I grew up always wanting to try going vegetarian. It was something that was new to me. I didn’t put it into effect until my second semester of college.

I was not surrounded by anyone who was vegetarian, so I felt like I had no one to go to or had a support system. I then went to college, and one of my suitemates was a vegetarian. I didn’t really show my interest in it until my second semester. I decided to give it a try and see if it was something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

And so, I began. The reasoning behind me wanting to try it was health reasons and because if I loved animals as much as I said I did, why did I eat them? I went and did it; I lasted a month and two weeks without eating meat.

I have learned a lot of things about it, and I also tried a lot of things I didn’t think I would.

It was fun but also very difficult for a beginner. I lived on campus, so I had to look for things that I could actually eat. It wasn’t hard to find things to eat, but it was difficult changing the foods that I would have had meat in originally. After a few weeks of it, I started to have dreams about eating meat. It was the strangest thing.

Yes, there were so many times I was tempted to eat meat, but I kept going as long as I could. Finally, I decided one day that I was done. I couldn’t see myself being vegetarian for the rest of my life, so I didn’t see the reason to keep going on. I tried to see if I could be that way like I thought I would’ve been. It is very difficult for people who are not used to it.

I don’t regret ever trying it.

Learning from my experience, my advice for those who are wanting to try it is: really do your research. There are a lot of foods that you can eat but there are surprising ones that you cannot eat. Another one is you must be willing to do it for your own personal reason, not because it's “in." Lastly, have fun doing it. It was the best experience but I just felt as though it just wasn’t for me.