What to do first?

galmal

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Apr 19, 2015
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If you were first considering becoming vegetarian, what would be your first steps? What type of meat would you give up first? Would you go everyday, or just start with a few days a week? Have you found any good recipes that helped you with the journey? How do you convince the rest of your family to join you on the journey? Are there any good books or resources that deal with the unique nutritional needs of a vegetarian? What do you do/say to people when telling them about switching, and they undermine you about it?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Sometimes, it's that first step that is the hardest to take.
 
I think it depends how often the person already eats meat. If you're the type of person who can go a day without eating any meat anyway, then I think you can speed the process up somewhat, but if you eat meat all the time, you should cut it down gradually. Maybe start with "Meat Free Monday" and go from there?

I feel like the best recipes are those you already like, just altered to take the meat out. "Fake" meats can help make the process more tolerable if you miss the taste of meat, too. Say, you love rice and chicken or something. Eat the rice with veggie "chicken".

As for what to tell people, just tell them your reasons. This will obviously vary from person to person.
 
I think when anyone wants to make a change, it's fairly common for them to want others to go along with them. I think you have to work on your own changes first though, especially if you think there will be resistance from others. Maybe once they see that you are serious, they will become more curious and more open to making some changes themselves.

In my experience, trying to change too much too fast, doesn't really work that great, but your mileage may vary.
 
I've been looking into switching for a while now, so I'm curious about the answers to these questions. I tried once before and just jumped right in with cutting everything out and starting a whole new diet. It worked for about a month, but I started craving meat and I was spending so much money. I need to figure out how to do it in a cheaper way.
 
There are plenty of books and recipes online. I would choose a few of those you like and make those dishes; pasta dishes are the easiest or noodle dishes. One thing that is important is seasoning and sauces.

The classic dishes of vegetable lasagne, you can add whatever vegetables and sauces to (cream/tomato) and then a stir fry id easy too and add some chopped tofu to it and you can make is spicy if you like it. A good cheap way is sometimes to buy bags of frozen vegetables, because then you can experiment when you have time and they don't go off. You can try soups and then combine them with items like mushrooms and eggplant to make dishes.