If you decide to become a vegan, you are making one of the greatest choices you can for your health and a doing great deed for the planet. You should know, however, that going vegan is far from easy, especially if you are usually heavily reliant on meat. You will have to make significant changes to your routine and diet, and the people around you may have to adjust too. Here are some of the challenges you’ll have to face when transitioning to veganism, and how you can get over them.
Finding Good Restaurants
You’ll soon find out that vegan restaurants can be very hit or miss, and you might be very disappointed by your experience if you don’t pick the right one. Some restaurants use questionable methods as well. A restaurant may not be as vegan as you think, so you have to make sure that they have a solid reputation and that you can verify their cooking methods and ingredients. You also have to make sure that their dishes don’t come off as too “vegany”.
Things will be much easier for you if you’re in a big foodie city, however. Cities like Chicago, for instance, have some of the best vegan restaurants on the planet. If this is where you live, we suggest you check out the vegan restaurant menu from Native Foods. They’re one of the most respected vegan restaurants in the city and you’ll be amazed at how close to regular pub food their vegan dishes are.
Eating Out with Friends
Eating out with friends will also become a challenge for you. You might have to compromise and go to a restaurant with only a few vegan options, but you could also take the opportunity to introduce your friends to vegan restaurants by taking them to a great restaurant.
Make sure that it’s not the first time you go to that restaurant, however, and see if you can try a tasting menu if it’s a restaurant you’ve never tried before. If you pick a good restaurant, your friends might get so impressed by the quality of the food that they might want to join you on your vegan journey.
Eating on the Go
Grabbing a bite when you’re heading to the train or on a busy morning on your way to work will be much more difficult from now on and you might not be able to find any good vegan options. This is why you need to know what type of vegan menu major fast-food chains offer and which one does vegan dishes the best. This way you’ll have always somewhere to go if you ever need to grab something in a hurry.
Ideological Differences
If you’re an ideological vegan, you have to be careful not to push your opinions on other people. You can try to introduce people to veganism and expand their consciousness on things like animal cruelty, but you have to understand that you were a meat eater just like them once, and you’ll remember how much you loved it.
Conversely, you might have people who will push back, try to ridicule you, or literally try to force you to eat meat. The best move here would be to avoid them until they show you respect.
Going vegan is not always easy and you will go through peaks and valleys during your first week. But, once you get adapted, you should be able to enjoy a pretty normal and often much healthier life.