About a month and a half ago I stumbled upon a video of Graham Hill and his thoughts on weekday vegetarianism and wrote about it. As mentioned in the post I was seriously considering following that regime for a month to see if it could work for me. So for the month of June I’ve been a weekday vegetarian but with some exceptions. Let me explain.
Of course the main outline was to go completely vegetarian during the week and having the opportunity to eat meat (which I have stated before I love to eat) during the weekends. I added a provision though: if I would find myself in a social setting where eating was involved (say eating out with friends or anything work-related) I would choose at the time. During the month I found myself to be in one of those situations about once each week. And I have to say that I chose the meat option on every one of those occasions (did I mention that I love meat). So all in all I was completely vegetarian for about 4 out of 5 weekdays (with 2 out of 3 meals on the other days being vegetarian as well).
So what did I eat? Well, same as in my first experiment with being a vegetarian I would eat soy based replacements. I also started to eat fruit in stead of bread in the morning. As for dinner I just experimented with vegetarian dishes (some came out better than others). I think this has helped to improve my eating habits towards an even healthier diet and I even lost a fair bit of weight (although, to be honest, that could also have to do with my increased exercise regime).
I have to admit that changing from just a Meatless Monday to weekday vegetarianism was an easy step. As stated before, I will never give up meat entirely (with this lifestyle though, it seems I enjoy eating meat even more) but with the apparent advantages it has I will keep on living the weekday vegetarian lifestyle for the foreseeable future.
I like to eat meat. Let me rephrase that: I love to eat meat. I haven’t met a piece of meat that when prepared well I won’t eat. So the decision I made to try and be a vegetarian for a week felt a little strange. It’s not that I suddenly hate the meat producing industry or refuse to eat meat. I decided to do this because I try to lower my carbon footprint (and producing meat does tax the environment quite a bit) and I was curious if there were ways of doing it without compromising my eating habits too much. So how did it go?
As for replacing the meat I have to tell you surprisingly well. All it really took was cutting the meat out of my daily eating habits and just replace it with something different (it helps if your eating habits are fairly healthy to begin with and not based on say fast food). For breakfast and lunch I would replace the meat on my sandwiches with cheese, jam or soy based meat replacements (which nowadays taste a whole lot better than the ones I tried a few years ago). For diner I just tried out a few vegetarian dishes (some I’d tried before) or again replaced the meat with soy based meat replacements.
And as stated the taste of the substitutes was surprisingly well. That didn’t take away the fact that for me the dishes would be better if it would’ve contained meat. It’s not that the spaghetti with soy based meatballs tasted bad; it’s just I think it’s better when the meatballs are really meatballs. And that’s all a matter of taste I’m sure.
It wasn’t difficult to change to an all vegetarian diet nor did it produce awful or tasteless food. It went well enough and because I also read more about the advantages of being a vegetarian and cutting down on my meat consumption, I’ve decided to join the Meatless Monday movement and from now on make my mondays meat-free. That way I’m helping to reduce my carbon footprint while I still can enjoy something I love to eat the rest of the week.
Last week I started a week of no-web experience (which happened to coincide with a week of fun visiting friends in Lebanon) because I wondered if I could last 7 days without the one thing I use most in my life. Did I last?
Yes, with a small exception of showing my friend how easy it was to get online on a phone in Starbucks and that was for maybe 3 minutes. But I didn’t tweet, read blogs or use the web for my usual stuff the rest of the week. As suggested by Graham, I also didn’t read my mail for a week.
I didn’t miss some of the things as much as I thought I would. Sure there were the occasional times I wanted to tweet some of the things I heard or saw (airports/planes are a gold mine for funny things to see and hear), check on the one social site I’m on or see what people I know shared or said. But overall that’s something I could do without.
What I did miss was the way the web makes communication so easy with email, chat or apps like Skype. I also missed the fact that it’s so easy to just whip out your phone and look something up. The information at your fingertips and it’s 24 hour access is really something I love about the web. Finding information about certain subjects (like say if my countrymen won something in the Olympics) could be done but not as fast or easy (especially when you’re in a place that doesn’t care about the subject).
Another thing is that after being away from it for a week a whole pile of mails, tweets and blogposts are waiting for you to digest and it takes time to catch up. This however gives me an opportunity to look at my feeds carefully and see which blogs I want to see every entry from and those I don’t feel as strong about. There will be some unsubscribing involved.
Being away from the web for a week and even longer is manageable and a lot of the things I do on it I could live without. The thing is though that they are so much fun to do and when I have the time and access I love doing them. I just have to be careful that they will not start to rule my life. And of course there are other ways than the web to communicate or find information. The fact is though that the web makes it so easy that it’s hard to find a good substitute. So I could live without the web if needed, but as long as I have it, i’ll use it. A lot.
The coming week I’ll do a little experimenting again: (almost) no web-related activities. This means no checking/interacting/downloading/posting on/from sites, forums, my rss-reader and even *gasp*…Twitter. I will check my email once in a while, but that’s it. So why do this? Is it to have a cleanse like John Mayer (although I will be using some of his cleansing rules)? Am I bored with the web? Not really.
I don’t suffer from web overload or boredom. I do believe it would be interesting to see how much (if any) I would miss the thing I spend most of my free time on. Especially what I would miss. It’s convenient that it coincides with a vacation I’m taking next week (more on that in a later post) in a place where I don’t know if I can get on the web easily (I know my friends place where I’ll be staying is connected, but know nothing about mobile web availability).
So what does this entail? As from sunday morning 21st of February 0.01 AM CET until 168 hours later I will just check email with my usual regularity (once a day) and that is all the internet activity I’ll allow myself. For all the other stuff I use the web for I’ll either have to find alternatives (for things like news gathering) or just be without (things like chatting or Twitter). Of course until midnight comes I’ll probably share, discuss and tweet so much it will look like spam-like activities.
See you in a week.
