It has been almost one year ...

For nearly one year now, I have been following a so called lacto/ovo vegetarian diet. Giving up the meat has been rather easy and I wonder now why I haven't been able to do that much earlier, since I felt for a while rather like a hypocrite by eating meat.

We have come to the decision of no longer consuming animals independently. I am partly (or mostly) crediting Seashepherd and Captain Paul Watson and his wonderful crew for our final turn-around.

I have been fond of whales ever since I can remember and was very much interested in protecting them as a teenager. I cannot remember exactly what lead me to believe that whaling was done and over with or if I just simply grew up to worry about other things in my life. After all, leaving my home country and moving to the United States, working full time and going to school was time-consuming but I feel very guilty now that I had pushed the fact that there were still killings going on to the back of my mind. Of course, I wasn't aware what huge production the so called "Research" from the Japanese whalers included. There is a factory ship, several harpoon ships, a spotter ship and a refuel vessel.

After a Seashepherd ship was rammed and sunk by one of the Japanese harpoon ships, we heard about it on the news and found out what was going on in the Southern Arctic Ocean.

After purchasing seasons one and two of whale wars, we were enticed and after much research both of us came independently to the conclusion that we no longer wanted to eat animals. After my Sunday grocery shopping trip, my husband told me that he didn't think he could eat meat again to which I responded "good, because I didn't by any; I got some tofu instead."

My vegetarian diet went well but not really healthy. Cutting out meat didn't bother me but most of my dishes were heavy on dairy.

I am now at a point - finally - that I cannot watch myself get bigger and bigger due to an unhealthy life style including candy and snacking through out the day.

When I came across the book "the get healthy, go vegan cookbook" on one of my amazon.com suggestion lists, I was hooked. I ordered it, read as much as I had time to and planned the day I was going to make the change. At first I thought it wouldn't be too hard to do but once I realized that it would affect my entire day staring with the creamer in my coffee in the morning that I so cherish, our weekly family outing at Moe's to the cheese pizza on Friday evenings.

Today is DAY 1!
My first day going completely vegan. It went well but I didn't eat enough since I was missing some key ingredients for my lunch; instead I ate two apples throughout the afternoon.

Dinner tasted great! I made Italian Fulilli with sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts

I'll have three more dinners/lunches, so that will be nice as I have only limited time during the work nights.

Yay for vegan! Yay for healty eating! Yay for me sticking with it (hopefully!)!