I Like Animals Way More Than People
I also like eating plants way more than animals… this is the story of my journey to becoming a vegan. I know many will scroll right past this, but it is meant for those that have an open mind as I did when I started my own journey.
I was raised as a vegetarian — my parents were vegetarian due to their Hindu upbringing. They brought me to the United States as an infant and over the years as I got older, I realized vegetarianism was not the norm in the small Texas suburb we were living in. There seemed to be a stigma associated with being vegetarian so I grew up hiding behind feigned omnivore eating. My family moved a lot after we left Texas but it was mainly to very small towns all over the country so we didn’t meet many vegetarians. I would be embarrassed when we went to restaurants and my parents would loudly insist on “NO MEAT PRODUCTS” with our waiters. To me, it was humiliating that not only were we one of a few if not the only non-white people in the community but now we ate “weird” and always got quizzical looks from those that overheard, not to mention snide remarks from classmates in school. As an introvert, I often didn’t open myself up to many people, but being the focal point of their incendiary comments didn’t help me feel comfortable in my own skin.
My parents brought my brother and I back with them to India for various reasons when we were in high school. I missed my home, but I realized there are so many vegetarians here that I grew comfortable being one. So when I returned to the US for college, I was finally able to open up about being a vegetarian and going out to eat with others, easily saying no to non-vegetarian foods. When people asked me why I didn’t eat meat, I said it’s because I grew up that way. Health was not a consideration and certainly the suffering of animals didn’t even come into the picture at that time.
I never let it bother me that my friends and even those I was in intimate relationships with were not vegetarian, and in some cases, quite the opposite, eating very little plant based meals. I had no problem with it because I thought I was the “odd” one being a vegetarian, and anyway, up until this point, I’d been a junk food vegetarian. I had been known to eat entire meals consisting of Cheetos and Oreos because they were vegetarian food items.
When I started eating more whole foods, I smugly thought I was doing great things for my body while still consuming eggs and dairy products. After all, I’m eating my fruits and veggies and whole grains! Besides, I was wholly hooked on cheese so I was unable to give up dairy and, I too was under the false impression that eating only plants could not provide me with sufficient protein.
In 2016, I developed an autoimmune skin disease. I thought I was healthy enough but after finding others online that had helped their condition without the use of antibiotics or steroid creams, I decided to do a panchakarma cleanse. I went into remission so quickly, my dermatologist was astonished and I will post on that soon to share my story. However, I brought dairy and eggs back into my diet immediately after that. I still experienced digestive issues even as I continued eating minimal animal products, mainly in the form of cheese and eggs since I’d stopped drinking milk by this time. I did start shifting my thinking from purely health to advocacy for the animals but I truly believed at the time that dairy and eggs were acceptable. These “foods” allowed the animals to live and I wasn’t part of the murder of sentient beings…
…until January 2021, when I watched Forks Over Knives. I was convinced that it would turn my boyfriend into a vegetarian but instead, it started me on my path to veganism. However, I didn’t completely embrace it until March 2021 when I joined a vegan bodybuilding challenge, which made it much easier to give up the dairy and eggs. While partaking in the challenge, I realized then that I was doing so much better without dairy or eggs and these products were not optimal for my health. I started to follow other vegan fitness coaches and bodybuilders and kept discovering more people advocating for animal rights. I started understanding more about the dairy and egg industries and learned that they may be far worse to the animals than even the meat industry.
I’m not excusing the meat and fish industries of their role in enslaving and murdering sentient beings. However, the dairy industry performs those atrocities along with raping these animals so they can be pregnant and lactate to produce the milk that humans consume, all while their own babies, for whom that milk is meant, are taken away and in some cases, even murdered after only a few days of being born. The egg industry is no better. Even if the hens are meant to lay so many eggs, the chicks that are born to replace those hens are not always the gender needed so the male chicks are often shredded alive within hours of birth, being of no use whatsoever since your supermarket chicken comes from the hens that can no longer lay eggs.
And when this realization came to me, I was able to completely give up dairy and eggs and not even crave cheese, which used to be my Achilles’ heel. By that point, it wasn’t even an option. There is no taste or craving in the entire world that is more important than the life of another creature and I do not want to be part of that cruel industry.
I am still on my own bodybuilding journey as a vegan, I’ve gotten to know several amazing individuals and made several friends through this journey and I am honored to know them. I took a course on Plant Based Nutrition through eCornell and the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies to have a scientific knowledge base to my newfound love for being vegan.
For those that may have become vegan but quit due to not feeling great, oftentimes it’s because you’re a junk food vegan (Oreos are accidentally vegan) or not eating enough calories or even too many calories, which is possible on a vegan diet, especially with processed foods or overloading on nuts and natural sugars. If you are questioning my thought process or want more information on how or why I came to feel this way, please feel free to ask questions but I also urge you to listen to the speech by Gary Yourafsky and watch Dominion or any of the other movies recommended in my Instagram bio. Thank you for sticking around this long. Please consider going vegan.
