Eating Florence: Vegan Gelato

As I said in my first blog from Florence, if I had known I wouldn't be able to eat Gelato when I was applying to study abroad, I probably wouldn't have chosen the gelato capital of the world as my location.  But here's the best news in the whole world (really): you don't have to give up gelato when you give up dairy!  It is in no way necessary, even in Florence.

I used to love ice cream.  When I was little, I would make up songs to convince my parents to take me to Dairy Queen on the way home from school.  I wish I was kidding.  Gelato is like ice cream's cuter big sister that everyone likes more but is a little less approachable.  Gelato is a really big deal.

However, ice cream and gelato have this cousin who could definitely be as popular as gelato but she has a bad rep. because her mom is a weirdo.  Her name is Sorbet and we are in love.

The sorbet here is not like the sorbet in America.  Other than the fruity flavor, you can't tell the difference between that and regular gelato.  I highly recommend you give it a try, even if you normally eat dairy.

So far, I've had Strawberry (fragola), Pear (pera), Lemon (limone), mixed berry (frutto di busco), and chocolate (cioccolato).  To be honest I feel like a real fruit talking about sorbet in so much detail, so I'll just say that all of them were amazing.  Pear is my favorite.

If you're looking for dairy free gelato that isn't sorbet, there are also a few places to get gelato made with milk alternatives.  Perche No? Gelateria offers a few soy-based flavors, for example.  I got hazelnut and chocolate, and was pretty pleased.  Just make sure you know how to get there: I went into a pizzeria and said, "Dov'e perche no gelateria?"  To which the man responded in broken English, "We don't have gelato because this is a pizzeria."  :|

Another gelato place I have found that has dairy alternative flavors is Gelateria Dei Neri, near Santa Croce.  They offer a few rice-based flavors, which I never knew existed.  Rice-based products are more common here than they are in America.  This was my favorite of the three.

The last location is Festival Del Gelato, near Piazza Della Reppublica.  They offer a few soy-based flavors in addition to their sorbet.  However, their flavors "senza latte" are also "senza zucchero," as in  "without added sugar."  If that is something that interests you, Festival Del Gelato is the place to go.  But I found it a little disappointing.

When you go to these or any gelato stores, look for labels that say "senza latte" or "senza latticini," meaning without milk or diary.  To make sure, you can say, "Questo è senza latte?" - this doesn't have milk?  To ask which flavors don't have dairy, say: "Qual i sapore non hanno latticini?"  It's really easy, just practice.

I hope that this has inspired you to try the multitude of dairy-free dessert options here in Florence, and also helped to subdue the discouraging feeling of being unable to participate in elements of culture while you travel.  Like I said in previous blogs, I am doing my best to maintain optimum health while also participating wholeheartedly in the culture of the locations I visit, and I know you can do the same.

Roasted Vegetables and Quinoa Slaw

Quinoa and Roasted Vegetable Slaw

It's a quinoa salad, but I thought the term "Slaw" made it much less pretentious.

I've adapted this recipe from Ina Garten's Orzo with Roasted Vegetables. Though I would never deny the wonder that is Ina Garten nor her expertise in making delicious food, this alternative is vegan and gluten free and contains less fat. I've made a lot of her recipes, and I've found that there usually is too much oil. That's not just me being healthy, either! Sometimes I just think it's a little too oily for my taste.  This is a recipe that you can make for your family or save in your fridge for a quick lunch or dinner.

Ingredients:

1 Yellow Onion, roughly chopped

1 Eggplant, peeled and  ¾ inch cubes

1 Red Pepper,

2 Cups Cherry Tomatoes

2 Cloves Garlic, Minced

3 Cups White Button Mushrooms, halved

1 Cup Quinoa

2 Cups Vegetable Broth

3 or 4 Tbs Olive Oil

1/3 Cup Dry White Wine

Salt and Pepper

1 Lemon

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400.

Toss onion, eggplant, red pepper, tomatoes, and garlic in olive oil, salt and pepper on a sheet pan.  Bake on middle rack until browned, about 25 minutes.

Combine quinoa and vegetable broth in a medium sized pot.  Bring to a boil then turn down to a simmer.  Cook, lidded, until the liquids are absorbed, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, saute the halved mushrooms in the wine on medium heat until they have exuded their liquid and browned, about ten minutes.

Serve vegetables and mushrooms over quinoa, and squeeze lemon to taste.

Additional Comments:

• The salt in this recipe is recommended but not required - try adding less than you would normally (stay with me) because the lemon will bring out the flavors in the same way that the salt does. Also, aim for a low sodium vegetable broth.
• Because we've reduced the oil, use a non-stick pan or parchment paper. If you're stuck with a difficult dirty dish at the end of the recipe, put baking soda on it, let it sit for a few minutes, then pour boiling water over the pan. The cooked-on grease will come right off; no need to do extra work because you're using less fat. Then take a second to think about how weird it is that baking soda does that to dishes but we eat it anyways... I dunno.
• The vegetables listed in the recipe make delicious food, but you can try with whatever vegetables you want - local, in season, in your pantry already, whatever.
• In order to lower the fat, it's important to cook the mushrooms separately: they are like little sponges for liquids and won't share with the other vegetables. If you're not a fan of the flavor of wine, see these substitutions.
• If you don't eat quinoa regularly now, take it easy. It is a powerful grain that your body will need to make adjustments to. If you want to know more, see the nutrition facts and make some inferences.

Thanks for reading and let me know how your fooding goes. Like always, I'd love to hear from you!

I Like Food Just as Much as You Do.

Not many people reading my blog are vegans (yet), which is definitely okay and possibly ideal.  I didn't start this blog to communicate with people who had already made choices about their diet and lifestyle.  This blog is for smart, forward-thinking, openminded and attractive people like you.  From the beginning, I have hoped to provide people with honest, unbiased, and comprehensible information about how food can affect people's lives by means of experimentation.  For that reason, I want to make sure to write from the perspective of a human, not a vegan.

I used to look at people with strict diets and simply assume they didn't like food as much as I did.  So when I found out that my health problems were possibly caused by food, I was defiant.  The information was too varied, the instructions too vague, and the proposed changes too extreme.  If I was going to have to change my diet to stop having migraines, I was going to have migraines forever.

It wasn't all defiance; a large part of it was hopelessness.  When I looked at the influence food had on my life, it just didn't seem possible to alter.  Food wasn't about nutrition, it was about social interaction, culture, creativity, and entertainment.  I wasn't going to give all that up to get rid of some headaches.

Here's the good news: I didn't.  I still use food as a means of social interaction.  I continue to learn more about the culinary practices of different cultures.  Through vegan cooking, I am more creative with my food than ever, and I am definitely still entertained by food.  But I have gone through a huge transition.  My relationship with food has changed.

It didn't happen overnight, but it did require what some people would consider an extreme adjustment to my diet.  I started out reluctant, had a difficult time in the beginning, and then one day I realized that healthful behavior was making me really, really happy.  So what, specifically, am I doing differently that caused that change?

• I read ingredients:  I first had to do it to make sure that my food didn't contain animal products, but after the habit was formed, I started noticing a lot of other things.  I would read some things and find no animal products, but also no other ingredients that I recognized.  I would notice how some ingredients (like sodium or wheat and corn products) would sneak into food where I never would have expected it.  I used to read ingredients and either immediately decide not to care or care for a second and then get discouraged by the surplus of negative information.  But when you read the ingredients of everything you buy, you will find some things that are good for you, and the gnarly ingredients will start to be less and less appealing.
• I notice when I'm hungry and then I eat:  I wish that was an obvious thing to do but it's just not.  From the three-year-olds I babysit to my adult brothers, people spend too much of their time hungry and angry for no reason.  Ever heard of "hangry?" Let me tell you, it is a real thing.  Some people don't realize that a lack of food is causing them to be angry.  Some people intentionally limit their calories.  Some people don't realize how much they're supposed to eat.  I never told myself to stop eating, but I accidentally let myself go hungry a lot.  Now that I'm eating the right food, I notice being hungry and thirsty and I finally recognize the importance of changing that immediately.  I don't care how great your people skills are.  You're better at being a human after you've eaten.  Before you take a test: eat.  Before you go to an interview: eat.  Before you watch an ASPCA commercial: eat.  Before you argumentatively comment on this blog about how I used the wrong "your":  eat.  
• I don't eat for fun, I indulge:  I love food.  Sometimes food benefits me in ways separate from nutrition.  There are definitely some people out there who do not have this feeling about food, but I will never be one of them.  However, I'm not tied to these unhealthy foods.  I've had one pint of Soy Creamy Cherry Chocolate Chip ice cream in my freezer for weeks!  Eating foods like this is now a conscious decision to indulge, rather than an impulse to consume.  I have trouble writing about this because I never thought this would happen and I'm not really sure how it did, but I thought it was definitely something to take note of. 
• I am attracted to healthy things:  This is the big one, and the only way I can think to explain it is through example, so listen.  My hypothesis thus far is that my migraines are caused by dairy products.  This was an extra difficult pill to swallow because I used to drink around three glasses of milk a day.  Now when I look at a glass of milk, I see myself losing vision and vomiting and laying in bed under twelve blankets for the next three days.  And I don't want to drink it.  I changed my mind about milk through its relationship with my health.  It's not as fun to eat something when you know it's poison (like not the fun kind of poison).  This transcended into things that wouldn't cause me direct pain, but would increase my likelihood of health issues in the long term.  The important thing to note here is that it was a voluntary and conscious effort.  It is a decision I make every day to adjust my focus, when dealing with food, to the nutritional benefits, rather than the more superficial advantages.  I don't do it always, of course, but it has become a potent influence on my day to day choices.  

In the future, I can go into more detail about how I made all of this happen; for now, though, the most important thing to take away from this is that I never thought I would.  So if you're looking to change the way you eat, trust in your body and your mind's ability to adapt.  These changes have made me happier, healthier, prettier (I know, you didn't think it was possible), and given me more energy and motivation to continue with a healthier lifestyle.  Do your research, make realistic goals, and stick to them.  It will be easier than you think.

The Initial Effects of a Vegan Diet

      One of my major motivators for creating a blog was to give people an honest and accurate account of my experiences with making diet changes, so I thought I'd take a break from my more intellectually-driven ideas to give a report of how things are going for me.  Overall, it has been an extremely positive experience that I would highly recommend to anyone feeling discontented.  What I've noticed is that even if it isn't the source of your problems, knowing that you have control to change something and the drive to commit to the change can give you a new perspective that is really motivating.  It definitely hasn't been easy, though, and I plan to be completely honest about that.  Here's what has challenged me throughout the process:

1.  Cravings:
      In an interview by KD Traenger, Anne Hathaway stated, "The moment I learned, I evolved.  I have never, not once, craved a single non-vegan food."
...
     Now, maybe Anne Hathaway didn't have roommates who brought Frosties back to her room late at night.  Maybe she doesn't have a Pinterest account to scroll through grilled cheese after grilled cheese at any given moment in the day.  Maybe she's just one of those weirds who doesn't actually like ice cream that much.   Or it could be that she really did just poof her cravings away with magic.  Whatever she did, I haven't figured it out.  Throughout this experiment, I have wanted to eat so many things that I shouldn't eat.  When I started, it was milk, ice cream, and other non-vegan desserts.  I realized, though, that I was never craving the animal products in these things; I was craving the sugar.  And sugar, for all it's other possible flaws, is vegan friendly.
     I've always heard people say "well if you crave sugar, eat an apple!" and laughed at them.  'You obviously don't understand,' I would think.  'I don't want sugar, I want pure white refined sugar in heavy cream.  An apple isn't going to do it for me.'  And I was right.  But the thing is, though I thought I was craving the heavy cream and other things in the recipes, I really just wanted a large amount of sugar.  It takes a lot of apples to get to the amount of sugar in a Frosty.  The good news is, eating lots of apples is okay!  Way more okay than a Frosty.
     Once I adopted this new idea, I didn't have cravings anymore.  What I did have a few weeks in, was a craving for meat.  Really weird.  I've been a casual vegetarian a few times in my life, and never actually craved meat.  But after I eliminated milk, cheese, etc., I actually wanted meat.  These ended after about a week, though.

2.  Quantities:
     "Enough," I have learned, is a relative term and will change when you change your diet.  Animal products are much richer than their plant based alternatives.  If you make the switch to plant-based foods, you'll find yourself eating Cheesecake Factory-style heaping plates of food for almost every meal.  That's just what your body wants, and it's not over eating.  I know this now, but I grossly underestimated my caloric needs at the grocery store, and I basically ran out of food half way through the week.

3.  Being that guy who has to ask if there's cheese on the pasta:
       It's really easy to be a vegan when you already went grocery shopping and all the food in your house is vegan food.  But food is a social thing and I am a social person.  I'm not a picky eater so I'm not used to having difficult food preferences, and it feels weird to ask people questions about the free food they put in front of me.  Again, it helps to have eaten enough at home.  But I've found that it's more than just being full.  It's being comfortable with your choices about food to discuss them without feeling pretentious or needy.  Because I do feel confident in my choices, I've been able to get over the initial weirdness.

4.  My body was like "What are you doing?"
     This was a pretty major change for me and my body responded to it as such.  I don't want to go into details here, for the sake of the general body of readers, but if you really REALLY want to know you can contact me elsewhere and I'll probably tell you?  I don't know.

    The major drawbacks have been, for the most part, physical.  But the major advantages of this switch surpass the needs of my body.  I know that there is one element of my life I am consciously making changes to.  To feel like you have enough knowledge, skill, and commitment to successfully change even the smallest aspect of your life is really empowering.  I urge anyone reading this to find one thing about their life that they're not happy with, and consider changing it.  Baby steps.

Doctors are great but this is just silly.

       I went to the doctor today and it brought up a lot of issues I have with the way the health care system.  Oooo that sounds controversial.  It's really not.  It's just one girl's struggle with having migraines and having doctors not help.  

My first migraine happened this summer.  I was at a dance class and all of the sudden I could only spot half of my face.  That is, I could only see half of my face. I sat in my car after class ended for a few minutes, trying to understand what was going on and how I was going to get home.  I drove home on all the backroads going fifteen miles an hour like a big douche-bag, using the median to guide me because most things to the right of it were covered by a silvery blob. I arrived home and burst into tears, to the extreme confusion of my dad and brother.  I composed myself enough to described to them what was happening and while my dad tried frantically to get me to stop crying, Kevin looked up my symptoms.  He came back with the verdict that it was probably a migraine. Shortly after that, the severe pain kicked in.  I spent the rest of the night in bed with the exception of when I got up to vomit. I fell asleep around 4:00AM and woke up at 8:00AM.  That morning, we went straight to Urgent Care.

I described my symptoms and they confirmed the migraine diagnosis.  Then they gave me a shot of Imitrex, a commonly used migraine medication.  “This should make you feel better,” they said.  The nurse left, turning the lights off and practically tucking me in - she was really nice.  Then, it felt like the bottom of my brain was on fire.  It spread to the rest of my head, then to my lungs and stomach, until it was all over my body.  If you have ever cut a thousand jalapeno peppers and breathed in their gas, that’s basically what it felt like, but all throughout my body.  My dad went out and asked the nurse if she knew what was happening.

“She’s in there and she feels like her insides are burning, do you know what’s going on?”

“No, I don’t.  Doctor!  Do you know why her insides are on fire?”

“Nope, sorry!”

The nurse got out some kind of nurse’s encyclopedia and said, “well look at that, it’s an uncommon side effect!”  They performed an MRI Scan which came back normal, eliminating tumors as a cause.  Hooray!  They said I could follow up with a neurologist, but advised me to wait and see if it was an isolated incident.  

It wasn’t!  I got my second migraine a few weeks into the semester.  It started while I was waiting for a train after going away for the weekend.  I didn’t want to deal with another doctor, and didn’t have a private physician at school, let alone a neurologist.  But by the eleventh day of the migraine, I thought maybe I should find out if I was dying.  I went to my university’s infirmary on a Friday afternoon, hoping to get some advil for free or something.

“Are you on Birth Control??”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well then it might be a blood clot.  Yeah, Birth Control causes blood clots.”

“Oh… What do we do about that?”
“We’ll have to get you a blood test right away because it might be a BLOOD CLOT.”

Clearly, what the doctor was saying here was, “you might have a blood clot.”  But what my anxious irrational migraine mind was hearing was something closer to, BLOOD CLOT BLOOD CLOT DEATH YOU’RE DYING YOU’RE ACTUALLY ALREADY DEAD THIS IS HELL HELL IS A DOCTOR’S OFFICE.  This made me stressed out and, since I already had a migraine, nauseated.

“Um, I’m sorry… I’m listening but I think I’m going to throw up.”

She sent me to the Emergency Room.  In an ambulance.  They put me on a STRETCHER.  I waited in the Emergency room for three hours, so that a doctor could come in and be very condescending.

“I can’t really do anything for you except give you migraine medication.”

“I had an adverse reaction to migraine medication.”

“Well I can pump you full of glucose?”
“Oh okay, yeah…  Oh, but the doctor at the infirmary said I might have a blood clot.”

“Pft… A blood clot where??”

I DON’T KNOW SIR YOU’RE THE DOCTOR I JUST WANT TO GO HOME I DIDN’T CHOOSE THIS PLEASE DON’T BE ANGRY.  They gave me an IV of glucose which was rad, then we waited for three hours for them to discharge.  Oh, and I didn’t have my insurance card because I don’t need it at the infirmary and DIDN’T EXPECT TO GO TO THE ER, so they charged me $900.  :)

After this, they referred me to a neurologist.  I won’t go into the details of how difficult it was to get an appointment - that’s a whole other story.  She was the most pleasant doctor I ever had, aside from her notorious lateness.  My appointment was at five, they saw me at seven fifteen.  Super.  It was clear that her lateness was caused by her thoroughness, though.  We sat, separated by an enormous desk that emphasized her tiny size almost humorously, and I gave her a really detailed explanation of my issues.  She gave me a packet of information pages and pages long about migraines, then described, in detail, my options.  She then gave me a physical examination and prescribed a brain test of some kind.  Since migraine medication wasn’t really an option for me (and shouldn’t be for anyone… I’ll explain that in the future), the other options were preventative medication and dietary changes.  Here’s the list of foods to avoid to prevent migraines that my doctor gave me:

• Ripened cheeses
• Herring
• Chocolate
• Vinegar
• Anything fermented, pickled or marinated
• Sour cream, yogurt
• Nuts, peanut butter
• Hot fresh breads, raised coffee cakes, donuts
• Pods of broad beans
• Foods with MSG
• Onions
• Canned figs
• Citrus fruits
• Bananas
• Pizza
• Pork
• Excessive amounts of tea, coffee, or cola beverages
• Avocado
• Fermented sausage
• Sourdough Bread
• Canned figs
• Raisins
• Papaya
• Passion fruit
• Red Plums
• Sauerkraut
• Soy sauce
• Meat tenderizers
• Seasoning Salts
• Canned soups
• Frozen TV Dinners
• Alcohol

Boy, wasn’t that fun?  So that wasn’t going to happen.  How would I ever know which of them cause migraines?  How would I ever enjoy food again?!  While I did plan on making some diet changes,  I also agreed to go on Beta Blockers, a preventative medication.  Two weeks later, I’m doing my best to avoid most of these things.  I’m on the medicine that, for the first week, kept me up all night (a common side effect).  And I get a migraine!  That was cool.  This is about when I gave up on relying on doctors to solve my problems, and took matters into my own hands.  Hence my experiments, and this blog.  

Today I had a follow up appointment (that was supposed to be two weeks ago… I got busy) with the neurologist.  “Your brain scan was normal.  How are you doing?”  

“Well.  I think my migraines are caused by dairy products.”  

“Oh, yes that happens sometimes.  Good for you!  And are you still taking the beta blockers?”

“No, they didn’t work, I got a migraine two weeks into taking them.”  

“Oh, well if they don’t work I can proscribe more.  You should have called me, I would have done that for you.”

“Oh, well I think I’m okay.  I think I’ve pretty much gotten it figured out with the diet thing.”

“Okay, well good for you for figuring it out for yourself!”

If you get migraines, I highly recommend that you go to the doctor.  Migraines may be a symptom of a much larger and more serious problem.  The scans and tests that I had done were completely necessary.  But You can avoid dealing with all that I just described by taking your health into your own hands.  Do your research, consult experts, get the necessary medical tests, and commit to making changes.  Do not rely on the doctor or the medication to heal you, because that often means masking the symptoms, rather than the causes.  I didn’t write this to scare you away from hospitals or convince you that doctors are bad, because they’re not.  I wrote this to emphasize the ineffectiveness of the common strategies for curing ailments.  Think about it.  Let me know what you think, and share your similar or contrasting experiences.  

Things that Stop Us and Why/How We Should Destroy Them

To understand how people feel about a friend or family member going vegan, think of how your loved ones would feel if you got a random facial piercing.  Oddly enough, if you’re my mother, it’s very similar.  I know that because this semester, I both pierced my nose and decided to go vegan. Oh God that sounds so angsty. First, surprise: “you did what?”  Then, disbelief: “Today?  No you didn’t.  Really?”  Really. She had always said nose piercings were cute, so I was confused.  “Yeah, but… not on you.” 

She’s skeptical about the nose ring (just wait until you see it, Mom, I promise I’m still pretty) as well as this whole vegan thing.  So is almost everyone else.  So am I.  I just don’t know if I can handle it.  But deep down, I know that this diet experiment is a really good idea for me, and that now is the right time.  Not to mention, I need to make these migraines stop as soon as possible.  So I am going to do this.

I feel like my hesitations are the hesitations a lot of people feel when trying to make drastic changes to their diets and their lives.  So I thought I’d put together a list of arguments against going vegan that came from my own mind (that can be applied to other dietary changes) and how to combat them, both internally and externally.

1. Vegan food tastes bad.

Wrong!  Vegan food tastes good!  (I mean, obviously, there are people who don’t like vegetables.  I don’t really know how to attack this if you’re hoping to go vegan without vegetables… Good luck to you.) But maybe you’ve had bad vegan food before, but it was either the wrong vegan food for you or just not prepared well.  Not a lot of people are good at cooking these days.

How to attack this:

Invest in some good spices.  A lot of vegan recipes call for a much larger quantity of spices than I’d expect or spices I’ve never even heard of.  This is because though vegetables have a lot of flavor, a lot of standard (western) recipes call for animal products like cream or butter to bring out flavors, or to tie multi-ingredient recipes together on your palette.  Smart use of spices can do basically the same thing. 

Try new things.  If you’re only eating vegetables, fruits, and grains, you’re going to get tired of the same five vegetables, fruits, and grains you’ve enjoyed before.  Some of them will be bad.  Some of them will not be.  For me, Medjool Dates, Acorn Squash, and some vegetable I still can’t identify, have all been successful new additions to my diet.

Find good vegan recipes.  I mean good vegan recipes.  The internet is a thing!  Contrary to popular belief a lot of vegans do use computers, and they are happy to share what they know.  (How do you know who the vegans are at a party? … Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.)  One of my favorite new internet discoveries is http://www.mynewroots.org/.  She’s a nutritionist who is not strictly vegan but has a lot of healthy, delicious looking recipes and good resources for this kind of diet.  There are lots of good resources on the computer, it’s just a matter of finding them.  And maybe, with practice, you won’t be a bad cook anymore!  

2. Okay… some vegan food is good.  But so is cheese and ice cream.

True.  I’m not even going to pretend.  I love ice cream.  Ask literally anyone who knows me.  And cheese was never an optional food.  It was like cooking with water.  But I do know they’re not good for me.  They’re just not.  

How to attack this:

Eat enough of what you can eat.  You won’t crave anything if you’re truly full.  And the good news about a lot vegan foods is that they will make you actually full without giving you the false fullness caused by fats.  This includes eating enough before you go somewhere where these foods will be offered to you.  Because they will be.  They’ll be right there smiling at you on pretty trays.  But you are strong!  Making yourself a smoothie in the morning to carry around every time someone mentions cake is a good way of doing it.  I actually do this.  It’s ridiculous.

Find good replacements.  Again, I mean good replacements.  I’m really not into vegan cheese and butter.  You can put on the cheese costume and dance around and say “I’m cheese!” but I’m never going to believe you’re really cheese.  What I do like, though, is Trader Joe’s brand Frozen Coconut Dessert.  I get that “frozen coconut dessert” doesn’t sound like as much fun as ice cream but it is pretty delicious.  Look for the replacements that are prepared convincingly with readable ingredients (“vegan” and “healthy” are not necessarily the same thing).  

3. I won’t have a balanced diet.

Wrong!  Sort of.  You can get all the nutrients you need without animal products.  The issue is, you might not.  It becomes more difficult to balance your diet, especially if you, like most others, are really accustomed to gaining nutrients through an animal-based diet.  There are really healthy vegans and vegetarians, and then there’s my brother circa 2004, who decided to be a vegetarian for a year and ate bean and cheese burritos religiously.

How to attack this:

Do your research.  One helpful resource that Lettuceboy found me (he’s starting to love the alias I’m sure) is http://cronometer.com/, which keeps track of all the food you’re inputting.  You make a personal profile that can include your height, weight, dietary preferences, and exercise routines, and you input the food you consume.  It converts all that into helpful, personalized health information.

Plan ahead.  Give yourself enough time to buy, prepare, and eat the right things.  What I’ve noticed about my vegan diet is that it takes a little more time to do all of those fooding things, and it’s easy to say “uhhh… pretzels are vegan!” When you’re running to class.  Also, packing lunches and whatnot might be nerdy but it can be done with style, and will probably keep you from being unbalanced/unhealthy.

4. I don’t want to be annoying to people I hang out with.  Literally no one wants me to be a vegan.

Here lies the nose piercing issue.  But, like my nose ring, it really shouldn’t directly affect your friends and family.  And as for the second thing: wrong again!  There are people who want you to be a vegan.  They just might not be your friends… or your family… or anyone you know.

How to combat this:

Don’t be pretentious or invasive.  There are ways of sharing ideas, even ones you feel strongly about, without coming off like that guy standing outside of the movie theatre with pamphlets about how to bring Jesus into your life. 

Let them know you’re having a positive experience.  They’re probably just worried about your health.  But also, if you’re not having a positive experience, pay attention and have an open mind. 

Find the believers!  Every vegan out there wants you to also be a vegan, they’re like religious people.  The food blogs I’ve mentioned before as well as www.vegansociety.com are places to find resources and communicate so you don’t feel like a kook.

5. I won’t be able to eat out, and it’s just not convenient in general.

It may not be convenient to be healthy, but it is always healthy to be healthy.  Again, I’m not saying “vegan” and “healthy” are the same thing, but if you are going vegan for your own health, you know it’s worth the extra work.  As for eating out, the task may seem more impossible.  

How to attack this:

Look (ahead) for the right dining-out options.  Though a lot of your favorites may have you saying, “I’ll have the water.”  There are a lot of solid restaurants that have vegan options.  Panera Bread, for example, is a beautiful glorious magical place that has a section of their website dedicated to their vegan menu options.  Also, a lot of Thai and Indian food restaurants will have a lot of inherently vegan menu options.  You may just have to look ahead online or call before arriving.

Plan.  Again, fooding vegan is difficult and time consuming.  There’s a lot of chopping, processing, and chewing involved.  Give yourself the time to do all of those things because they’re important.

6. It’s kind of extreme.

I mean, yeah.  It is.  If you’re feeling like you can’t do it, remember there is a middle ground.  It can be overwhelming to read all the different dietary options and opinions, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make changes.  Baby steps.  Don’t feel obligated to give everything up at once, and don’t feel like every decision you make is permanent.  Focus on the things you add rather than the things you subtract.  This is true for any diet change. Also, doing what I did and committing to a small period of time is a non extreme way of going about an extreme change.  I am beginning to feel a strong sense of empowerment from knowing that I am taking control over this aspect of my life, and I can tell you quite honestly that it has been worth the sacrifices.

Some Background Information (and Wit to Impress You)

  Food is a beautiful thing. We shouldn't let it negatively affect our bodies. And it should never feel like a burden. From development to production to transportation to consumption, there's a lot we're all doing wrong. All of these things fall under the category I call "fooding" and I hope that through this blog, we can start to understand fooding better, and learn how to food correctly (trust me, you'll get used to the term eventually). Before I get started, I thought some background information would be helpful. Here are a few questions and answers that hopefully give us all an idea of what to expect from this blog.

When and why did I start caring about food?

A few things have happened to me recently that have really influenced my perspective about my body and what I put into it. Their significance varies, but they have all contributed to what I hope is a large and necessary lifestyle change:

• Moved away from my home in San Diego, California, to go to college in Long Island, New York.  How did that affect my diet?  Lots of ways:
• The “fresh” produce here is just a joke to my little Californian brain.  Where I come from, lemons are free because they fall on the ground in our yard.  Everyone I know knows what an avocado is.  Not to mention, in California, Oranges tend to be, um, orange.  
• In my second year here, I got off the meal plan and began cooking for myself.  This gave me the opportunity to choose what I ate.  I like to shop at Whole Foods and make recipes by Ina Garten and Giada De Laurentiis.  It was much healthier than the campus food.  However, this also meant the responsibility of purchasing, preparing, storing, and consuming this food at appropriate times.  Difficult.  I have to eat every day.  Yikes.
• College is hard.  Stress eating.  No eating.  Wendy’s is the closest and most convenient dining hall to my building.  You get the idea.
• Winter.  What the heck is this business about.  The Wendy’s convenience becomes soooo much more significant.
• My athleticism has significantly slowed down.  I started dancing when I was eleven, and by the time I was in high school, I danced enough to consider myself a pretty intense athlete.  It was always very easy for me to get the proper amount of exercise because I just didn’t think of it that way.  It wasn’t working out, it was dancing.  And I usually liked it.  Now that I’m in college, I don’t have the desire, time, or resources to exercise as much as I used to.  All the sudden I looked in the mirror and realized I might someday have to start thinking about maintaining my weight.  To be honest, it hasn’t happened yet.
• Here’s the big one:  This summer, I started getting migraines.  Loss of vision, nausea, vomiting, chills, the whole nine.  After the first migraine, we waited to see if it was an isolated incident.  If only.  After the third migraine, I went to a neurologist, who gave me a list of foods that I should avoid to prevent migraines. In a future blog, I will go over the specifics, but for now just trust me: it was ridiculous.  When every time you eat you think, this could make me feel great, but it might make me vomit and temporarily lose my vision and make me miss my classes tomorrow and force me to wear sunglasses inside even when it’s dark out and look like a big douche-bag, you really start to think about the significance of food.   
• I started hanging out with this vegan boy.  I know… DUMB.  Stick with me here, though, please.  The more I got to know him, the more I realized he is sooo vegany.  Like, the I-walk-around-with-a-head-of-romaine-lettuce-in-my-back-pocket kind of vegan.  Yeah.  He feels very strongly about food, and definitely lives a much healthier lifestyle than many of the people I know.  Conveniently, he came into my life while I was a walking diet experiment and has therefore been a big contributor to my research and implementation of diet changes.  

Why the blog?

I am a privileged middle class Caucasian female living between California and New York who willingly gets a surplus of exercise and consistently had all the resources necessary to living what many would call an ideal lifestyle.  My mother is a fantastic cook who has always taken pride in providing our family and others with delicious and healthy meals.  Our family income allowed her to be a stay at home mom, which gave her the opportunity to do so.  If you compare me to the rest of the world, I really should be the picture of health.  But I’m not.  This really freaks me out.  The food that I eat is definitely on the healthier side, and it is causing me severe physical pain.  

If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone.  The food we eat can shape the way we live, but making changes to something so routine, so inherent, is extremely difficult.  I know, because I have every resource I need, and I still have trouble understanding and implementing the necessary changes.  So in writing this blog, I hope to be a resource to people who don’t want to get heart disease but also aren’t quite ready to join lettuce boy on the slackline (no disrespect to lettuce, boy, or slackline… I enjoy all three).  The middle grounders who want to make changes to their lives, but just don’t know how.

What is a “healthy diet?”

Gosh, I don’t know.  Don’t expect the answer to that in this blog, because I really can’t give it to you directly.  I’ll keep everyone updated on my food experiments and let you know what I find out.  A huge frustration for me in my research has been the fact that I do not understand my body or my food on a chemical level, and so the research that I do is often another person’s interpretation of something I can’t validate because I simply don’t have the base knowledge.  But chances are, neither do you.  So rather than a regurgitation of my research, I am your willing example.  Because honestly, the proof doesn’t come from a chemical understanding.  It comes from how the food makes you feel.  So I’ll find out, and let you know.  

What’s the plan?

First, in the next few weeks I plan to record my experiences with a vegan diet.  I’ve done the research.  I know that it is better for the environment as a whole and better for the animals.  Many experts suggest that it is also the most beneficial diet to our bodies.  But of course,  I have been influenced by previous generations enough to be skeptical about this one element of it (my dad’s favorite argument is that “meat keeps you warm in the winter”).  So this is an experiment, and nothing more.  I’ll let you know how I feel and we can all make our decisions when the time comes.

After that, I plan to implement elements of a mediterranean diet.  This is a budding fad diet that seems to be pretty nutritious and also extremely appetizing.  Also, starting in February I’ll be studying abroad in Florence, Italy.  I’m taking an Italian Vegetarian Cooking class, and I plan to utilize this opportunity to absorb more knowledge and gain perspective about food.  Food was one of the main reasons I chose Italy.  Granted, that was before I wasn’t eating cheese… it’s okay though!  I will make it work!  

I will document each of my subsequent adventures and let you know how my lifestyle changes affect my diet, how my dietary changes affect my physical health, and how my physical health affects my lifestyle.  Full circle dude.  With each blog, I hope to be a resource myself and also give you the resources I find helpful, informative, and interesting. Additionally, even if no one reads this blog except my mom, I plan to use this to keep myself motivated to continue my fooding journey. With that said, please let me know if you have any questions or specific topics you'd like to see covered.