Why I changed my diet (by Leslee Horner)

Please join me in welcoming Leslee Horner back to FemCentral. Since we last heard from Leslee, she’s acquired a literary agent who is shopping her first Young Adult novel, SUMMER OF STARS.  You can learn more about the book, its road to publication, and read Leslee’s blog at www.lesleehorner.com. Leslee will be sharing a series of posts with us today through Wednesday. If there is a subject about which YOU are passionate, you always have an open invitation to contact me about guest blogging!

I just finished lunch, which consisted of 4 celery stalks and a half a cucumber with hummus on the side.  I’ve been a vegetarian for three and a half years and am currently trying out a mostly vegan, mostly raw diet.  When I told my mother what I was up to she exclaimed, “But you need your dairy, your cheese, and where will you get your PROTEIN!”  There was terror in her voice as if she was imagining me eating celery stalks until I simply withered away.  The thing is I am certain that I will not wither away.  I will become clearer, stronger, healthier, and more creative than I have ever been.  Why you ask?  Well for starters, because it’s my intuition that is leading me down this path and following that beacon of light can only result in my overall success.  As for all of the other reasons I believe a raw, vegan diet will make me better, I’ll get to those over the next few days.  Let me start by sharing a little of my background.

I grew up in the US south-North Carolina to be exact- with a mother who was a magician in the kitchen.  Love came in a lot of forms and food was one of them.  She showed her love by making delicious meals and we showed our love by receiving-and devouring-them.  I grew up eating meat and lots of it: fried chicken, roast beef, spaghetti and meat sauce, pork chops, liver mush (yep, you heard me), hot dogs, and burgers.  The thought of being a vegetarian back in those days (or even six years ago) was completely foreign to me.  If a meal didn’t include meat, well it just wasn’t a meal.

I went most of my life without questioning the food I was eating.  I lived in a bubble where I believed completely that if it was for sale in the grocery store and restaurants it must be safe and perfectly fine to eat.  I also, like most Americans, was completely detached from the source of my food.  I didn’t look at pictures of chickens or cows and relate them to my dinner.  Not.  Ever.  I also never thought about the farms and plants where the animals were being raised and the meat processed.  It was almost as if Ronald McDonald himself was pulling those burgers out of a hat in the back room.  That started to change about five years ago.

My husband and I rented the movie Fast Food Nation.  Watching that movie was the first time I began to see the connections.  I saw how the animals were treated, how the packing plants were run, how the employees were exploited, and how the beef was tainted.  And although the movie was more of a “story” the book it was made from was non-fiction.  After watching it, we vowed to stop eating beef.  We had connected the dots in the beef industry but not yet with poultry, pork or dairy.

Over the next year I often said, “wouldn’t it be nice to just be vegetarians” as I gobbled up one of the chicken dinners I prepared each week.  I think back then I had the thought more out of laziness than concern for animals and diet.  I hated washing, cutting, and prepping raw chicken.  It disgusted me and it was time consuming.  Yet I did it several times a week.

In 2008 I was reading and learning all I could about intuition and spirituality.  In February of that year I read Divine Guidance by Doreen Virtue.  In one part of the book she talked about getting guidance from her angels about her diet.  In her mind’s eye she was shown a piece of chicken and told she should remove meat from her diet.  She discovered that when she stopped eating meat her intuition became clearer.  When I finished reading that section of the book I knew it was my time to go vegetarian.  I prepared the last two pieces of chicken in the fridge that night and I have not cooked or eaten any meat since then.

For a while I had no answer to why I had become vegetarian.  It was simply because when I read Doreen’s story I just knew I had to do it.  I became a vegetarian first and then I went on a mission to figure out why.  In the past three years I’ve researched and learned a thing or two and now I have three clear reasons for my dietary lifestyle.

1. My health!
2. Compassion for my fellow sentient beings!
3. To help the environment!

I will go into detail about each of these reasons over the next few days.  I hope you will come back and learn more about the benefits of a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle!