My First Experience as a Vegetarian

On December 11, when I decided to become a vegetarian, I thought that I was merely giving up meat. That would be easy right? Making a lifestyle change is never easy and requires time and careful planning, so I’m writing this post to provide some tips that I wish I would have known. Meat obviously provides protein and so do plants. The technical definition of protein, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary is

“Any of a class of nitrogenous organic compounds that consist of large molecules composed of one or more long chains of amino acids and are an essential part of all living organisms, especially as structural components of body tissues such as muscle, hair, collagen, etc., and as enzymes and antibodies”.

 Protein is essential for growth and repairing our bodies and it also makes you feel satisfied after eating. If you wonder why they make protein shakes or protein bars, it’s a low-calorie way to stay full longer. Once you take meat out of your diet, you need to replace it with an equal protein. Otherwise, you’ll make my mistake in not understanding why I was so hungry all the time.

Instead of looking for proteins, I looked for anything that looked good in a college dining hall: carbohydrates and fats. Pizza, muffins, ice cream, cereal. These things aren’t bad – in moderation. But, eating pizza once a day, or even three times a week, builds up, and trust me, you’ll experience weight gain. To be honest, I did not know what was wrong with me. How could I be exercising 4 days a week, getting 7 hours of sleep, and gaining weight as a vegetarian? So, I went to a nutritionist that UVA offers. For free! College students! You are paying for all of the services that your university provides for you like a nutritionist or counseling services! Use them! Anyway, I told my nutritionist and she had me take a picture of everything that I ate for 4 days. Now, this is how you become truly accountable: with pictures. Because you can’t lie about how many mashed potatoes you truly ate, or exactly how large that frappucino was. From that, we took running totals of the amount of grains, milk, protein, carbohydrates, and fats that I was eating over a long period of time. Turns out that I was eating three times as many carbohydrates and half as little protein. My main problem was: how do you get non-meat protein in a dining hall?? It’s practically impossible! Turns out that it’s not! Read the next blog post to find out!

So be careful and don’t make the mistake that many first-time vegetarians make. Takeaway: replace meat protein with plant protein.