Hi

Here's a picture of the beautiful Colorado Rocky mountain. Snapped this on a hike this weekend, Galaxy s8+, no filter (:

I'd like to start by thanking the Steemit community for

1. Being caring and patient enough to make numerous posts helping out noobs. (I'm a slow learner)

2. Being excellent teachers and holding thr community to its highest standards. (Fuxk yeah!! this is a unique moment in history and y'all vets should be proud)

3. Collectively forming the darn near best online social experience the world has seen.

On to the post...

Moment of honesty

I claimed for a while to be vegan. The truth is... I'm not. Or...I wasn't. Back to day 1.

I was vegetarian for about 4 years and vegan for about 2, but fell off the wagon after a head injury. I was scared, scarred, and gullible enough to believe that eating meat was necessary to my recovery.

You see, I've always been vegetarian at heart. I was raised by an authoritarian mother who insisted I eat what she put on the plate or I don't eat at all. I vividly remember fighting through countless bites of chicken whose texture was awful, beef that made my tummy ache and pork that gave me deathly smelling gas. I'll spare you the details, but long story short my body HATES meat, and it doesn't hesitate to speak up. But the first 18 years of my life depended on my choking it down because ma just knew "we need meat" to live. She blamed every ailment we had on iron deficiency or something relating to us needing to eat more meat. I'd get grounded if I didn't clean my plate.
To be frank, it baffles me that she still believes daily meat consumption is essential to a healthy diet... So many people still do, and I dont blame them cause I thought so too when I was real sick and couldn't keep down food... plus everyone's body is different and I can only speak for myself.
Yes, maybe the animal fat, or GMOs, or saltiness of that first taste of chicken broth was what my body needed to begin holding down solid food again, or maybe it wasn't.

Either way, it felt good to begin regaining the 20-something pounds I lost in just under 2 weeks.

Sick or well, that was the beginning of an end. I learned through all this that meat and dairy is truly addicting...for me, anyway.
Whether it's manufactured with intent to be addicting, or be it the sheer caveman instinct and release of dopamine after a bite of dead meat is debatable; but the year long binge of unhealthy fatty greasy food addiction that consumed my life was realer than the hair on my head.
See, everytime I made a choice to eat shit I knew I would regret it, but I did it anyway.
Its like being vegan made the meat taste 10x better after so long without it.
My body spoke out in every way it could, but I continued to ignore the signs simply to feed the addiction I knew I had...

the brief moments of pleasure were worth the several days of gastrointestinal disruption... somehow.

Almost exactly a year later I see how I'm ruining my body, and inadvertently my life because I don't have energy and usually end up laying around...I feel tenfold better after a salad or smoothie than I feel after anything with processed foods or meat.
This lesson has been echoed in other areas of my life too. I see that intuition is guiding me toward a specific diet and when I ignore that there consequences. Same goes for ignoring the intuition in other areas of my life. I sometimes choose the easy route but it gets me nowhere.
I've decided to eat to live, rather than living to eat. I've decided to listen "to my gut" because it really does keep me out of trouble.
All I think about is the other vegetarians out there who may be reconsidering their diet or who have slipped off the wagon completely. I'd like to tell them there's never too late to do the right thing and to let go of the past and any guilt or negativity. My dearest friend of 12 years was veg her entire life and began eating chicken last summer too, independent of my choices, in fact, it was before I slipped. I was shocked... shes the one who inspired me...but her fiance convinced her that her "for the animals" approach was useless and that it would be healthy for her...she listened and forced herself to eat chicken because she thought it was healthy even though she didn't like it and has severe stomach pain...(if I remember correctly)
I love myself, I love my body too much to be weak. Food is medicine and we outta eat that way.
End of rant, I just hope this can help somebody. Challenging ourselves in any way is what builds character, and in the end I'm glad I chose the route of eating meat just so I can really know whether it's right for me or not. :)
Bless you all ♡

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