If you had told me at age fifteen that one day I’d become a committed vegetarian, I’d have laughed in your face.

I was raised to believe that humans were intended to be carnivores. The consensus in my household was that vegetarianism was unnatural, and that anyone with an ounce of sanity would never pass up an opportunity to eat meat.

At restaurants, I’d scan menus hungrily, searching for greasy cheeseburgers, fried chicken, platters of buttery seafood. Leafy salads generally went unnoticed.

As a child, I lived a very active lifestyle and was always participating in some type of organized sport. When I reached high school, I played varsity soccer and took up running as a personal hobby. My craving for protein intensified, and I embraced it. I exercised hard, maintained a healthy body weight, and to reward myself for this I indulged every meat craving that crossed my mind. For a long time I never saw an issue with this.

Things gradually began to change. Towards the end of my high school career I was educated, as most students are, about the horrors of the meat industry. My heart broke as I watched documentaries depicting helpless cows, chickens, and pigs being subjected to unimaginably horrible conditions. I started to view my meat consumption differently. I wasn’t yet inspired to make the transition to being a vegetarian, but it became a real possibility for the first time in my life. I watched my vegetarian friends a little bit more closely, learning about protein supplements and black bean burgers and meat-free cuisine.

I moved away to college and initially forgot about the subject entirely. Being in such a new and fast-paced environment, I was forced to rely on high calorie, high protein meals to give me the energy I needed to make it through the day. I was still running, but it was no longer a priority. The combination of these two factors led to inevitable weight gain. Although I never gained more than 8 pounds over the course of my freshman year, I was mortified. Until that point I had always been proud of my sense of self control over my dieting and exercising habits, and so any weight gain felt like failure. I came to the conclusion that I needed to make a change. That change, as it turned out, was vegetarianism.

I decided to try it for just a few months, as a summer cleanse from the unhealthy eating habits I’d developed at school. My boyfriend agreed to do it with me, which made it more fun. But as I began to research how to adjust to a meat free lifestyle, I was also able to relearn about all of the positive impacts I’d be having by cutting meat from my diet. I was suddenly and forcefully reminded of what I’d learned in high school. I realized that I genuinely wanted to be a vegetarian—not only to help me lose weight, but because I wanted to make an impact, however small, on the lives of innocent animals as well as on the environment. My love for meat seemed trivial and irrelevant compared to my newfound beliefs.

I am happy to say that I’ve been a vegetarian for about seven months now. Making the change was relatively painless, despite the grief I received from my family, and I love knowing that I’m not contributing to the inhumane treatment of the animals born and raised for the meat industry. If you are a meat lover like I once was, please know that it is possible to make the switch, and you can live a very happy life as a vegetarian as I currently do.