Fourth Form of Madness

I’m working from home at the moment and I must say I quite like the experience. I save two hours in travel time which means I can start earlier and knock off earlier giving me plenty of time to do the truck load of other things I also want to be doing. Also I am finding when it all gets to stressful, usually indicated by me shouting at my computer whilst simultaneously banging random keys, I can take a break, do some yoga and then come back all “marshmallow” and “light” in nature 🙂

On one such break, hubby (who is also working from home at the moment), and I decided to watch a movie on AppleTV (sorry a bit of plug for Apple there but I’m not sponsored by them so it really is my own opinion that it is brilliant). We (I) selected Vegucated because I love a good doco particularly about re-programming of people’s habits. The doco was primarily about taking 3 die hard New Yorker meat eaters and seeing if they could go Vegan for 6 weeks. Now they just didn’t give them a bag of salad and say good-luck, no, they educated them about the meat industry’s way, about what foods are good substitutes for egg, meat, cheese, diary etc and put them in touch with all sorts of activist and support groups. We were talking 3 serious meat eaters and all of them at the end of the 6 weeks was Vegan or vegetarian with intentions to remain so. Incredible. Actually, make that 4 people, after what I saw on Vegucated I don’t want to eat meat either.

I have a long history with being veggie. Me and veggie are like another rendition of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – a hot, and totally passionate romance that so easily turns sour. Suddenly good turns to bad and you have to abandon your love, yet you walk around feeling incomplete. I have been a veggie 4 times and each time I love it ethically :-), yet each time my body revolts and loses so much weight that I just look so sick and I get depressed, really dark.

So after watching Vegucated and having a huge howl over the segment on how animals are treated in the name of producing food for us, I declared “I’m going veggie.” My ever supportive husband, did state that I best be learning how to take care of myself better this time and then started singing “Your once, twice, five times a veggie…..but you are always a omnivore to me…”. Promising that this time I would actually read a “How to be a Veggie (dummy’s guide)” I kicked everything off with making a delicious spinach pie out of one of my yoga books. Seriously I think that might be the first time I have cooked in nearly three years and I loved it. It felt so creative and cool that you could mix all these things together and come up with something new and edible.

To be fair I am breaking myself in slowly, seeing how it is goes, baby steps (yeah this in itself is new to me, I’ve always been a bit of an extremist). I’ve decided to still eat seafood at the moment. I went to see a neuro-chemical brain specialist a few years back. He was pretty special. He was zen buddhist (it had passed through his Japanese family) and he was like opening the window on an airless room. He was so vivid and intelligent, that one genuinely felt better just being in his presence. He also loved to save dogs, we are literally talking hundreds of them. At his private rooms, it would not be out of place to find yourself surrounded by three dogs, usually one on your lap, one at your feet and one in his lap. It’s kind of a nice way to chat. During one of these chats he suggested to me that I might need to take a certain amino acid that currently is being produced and sold only in New Zealand if I wanted to be a vegetarian. Therefore, I am kind of waiting for that to come through before I cease eating meat altogether.

There is a part of me that wishes one day I would wake up and find that I no longer like the taste or smell of meat and that I don’t really want to eat it at all. I wasn’t born one of those types of veggie. My brother was, he hates red meat and could take it or leave it and as an extra kicker until recently was allergic to seafood! No not me. I feel like a vampire off True Blood that is living off the synthetic version of blood, “true blood”, whilst all the other vampires drink the real thing. I still don’t like to be around meat if I am hungry and as a reflex action will start munching on anything else non-meat around (my version of true blood). Still I don’t trust myself, hungry, alone with bbq chicken. I’m sure with time this will get easier, until then I will just have to put my ethics into practice and stop acting on habit and start acting on how I “ought’ to be acting out of “duty” to fellow beings.