Today I was a true vegan - ate Nachos with spicy sauce and coke for breakfast-dinner and potato chips and sprite for supper. I don't feel any healthier
I feel like I have to start my tomorrow morning with a chicken soup.
Healthier diet in a nutshell - eat more vegetables and fruits instead of sweets and reduce fat (and red) meat to minimum, mofuka. Drink more water instead of soda (mixing water with some fruit juice or soda is okay too, really - especially if you can use it to go down on the latter).
When you eat outside eat what you feel is good for you because deep inside you know when you're eating crap food. Keep your meals smaller (especially in North America you get humongous portions of food). Also make sure you eat different kinds of food and mix things up - don't eat the same kind of stuff all the time (though there are all-around safe choices, like rice with
chicken breast and vegetables which is a truly complete dish nutrition-wise
).
If you want to be super anal and look good try to eat more protein and less fat and keep your daily calorie intake around maintenance - don't ever eat more than you feel like eating, even if you prepared more - eating that "extra" when you feel you had enough is what's causing the most harm when you want to drop weight.
That's a few basic things that are still waaaay too hard to follow for most people yet are what you need to do to stay healthy. Sure you can feel like the do-gooder if you're vegan, but you don't need to go all radical if it feels like it's too much to handle, and for a lot of people it is. A goal to make sense has to be ambitious but also seem honestly achievable. If you feel like it's really, honestly achievable for you then good luck, because it's a good change. People go vegan everyday so it's totally within anyone's reach.
Vegan diet is doing a huge favor to the society but you need to remember that you need to be much more strict with your diet than with a healthy balanced diet that includes lean meat. The biggest gain from the vegan diet doesn't come from the fact that you don't eat meat (health-wise) - it comes from the fact that you HAVE TO be aware of what you eat, so you do that - you eat consciously and healthier in the process.
I opened my mind to some vegetarian dishes (a close friend of mine is vegetarian). It's still hard for me to eat most of their stuff because I was never into vegetables, especially boiled vegetables but.. some meals are good. What I find that applies to me about vegetarian food is that their dishes either look much worse than they taste or the other way around - they look good and taste weird. Since it's not really a popular thing here and being vegetarian you are pretty much equal to being gay or mentally ill I'm yet to see a good vegetarian restaurant. And I'd honestly like to find one just for the sake of eating more vegetables.
