the day I went vegan..

My name is Julia, I am 24 years old and I study Business Administration. Since 3 years I live a vegan lifestyle. How did I get there? Well - it was the Summer of 2010 and my holidays must've been a little too long, because one morning I woke up thinking "why would anyone possibly want to be a vegetarian??" I have to admit I know quite a few people who are vegetarians, but I was always one of the people who kind of admired it, but never thought I could do it myself. Also I did feel sorry for the animals, but somehow not enough to stop eating them. I never really thought about it and I probably didn't really want to know up until then. So I started researching and thanks to google I found a lot of articles and videos about being veg*n. I read a lot, watched quite a few videos, including "Earthlings", which is a 1.5hours long documentation about how animals are used and abused in our society. You can watch it for free on google videos. I took me months to watch it, because I couldn't watch more than 10-15minutes at a time. My eyes were filled with tears and my stomach felt like it was turned upside down, everytime I watched any of these videos.

So after doing my research for about half a day I decided, that it couldn't be that hard to try this vegetarian-thing. Only for a week, to see how it goes and if I missed anything - apparantly I didn't!
So I did more research on milk and finally realised, that cow's milk is breastmilk for a babycow. Just like human's breastmilk is for human babies. Sounds completely logical, but I never thought about it. So why is the human the only mammalian, that drinks another animal's breastmilk until we grow old? Every breastfeeding mother and most probably pretty much everyone else as well, has heard about swollen, sore, inflamed nipples - and did you know, that the cow's udder is, just like a woman's nipples - can be swollen, sore and inflamed? But cows still have to keep giving milk, but not to their babies (they are taken away after birth) but to a machine which kind of pulls the milk out of the udder. So due to that extrem suction of these machines the inflamed udder starts bleeding. So often blood and pus are in the raw milk, but don't worry, they filter and boil the milk, so there shouldn't be many germs left. Sounds disgusting, right? That was the main reason for me to stop eating milk and milk products.
So anyways.. I wanted to try this veg*n-thing and it took me the first 2 days to getting used to it, but after that I felt great! I felt healthier, my stomach wasn't bloated after meals, which was the case after every meal prior to going veg*n and overall I felt calmer and de-stressed.
And now? I had my 3 year vegan anniversary on July 14th, 2013 and I can't imagine ever eating anything non-vegan ever again!
A lot of people actually say that they feel more calm and de-stressed after going veg*n and there are theories, that you consume the animal's stresshormones when you eat meat, but I'm not sure if this is actually true or the reason for feeling de-stressed is a lifestyle-change in general.

and btw, July 14th is my mother's birthday, we were out for a picknick that day and she brought chicken wings for everyone (not for me, I told her I'd try this vegetarian-thing for a few days).
But the moment everyone else started eating their chicken wings, I felt so disgusted, that I said to myself "this is it - I'm going vegan! Forever!" - So far it went pretty good I think :)

So what's your story? Are you living veg*n? Do you want to try it, but don't know how? Leave me a comment :)

Julia
xoxo