Vegetarian…finally!

July 12th, 2006

Sometime back I jumped on to the vegetarian bandwagon. I have been a non-vegetarian for a pretty long time, and had kind of got used to the taste of meat, the feel of meat, rather.

I am a great lover of animals, and was therefore always at conflict - if I loved animals, how on earth did I manage to eat them with a clear conscience? When I say I am an animal-lover, I don’t mean just a dog or cat lover. I love animals - wild, domesticated, reptilian, whatever. There is an absolute innocence about animals that is missing in us humans. We are robbed of this innocence because of our ability to think, because the basal dichotomy that the ability to think creates is what makes our world, our lives, such an entangled web of contrasts and complications.

It is not like I haven’t tried to stay vegetarian. However, each of these attempts has been a failure; the longest period I managed to stay vegetarian was 2 weeks. Because food just didn’t taste the same without meat being a part of it. It was then I realized that much as I wanted to get off meat, I just couldn’t. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I had kind of got addicted to it!

Addicted to meat! The word ‘addiction’ has some very degrading connotation to me. Enslavement, and me? No way! But it was true. Fact - I was addicted to meat. Fact - I craved for it when I didn’t get it. That discovery made me angry and frustrated, because I always liked to believe that I was in control of my life. To discover that my will was subjugated by something as basic as greed, was numbing and annoying. When I was young I used to read spiritual texts where they talked about our body being enslaved by the 5 senses (indriyas). I could now perfectly understand what it meant; all this while it had seemed some mystical, almost alien concept.

I have always loved challenging myself, and this seemed one of the best challenges I could have thrown at myself. So I quit eating non-vegetarian stuff, and that was that. I figured it would do me a world of good, from the point of both physical and mental health. Mental health because ayurveda says that non-vegetarian food can make people aggressive and aggressive is certainly one of the requirements for finding mental peace.

There are other more important benefits as well. From a health point of view, by combining my turning vegetarian with a proper exercise routine of walking and yoga, I have managed to make myself fitter, lose a few pounds, something I had been wanting to do desperately, and also live with a clear conscience now. There is a level of purity associated with vegetarianism that is missing in non-vegetarian diets. Maybe it is all in my head, but I like to think that being vegetarian makes me more caring about the world around me, the world that the animals share.

It was not easy initially, though. I had to do a lot to shore up my defenses. Especially when I made my way to the cafeteria on hungry afternoons and the whiff of non-vegetarian food hit me like a sledgehammer. However, now it’s been 2 months, and I am confident enough to be able to write about remaining off meat, finally.

Entry Filed under: Healthy Lifestyles