Thread: Going vegetarian soon. Tips?

Make sure that you eat a log of peanuts or soy. Most vegetarians end up being protein deficient and bruise easily and randomly.

Stock up on nuts, greens, and fruits. Fake meats are good to, but can be pricey. Boca Burgers are a really good source of protein and taste pretty good too. From Sam's Club you can get a box of 16 large patties for like $9.

Beans, eggs, and dairy products are your friends. Soy and rice milk are also going to be healthier than cow's milk for you, so you should give those a shot. Multivitamins wont hurt either.

just be careful about your level of soy intake. I think it's pretty easy to become sensitive to it if you have too much in your diet.

Morning Star is a great veggie company.

When I went vegetarian, I remember cutting out one meat monthly or something. But since you don't eat much as you said, it probably won't be as hard/slow for you. I come form a family that eats meat pretty much everyday, so it was a gradual process for me. :p

Stardrowned, I would look for a food co-op somewhere nearby. Most of them are laid out like little grocery stores, and while they offer member discounts, usually anyone can shop there. They will often have good bulk foods like grains, beans and granola, great produce, and sometimes even veggie deli items like burritos, faux-meat sandwiches and salads. Deli items can get pricey, but bulk foods are very cheap. Looking around these places, asking questions, and googling things when you get home is also a great way to expand your knowledge, which is key to a change as profound as adopting a new diet. You'll often find fliers for veggie potlucks and the like at food co-ops, too.

If you don't have one, invest in a rice cooker. You can get a decent one at Target for $15-20, maybe $30. They make it simple to cook up any kind of grains (amaranth and quinoa are tasty, and great for protein), and usually come with a steamer basket for veggies, which is both a healthy and fairly idiot-proof way for a newb to start cooking vegetables.

If it's an option, you might want to subscribe to a Community Supported Agriculture program. Not only do you get better-than-grocery-store produce at a cheaper-than-grocery-store cost, but because you're 'stuck with' whatever's in the basket that week, you end up expanding your knowledge base by googling recipes for sunchokes, acorn squash, tomatillos, and etc.

No one's forcing opinions down each others throat, so I don't see the articles relevance.

~

Eggs, nuts, tofu, protein. It's important. Eat it.

thanks a lot for the tips guys. much appreciated. i'm gonna start monday

I went on a vegetarian diet for 2 1/2 years to let a bleeding ulcer heal, and it did! Meat takes more acid to digest, so not eating it, allowed healing to take place. My dreams actually guided me to drop one meat at a time, and then cut back on dairy, and what herbs to take to help the process along. I now use about 50% soya products in place of some of the dairy. I'm still more vegetarian than meat-eater now, eating a little meat because I have more energy when I do, but not much of it... like maybe three ounces of meat three or four times a week, and sometimes, if I don't want it, I'll go a couple of weeks without any.

Your best friends should be fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts. Avoid white bread, white rice, white flour, anything overly processed except for an occasional treat.

Some of my favorite products: Light Life Ground Round, both original (like browned ground beef and can be used in any casseroles requiring that) and the Mexican seasoned one for tacos and burritos. I use both a lot of different ways. It's a very satisfactory substitute for hamburger in many dishes, like hamburger stroganoff, spaghetti meat sauce, tacos, picadillo pie, etc.

Gardenburger's Black Bean Chipotle Burgers. They have booted Boca Burgers out of my freezer, though I still like Boca's smoky ones okay. I'd get them if the store was out of the Gardenburger's. I like them on big whole wheat buns with onions and a leaf of romaine lettuce and a slice of soya cheese and lots of condiments.

Amy's Refried Beans. The black bean ones, which have green chilis in them. Yumm! I use them for nachos and burritos and tostadas. They are seasoned perfectly, imo.

Morningstar Farms Soya Sausage Patties. I use these so much! I will chop one into little cubes, and use it for a small sausage pizza on a crust made of a whole wheat flat bread, or have one with an egg and a slice of soya cheese on a whole wheat English muffin for my own Sausage McMuffin, way healther than McDonald's. I add mixed colored peppers and onions sauteed in olive oil too, and a clove of chopped raw garlic. They're good with pancakes, which I mostly like whole grain blueberry buckwheat ones with real maple syrup.

Hodgson Mills Oat Bran Blend Flour. I use this to bake, especially nut breads and muffins. You can use any muffin or nut bread recipe, just add 25-50% to your leavening agent. And of course the breads and muffins can also have raisins, dried cranberries, chopped dried apricots, etc. as well as nuts and honey and whatever else floats your boat the day you bake. Hodgson Mills also makes good whole wheat pastas and a baking mix similar to Bisquick, but whole wheat, and a good buckwheat pancake mix. AND, they're available at Stop and Shop.

I like canned peaches, pears, and pineapples and keep them in stock. Oh, and mandarin oranges. All in the juice pack variety. They're nice for quite a few recipes, plus I don't have to buy so much fresh fruit, which being single, tends to often go bad before I get to eat it up.

I love to make up a bunch of interesting salads for my own personal salad bar too... when I do that, I don't have to cook for a few days, just take a sampler of my salads out of the fridge. There might be a green salad, a potato salad, a taboule salad, a jar of pickled beats or three bean salad. When they get down low, I might have half a sandwich with the rest, or a bowl of soup.

And I love to make veggie soups from scratch, and to vary what goes in. Some soups get miso added. All are full of herbs, always. It's a great thing to do just before grocery shopping to use up any leftover celery and carrots and other things in the fridge.

Hope that helps! Good luck with it!

Drink raw eggs for protein ↓

Originally Posted by Maverick

Drink raw eggs for protein ↓

Not a good idea nowadays, as the salmonella is living inside the danged things now, so can't even just be washed off the shells before you crack them. Having had a recent bout of salmonella, probably from some underbaked meringue cookies I bought at the Job Lot store, I am painfuly aware of salmonella's miseries.

They have just as much protein cooked.

Yes, exactly. Cooking the eggs denatures the protein, but your body does not use the raw protein anyway. Denatured or not, your body will break it down to aminoacids to use it.

Salmonella will make your toilet very brown for a few weeks. I'd much rather cook the eggs.

In before "Don't go vegetarian" advice.

Originally Posted by IrisRavenstar

Not a good idea nowadays, as the salmonella is living inside the danged things now, so can't even just be washed off the shells before you crack them. Having had a recent bout of salmonella, probably from some underbaked meringue cookies I bought at the Job Lot store, I am painfuly aware of salmonella's miseries.

They have just as much protein cooked.

Fact: About one in 30,000 eggs contains salmonella.
Fact: Based on those numbers, the average person would come across a contaminated egg only once in 42 years.
Fact: This number is greatly reduced even further if you buy eggs from organically fed chickens.
Fact: Unless you are a child, very old, or have a disease which impairs your immune system, getting an infection is a very low risk to your health.
Fact: Infections are curable by taking some probiotics.
Fact: Cooking eggs destroys many of the nutrients and proteins found inside the egg.
Fact: Rocky Balboa, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Lee drank drink/drank raw eggs which makes it manly.

Let's not turn this thread into a salmonella debate, I just wanted to give my side of the argument

All of them right, except:

Fact: Cooking eggs destroys many of the nutrients and proteins found inside the egg.

Originally Posted by Kromoh

All of them right, except:

Fact: Cooking eggs destroys many of the nutrients and proteins found inside the egg.

I'm not going to get into this argument, just believe what you want