Why I am now a vegan (Part I)

My reasons for becoming Vegan started in late, 1993.
I was 20, turning 21. I had started going to a local chiropractor after a friend told me how good he felt after going to see one. So I thought that I would make an appointment myself to see what all the fuss was about.

At the first visit I was told about how my body works with all it’s nerves & muscles, etc and that the spinal column is a vital part of that network. Having a bad spine can lead to all sorts of other things going hay-wire too.

After about the 3rd or 4th visit, I was told about a short talk that the Chiropractor puts on for his new patients, and that it may answer any questions that I may have.

I attended this little talk, and found out some even more interesting things about the way that my body functions, etc. It was at this talk, that the Chiropractor used the sports car analogy. That went something like this.., you decided to buy a $100,000.00 Ferrari, are you going to put any old fuel into it or are you going to use the very best that there is? Our body is even more expensive and precision made that any Ferrari, so why eat any old crap as fuel?

At the end of this little talk, he gave us all some home work, and that was to read a book called “Fit for Life”, if we were honestly serious about taking the best care of our bodies that we possibly could. Wanting to know more about this new way of eating and things like that, I decided to go and buy this book, and see what it was all about.

I started reading “Fit for Life”, and at the start of it, I was very sceptical, and started to think that it was another one of those quackery books and things like that. Anyway, I persevered and finished the book. When I was about halfway through, a strange thing started to happen. What the authors were writing about started to make sense. Even before I had finished reading the book, I made the decision to become a vegan.

For me it was a right here, right now decision. There was no waiting until the next time that I went shopping, or when the fridge and freezer were empty. It happened as soon as I made that choice. The very next day, I cleaned out my fridge and freezer, and gave all the meat and eggs and crap like that to someone else that wanted it.

Let me tell you this, going vegan was the easy bit. Staying vegan for the first few months was the hard part. For me staying vegan was the hardest part. My circle of friends didn’t understand why I was doing this. My family had no idea why either. My mother, when I told her that I had become vegan, asked me if I had joined some sort of religious cult or something like that. Back in those days the only vegan that I knew was a teacher from trade school. He told me that he had been vegan for 10-15 years. Let me tell you that he was one of the fittest people that I have ever met in my life.

Fast forward to a few years ago now…

I started to read more into veganism, and why some things that society did, didn’t seem to sit right with me. This was about the time that I started looking more into the animal rights issue. This happened about the same time that I was befriended by a wonderful black Labrador, sitting outside talking to him one day, I came to realise that I would protect him from harm as much as I could, so why didn’t I have the same views for other animals.

I will continue part II in the next post

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