I have been a vegetarian for 7 months now, which seems like a ridiculously long time to go without a cheeseburger or a chicken sandwich, but time flew. There were many reasons I became a vegetarian and surprisingly, the main reason wasn’t because I was spending 40 thousand dollars a year on tuition and couldn’t afford meat—while that was a bonus.

I believe in the food chain, people eat animals, animals eat smaller animals. But the meat industry now a days is the cause of many problems. Animals are tortured, mass produced and spend their lives in cages just so we can get a bigger piece of steak at the grocery store that we will throw half of away regardless. This is the reason I stay a vegetarian - the deeper into this I got the more I believed in what I was doing and the good that was coming out of it. And I know that everyone likes to argue one person not consuming meat will not make much of a difference but I am helping in the very small way I am able to help.

However, I started for a different reason all together. I started because I was obsessed with my diet. Every bad thing I ate I felt guilty for - I would have an ice cream cone that I genuinely enjoyed and I would regret it a week after eating it. I’ve always been really into bettering myself. Everything I do is an attempt to be better than I was a day before, or a week ago or years before.

But this was extreme. I wanted to eat a Snickers bar without counting the calories of it. So I cut out meat, which was a good way to watch exactly what was going into my mouth. When picking a meal I choose one without meat (which always tends to be the healthier option), and when I splurge on a candy bar or piece of pizza after I had unintentionally eaten, well, it's not a big deal. This worked and felt amazing. I woke up everyday on my own at 8 o'clock and my body felt a lot lighter, and I felt free even if all of it was just in my head.

Being a vegetarian over the summer was my initial goal. I started at the beginning of June and I told myself that this was a summer thing, but then summer ended and I sat at a fast food restaurant and I told all my friends that today was the day I would eat meat again and I couldn’t do it - I didn’t want too. By this point I believed in what I was doing so I told myself Thanksgiving was the new goal.

When November rolled around my first meal with meat would be a Thanksgiving turkey, and then a cheeseburger, and then I would eat every piece of chicken within a two-hundred-mile radius. But the time came and my mind had changed. Eating meat seems so minuscule in a grand scheme of things.

"Rianna Garza was a vegetarian" will not be the words written on my tombstone and I am quite positive that my dying words will not be “I wish I had eaten a lot more chicken.” I don’t crave meat much anymore and when I do it is usually gone the moment something else lands in my stomach. So I set a new goal, this goal is a year. If by June I decide that this isn’t something I want to continue than I'll carry out the plan I had for November, otherwise I’ll continue to set new goals for as long as I feel necessary and carry on my reputation of the girl who always has organic snacks.