Veganism and Mental Health

How Does Our Mental Health Affect our Attitudes Towards Veganism?

I’ve already touched on the subject of whether veganism promotes mental health. I think it does. But I wanted to examine the topic from the other angle: how does mental health relate to BECOMING vegan?

I would define good mental health as stability – one neither falls into depressions, or loses one’s temper, but also has the ability to feel their feelings to the extent they want to. Mental health is resilience – an ability to look at situations straight on, bounce back from failures, and learn how to achieve emotional balance. But mental health goes beyond emotional health, to intellectual health – the ability to allow new ideas to enter the mind and jostle our pre-conceived notions as we strive to be completely honest with ourselves.

I would argue that poor mental health makes it much more difficult for people to become vegan. Follow this train of thought:

Life sucks.

My life sucks.

I am not connected to people.

My relationships can’t fulfill me.

All I have are my creature comforts.

My creature comforts are what I know.

I know what I like.

I don’t want to not like these things anymore or I would have nothing.

Please stop trying to take away these creature comforts – they are all I have.

VS

Life is good.

My life is continually expanding and progressing.

I have dynamic connections with people.

I’m learning and growing with others in my life.

I have so much abundance and so many thing I love to do.

My creature comforts are just bonuses.

I know what I like so far, but since I’m learning and growing these things may develop over time, too.

I have so much to give. I want to share myself in the most positive ways possible.

I want everyone to experience the joy I feel.

Please show me how I can live to my maximum ability. I am open to change.

Depression

When I was depressed, I had given up on people. No one could understand my pain and so I couldn’t be myself around anyone. All I had were the small things. Milk chocolate, ice cream, etc. If I had been able to maintain a healthy connection to others and to my creativity, those things would have stayed small things and not taken on more weight to relieve me of my sadness. When you truly have a life, your habits fade away as details that can be changed.

Cravings

When you don’t know your inner power, you don’t know the extent to which you can exert it. You believe that people and objects have power over you. You might go back to a dysfunctional ex over and over again. You might refer to meat as ‘my meat’, indicating an inseparable intimate relationship with the meat you’ve been eating – it’s yours, but it also ‘has you’.

Cravings are what your mind thinks of to soothe it based on neural pathways that you have created. If you think over and over again: sad>milk chocolate, then your brain will reach for the milk chocolate unless you reset the habit. As for chocolate itself, we’re SOL, it’s imprinted in our brain coding.

But just as people in Japan eat things that North Americans may find disgusting (eg. soft boiled fetal duck), we often love what we know and when we understand that we have the power to transcend tastes we were trained to have, then we are free to make ethical choices.

The BodyMind Connection

When our minds are sound, we want the best for our bodies because we see them as one. When in our minds we want to cause no harm, our bodies will carry out this desire and will refuse to be nourished by violence. Clarity of mind leaves no room for inaccuracies in our ethical choices.

I know many spiritual people who radiate positive energy and who devote themselves to living purely, but when it comes to their diets they throw up their hands as victims of a system where everything is made by slaves anyway.

We can’t always control who is indirectly harmed by our purchases, but we can control purchases in which people and animals are directly harmed.

Animal Products as an Addiction

Most of my formerly craved animal products are now pretty gross to me: red meat – haven’t touched it since I was a teenager and I imagine it would be hard to chew and hard to digest. Chicken? All I think of is biting down on a vein in a McNugget, which happened to me several times during my McCruel youth. Milk – sexist animal secretions, eggs – don’t necessarily have to be ‘cruel’ (say for instance if you rescued a chicken from a hatchery) but they can be pretty gross in a multitude of ways.

However some products in which milk is only an ingredient can be hard to forget about. There’s something about a Snickers bar that gives me a brain rush. This could be so easily solved in vegan chocoate bars were easier to get our hands on, like at Nice Shoes.

Vegan Chocolate Bars

An addiction is a perceived dependence of something outside our ourselves to achieve a positive inner state. Once we realize how to get the same effect from within, the pattern usually ceases. I used to do ecstasy, acid, coke, smoke weed, drink, etc. but I feel so good on a day to day basis now that I don’t have the need to. I’m not judging drugs at all as they can be useful tools, but for me, I have outgrown them.

It is not the animal products in themselves that give us the feelings of pleasure or satisfaction, it is ourselves. So as we gain self-awareness, and open our minds to revising all that we’ve been told about food pyramids and food chains, our mental and physical health inevitably become stronger.

Whether you choose to go vegan to get happy, or get happy to help yourself go vegan doesn’t really matter.

Happy Meateaters?

Many people will argue that they have wonderful lives and consider themselves happy carnivores. I know many smiley, happy, rather amazing people who aren’t bothered about their animal-based diets. But, when you reveal to them the behind-the-scenes of their diets they are not so happy to hear it. They become excusatarians – defensive and unwilling to learn more. The information you’re sharing doesn’t fit with their happy lives, so they reject it.

True happiness can’ t be tipped so easily. I think someone strong and confident would be concerned that their happiness was coming at the expense of others. And they would want to iron out this area of friction so they could get back to enjoying whatever happiness they could.

When it comes to those who support animal agriculture – ignorance is bliss, but true bliss – bliss that can not be exposed as causing suffering – comes only from learning of the damage being done and then choosing otherwise.

You’re Vegan, I’m Sorry

Veganism Feels Good

A few of my vegan friends at Pigs for Peace in Seattle

So how’s that working for you? I’m often asked by curious people, understandably resistant to the concept, but genuinely curious.

Some people might go vegan overnight, but most don’t. I was raised on weekly steak dinners, hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken nuggets, baloney, and other lunch meats that stick to the wall, electric cheese, and yes even veal, as I’ve mentioned. My favourite vegetable was pickles. I was Albertan and my parents were born in the 50s, what can I say.

Honestly, when I went vegan, I was doing it out of guilt. I felt horrible for the cows and chickens. I couldn’t turn a blind eye anymore. I wouldn’t want to be treated the way they were, so I stopped after attending my first foie gras demo with Liberation BC.  What I didn’t know was that going vegan was going to change my whole way of looking at food. Cutting out animal products was essentially cutting out junk food. I couldn’t so easily reach for a chocolate bar, a bag of chips, ice cream anymore – I had to read ingredients. I had to take a moment to think before I ate.

It was hard for me to give up dairy. I let Glenn Gaetz in on my process, explaining to him how I’d cut it down to 2ce a week, 1nce a week, etc. And, bless him, he didn’t (outwardly) judge my process. I told him how it wasn’t working because I’d buy a tub of yogurt and have to eat it every day for a week just to finish it.

But having vegan friends, they showed me alternatives. Have you tried soy ice cream with granola? Coconut ice cream? What about vegan yogurt? Go to this website, try this recipe, shop here. Meat has been flesh to me for a long time. Inedible. Sick. But dairy used to be a craving in its many forms. Now it’s just a liquid stomachache.

The way I’ve changed my diet now… it’s incredible. I eat salads and smoothies every day. I experiment with recipes. I eat a lot more raw foods. I eat more organic and fresh than ever. And bonus – I eat no misery.

Good times @ Pigs for Peace

When I do eat junk food now, I feel AWFUL. I ate a whole pack of Twizzlers last week (which are vegan – props for that, just don’t eat the whole mothaf-in bag) while feeling sorry for myself about somethingr’other, and it seriously ruined my whole day. My body rejects junk now. I am the pinnacle of health, with indulgences of course in moderation. And I love food more than ever. I feel so accomplished to love healthy food. I did it! It’s like learning to love a good man and not the asshole who’s going to use and abuse you. Sometimes you have to reach beyond what you were conditioned to choose.

Now, my body loves me. I love my body. And karma loves me, too. I feel like I need to eat this way for another 4-5 years now until my cells entirely regenerate to full vegan form. Then I’ll full-on morph into… I don’t know, a mermaid or a cartoon character or something.

When I only had one or two friends who were vegan, I thought they were freakish and annoying, with their little self-promotions here and there. Now, I see that they are still crazy hippies, but I get why they’re so gung ho on their diets. Veganism Feels Good. It is the be all end all of guilt free diets. Guilt FREE, do you hear that people? What more can you ask for? Less cellulite? Better skin? A toned ass? It can give you that, too.

Being Vegan is Easy

Being Vegan is Easy

Kale Butter, oh sn*p!

… And you Know What they Say – If She’s Easy…

Like Carol J. Adams’ book, Living Among Meateaters, says: “Vegans see death in the meateater’s diet, but the meateater sees death in theirs.”

I feel the most common response I get from meateaters when I mention my vegan inclinations is: “I could never do that.” But, what is it that meateaters are actually picturing when they think of a vegan diet? They are thinking of not one, but two of the food groups they eat taken from them. Firstly, the food groups are sort of old news (a whole group for dairy? C’mon now). It’s all in the way you see food that eases the process over time.

Meateaters make an assumption that vegans are deprived, that we are always secretly craving animal products. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

As a crutch to help myself mentally handle the task of no more dairy, I allowed myself one Blizzard per summer (what flavour?  Probably cookie dough ; ) But last summer, when I went to cash in on this handy clause and I didn’t want one! I have begun to associate dairy products with the dairy process, and the physical pleasure of ice cream really does clash with the emotional discomfort in my heart thinking about the cow’s experience of constant violation (repeated rape), separation from their young, with whom they would naturally have lifelong relationships, then slaughter. Instead I opted for a frozen hot chocolate from Second Cup made with soy. Did the trick. And PS there are a few great recipes for vegan blizzards online.

Don’t be surprised if you crave dairy desserts on your vegan journey. Many dairy-product based sweets simply aren’t obtainable yet in vegan form. And yes, being vegan is all about baking and cooking your own gems, but sometimes when you’re out in the world, the whole appeal of a treat is that it’s prepared for you. I’m a human vegan, doing an adequate job  at it and making choices that feel good to me, not that follow rules set by others. If I make a choice that doesn’t feel good to me, then I can choose differently the next day.

Once you start thinking vegan, choices appear everywhere. I went to Capers today in Kits, and had spent $100.00 dollars on vegan groceries in a matter of 15 minutes, trying a sample of kale butter at the till which was !!amazing!! and had all the richness and flavour of a spinach dip made with dairy.

I would liken the process of becoming vegan to learning another language. At first it’s annoying to have to always check yourself when you go to reach for a word, but eventually, you gain a plethora of vocab to help you express yourself and, if you’re committed, you start thinking in  that language.