Tag: health

To Meat or Not To Meat

Dear Reader,

I am a carnivore.  I mean, I come from Tennessee with a grandmother who made pork chops, sausage, and bacon just about every day. And don’t get me started on barbecue. Ground beef was super-affordable, so I’m pretty sure it was in just about every dinner my mom made for us growing up.  And it’s tasty.  I consider a good meal one that has some kind of delicious protein in it seasoned just right, seared on the outside, and juicy on the inside.  But even I recognize that one should not eat the way my grandparents did, so I have made conscious efforts, at times, to eat healthier.  I even thought I was doing pretty good by eliminating most of the red meat from my life, sticking to chicken almost all the time and occasionally some turkey.

But every now and then, my wife will say, out of nowhere, “I think I want to be a vegetarian.”  It terrifies carnivore me.  She has good reasons for it.  For one, she is an avid animal lover – she can’t think of any animal with any less compassion than she feels for our beloved dogs.  And, to the detriment of animals, she thinks that Americans eat too much meat.  Americans annually eat over 55 pounds of beef alone.  In addition, the Pew Research Center reports that meat consumption is on the rise at a faster pace than any time in the last 40 years, and only about 3% of Americans follow a vegetarian diet. So, she’s right: we probably eat too much meat. That means that more animals are being raised just for slaughter, and that is tough to think about even if you adopt the posture that God put animals here for us to eat.

My wife also believes that consuming meat regularly may have consequences beyond cholesterol levels and fat in the bloodstream in the form of hormones – synthetic estrogens and synthetic testosterone for example.  There is some evidence that this hidden hormone consumption contributes to weight gain and even some types of cancer, though it is unclear just how much you’d have to consume to empirically prove this link. It is true that ranchers and farmers use hormones to create fatter, meatier animals. It is a common, accepted practice to inject hormones into young livestock so that they gain weight.  For the farmer, it’s a simple calculation: bigger animals produce more meat, and more meat is more money.  Hormones also help dairy cows produce more milk.  It’s hard to fault the farmer here if we are thinking of small family farmers – they have a tough go of it and I understand they need to do whatever they need to do to keep the farm going.  But we’re also talking about huge meat companies who aren’t exactly struggling given the overall rise in meat consumption.  They are really cashing in.

And this doesn’t even account for the environmental impact of our meat thirst. The meat machine in this country is a major energy and resource consumer.

meat impact

It’s a lot to think about.  It seems that there are real ethical, health, and environmental issues that go into the decision to meat or not to meat.  So this week, we embarked on a little experiment: A Week Without Meat.

 

The Experience 

First of all, it took some planning.  Not a lot, but it did take some planning.  I have been scarred by tofu and soy encounters gone wrong, and I was pretty nervous about whether or not things would taste good.  Dinners at our home usually revolve around some kind of meat.  Lunches usually involve lunchmeat of some kind.  Breakfast occasionally involves bacon or sausage.  So we did have to make a plan and shop a bit differently to execute it.  I am the cook around here, so I searched for some recipes that involved

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Our meat-free shopping cart

greens and grains and other options like beans and sweet potatoes.  We swapped lunchmeat for a vegetarian burger.  I ate out once during the week, but my kind friend accounted for this experiment and chose an organic market for our lunch date. We kept breakfast pretty simple, choosing cereal or oatmeal most days, but today I did allow myself a nice egg.  My biggest fear was that we wouldn’t feel full or satisfied all five days.

The Verdict

I am happy to say that we really enjoyed the food this week.  There was even something kind of easy about not fussing with cooking meat every night.  This was the first week back to classes for me, normally a bit more stressful than usual, and simple vegetarian meals were not really that daunting to prepare.  We haven’t had anything that we didn’t completely savor.  Peanut butter and jelly is a great

A Week Without Meat

sandwich.  Grilled cheese feels like an event.  Grains are friends.  Salad is salad, but salad is so versatile that it never has to be boring.  Beans and rice are shape-shifters – I really tasted tacos when I ate them.  In all, it was kind of a revelation.  I thought I might feel more energetic, but I have also had a head cold this week, so that is not really possible to say.

My overall takeaway is that we probably won’t be full-time vegetarians. But you never say never, right?  If my wife ever gets to the point where she wants to “go veg” full-time and for real, I will take that plunge.  For now, I do think that we will be much more vegetarian than we have been.  Our wonderful friends have contributed all sorts of recipe ideas, so we have lots of things to try.  I sort of like to think of our new approach to food as mindful eating – being thoughtful about how much meat we eat and making conscious choices to try more meat alternatives.  There is the feeling that one or two people can’t change the world, and that is probably true. I once had a student say in class (while we were talking about climate change) that climate change has been going on for so long and will continue long after we’re gone, and that since we are here for such a short time, it doesn’t do any good for us to try to do anything about it.  Imagine if we all thought that way about the world.  True, if the May family eats less meat, it might not save many of the animals or save much energy.  But given our love of animals and the environment, my wife and I feel good about making choices that we feel are ethical and finding a way to live our values.  I am also happy to be able to say to anyone else that might be considering cutting back or cutting out meat from their diet that it is a total myth that there is nothing good to eat when you’re a vegetarian. Everything we ate this week was flavorful and satisfying – and hormone-free.

I’m still a carnivore.  But I’m a conscious carnivore, evolving herbivore now.  That might not change the world, but it still feels like progress.

 

© Ryna May 2017

 

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Change is Gonna Come

Dear Reader,

Of course, this is the time of year when everyone makes resolutions to make changes in their lives. Most of the time, these changes fall along the lines of losing weight, saving money, getting fit, quitting smoking, etc.  However, as we well know, most of us do not keep those resolutions – why not?  Maybe we think changes are impossible.  Maybe we just aren’t ready for change.  I know it’s a cliche, but the only constant in life is change – so I want to think more about how to embrace it.

Dr. Art Markman, professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, says we don’t keep our resolutions because many of us who make resolutions fail to make a realistic plan to achieve our goals.  Perhaps we believe too much in the magical power of January 1st, as if putting up a new calendar on the wall wipes the slate totally clean.

Dr. Markman recently wrote an article for Time wherein he laid out a few pieces of practical advice for keeping those resolutions.  In summary, here they are:

  1. Prepare before New Year’s Eve.  Oops – too late for us on that one because the new year is already here.  But perhaps the point is to make a decision to start something and not worry about what the calendar says.  As the saying goes, “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
  2. The only way to really change is to change our habits.  Our lives are governed by routine.  If you want to jumpstart your career, you can’t just binge on Netflix every day – you have to change some behaviors.  You won’t get healthy by ordering pizza every week – you’re going to have to shop and cook.
  3. Focus first on positive goals rather than negative goals – a positive goal is something you want to do whereas a negative goal is something you want to stop.  This is perhaps my favorite bit of Dr. Markman’s advice.  It is much easier to gain some momentum toward things you want to do – such as taking more walks.  I love the idea of creating some success that will give me confidence in tackling some of the more difficult behaviors to change.
  4. Be specific about your plans.  This is also important.  It’s why we have schedules and calendars.  If you want to read more, choose a night that is the night you plan to read and schedule it.  This is how something becomes a routine.
  5. Change your environment to accommodate new habits.  The idea is to make it easy to do desirable things and hard to do undesirable things.  So if your goal is to eat better, don’t buy junk snacks for the house – instead buy, say, apples and carrots.  That way, when you want a snack, the desirable behavior will be easy.
  6. Finally, Dr. Markman advises that you should not be too hard on yourself.  Change is difficult for everyone, so odds are even if you plan well you won’t end up keeping all of those resolutions.  But maybe you achieve one or two of them. It’s best to celebrate the ways in which we are successful rather than beat ourselves up for the times we fall short.

The fact is, whether we resolve it or not, change is going to come in some form to all of us in the coming year.  Some of it will be good and some won’t be.  In looking back over the past year, there were some definite high points and some definite low points, but life is definitely not the same as it was one year ago today.  I was not always ready for change to happen, but we can’t always control things in our lives – change happens whether we like it or not. All we can control is how we react. And when circumstances do change in ways we don’t like, we have the power to decide what we are willing to accept and what we won’t stand for. 

I normally don’t really make New Year’s Resolutions because I think they are destined to fail, but this year I do have some changes I’d like to make.  I’d like to return to health.  This time last year I was training for a half-marathon and running up to six miles at a time.  After the half-marathon

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At the starting line of the Rock N Roll Half Marathon in DC, March 2015
in March, I backed off running to give myself some recovery time, and then I had a freak encounter with a stair that left me with a torn meniscus in my knee.  I have not been able to exercise for months and I don’t feel terribly healthy.  So I’d like to be able to exercise again.  I never thought I’d miss running, but I really do.  I don’t think I’ll ever run a half-marathon again, but I would love to do some more 5ks this year, and I’ve always wanted to do the Warrior Dash.  If I can keep recovering from the knee injury, I would love to do that this year.  I think the Maryland Warrior Dash is in May.  That’s a specific goal I can challenge myself with.  To get there, I have to focus on things other than running for the immediate future so I can start to regain some strength.  Nothing is going to happen overnight, but I have to have some specific plans in order for anything to happen at all.

The other change I want to make this year is to be open to change.  A lot of us have had that feeling in life of being in a rut or staying in a pattern because it’s easy or comfortable.  I don’t want to do that this year.  I want to be more Zen about what has been and let go of regrets and things that disappoint me.  This year, I want to be open to the possibility of new things, even if the new things seem scary. Everything changes eventually: jobs, people, locations, dreams.  As Hamlet said, “the readiness is all.”  This year, I want to be ready.

© Ryna May 2016