(boy)

Ah fuck it. I'm too hot...

:-D

It would be sensible to now exit this thread

so are cows. and baby lambs. and bunnies...

(except I've started to introduce fish and chicken very occasionally in the last year). You need to make sure you have plenty of protein in each meal, as well as carbs and vegetables. Normally when I make a curry or something, I'll use a tin of beans, you need to eat quite a lot. Also keep your iron levels up - this comes from dark green vegetables - spinach is awesome.

for 18 years and i'm still pretty healthy

beans on toast made with the kind of bread with seeds (granary or seeded batch) in is well good for you for breakfast cos it has loads of protein and slow release starch, and new scientist reckons it can increase your intelligence all day!

you should try and eat some protein with more or less every meal - beans or peas or cheese or eggs or quorn or soya stuff, and don't eat loads of white bread and rice because veggies are prone to getting low blood sugar attacks because they fill up on fast release starch and no protein, i used to do this all the time and was really irritable and cranky which was not fun either for me or andy

eat loads of fruit - interesting stuff like pineapple and strawberries not just apples and the like, and to be really healthy try to get used to eating vegetables as raw as you can bear them, i now hate veg that's been cooked until it's soft and am completely addicted to broccoli (even on pizza), that said i barely touched vegetables for the first 10 years I was veggie (chips and beans most of the time) and managed not to kill myself

there's millions of different pasta sauces you can make without meat, lots of different pizza toppings, cous cous or rice based things with roasted veg take no effort to make and taste amazing, thai green curry veg rules my world, drink smothies cos they can contain up to 3 portions of fruit, and if you're worried take a multivitamin as well (B12 is the one that is hard to get as a veggie) - read the label forst to check what they made then from

if you get stuck, go and look in some recipe books in smiths and see what looks good, you don't need the recipes to nick ideas, www.vegsoc.org has recipes as do millions of other websites

i am prone to eating fake bacon and sausages when hung over, it's slightly embarrassing eating fake meat but i'd rather that than eat dead stuff, seen the insides of too many humans to ever be tempted back to eating rotting flesh. That said, after 18 years my grandma still thinks it's some kind of phase i'm going through and constantly goes on about how much i used to like steak as a child (not my memory)

and if you're tempted remember
- vegetarians htend to weigh less than meat eaters (so you can get away with eating more treats!) and are generally healthier, have lower cholesterol, don't really get food poisoning etc etc (100% of regular chickens in the UK are contaminated wth campylobacter that will make you sick if you don't cook it properly)
- most meat production is incredibly cruel, thought to be responsible for a lot of cases of resistance to antiobiotics, not to mention years of people cutting down rainforests to clear fields for beef production, it's also very inefficient

this is a delightful video showing how animals are raised in factory farming
http://www.chooseveg.com/farm_to_fridge_overview.asp?bandwidth=high&rate=1262

and if you give up - please buy organic, free-range or "freedom food" meat, yes it's more expensive, but that price represents the real cost of raising animals for slaughter in humane environments.

sorry this was so long