We've all had the desire to go healthy sometimes. This is, admittedly, one of the more radical things that I've done in my life, and if you've ever at least considered the notion, I think this article may be for you. Also, as a light-hearted idea that may take the dullness out of a piece about eating vegetables, I have replaced all of the gifs and images in this article with stock photos of women laughing while eating salad. Enjoy!

In this article, I will not shamelessly pester you to convert yourself from your omnivorous or carnivorous ways. Different diets work for different people. Some people need more vitamins or more vegetables in their lives, some people need more protein or meat in their lives. I found something that worked for me and that's fantastic. Diets tend not to work in the best of ways if you're looking to lose weight because most times weight loss isn't as simple as eating less or eating right, it's also a lifestyle thing. You might want to think of it instead as burning fat and gaining muscle. So with that out of the way, let's begin.

1. I learned that there's a surprising lack of vegetables in most meals.

Often times, college salad bars aren't going to cut it. I love salad bars, and I think that there's some good stuff in most of college salad bars, but let's be frank, eating salad every day for a year isn't going to sound too appealing to anyone, even the most hardcore of vegans.

Imagine that you have ham in front of you one day for dinner. And the next day there's ham glazed with honey (so it's honey-glazed ham). The day after that it's ham with pineapples. The day after that it's ham chopped up into little cubes with some other meats, yet it's still predominantly ham.

Trust me, if you keep eating ham every evening for dinner, you're going to stare intently into your mirror one night and start yelling at your reflection for no reason. It's like you're a Sim, and ham is the least expensive thing in your refrigerator full of food (I've never played The Sims, pardon me if that's wrong).

Salad is the same way, I love salad and its options, yet I can't eat it every d*mn night over and over again. And when your college's cafe only offers salad, greasy veggie burgers, and tofu stir fry with a sauce so thick that you can't taste anything natural, you begin to lose motivation.

It's important to note that I also had a kitchen for the whole year, and that I did cook some vegetarian things there, but with the budget of a college student and with the price of produce and vegetables, I think you can deduce what went wrong.

I still bought vegetarian things, but I bought vegetarian things that were very unhealthy: often this included poptarts, Cheez-Its (which are amazing little squares of hangover cures, but really unhealthy too), and tortillas and cheese. This actually works really well into my next point, too:

2. Eating vegetarian is hella expensive.

You may have heard a few years ago that Mexico displaced the United States as the most obese country. You may not have heard why, though. Mexico is also one of the more impoverished countries in the world, yet they still have McDonalds and other fast-food chains that give you a lot of calories with little protein for little cost to you.

When you're on a stricter budget, like the casual college student, you're not buying the things that are the best for you, because you can't afford to buy that every time. You're buying what you can with your budget that's still within the confines of your diet.

Almost every time, meaning 99.9824673 percent of the time, the cheaper food is the unhealthier food. That's the major reason behind Mexico's obesity rate: if you're poor and you need to feed your family, your only option with a few dollars in your pocket is to hit up McDonald's $1 Value Menu, and you're going to get a bunch of damn $1 cheeseburgers.

I was gifted with some money to re-kick-start my vegetarianism a few days ago, so I went to my local grocery to grab some squash that I could turn into spaghetti (a few years ago I got a squash-spaghetti grinder that makes it into spaghetti, I think it's called The Squashetti, or something else equally stupid) because I like squash and I like spaghetti.

There was a pound of pre-spaghetti'd squash for about $5. Then, there was a pound of squash for about $2.49. Obviously, the better option would be the whole squash, thinking economically, but then I remembered, I might not actually cook this until later on in the week. The spaghetti'd squash is vacuum-sealed tight in its container while the actual squash is exposed and more likely to rot before I have time to cook it. So guess what I bought that day?

3. I learned that eating vegetarian is not a spectator sport. This is some real sh*t.

If you want to eat vegetarian, you need to actually get control of your life and start planning it out. Nothing may cause you to whip yourself into shape more than eating vegetarian, because you're working on Mother Nature's Timer of Death™. Here's what I mean:

You say, "You know what, f*ck it. I'm gonna buy the whole god d*mn squash and I'm gonna make magical things with it." The second you pick the squash up and put it in your basket, Mother Nature starts the timer. You don't know exactly how long she set it for, it could be a day, it could be a week. You just know that she set it, and you're racing against the clock.

You need to use that squash, and fast, or else you just wasted $2.49/lb. And Mother Nature is upset with you and she'll curse you with locusts or droughts (take a hint, California) or storms of the blood of polar bears, I don't know.

If you want to start eating vegetarian, you need to planning your meals out. You need to be searching up recipes that don't taste like you're literally eating dirt, and you need to get a tiny little notebook or a Rolodex full of your favorites. Then, you need to shop less but frequent the grocery store more; when you go, you need to buy less food every time you're there, but you need to visit the store more frequently. Only buy food for a few days (three, maybe four at most), then plan what you're going to cook and when.

4. I learned that most people don't know the difference between vegetarians and vegans.

(So I zoomed in on this picture.)

(Then I ran acolor checker on her eyes because they looked very dark.)

(And I found her eyes were a shade of black. This is what happens when you sell your soul to stock photos.)

Anyways.

veg·e·tar·i·an

/vejəˈterēən/

noun

1. 1.a person who does not eat meat, and sometimes other animal products, especially for moral, religious, or health reasons.

adjective

1. 1.of or relating to the exclusion of meat or other animal products from the diet.
   1. "a vegetarian restaurant"

synonyms: meatless, meat-free, no-meat

veg·an

ˈvēɡən/

noun

1. a person who does not eat or use animal products.
   1. "I'm a strict vegan"

Okay, so that's still a bit vague. Here's the real difference, though: vegetarians don't eat meat, but still eat most animal products such as dairy products and honey. Vegans don't eat any animal products or anything made by animals at all. They do eat substitutes though, I've seen some clever adaptations of dairy products like almond milk or soy milk, cashew cheese and the like.

When most people think about those people that try to pester you to become "one of us," they're mainly thinking of a stereotype of vegans. I personally don't care if you're vegan, vegetarian, carnivorous or other, as long as you're happy and healthy I think you can eat what you want. That being said, and keeping prejudice out of it, I'll tell you a story:

So I was on Tinder, and I matched with this girl that was pretty cute; she dyed her hair grey, which doesn't look great on a lot of people but it was amazing on her. She really was very attractive. Literally five sentences in to our conversation, she brings up that she's a vegan and when I mention that I'm a vegetarian, she says "Oh my god you should totally make the switch! You're so close!" And when I tell her I'm happy with where I am, she doesn't respond. So that was the end of that. And I never found out if vegans swallow or not...

5. I learned that everyone assumes that you're really healthy.

I try not to mention that much that I'm vegetarian, but when it comes up in casual conversation people either don't believe me (because I'm a bit overweight) or they say "I was wondering that, your skin looks great!" My natural response is to think but not to say, "Oh, well I'm wondering if you're a good dancer, because you're doing a real good job at dancing around the topic."

I understand that my appearance can be paradoxical to what my diet is. Vegetables don't always equal instant smaller waistlines. I have been getting into shape: eating less and exercising more, but it's not always that simple. People that eat predominantly vegetables can be built that stereotypical way if they're not doing it right. If they're not getting complete proteins, they're not going to have that much muscle.

If they're not getting a bunch of vitamins required to maintain this diet in a healthy way, they're not going to have good bone density (magnesium, calcium, Vitamin D), their blood isn't going to clot as effectively (Vitamin K), they won't be able to metabolize energy all that well (pretty much all the B vitamins), and the list goes on.

You can be unhealthy in a lot of different ways, and sometimes doing something that you think is good for yourself can be one of the worst things you can do to your body, if you don't have the facts to do it well. One of the mistakes that I made going into vegetarianism the first time was to essentially starve myself and lose a lot of muscle in order to lose weight.

That wasn't burning fat, that was making exercising and competing in sports more difficult. So when I realized this, I started eating more eggs, I started eating more nuts and seeds, more soy products and such to get complete proteins (toast and peanut butter is a great complete protein). I also started making protein shakes and using whey protein powder, but I tried not to make that a major source of my diet.

I understand that people will assume that I'm healthy because of my diet, but I wan't always. It took a while for me to learn the necessary things to get healthy with vegetarianism, which in the long run, (I'm only going to say this once, so pay attention) wasn't actually that more productive than regular diets including both meat and vegetables. Being vegetarian just made me more conscious of what I was eating.

6. I learned how to cook a bit more.

Vegetables are picky things sometimes, it's like how I feel my Italian grandmother would have reacted when faced with almost certain death from a super villain: "I don't care if you're on a schedule, I'm either going to cooked until golden brown at 350 degrees in an auger or you can kiss your dreams of world domination goodbye! Cazzo!" (That one might have been a stretch.)

Most times you can't just stick vegetables in a frying pan and call it dinner. Like everything, there's seasonings, fats, mis en place and other stuff that you have to work out to make a dinner out of asparagus or that squash from point #2; that spaghetti'd squash isn't going to be good if you put it in the microwave, it'll just be wilted and anti-good. So you boil it like pasta, then you make tomato sauce (or hempseed pesto, which is my new addiction) while it's boiling, then you toss the pasta in the sauce after you strain the pasta.

A block of tofu is nice, but it's essentially tasteless. If you've never had tofu because you don't like the texture, then I understand that and no one's going to force you to try it unless you go to that fucked up super villain from earlier because he seems like the guy that would do shit like this. Tofu absorbs the flavor of the things around it. If you cook tofu in soy sauce or teriyaki, congrats, you have tofu with teriyaki or soy sauce. If you cook it in tomato sauce, wow, you have tofu with tomato sauce. The list goes on.

The point here is, again, you have to know what you're doing. Don't just get a bunch of ingredients from Whole Foods because yes you are the pretentious, and not know what you're doing. I mean what even is farro? And what makes Red Quinoa different from regular quinoa?

And why do they have dispensaries for their seeds, beans and nuts like people are just running to their isles to grab them (mind out of the gutter now)? And what the hell is kale? This is stuff to figure out before you go there. Again, get a little notebook, write some stuff down that you don't know, take it home, figure it out later. Maybe even look for recipes, you might find your favorite new food.

All in all, going vegetarian wasn't something that I planned out initially. I made a salad in a bag with almonds, goat cheese, lettuce and other leafy greens, tortilla strips and a really unhealthy salad dressing (thousand island is literally mayonnaise), and ate half of it a night for dinner. It was fatty and gross and I realize now that I probably wasn't getting any protein from that at all.

I didn't even Google how to do it right, I just thought "sure, I can eat veggies". That's why, my friends, you should take it from me that it's a bit more work than you realize. I can understand why there's the stereotype about vegans trying to get people to convert, because it's really a fun thing after you get into it.

And if you're doing it right, it should become a bit obsessive because it's something that you're investing a lot of time and energy into. I really love being vegetarian because I really love vegetables and spending my time being vegetarian. And it's obviously not for everyone, but it seems like it's for me, and I'm happy.

Almost as happy as the woman from this gem that I saved for last.

God bless America.