Challenging, surrounding opinions and lifestyles pertaining to food habits is a difficult task to do, especially if you are a young and growing human being without a huge amount of information and life experiences under your belt. There is a constant struggle to figure out how your eating habits will affect this world or your own world and whether it will restrict purpose in your life or invite purpose. A great step to figuring out, who you truly are is by being open to new experiences, by changing your perspective on eating meat.
That includes changing your diet for ethical reasons and not just dietary reasons.
Give yourself the option to save other living beings lives, or at the very least, ask yourself why you haven't thought about, what you are eating. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to delve more into this new way of life:
Why am I mindlessly shoving this hamburger down my throat?
Why am I eating another living being?
Why do I call myself an animal lover, yet I eat them, when I am bored?
Why am I not changing my ways?
Why don't I start this journey now?
After you have written down some questions to further guide you to a new way of viewing a hamburger/cow, start by setting small goals. Do not cut meat out cold turkey (no pun intended) because I guarantee that you will be eating meat again within the day. Start by cutting out a product that you know that you weren't crazy about in the first place. My first cut out was red meats; hamburgers and steaks were never a staple in my life. However, your first cut out might be pork, poultry, fish, dairy etc. After you have successfully taken that first cut, you already feel like you are Captain Planet.
Yet you probably feel like you still need to do more to further this personal experiment.
Next step is to cut out another category of meat and to keep slowly cutting out a category until you no longer crave it. Get to the point where whenever you see meat, you think of the baby form of that animal. For example, before you eat that steaming heap of chicken, envision a cute little baby chick on your plate. You know the ones you get to hold and pet at the petting zoo, and their little feet feel weird on your hands as they flail around with their immense amount of energy? When you take yourself back to that moment, you make the connection of meat and baby chicks being the same thing, a connection that majority of Americans/humans are missing. You. Are. Eating. Dead. Flesh. Maybe that might resonate with you a tad bit more, but just in case it doesn't, think about the health benefits that comes with becoming a vegetarian.
1. You are dramatically decreasing your risk for heart disease and high blood pressure.
2. You are also dramatically decreasing your chances of some forms of cancers.
3. Assuming you will become a healthy vegetarian that gets their protein from other sources like legumes, tofu, nuts or dark greens, you will also be eliminating other diseases like diabetes and obesity.(American Heart Association, Nov. 6th 2015)
4. You will have more energy since your body doesn't need to waste it on digesting meat, since meat takes a ton of time to digest.
5. You will feel better physically and mentally.
Hopefully the reasons I have listed above will further guide you to living a meat-free life and will help you feel like you care about other living beings other than yourself and hopefully stop thinking about who's on the menu for dinner. Start living life with compassion and live beside animals. Remember, fish are friends, not food.
