So after a somewhat extensive hiatus, I'm back. It's been a while, but I finally felt up to updating my blog again.

So I'm putting serious thought into becoming vegetarian. Well, technically flexitarian. So as the wiki page states, a flexitarian is someone who is mainly vegetarian, but occasionally eats meat.

I want to switch to a mainly vegetarian diet for several reasons, but the main reason is the healthy benefits that will come from mainly eating vegetables. Our meat industry in this country is really scary to me, and I think I will feel better once I cut it out of my diet.

However, I don't have a problem eating meat occasionally, as a treat. Once I do my research and start, I will try to limit my meat eating slowly, like maybe having meat ever other day, then eventually once a week, then once every two weeks, etc.

It will be nice to be able to eat meat every once in a while, but to mainly delete it from my diet.
I'm not sure when I'll start this process, it may wait until I get back to school and have the help of my vegetarian roommate Coreen, or I may start sooner than that, I'm not sure yet.

I already eat lots of vegetarian foods, like almost every morningstar farms product I can get my hands on, and I'm excited to start cooking with their vegetarian 'meat' crumbles, which will allow me to still make things like tacos and casseroles that contain ground beef.

I had a vegetarian chili last year around Christmas time at Elyse's house that had the Morningstar Farms faux steak strips, and I was totally fooled! Products like these will make it somewhat easy for me to mostly give up meat.

The only concern I have is eating dinner with my family. I don't want my family to feel like they need to cook me something special myself just because they're eating meat. We generally will have some sort of vegetable and side pasta or potato, and as long as that's the case, I would be totally fine just eating the vegetable and side, I definitely don't need a special meal cooked just for me.

We'll see how it goes. I'm trying to compile a list of recipes I can make for myself (and Coreen) once I get back to school, at this point. Wish me luck!