The First Day of Christmas... Know Thyself

As promised, it's December 13th and it's my First Day of Christmas as I prep for Veganuary - or going Green in the Eighteen. If you're just catching up, no worries, read on noble reader, I'll catch up you. If you are already up to speed, go on and jump ahead to the title of this post - Know Thyself - below.

CRIB NOTES:
January 2018 and in fact the whole of 2018 I'm predicting/crossing my fingers and praying will be a spectacular year for all of us. If your 2017 was anything like mine -- mine made 2016 {also known as the 9th rack of hell} look like a cake walk, then you'll want to believe that 2018 will be a turning point too. It was a hard year y'all. I've been feeling less than awesome. As blessed as I am to have work {so blessed I tell you} I am exhausted. 

So I wanted to do something that would change all that. My girl Emery has been spreading this loving message of healing our planet, stopping global warming by turning to local and sustainable ways of getting food and cooking for ourselves to heal what ails us and I got all inspired and shit. 

Ergo I have decided that one of the best ways to heal both myself and the planet was to "glitterally" {it's glitter and literally smushed together, thanks again Myla} put my money where my mouth is and GO VEGAN starting January 1st. 

{Confession, kinda already started y'all, but Ima get to that later} 

I knew that there was no way that I could take this on all by my onesie, so I enlisted help. I've signed up for VEGANUARY going vegan for January. You must go to this link, trust me they know everything, have answers for every question and they will support, encourage, inspire and help you feed yourself in an awesome plant-based way.

But I also know that if I am gonna be accountable, I gotta go public with my declaration otherwise I might will be prone to cheat. It worked for the 30-Day Method and years of Metamorphosis and Continuity. It worked for kicking sugar. So here I am, this is my public declaration - I shall not be responsible for any harm coming to any living animal on our planet. So, without further adieu...

KNOW THYSELF

Have you heard the latest catch phrase? "You do you?" It means be yourself. Do your own thing. Dance to the beat of your own drum. Forget about what everyone else thinks etc. etc. I'm kind of a fan of "you do you" as my number one Shamandment is to Be Shannon.

It's sometimes easier said than done, right? Especially when it comes to food choices. I'm currently sugar free and gluten free while He Who Shall Not Be Named is a Vegan. When we go out with certain friends, all they want to talk about is our "freaky" eating habits. Sometimes I think, maybe it would just be easier to have that cookie, cake, steak, croissant {well definitely not that last one as I have a serious gluten allergy} but you get the idea.

So on The First Day of Christmas, I thought it might be interesting to explore why we make the choices we do, or don't do as the case may be.

Why have so many of us have thought about veganism but have yet to take the plunge? And why I personally have had a bit of an aversion to "Vegans" in general, how they got a bad rep {in my head} and why that's now changing. 

You with me so far? Great, then let's do this.

I can't speak for you, but I can share my story. I turned to vegetarianism in my late teens/early 20's because I looked into the face of a cow. I saw those big beautiful brown eyes and those long eyelashes and I fell in love. Bossy could never be my dinner. 

And if I had enough love for Bossy, then that meant I couldn't eat Babe or Foghorn Leghorn (the Looney Tunes Chicken Hawk).

So I chose to give up "anything with parents or a face". But that didn't include milk, other dairy products or eggs. Like so many vegetarians I believed I was living a compassionate lifestyle. After all, nobody had to die for my dinner did they? So why the heck would anybody ever want to become Vegan? I'll get there. But first, let's stop saying the word vegan because it kind of still does have a bad image in my mind. Let's start saying Plant Based diet because that is what we're talking about here. Vegan was just a made up word. 

Why didn't I like most "vegans"? {The ones in my head, not the ones in real life., I am married to one don't you know.} Because they always kind of seemed like unhealthy granola munching weirdos -- geez I really can be mean sometimes. But it's how I felt.

And they always seemed to be trying to force the rest of the world to conform to their way of being, like the rest of us should feel guilty for our very existence on the planet for all the harm we were doing. 

I don't want to be that person, the one listing off statistics, screaming out at the top of my lungs that all meat-eaters are bad, that we're killing the planet, causing suffering, poisoning our bodies. I'm not writing about this transition to make you feel guilty or to try to force you into any change that you're not ready for. But I will appeal to your common sense and try to help you see and understand why I'm doing this and then maybe, just maybe, come January 1st, you might wanna give it a try too.

So how come we're not vegans yet? I bet I can give you a list of reasons among which you'll find at least one or two that you yourself may have used.

I'm not hurting anyone by eating eggs. My chickens are happy free range chickens.

I love cheese I could NEVER give it up and besides, I only buy organic grass-fed so the cows are happy.

I need meat, without it I feel so weak and tired.

I work out a lot, how in the world would I ever get enough protein?

There's no way I could afford all the supplements I'd need to take in order to live on only plants.

I don't like beans.

I'm anemic.

Eating a strictly plant based diet is just way too expensive.

Have I hit on anything yet? Every objection above is a myth. You want the true story? Go here and read everything on the page. You'll see, we're kind of just making excuses. These objections to going plant based are just a story we tell ourselves so that we never have to actually think about what our eating habits may be doing to our bodies, our planet and most of all the animals. {The animals are my raison d'etre btw, may as well just get that out there.}

But again, I'm not blaming us. I'm not even going to blame our parents or their parents for raising us up to think this way. No blame, no shame, remember? There is no point in dwelling on the past. Corporations have brainwashed us into thinking all of this stuff because if we continue to believe it, they get rich and we get sick, then they get richer because of all the meds they sell us to help us "feel better".

If I haven't driven you away yet then I'd like to ask two things of you. One -- keep reading, and two -- watch Vegucated. It's on Netflix, but it's also on YouTube. Or, for your convenience you can watch it right here. 

In short, it's a documentary about a New York Vegan who convinces three meat and dairy loving New Yorkers to go plant-based for six weeks. I learned so much watching this and there's some really important information in here that convinced me that going plant based isn't only the right thing to do, it's kinda the only thing to do. I think after watching this film, you'll not only want to "do you", you'll want to do you in a whole new way. You'll discover a you that you maybe weren't even convinced was inside of you. A warrior for peace. A protector of the innocent. A soldier of compassion. And a lover of veggies.

So let's see... we've covered off the multitude of reasons why we're not vegan right now and discovered that our reasons are pretty flimsy. I've talked about why I didn't really like vegans - always so pushy and making me feel all guilty and crap - but I didn't really tell you why that's changed.

Vegans ain't what they used to be. No longer are the herbivores simply Birkenstock wearing tree-huggers {Hey, nothing wrong with Birks or hugging trees - you do you, remember} today's vegans are compassionate, healthy thinkers. {I mean I suspect they always were but they just look different today} Today, a vegan is everything from a body builder to a talk show host, to a farmer, model, writer, comedian, to the person you share your life with. 

Did you know that Liam Hemsworth, Miley Cyrus, Peter Dinklage, Sia, Jenna Dewan Tatum, Mike Tyson? Seriously??, Woody Harleson, Jason Mraz, Toby Maguire, Carrie Underwood, Ariana Grande, the lovely Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Alicia Silverstone (whom I love), Stevie Wonder, and of course our fave -- Ellen are all vegans? Not a dummy among them. {and hopefully by the end of the month we'll be able to add our names to this amazing list}

I love Ellen that much more because she cares about the animals enough not to eat them, but the person who really convinced me without ever once saying: "You know, you really should become a vegan" was He Who Shall Not Be Named. That's right, my husband.

He elected to turn to a plant based diet in February of 2016 and hasn't looked back. I ate cheese and eggs in front of him relentlessly and he never gave in. I tempted him with gluten free sugar free banana bread - so what if it has an egg in it, you'll be fine. {Oh Lawd I hope I don't get sent to hell for that} I mean I guess I'd likely have lost most folks at gluten free sugar free but whateves. It's good shit, I promise you. We'd split a pizza (gluten free crust of course) and he'd have vegan cheese on his half and let me have my dairy cheese on mine without ever making me feel guilty.

Then one day - I was like dude, what the hell is so bad about dairy? Bossy the cow has a good life. I mean, my beloved was raised on a "mom and pop" free range happy cow dairy farm in England. He grew up milking cows. How does a guy like that give up cheese? His favorite food in the world?!? How?

And then he told me a story. Please please please don't stop reading. It's not violent or abusive or graphic. I want you to hear the story - and let me remind you, this is not the big agro business kind of farm. This was his great grandfather's farm, then his granddad's, then his dad's, and it was supposed to be his. Ahem, we live in Canada now so he is no longer a dairy farmer, but I digress.

It was that time of year, calving season. When all the pregnant cows {I'm not even going to tell you how they get pregnant, but I'm sure there's documentary for that. It's not nice and it isn't right} Anyhoo, all the "happy free-range, grass-fed" cows were about to give birth and they did, like every year. But one such pregnancy did not go so well and the calf was still-born. The mommy cow stood over her dead baby in the field and she cried. She yowled and mourned and no matter what they tried, there was no way she was leaving that field without her baby. So my husband's dad made him tie a rope around the dead baby and drag it across the field. It was the only way they could get her to come inside. She wept and wailed as she followed her dead baby across the field and he said that sound has haunted him all his life.

The reality is, that no matter what kind of farm you get your milk and cheese from, every single baby is taken away from its mother and every single mother cow weeps for the loss of her child. And you can bet your sweet cheese loving ass that every single baby cries for his or her mother. Some don't even get to go to a grass-fed lovely new home to await their fate of eventual slaughter when they grow up - some get... I can't even... they become veal and if you don't know the horrors they endure in their sweet innocent lives, you better go and look it up, because no one and I mean no one should ever eat veal. OMG, I'm becoming one of those vegans I hate.

Anyway, if you think I'm exaggerating - please watch this most beautiful reunion between mother and baby -- 

And for another happy ending, please watch this... it's important that we learn the truth about the loving bond between mother and baby so that we can understand why their milk is not for us. And when we look back and remember these happy reunions they'll help us say "no thanks" when the cheese tray gets passed around.

Last one, this is the best story and if this doesn't convince you that cows have feelings and can think for themselves and actively make choices, nothing will...

And now shit's about to get real. These videos with the happy endings are the rare exception and not the rule. Right now as I'm typing this there are millions of mothers crying over the loss of their stolen babies. And the hard truth is that they don't need to be. We can actually actively make a choice to stop it by choosing not to purchase these products. WE CAN DO IT! We can be part of the revolution that stops the insanity so that future generations can look back and say "Holy shit, can you believe that people actually used to eat animals? Sick and wrong." It will be the same way we look back at people who "used to be cannibals." People who "used to own slaves". We have the opportunity to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who lived during Nazi Germany and honestly look in the mirror and know that if we were them, we would have done something because we are "doing something" now by saying this behaviour isn't right and it's got to stop! And I'm going to be the one to stop it by turning to a plant based diet and by telling everyone who will listen that they can do it too and that it will not only be pleasant and painless, it will be delicious and we'll feel so much better for it.

I hope you're with me. Would love to hear your thoughts, so leave me a message the comments below.

Big hugs,

Shan