Arjun Khemani

3 weeks ago—6th July, 2021 marked one year of being vegan for me. It’s been a great journey and I intend to keep it going maybe forever. Here’s why and what I’ve learned from being vegan for a year.

Note: This article is not intended to persuade anyone to be vegan. My goal is to share honestly what I have learned and gained through this experimentation. Consider talking to your physician before implementing anything said in this article. Okay, now back to it!

I came across the whole plant-based thing and veganism from Netflix’s documentary “The Game Changers” sometime during late 2019. I found it really good and it completely changed the way I looked at meat and vegetarian food. There’s a real problematic issue with me that makes me do whatever I seem to like. So, after watching the documentary and seeing all the biased benefits of being vegan in the documentary, 17th November, 2019 was the first day of my new vegan diet. The idea was simple. I would eat no meat and dairy products, no matter what kind of food it was. From that day on, I was a vegan. It gave me a great sense of pride to think like that and tell people about it at the beginning.

To be honest, being vegan was relatively really easy for me. I don’t really know why since I had to make a complete shift from eating all the good, delicious, and unhealthy food to green, plain, vegan, and healthy food. But I think it was because of the pride of the vegan identity that I now held with me that made it easier to follow the definitely hard at first, plant based diet.

I was vegan for three months when I got persuaded to get back to normal and “enjoy my life” by eating good food. The persuasion was hard and I stopped being vegan on 16th February, 2020. But, it looks like I missed it a lot and 5 months later on 6th July, 2020 I became vegan again and I have been a vegan ever since that historic date.

Here’s what I learned and gained from being vegan:

• If you’re vegan, junk food is not an option—You may browse hundreds of recipes of vegan snacks and vegan junk food, but most of them aren’t really that bad for you. They aren’t healthy, sure, but they aren’t that unhealthy too. If not, junk food not being an option, when you’re vegan you certainly cut out a lot of junk food from your life. And the options are quite limited. I’m not saying that all vegan food is healthy, I’m just saying that most of the vegan food is not unhealthy at all.
• It’s hard at the beginning—Like I said above, it was relatively easy for me to become vegan but like all new things you start out with in life, the beginning is always harder than the process on average. This is because, we’re all accustomed to having non-vegan food at first and subconsciously are sort of not “wired” to be vegan. And so to break those many years’ cycle is hard. But after a while, it all tones down and it’s just normal for you. After a year, now it feels entirely normal and like no big deal for me to only eat vegan food
• Mental benefits are as much, if not more than physical—Well, there surely are some great benefits to your physical health of going vegan, but I believe that is the same with the mental benefits. Now, it may seem a little crazy but as you may know that “You are what you eat.” and I think being vegan helped me a lot on the physical basis as well as the subjective basis. It makes me feel more energized. It makes me able to do more physical work as well as creative and mental labor. And it just makes me feel good about myself and proud about being vegan.
• You get your protein—The one question I get from everyone and I’m certain all plant based eaters get is that “How do you get your protein?” And I think that’s one of the most frustrating questions to receive as a vegan. We do get it. We get it from plants. It’s simple logic, you see. If you are well versed with the food chain, you should know this. All protein in the world originates from plants. Then the cow eats the grass and gets it’s nutrients. And then we drink the milk from the cow which we call “high in protein”. But where did we get that protein from? The grass, indirectly. And it got transferred from the grass to the cow to us and that’s obviously so ineffective. As Dr. James Loomis points out in The Game Changers, “All that protein that you get when you eat a steak or a hamburger, where did it come from? It came from the plants that the cow ate.” So in simple terms you do get protein and yes it’s enough protein if you know what to eat. Of course, I am not nutritionist and I’m not trying to make people vegan. I’m just sharing what I think is some research backed common sense.

There’s surely been so many more advantages to me due to being vegan and I’ve learned so many things from it, but this article shares the main points. I like it and I can’t imagine that I’ll ever think on changing my diet/identity anytime soon. VEGAN POWER!