My 7-Year Veganniversary: How I Went Vegan

As of this month, I’ve been vegan for 7 years. I plan to celebrate this Vegan-iversary with several blog posts, including how I went vegan, what’s kept me vegan, and other reflections and musings in my 7 years. For now, here’s Part 1!

How I Went Vegan

Me doing the breaststroke

In high school, I was the varsity captain of the swim team and water polo team. I was always looking towards medaling at state tournaments/meets, and so my training schedule was pretty intensive: 2-3.5 hours of swim practice every day, plus weight training for an hour 3x per week. In between all that training, I was busy eating s***. I ate fast food 2-4 times per week, when my team would go out together after meets and games, as was the tradition. When we weren’t celebrating after a meet with fast food, we were having team dinners where we shoveled truckloads of white pasta in our mouths, carbo-loading with enthusiasm in an attempt to make up the calories we were burning and resulting in many tomato-sauce stained clothes and the occasional unfortunate swimmer family’s carpet. I never, ever ate green vegetables and fruit was an occasion every couple weeks.

But health issues were beginning to show up. I had severe chronic fatigue, I had a nasty virus which would snatch me every couple of weeks leave me, for days on end, unable to walk or be awake for more than an hour. I was so mentally foggy I couldn’t focus on anything. I was in shape, I looked in shape, I won state medals in my sports. But my diet really couldn’t have been worse and I felt horrible. I was performing well in sports but burnt out every other minute of the day. I didn’t care about healthy eating, and for the most part I dismissed my diet because it’s what all my athlete friends ate and because I was doing so well in sports and I looked totally healthy physically. I hadn’t drawn the parallels between my developing health issues and my diet whatsoever.

Enter the glories of documentary-making. It was the fateful year the documentary “Super Size Me” came out, and someone made me watch it with them. I didn’t care to change my diet, I didn’t seek health info out… I was a great candidate for a powerful documentary. I watched it and it really did get through to me, right away. I was that person who ate fast food all the time and the documentary made me very concerned about what my health would start to look like later in my life if I kept this up. It was also the first time I realized my nutrition and the stuff I was starting to experience with my health might be linked. So I stopped eating fast food with my team. Amazingly, even just that step began to elicit my teammates calling me a health freak. JUST not eating at fast food chains!

Some seniors, I’m far left

A couple months later, another step towards my veganism occurred, and again, not really by my proactivity. A friend was reading the book “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser, which had also recently come out. He sat near me in French class and was so engrossed in it that he’d read it in the few minutes before class started and would be constantly reading  passages out to me in his enthusiasm, saying, “You have to read this!” and “This is crazy!” I thought it was interesting but really didn’t have an intention to read it — I figured I knew it all from watching Super Size Me. Later, I went to the library to find a table to do some studying. I found a vacant one and glanced over at the books that were right up against that particular table, to find that the only library copy of “Fast Food Nation” was sitting at eye level. I grabbed it out of the shelf, began to leaf through it, read some interesting things, and decided to check it out.

Fast Food Nation does indeed talk about fast food, but it really addresses all processed foods, and the health dangers of all of them. I realized that the foods I was eating at home and getting from the grocery store weren’t a whole lot better than the fast food chain “food.” I began trying to cut out junk food and tried to eat more fruit. It helped a little bit as far as my health. By this time, my turning down the fast food that was served in my school cafeteria and my declining going to fast food as part of team tradition really got people’s attention and I began to be viewed as the health food girl (which is funny to me now seeing how not really that healthy I was eating).

For my birthday, a friend of mine bought me a book she’d never read but thought looked interesting, and I’d never heard of, called “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About” by Kevin Trudeau. At that time, at that age, it worked for me. It taught me about organic foods, and about all kinds of other holistic health practices that weren’t food-related, like drinking filtered water and skin care products. I was so excited by the idea that I could feel so healthy and felt awakened by the realization that feeling exhausted every minute of the day and having tons of mental fog was not normal. I felt inspired by the possibilities of health. I started eating organic and changing my lifestyle habits, but was still eating animal products.

By this time my interest in holistic health and nutrition was really kicking off and I was feeling better physically. But there was one resource, one experience that catapulted me from organic omnivore to vegan in a month. I went to the local library, I don’t remember what for exactly, but ended up in the health section and saw the spine of the book “The Food Revolution” by John Robbins. I saw the impressive endorsements on the covers and though I anticipated it wouldn’t be much different than “Fast Food Nation”, I decided to check it out.

I couldn’t put the book down. I read it on all my breaks during my summer lifeguard job, and ended up spending most of those reading breaks with tears in my eyes. It’s about veganism, which I realized fully a couple chapters in, and reading it felt like waking up from a huge, elaborate dream that I thought was reality but it really wasn’t. John Robbins discusses veganism from a health perspective, an environmental perspective, a human rights perspective, and an animal rights perspective. Reading about how my own health could be wonderful throughout my life was inspiring, but it truly was all the other parts of the discussion that stole my heart. When I read about how animals were treated, I bawled, and learning about how we perpetuate world hunger by eating animal products, and how the environment is suffering because of it broke my heart.

On a positive note, the visionary picture that Mr. Robbins painted about what our individual lives and what our world can look like by having a “Food Revolution” made me feel like suddenly life made so much more sense, there was so much more meaning in my own life, and really opened a sense of love in my life that has never left. He was even able to relate veganism back to character, integrity, and a spiritual connectedness, which felt like soul nourishment at a place in my life where I felt otherwise pretty disconnected. One of my favorite quotes:

“Your life does matter. It always matters whether you reach out in friendship or lash out in anger. It always matters whether you live with compassion and awareness or whether you succumb to distractions and trivia. It always matters how you treat other people, how you treat animals, and how you treat yourself. It always matters what you do. It always matters what you say. And it always matters what you eat.” -John Robbins

There was no ambiguity, no fear, and no hesitation. I went vegan that month 7 years ago and I haven’t looked back.