest difference between my experience and the others’ experience, though, is that I’ve gone from meat-eating to vegetarian twice before and have gone through the process of disciplining my diet a few times, so my main challenge was not necessarily resisting, but discerning what is vegan and what isn’t. I had to spend a lot of time reading labels and searching websites to see what packaged food is vegan or not. Also, I ran into a lot of problems at restaurants where nothing is vegan! (I actually found myself preferring to eat in Upper than going out to a restaurant, because I knew I could find something vegan.)

Overall, I think my tactics for change were incredibly helpful, and the support of a sympathetic community and a father willing to make me vegan thanksgiving (thanks, dad) really helped me stick with veganism, despite its inconvenience. Having this community was incredibly helpful to me staying with veganism because it was motivating, but also flattering to see that some people used my strategies! I absolutely love helping people implement positive change in their life, so to see that I could help out made me even more determined to stick with it, myself.

As the SBC comes to a close, I have decided to make a permanent dietary change to be dairy-free. I feel that it’s a nice middle ground between vegetarian and vegan and also a favorable accommodation to my temperamental digestive system. It also allows my main source of protein (eggs) to stay in my diet so I don’t fall down the trap of protein-deficient vegetarian.

Thank you, Team Vegan/Vegetarian!