Saturday, May 23, 2009

Confessions of a Born-Again Omnivore

I've been a vegetarian for almost two years.

Sort of.

I still ate fish. And I adopted the Joey Tribbiani rule and ate meat when I was overseas.

(Greece is not Greece without a gyro.)

But recently I've been thinking a lot about why I wasn't eating meat. I've never been someone who thought that eating meat was wrong, or "not natural"... I absolutely think that eating meat is okay... but for a time I decided that it wasn't for me.

Lately, though, I realized that I wasn't eating meat because I didn't want to let OTHER people down (mostly my vegetarian friends and family members)... and that's not a good way to live.

So I've decided that at this point in my life, I'm eating meat. If I change my mind sometime in the future, so be it.

With all of that said, I have some advice for those of you who ever change from eating little to no meat to making it a more substantial part of your diet.

It's not the BEST idea to go to Vegas and visit a restaurant that has "all-you-can-eat-meat-on-skewers" a few days after you start eating it again...

Because even if you don't eat a TON of food... you will probably eat ENOUGH of the pork and grilled pineapple or things wrapped in bacon, and then you will regret it.

Especially when you have to walk a few miles back to your hotel.

And even though you'll try to make it back to your room, you'll probably end up throwing up in an alley next to some hotel (don't worry... it was one of the older, tacky ones, so it doesn't really matter) in front of a whole crowd of people...

It's one thing to throw up in Vegas because you had too much fun drinking at the bars... but throwing up because you ate too much pork? Embarrassing.

Really, really embarrassing.

And kind of sad.

So... if you ever make the change back to omnivore-y... take it slow.