Hello,
I have been vegetarian for a few years, I started when I was a teenager and now I am 20.
At the start, I would still accidentally eat products not suitable for vegetarians as I did not realise at that point how careful I'd need to be. For example, I had this bread product a lot when I started being "vegetarian" years ago just to discover that months later that bread, including this one, could have animal fat in it!
For a while I was super careful about food and checking ingredients but I realised how hard it was to even tell, a lot of food labels list ingredients that I cannot even understand and since these lists are always super long and filled with chemicals and such I find it hard to google search each ingredient individually.
Ever since I became vegetarian, my family get super mad and frustrated when I try to be careful with what I eat and this made me so uncomfortable that I stopped being as careful and started to make assumptions again about food (like how I was at the beginning)...and today I just found out that I may have yet again accidentally eaten a non-vegetarian product. After talking to a friend (who is not vegetarian but understands my vegetarianism), I realised that deep down I am feeling guilty about this.
On top of that, my family want me to consider going on holiday with them to a foreign country where we don't speak the language and I just know that if I join them, then they will just be mad at me because I am going back to being careful about what I eat.
I still call myself vegetarian because I never intentionally ate non-vegetarian products but I would very much appreciate some advice about how I can make it easier to check labels/ingredients and how to handle my family being so mad when I want to check things. :crying: I feel so guilty about calling myself a vegetarian all this time when I have made a few mistakes, should I even call myself vegetarian? (Thanks to anyone who reads this)
I have been vegetarian for a few years, I started when I was a teenager and now I am 20.
At the start, I would still accidentally eat products not suitable for vegetarians as I did not realise at that point how careful I'd need to be. For example, I had this bread product a lot when I started being "vegetarian" years ago just to discover that months later that bread, including this one, could have animal fat in it!
For a while I was super careful about food and checking ingredients but I realised how hard it was to even tell, a lot of food labels list ingredients that I cannot even understand and since these lists are always super long and filled with chemicals and such I find it hard to google search each ingredient individually.
Ever since I became vegetarian, my family get super mad and frustrated when I try to be careful with what I eat and this made me so uncomfortable that I stopped being as careful and started to make assumptions again about food (like how I was at the beginning)...and today I just found out that I may have yet again accidentally eaten a non-vegetarian product. After talking to a friend (who is not vegetarian but understands my vegetarianism), I realised that deep down I am feeling guilty about this.
On top of that, my family want me to consider going on holiday with them to a foreign country where we don't speak the language and I just know that if I join them, then they will just be mad at me because I am going back to being careful about what I eat.
I still call myself vegetarian because I never intentionally ate non-vegetarian products but I would very much appreciate some advice about how I can make it easier to check labels/ingredients and how to handle my family being so mad when I want to check things. :crying: I feel so guilty about calling myself a vegetarian all this time when I have made a few mistakes, should I even call myself vegetarian? (Thanks to anyone who reads this)
