Eating Junk Food: Now With Less Meat

[Me As An Indignant Three Year Old]:              

How would you like it if I called your food junk food?

Mom has been telling the above story for as long as I can remember.  It pretty much comes up every year during Christmas time and every now and then at an Applebee's outing.  

My culinary pallet for junk food hasn't shifted much since then.  I pretty much crave the same cheeseburger, oscar meyer hot dogs and double decker tacos that I did when I was a toddler.  

One would think that if I cut out the meat then my diet would be way healthier.  Unfortunately thats not the way its worked out so far.  

Protein used to account for around 26 to 30 percent of my caloric intake in a given day.  Now its closer to seven.  What thats meant is that I've been mostly eating fat and carbs (calorie wise) since I've started this diet.  My weight hasn't done much,  I've been mostly stagnant just varying a few pounds each way.  The difference has been in my energy level.  I'm usually feeling good at a pretty constant level between meals.  Now its been really spiking. 

The experiment continues...

Cheese Enchiladas

Dinner tonight was cheese enchiladas.  Thats with lard free tortillas and no meat whatsoever.  Pretty much just mexican manicotti.

It was pretty good albeit artery clogging.  The sauce was sweet more than spicy and the cheese got to be too much pretty quickly.  Add in a little sour cream and salsa and you've got yourself a pretty easy make and bake meal.

Frankly, as its been so far the only thing that could make the meal better is the one thing I can't eat.

Just Glanced at the Ads

Just took a glance around my ads and no kidding had a hiking outfitter, ads for "Vegetarian Diet" and "Vegetarian Dating" and a headline that said "Attention Bowel Sufferers!"

Awesome...

This made my day.

As I was looking around for some famous vegetarians and why they have decided to go veggie (I know that Paul McCartney has been famously vegetarian for decades) I came across the PETA page dedicated to ads of mildly (and I stress mildly here) famous people who have decided to limit their diets and talk about it to PETA.

This is "Masta Killa" talking about how he values all living things.



The irony was not lost on me.  I can't say the same of PETA.


Oh and for all my fellow Weeds fans, this was pretty good too.

Veggie Tenets

My research so far as been as to what makes a vegetarian a vegetarian.  Since I grew up in the modern age the first thing I did was to check out the wikipedia page for vegetarianism.

As it turns out there are a lot of different religions/religious groups that abstain from meat:
Sikhs
Buddhists
Hindis
Rastafarians
Hare Krishnas

Now why these are each important to the world of vegetarianism they really don't fit with what I want to be becoming.  Their rationale is based on the shared spirituality of every living being or to simply encourage non-violence in all things.  They could probably each have a week or two of their own.

So I've decided to call this style I'm going for 'American Vegetarianism' because I don't want to spend two weeks being spiritually connected or non-violent quite yet.

My main ethical drivers will be what I can find on pro-vegetarian websites.  Which so far seem to be: to respect the rights of animals, to lessen enivornmental damage by reducing the usage of land for meat production, to limit the assumed health effects of poor quality and modified meats.

Those'll be the main adopted reasons behind my actions this coming Monday and for the two weeks after.