To vegan or not to vegan

It's been an interesting time.  Especially for my plate.  I have literally wiped it clean of all those loved foods that I accumulated over the years, like collecting coins in a TV game, without thinking and just to be in the game.  And like coins that can get too heavy, I was living on a diet of carb's, fat, meat and yo yo dieting and well I was more than just heavy; I was unhealthy.  There were many moments in my life where I knew that I needed to pull my sh!t together in regards to my diet and my lifestyle, with a symphony of alarm bells going unheard but it was in August of last year that I went Vegetarian.  This year I saw lent as an opportunity to finally kick the habit on those parts of my diet that were making me die.  Literally.  So, I am now on day 38 of my fast / detox of wheat, sugar, booze, dairy as well as the obvious meat and no I don't eat fish, as they have a soul too:)  I get asked; "My g#d then what do you eat?"  and I reply honestly; "so much".  Yes it is difficult to go to suppers and avoid the "DON'T" list without drawing attention to yourself and yes it is irritating to have to trawl the back's of packaging for those hidden additives and yes I was at first embarrassed to give the "Do not add" list to waitron's at restaurant's but you get savvy in pursuit of conscious eating.  And amazingly deaf to all the advice and teachings et al.  And then you find out what you like and what you don't like and your body starts to work at optimum like a racing car with just the right fuel.  Vroom vroom.  My decision to give up neatly wrapped chunks of flesh in plastic and polystyrene was made when I was on a retreat last year.  My ideas of going on a retreat had always been of one that you would find in a movie; hills, humming monks, natural cloth, butterflies farting, food picked from the earth and made with love, yadda yadda, you get the picture.  Mine was more of a knee jerk reaction to a serious situation, that had been mounting, that of my health.  So not finding the perfect fit, the Catholic church could not help me, India seemed to far and the Karoo was having an existential crisis of trying to be LA.  So I cut and pasted a week of Ayurvedic treatments, a vow of going slow (easy for a South African to do) and slumming it at the Krishna temple in Chatsworth.  Slumming not so much, it was simple and clean but I couldn't resist the reference.  I took to the lifestyle with glee.  My cellphone was off with a "Hi, you have reached Tanya Hayward, I am not available.  Call back on -- date and I can discuss things with you then.  Do not leave a message.  Have a blessed day.".  I was up at 4 am dancing and prancing with the krishna's, greedily counting the prayer beads and I loved it.  Perhaps it was the incense and flowers and the sheer extravagance and yet simplicity of the faith or perhaps it was the routine.  The reality was that I was overweight,  give or take 20 kg's and although I "carried it well" and had convinced myself that I was a fuller figure and a gorgeous plus size, the reality was that I was fat.  And that fat was making me sick.  My first weight gain was when my Nanna died at 7 and then when I went to the US when I was 12 and again when I lived in Italy as an au-pair.  But each time whether it was emotional eating (or padding on the pounds to protect myself) or change of diet and gorging on new delights, I shook those kilo's off like a wet dog shakes himself dry.  But when I was in my early twenties I hit hard times.  Emotionally that is.  I broke up with my first love and he moved back to Durban.  The afternoon of our break-up his best friend took me out and plied me with too many whiskeys.  And then he hit on me.  My outrage had me roaring up and down Long Street in Cape Town until the wee hours of the morning.  I fell in with the "wrong crowd" and my weekend partying became my daily mission.  My home became the chill out spot and because I was working hard and earning a lot of money, I was very popular.  I was the cliche "work hard and play hard" with some days only getting a few hours of shut eye.  But my body took a toll.  My metabolism started to slow down, my bad lifestyle choices and emotional issues reflected in my growing waist.  My only exercise was moshing or trance dancing and stress was my middle name; literally my nickname in the industry was "Captain Chaos".  I didn't even run on set anymore, I was secluded to a winnebago and behind a computer.  This time I did not shake the creeping kilo's, I packed them on.  Year on year I gained more and more, then lost, then gained and then when I was pregnant I had a sordid affair with cheese cake.  I ballooned.  My daughter was 4,3 kg's when she was born.  She was very healthy and strong but I suspect that I could have been on the verge of gestational diabetes.  But I dodged that bullet and thank the heaven's we were fine.  Until I had an all fall down.  I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue in 2009 after a very nasty real life version of an action flik and an attempted hijacking in downtown Joburg with my client from London curled in a feotal position on the floor of my car and me swearing in bad Zulu at 3 armed men who had smashed my drivers window with a pistol.  It was a narrow escape.  That narrow escape lead me to the same place that most upsets had led me to, to the bar and my client and I drank a huge amount of whisky and even got a police escort home after we had finished drinking with police officers, over the limit n all.  You have to love South African irony.  After that, I couldn't get out of bed for 3 weeks and it was not because I had a hangover. This was something else, something more sinister.  I felt like my head was velcro and my pillow was fluff and no matter what I tried, I could not divorce the two.  Thank the heaven's for my housekeeper at the time who literally fed, bathed and cared for my daughter and I and kept things from falling apart.  My friends were few in those dark days and I was not in the business of saying; please help me.  I read from a scrip that I had written on the do's and don'ts of relationship and had not disclosed it to anyone.  Still to this day I pop money into her account as a way of saying thank you.  Then for the next 5 years, I have seen every type of doctor known to science; registered and not.  I sit here and feel better than I have felt in years.  But I am in doubt.  After a 2 hour conversation with a friend last night about how I am restricting myself and that I need to allow my body to be my body, I feel on the one hand relief that I have a friend in my life that is so versed in life and really does know me but then am also peeved that she is not on the same wavelength as myself.  I mean, she always backs my corner.  Always.  She kept on saying how I should not limit myself and that if you wanted to eat something, that if your body needed it, then why not have a bit, then leave it and continue the healthy lifestyle?  After our conversation and now faced with the "option" of eating meat, our conversation made me think of why I turfed the flesh in the first place.  The moment of "aha" was when I was in the middle of the retreat last year and I was standing in Checkers next to the deli counter and a woman, all in white, slammed a steel tray loaded full of polony onto the counter with coagulated blood dripping down the front of her white pinafore.  Her face was pinched, her eyes dead.  My stomach retched, the smell was vile.  Flashes of carcasses being fed into machines that pulverised heads, bodies, hoofs, ears to pump out polony made me never want to eat meat again.  Ever.  And to this day I have not. That moment in the grocery store I pledged to my body and my soul to forever protect, keep and feed it what was good and healing.  It was the moment when I decided that I did not want to be part of death so that I could live.  I do miss meat.  The taste is incredible.  But I don't miss that another soul had to die for me.  I don't miss the persecution of the animal so that I can smell the sizzle on the braai. Turning vegetarian and now Octo-Vegetarian, I am vegan except I eat eggs and honey, a whole world of eating and consuming has opened up to me and I for one do not feel that I am depriving myself, I feel as if I have opened a treasure chest of other food, super food, soul food that literally heals me from the inside out.  Recipes and ideas sprout out of me, seasonal vegetables are sought out and farmers markets are where I go to buy my food but also my medicine.  My doctors and chemist bills have reduced dramatically in 7 months.  So, to Vegan or not to Vegan, well, for now I will tread where my heart and soul likes to go.  And for me it is nutritious, whole food that does not have a mother and my steps are lighter on the world.  So thank you, friend who shall remain nameless for holding a mirror up to me last night and you were in my corner as today has been about asking me the questions that you asked last night and I did probe and prick myself and I have realised that I am loving my new conscious eating lifestyle without meat, sugar, wheat, alcohol, dairy and am about to enjoy a lunch of roasted leeks, sweet potato, pepper dews and cashews on a bed of rocket and dressed with tahini.  Yum, yum, YUM.  Namaste y'all, 'til anon....