Hey everyone,

So I am very very new at this vegetarian thing, like I decided today this is something I really wanted to do. I was at my friends party talking to this girl who has been a vegetarian for 2 years and when she told me her reasons I discovered that I feel the same way about everything she does I just have never acted on it.

Are there any suggestions of how to get started and such. I really want this to work out. I would glady accept any tidbits of information.

Thanks so much,

Alayna

For starters, think that meat is simply not something you can eat. As I said elsewhere, skip right over the meat sections in the menu, as that is for a completely different species.



Get rid of any meat in your home (unless of course there are others there planning on eating it, in which case you could find yourself in trouble).



Start doing some reading on proteins, iron, omega-3s, and the B6 vitamins.



You will need to start paying close attention to labels on foods.



Check out this website for TONS of great recipes: http://vegweb.com/ (I would bookmark it)



Then this webpage also has many good recipes along with tons of info on getting started and how to become vegan/vegetarian. http://www.theveggietable.com/ (I'd definitely bookmark this as well).

Find out where the nearest health food store is around you (i.e. Whole Foods is a great one).



Stock up on rice, flax, quinoa, nuts, seeds, beans, vegetables (both fresh and frozen), and fruit.

Instead of jumping head first into the lifestyle, I've entered it slowly (which has worked incredibly well considering my husband was leery at first) by first incorporating more vegetarian dinners, stop buying meat but using up what we had, and only buying cookbooks with vegan and or/vegetarian recipes (this has been a huge one because, in the beginning, dinner alternated between spaghetti and vegetarian chili which got old real quick- LOL!). Now I eat meat maybe once a week so I'm not totally there yet but considering that up until three months ago meat was a morning/noon/night deal in our house I'm really happy with the progress. Hopefully this will work better for us than cutting meat out completely right away. Maybe it would work for you, too?

If there isn't a Whole Foods or other like-minded store, try the local food co-op, too.

welcome