Hungry For Change.

Please watch this.  You won’t regret it.  Also, there’s a free online preview until March 31st HERE.  So hurry up!  This means you Kelly.

Vegetarian or Skinny Bitch?

My name is Kayla, and I’m a vegetarian.

I have been since October 20th, 2007.  I remember this day because it was exactly a week before my birthday and I was cooking a chicken breast for my dinner when I stopped mid-bite and couldn’t finish it.  I haven’t eaten meat since that moment.  I guess I stopped eating meat cold turkey.  Pun intended.

It started with a book.  Nothing like a book called “Skinny Bitch” which features two very pretty, skinny girls using obscenities to essentially guilt you into giving up all animal products to really spark an introspective moment, right?

I’m scared of them. Aren’t you?

There’s a lot of positive feedback for this book, but as you can imagine, the “bitchy”, know-it-all tone of this book doesn’t win all audiences.  Have a read of this Jezebel article I found that talks about the negative body image issues that these ladies could be pushing on girls.  Regardless of the fact that I was pretty scared of these girls while I was reading the book, their message stuck.

I couldn’t look at chicken the same after reading it.  I couldn’t un-know the things I now knew.

I am one of those vegetarians who never really liked meat to begin with.  I never really ate chicken wings (bones, ew), steak (weird taste), or Swiss Chalet quarter chicken dinner (skin, ew. It’s like eating your own skin).  I did love things like bacon, chicken breast (boneless, skinless), ground beef.  Essentially anything that didn’t look like meat at all!  So the transition to eating vegetarian wasn’t really that tough for me.  Although it did take me about a year before I understood how to get the right amount of protein and iron as a veggie.  But that’s a post for another day.

Being vegetarian has now become something that is so synonymous with who I am, I hardly think about it anymore.  I have no delusions about wanting everyone to stop eating meat and join hands in hippie harmony and eat kale and beans forever.  That’s not going to happen.  In fact, I don’t think badly of whatever you eat.  I do kind of agree with the argument against vegetarianism that says “people were made to eat meat.  They always have, we were designed to do so”.  I get that.  We also had to in order to survive.  And, and this is a big one, we didn’t create life and then turn around and kill it for food.  I think that’s the biggest thing that I can’t wrap my head around.  We breed animals that wouldn’t otherwise exist, we force them to live in unnatural environments, and then we kill them and eat them.  In incredibly large quantities.  I just can’t get behind that.

 Basically, I eat what I eat, and you eat what you eat, and that’s cool!  When you come over to my house for dinner, I probably won’t make you steak.  But I will make a delicious, healthy, protein filled vegetarian meal for you to enjoy.  I don’t want to make anyone feel bad or weird about what they eat.  If you want to move towards a more plant based diet, awesome, welcome aboard!  If you’re happy with the way you eat, then so am I!  Thanks for stopping by and reading about my journey.

PS- I am not a skinny bitch.  I neither want to be skinny, nor bitchy.  I would like to be a healthy, happy , interesting person, though.

How about you?  Skinny bitch?  Or healthy, interesting person?!