Vegetarian Month I Final Update

My first month of vegetarianism is over; it was pretty good all in all; I don't think that I used it to its full potential all in all, I should have looked at more different recipes than I did, but it did feel good to have a change.

I did miss eating meat and fish, but I didn't crave it at all - except on one occasion when my family were having bacon - and now that I'm back eating meat and fish I don't feel any great compulsion to eat it. I had a nice trout fillet on Sunday and some cottage pie yesterday, but think I will be eating less meat and fish from now on.

The best thing that came out of the month was my discovering homemade soup. So simple, so tasty and I just loved making and eating it. I'll be doing that more often.

April might be veggie month II, not decided yet. Veggie month III will probably be next February. Stay tuned for soup recipes!

Vegetarian Month I Update 3

Only a few days left to go; I'm not going to rush back into eating meat with a big steak on Sunday - I'll probably have a piece of fish or something - but I am looking forward to eating meat and fish again. I didn't do this out of any big moral imperative, but rather to try and eat differently, possibly more healthily; this has also meant that I have cooked a lot more over the last month, and while my family might claim that I have been quite limited in the range of foods that I have eaten, at the same time I feel quite good for having tried a range of recipes with them. Things definitely got better for me when I started to follow recipes as well, rather than just make them up as I went along (as I have noted previously).

I'll take next February as one of my two remaining vegetarian months I think, and try to have this April as my other one. Somewhere amongst all this I'll do my thirty days of five-a-day as well - probably; at the moment I'm looking into the whole five-a-day thing due to something a friend told me about the health benefits of following that being a myth (not that I want to excuse myself from eating five-a-day, but if there is no benefit I would rather add something else to the list).

Vegetarian Month I Update 2

So. I found it increasingly difficult to stick to five-a-day (which I know, I know, I shouldn't really, given that I am not eating meat this month) but have found it easier this last week eating as a vegetarian. This is primarily because I started looking for and following recipes, rather than just saying, "Hmm, a big flat mushroom baked in the oven with some red onion? Yeah, that's kind of like a burger!" when clearly, clearly, it is not.

Have made soup twice this last week, relatively low in calories and very satisfying, and have also tried a few veggie delights such as nut roasts and meat free burgers - the latter taste nothing like meat, but oddly have a satisfying burger-ness to them. I'm still not convinced that I would ever want to be vegetarian long term, but it's not bad.

And the good news is that between the 2nd of February and the 14th I lose four pounds! If I can keep that sort of weight loss up over the next two weeks I would be very happy indeed. Hoping to carry over good cooking habits (I would have never thought to make soup from scratch before) into the next few months, combined with more walking and exercise, to try and shift a stone before I go to the USA in the summer. Perhaps April will be my second veggie month.

So. I'm quite happy. Onwards and upwards.

Vegetarian Month I Update

So I have totally failed at getting my five-a-day consistently, due to a couple of days where I just didn't feel much like eating, but I am still on track with my primary goal of eating vegetarian for February. Have been cooking a lot more in the last week, but due to my own stupidity have not made many things which I would honestly like to eat again.

Until today, when I decided to make soup. I looked in the recipe book which my friend had got me for Christmas, and saw two recipes which seemed attractive, one for leek and potato soup and one for a creamy spinach soup. However, I didn't have any leeks for the one, and I had no cream or lima beans for the other. So I decided to try and make a half portion of a fusion of the two, substituting some red and baby white onions for the leeks and adding the spinach.

And you know, it turned out alright. Sure, the soup is a disturbing grey/green colour, but it is tasty. My only complaint with myself is that I didn't trust myself to make something nice, and so in making a half recipe I ended up with only two servings. That's OK though, next time I'll make a larger recipe, enough for half a week at least.

The recipe from the last week which I definitely won't be trying was for a lunch that I made last Thursday. My sister put it best when she said (through tears of laughter), "At one point did you think, 'giant flat mushrooms stuffed with red onion and baked in the oven, served like burgers on batches - that'll be lovely'???"

As my family have pointed out, the key to all of this is preparation, thinking ahead to what I'm going to have (since a. I'm cooking all of my own meals - good practice for living alone - and b. I'm limited by what I eat - not that I am very fussy - and what is available). Tomorrow or Wednesday afternoon I'm going to make a pan of some tomato-y, Quorn mince-y, bean-y chilli that'll last for a couple of days, and for which I can just cook some carbs each day to go with it.

And next week will be soups galore I think (especially since I have three separate appointments at the dentist for fillings, for some reason the three teeth couldn't be done together or even combine a few of them).

I am missing meat and fish a bit, but have had no real temptation to break the "diet". All in all, going well!

V Day

Nope, not Victory or Valentine's, but Vegetarian. For the next month I'll not be eating meat or fish, see how it goes. I don't think I'll give up meat and fish after this, but I just thought it would be good to do this from time to time (for three months over the course of 101/1001). Kind of a detox, kind of encourages me to do something different.

I'm also hoping to eat my "five-a-day" every day for a month. I struggle with this quite a lot most of the time, not because I don't like fruit and veg (although I'm not that keen on most fruits if I'm honest), but because it just feels like there is only so much you can eat sometimes!

I'll be keeping a record of what I eat and the impact that this has on my health/weight as well. Another resolution for this month is to do at least a kilometre every day on my cross trainer (I should be able to do much more than that, but at the very least if I do that I will feel like I've done something). Am hoping that a combination of eating healthier and definitely doing more exercise will result in the start of weight loss and trimming down.

AND if all that wasn't enough, I'm going to start keeping a written diary as well (Thing 2). I used to keep a journal some years ago, and eventually fell out of the habit; I would write every morning and evening as I got the train over to uni. I now fill that time reading, and I like reading during that time, so I'm going to have to find time to keep my journal. Edited highlights will appear here over the coming months.

So, many beginnings today... Here's hoping that I see these things through to their conclusions!

February

I have a few plans for February to try and get a few longer term things underway. The first of these is to have February be one of my vegetarian months: I'm hoping that this will also help with my goal of getting my weight down a bit. I'd quite like to get down to fifteen stone by the time I'm 30. I don't know how reasonable that is, but I'm going to go for it. When I set that goal I was actually lighter than I am now; I put a bit of weight on over last summer and in the autumn, and haven't been able to shift it yet, despite stepping up the amount of exercise that I've been taking and trying to reduce my calorie intake.

Hopefully being vegetarian for a month will help with that, step up the amount of fruit and veg that I'm taking in. I'll keep a food diary as I go, and if I can I want to try and make February my month of getting my five-a-day as well. This is all to try and get me in a set of good habits for my life. I will go back to eating meat eventually, I don't have a problem with eating meat or fish (what else are the canine teeth for?) but I don't think there's anything wrong with switching your diet to try and get a health benefit either.

If I can get my weight to sixteen stone by the time I go to America I will be very happy. Ramp up the exercise over the coming months if I can, cut back on meat, increase the amount of veg that I get... See what happens. Maybe try and cut back on the amount of carbohydate that I take in as bread. I love bread of all shapes and slices, but it might be good to see how things are without it.

The other one of my 101 thing that I'm going to start in February is thing number 2: to regularly keep a diary for at least six months. I think that this will take several notebooks. A few years ago when I started keeping a diary - actually, thinking back that would be five and a half years ago now, when I started my Masters - I kept writing regularly for about two years, resulting in about twenty A5 notebooks. It was an important part of my life at the time, and if I am honest I'm not entirely sure why I stopped when I did.

I guess I just felt that I had reached a point where I didn't need the diary to help me figure out what I was doing any more. By the time that I stopped recording things (I would write every morning and evening on the train to university, and also sometimes of an evening I was feeling particularly pensive) I was at a good place in my life, started uni again for my PhD, felt like I had a bit of direction. Maybe back in April last year when I set my goals I knew that in the coming months/years I might have need of this coping strategy again, a need of somewhere that I could create an expression of my self that would be of use for my self-study.

Maybe it was just one more thing to include in a list of 101 things to do before I turned 30, who knows?

Anyway, between now and the start of February I'll read another book or two (more on that in a future post, I have an interesting little thing for my reading that could be quite handy, especially when it comes to reading some classic literature), I'll get another few haiku pulled together from the random words and thoughts that permeate my mind, and I'm trying to get another piece of flash fiction out. I've gone dry on ideas at the moment, but in sorting my laptop out I'm running across old files containing notes on stories and ideas, first paragraphs etc. It may be that some of them have something which will help.

Take it easy people, more to come soon.