Years ago, you could find me eating a bacon wrapped steak with mini cheeseburger sliders on the side enjoying life. I LOVED red meat, as I am 100 percent Italian and eating meatballs on Sunday is (or was) second nature.
When I was younger, I would always ask my mom if I could become a vegetarian. But, she would always suggest that I wait until I was 18. When I turned 18, the thought to transition my eating habits never really crossed my mind. Nonetheless, the idea of eating another animal usually grossed me out to the point where I would stop eating the meat product (I usually tried to not think about it).
My older brother and sister both stopped eating meat and became pescatarians (this is when you only eat seafood and not meat) a few months before me. They would try and sway me to do the same, but ever since I was little, I never wanted anything to do with cooked or raw seafood. I have always been fascinated by fish and owned so many that I felt bad eating them.
It wasn’t until I traveled to NYC on January 1, 2016 to visit my brother in Brooklyn when I started to consider it. He suggested that I read the book “The China Study” and be a vegetarian with him until I left in a few days. So, as the competitive person that I am, I accepted the challenge and wow. I immediately felt a difference. After finishing a full meal, I was not bloated, I was not tired, I had so much natural energy, and the list goes on.
After leaving NYC, I thought it’d be easy going back to Rochester and start this new lifestyle. I always knew NYC was one of the trendiest places in the world, but I didn’t realize exactly how trendy it was. Every restaurant in NYC has a vegetarian section on their menu. In Rochester, you have to scope out the restaurant with one vegetarian option. Thankfully within the last year and half, many restaurants have added more vegetarian and vegan options to make going out to dinner with my “carnivoric” friends easier.
To this day, I have never cheated, cut out many dairy products, stopped eating eggs and started to watch the amount of processed food I ate. Every day I feel better than the last and have not looked back since. There are so many more health benefits, and decreases the risk of getting diseases.
I will leave you with one statistic that has stuck with me since day one. With two focus groups of rats, scientists gave one group 20 percent meat and gave the other group 5 percent meat. Within a few weeks, every single one of the 20 percent meat eaters got diabetes, heat disease, lung disease, strokes, cancer, etc. and none of the 5 percent meat eaters got any of the diseases. The scientists found this interesting, so they switched up the percent of meat eaters within the groups. They found that every single one of the original 5 percent meat eaters who went up to 20 percent, got the same diseases/cancers as the original 20 percent meat eaters; while all of the original 20 percent meat eaters who went down to 5 percent became healthy and lost their diseases/cancers.
Now some people will criticize the vegetarian lifestyle— but statistics don’t lie.