Alright, every person I've told about this particular change has told me that I'm either crazy or being extreme. I disagree, and I'm going to lay out my thought process behind my decision. They've all come back at me with the same arguments, and I'm going to address them too. I guess in a way I'm being controversial to some people, but if the rise in obesity in this country and the lack of nutrition in our food isn't controversial, then I guess I don't mind being controversial.
The biggest change I've made so far is to cut way back on meat. Not any particular meat like red meat or pork, just all meat in general including poultry and seafood. In some research I've seen, the meat consumed by the average American over the last sixty years has increased from around 10% of their total diet to somewhere between 30% and 50%. Instead of being average, I've decided to make meat no more than 10% of my diet.
Initially, I began by only eating two meals containing meat each week, and I ate both of them on Saturday as it was just an easy way to keep track. The rest of the week, Sunday through Friday, I was a functional vegetarian. For a couple of months this worked very well, but after a while I was noticing that on Saturday night I just didn't feel all that good, so I realized I had to change something else.
First of all I wanted to start by focusing on what I was eating, not what I wasn't. I also realized that I needed to spread out the meat I was eating just so it wasn't such a shock to my body one day a week. Thus I began concentrating on replacing the meat I was eating with vegetables. I also learned to spread what meat I was eating out just a bit more, and if I did eat a meal containing meat during the week, I just ate one less on the weekend.
Incidentally, I'm a big fan of TED talks, at least some of them, and here's a talk on weekend vegetarianism that is great. I definitely recommend it.
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