Cut myself some slack?

Ok I'm gonna be harsh here, and give you some constructive advice.

Don't "cut yourself some slack." Veganism isn't some fast that you're doing. It isn't punishment. It isn't even hard.

Veganism isn't doing something "good". Since it is absolutely, entirely, catergorically, 100% unnecessary, eating any animal product is actively wrong. Where do you think all the male baby animals go? Everytime you eat an egg, some of the male chicks that are gassed died for you. Everytime you eat dairy, some of the calves taken from the mothers and slaughtered for veal died for you. The dairy/egg and meat industries are permanently intertwined, and it is impossible to separate them. Animal farming is also a major contibutor to world hunger, and global warming and other environmental calamities.

It really isn't difficult to be vegan, I've been one for 5 years. I've been in the same position as you, too, I tried 3 times before I made it. The big mistake I made was cutting foods out and not adding anything new in. When I did add something new in, it would be to try to continue my old diet, only with substitutes. But eventually I realised, there are already ample vegan meals and recipes out there, nothing has to be substituted, we already have everything we need, you just need to look. It takes about 2-3 months to learn (provided you add foods in and don't just cut things out) and then you'll never go back.

I've found that almost all vegan ice-creams taste exactly the same as real dairy. I eat one called Rice Cream which is soya-free but I can't find it on the internet.

Honey is bee vomit. It is most certainly natural.. for bees. The honey taken from their hives is replaced with a nutritionally poor substitute (honey is their food), which makes them ill. They ritually slaughter bees every two years. It isn't without death.

I haven't found any good yoghurts, although I didn't exactly look hard. The Alpro soya ones were over-sugary and really gross. Sorbets and frozen pureed fruit could be an alternative if you can't find anything. A new centrifugal force machine thingy (that I read about in a science magazine) has been invented which has the power to turn vegetable products creamy, paving the way for realistic dairy subsititutes. Posh restaurants have already started to buy them so it's only a matter of time before good replacements are a common reality.

When you eat out and ask for something vegan, they usually say no or offer you salad. This is because they automatically think vegans eat something "different" or "weird" that they don't serve, like birdseed and tofu or something lol. However, from experience a lot of places actually do have something vegan, even if they don't know it!

When finding vegan recipes, look on the internet, especially for foreign foods like south-east Asian and Indian, which have many recipes that are incidentally vegan. I haven't looked myself but apparently Ethiopian and Egyptian diets have a lot of vegan recipes. Most foreign food actually has a lot of vegan options, if you look. Most foreign food presented to us these days is geared to be appealing to typical westerners, ie meaty. Remember that most places never ate a lot of meat until recently, as it's expensive, and most places never ate dairy, as most of the world is intolerant, so you have to do your research and find real ethnic cooking and not just watered down stuff that has been altered for western tastes.

I haven't found any useful vegan cookbooks (but I only have a few). They are unhelpful because they try to be everything for everyone - gluten free, soya-free, low-calorie etc etc and the recipes end up being... crappy. I have one recipe book where all the meals seem to be below 300 calories!

By being a vegetarian you have already reduced the number of animals that died for you, just by reducing the mass of animal products that you eat, so you are already doing well. And your health will be better too, but bear in mind that the **** sapiens wasn't designed to drink the milk of the wrong species. Dairy products have been strongly linked to all kinds of health problems, including cancer and osteoporosis, amongst other serious ailments. The dairy industry would have us believe that a bodily fluid designed for the young of an enormous ruminent is absolutely vital for our health.

Keep it up, remember there are already millions of vegans in the world, if we can do it, so can you, people are all the same, the only difference is in the mind! And the human mind is the most powerful thing in the world! Mother Nature designed us to be herbivores and she makes no mistakes!

Doing what's right isn't always easy but it is always right. And very soon you'll find it easy anyway. Good Luck!

I know what you mean about not really trying hard to avoid non-vegan things IN products. Maybe your favourite cereal contains honey, maybe your favourite pastry product has egg in it. It's frustrating, but eventually you learn to find brands that don't contain these things, or you'll find an amazing vegan recipe that is close to your favourite pastry product (I have a great one for poptarts, takes 10 minutes tops to make). It does take some extra work, and you will find that you'll need to do more in the kitchen to get what you want, but it's all part of being vegan. Instead of looking at it as an inconvenience, think of it as a blessing: I find that I love cooking now, and I also love to bake. Also a lot of things that contain non-vegan products, aren't necessarily good for you, and so refraining from eating those items in the food, you are in turn doing yourself a favour; think doughnuts, cakes, cheese puffs, fatty creamy coffee, frozen meals, processed junk food, chocolate bars etc. These things you want to be avoiding anyway because of calories and lack of nutrition and crap, so you're giving yourself extra motivation to avoid them

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Originally Posted by lucky_charm

There is not necessarily a right or wrong way to go vegan. I think you gave a lot of good advice but substitutes (especially soya mince, marge, soya milk and soya cream) were a huge help for me when I went vegan.

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I agree, how many or little substitutes you want to use is dependent on you and your lifestyle. My mom didn't want to buy me substitutes in the first month of me going vegan. I think she didn't think I'd make it that long, so she didn't want to spend a lot of money on special things like that if I was just going through a phase. Now I see the bright side of things because I realized I don't need substitutes when I didn't think about them, but now that I'm beginning to try some of them, I also see how it makes veganism more interesting and they can also be helpful in trying new recipes.

I went from omni to vegan cold turkey, and my biggest advice is focusing on what you can eat, not what you can't. Your attitude plays a big part in your outlook on veganism, you kind of have to try to clear your mind to avoid cravings. Instead of craving you can direct that to your favorite new vegan foods. When you start thinking about your favorite omni foods, you'll just make yourself upset and it won't help at all.

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Originally Posted by AddieB

This. There's nothing wrong with taking the process forward slowly...

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Or maybe there is!

Seriosuly though, tehre is another way of doing it fast yet slowly. Be full vegan, 100% all the way through for a certain time period. Let's say three weeks, or a two months or five days or whatever you're comfortable with. Stick to it very strictly for that time period becasue this will teach you how hard (or probably easy) it is to be a fairly strict vegan and if you do it for a long ehough period you might notice some benefits too (feeling better, eating better, saving money).

Anyway, that's what I did and that's how I got hooked. I was of course already a vegetarian, the step wasn't huge, but I had been afraid to take it for almost 20 years. So I decided to give it three months, and was a 100% (or perhaps 99%) vegan during this time. Turned out to be much easier that I had thought. Going step by step you might not notice this but be more focused on all the little "problems" that come up.