My freshman year of high school, a girl more popular than me turned around and asked me "Are you a vegetarian?". I said no, confused that she was even talking to me. "Oh," she replied, "Well you look like a vegetarian."

I didn't know whether or not I should take it as a compliment, but I did. Growing up, I thought it was ~cool~ and ~trendy~ not to eat meat. I mean, it kind of is. But whenever I would "go vegetarian", it would only be for about a week or two before I gave in and had a taco.

This past April, I decided to try again. This time, I viewed it more as a "lifestyle change". I decided to stop eating meat not so that I could brag about it, but because I wanted to. Right now, I'm not really a vegetarian, I guess. I eat seafood, so that makes me a pescatarian — but it's easier to say that I'm a vegetarian. Plus, most people don't know what that is.

You know how some people will say "Wow, I'm really craving a steak right now," or "Man, I could go for some fried chicken"? I've never said either of those things. I've never craved meat, to my knowledge. Meat was always just something that happened to be a part of the dishes I ate — never the main focus. For example, I don't like steak. I never ate chicken thighs that were well-seasoned or something. That was just never appealing to me.

As for my taste, I don't really like ground beef. I would only eat burgers from Five Guys, really. I was scared of ground beef. Isn't that absurd? To be scared of a meat. *cue eye roll*

However, if I prepared chicken, I couldn't eat it. I couldn't watch it go from pink to white and then eat it. I was terrified that I would get some type of food-borne illness. But I could eat ground beef that I'd prepared! Do you see my dilemma?

Once I'd realized that I was just not OK with cooking the meat that I'd soon be ingesting, I decided not to cook meat anymore. I'd been ordering meal prep boxes from HelloFresh and Blue Apron, so I just changed my meal settings to "vegetarian". But I wasn't a vegetarian.

Eventually, I realized something else. If I ate meat during the day, my stomach would be in knots for hours afterward. That's when I had the thought: Why don't I just stop eating meat? I don't really like it anyway.

So that was that. I'm not a vegetarian because of my morals. I don't like the way animals are treated and all that jazz, but I'm not a vegetarian because I have such a ~great moral compass~. I get asked all the time if I'm vegan, so let me go ahead and address that right now: No, I'm not vegan. I think that would be WAY too hard. (I don't think that adult humans should have anything to do with ingesting dairy, but that's beside the point.)

On my new vegetarian diet, I eat a much wider array of fresh ingredients. I'm getting way more nutrients than I was getting before, honestly. Limiting what I can and cannot eat has made it more important for me to try new foods and to make up for the protein that I'm not getting as easily.

So, no, I'm not a vegetarian because I have strong morals. I'm a vegetarian for my health.