Tag Archives: food

How I messed up being vegetarian

Being vegetarian is awesome. Living with a smaller footprint and in harmony with the environment, contributing to a more sustainable life while taking good care of your health. Who doesn’t want this? This last New Years Eve I tried to remove meat from my diet altogether – just to find myself in misery a few months after.

Starting the smart way

Jumping into such a huge change is never an easy move though, and I wanted to do the right way. First, I moved away from meat step by step (here is a blog post on how I started out about a year ago). I also talked to vegan nutritionists and vegetarians regularly, asking about the shift towards vegetables without missing all the important nutritions.

I’ve read all what was out there to read: about vegetarian weight lifters’ diet, the need of iron and all that. My kitchen became fantastic. The number one rule was to keep on adding new dishes instead of just removing the meaty ones – so I ended up learning great tastes and even new vegetables and fruits.

In theory, everything you need is available in a vegetarian diet, especially if you vary the ingredients a lot. Betting on this I was fairly confident that everything will go fine.

This is not a symptom, is it?

If something small is missing from your diet, you won’t know about it until much, much later. At a time, when you don’t even expect it to come from skipping meat.

Looking back, my first warning signs were after a day in the mountains, when we did sports all day and had one too many glasses of wine in the evening. The next day, while driving home I was feeling really week. Have you ever felt week? Yeah, I did too. It’s not really a symptom, is it?

Sleeping got worse, on a few occasions I woke up in the middle of the night. Once I even noticed heart palpitations; had a little water and went back to sleep, and the next day I continued my yoga routines. All went back to normal again, so I was suspecting my turning-30-anxiety – all my friends had those as well, I guess.

More fun was to have short depressive episodes. I had beers with friends, when those weird thoughts crossed my mind: ‘it’s quite alright to collapse here, there would be enough folks around to call the ambulance‘. I didn’t consider these hundred-percent-normal for sure, but it was easy to blame the alcohol intake and the lack of sleep.

Fortunately, at this point I’ve met a friend who is an animal right activist and a vegan nutrition nerd. We had lunch one day, and she mentioned that most vegetarians take B12, because it’s impossible to get it from outside animal products. Oh, and by the way, most vitamin deficiencies cause weakness, fatigue, bad memory, heart palpitations – all sorts of those not-very-defined symptoms I had.

Fight B12 and iron deficiency

Having started taking vitamins right away, I went for a blood count the next week. The results showed that I was indeed lacking B12 and some iron as well. Good news is that fighting mineral deficiencies is rather easy. Supplements come in many forms like vitamin pills, power drinks and even as a tooth paste.

There is one big drawback: it’s all interconnected. As an example, while milk contains B12, it also affects the ability to absorb iron. And if you take iron pills, you should supplement it together with zinc – and so on. The whole thing is very, very confusing, and I couldn’t even guess what else was missing from my diet. Hence, for until my body finds its way back to normal, I decided to eat some meat again.

What is it like, to eat meat after a long time?

It’s rare to see my girlfriend as happy as the day we went for our first real burger. Well, at least till the point we actually entered the joint. After the first few bites I felt terrified and expected a heart attack any time; the room suddenly became too loud and smelly for me to bear, and we had to leave with half the sandwich to go.

Only the next time I ate meat did I realise that it had huge effects on my body. I was crossing a bridge on a sunny day after lunch, and my heart was about to jump out of my chest – pretty much the same experience as in the burger joint, except that this time I could enjoy it. It was like drinking six coffees in a row.

Fix your nutrition, it fixes your mind

Having to drink less coffee is only one upside of paying attention to my vitamin intake (and eating some meat again). A bit more than one month in, my overall mood is ways better, I’m more patient to my friends, and I’m less and less anxious before lunchtime.

The upside is, in the last half a year I learned a lot about food, the importance of nutrition, vitamins, micro-minerals and the effects they can have on the body and the mind.

In the end of the day: what doesn’t kill you, will make you stronger.

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Reducing the meat problem

Living healthy starts with eating right. Unfortunately if you are not a fitness-, cooking- or calories nerd, it’s not easy to decide what to put on the table every day. As for me, most of the time I end up buying some meat, roasting it and, serving with bread, call it a dish. Now this came to an end.

I would not want to go cold turkey (ha!) and become vegan, especially for all the excellent salamis and great wild meat out there. The only thing I want to stop is the mindless defaults: why would anyone eat chicken wraps and Frankfurters anyway? 

Somewhere I’ve read that an average grown up person in Europe would eat something like 50 kilograms of meat a year – my consumption seems to be fairly close to this, although I’m trying to be on the healthy end.

Ready-made products and those with unidentifiable origin seem to be easy to avoid, but then again: the recent horse scandal shows that even if the label looks very accurate, it’s rarely the case. Döner kebab is not something you would have high expectations about, but even Nestle and other, seemingly reliable companies sold horse meat as beef products.

Not that I’m picky with animals, I would eat whatever – my biggest complain here is that if we don’t even know the type of the animal, how would we know such very important facts like whether the unlucky pig was raised in a cage with hundreds of others, or: if it has ever seen the sun.

There I can get very picky actually. How much more awesome is to know that the animal I eat was in good health, free of weird antibiotics and full of energy! (Before it got slaughtered.)

If you just search for some minutes, you will see that some chickens are living a total of 32 days before you find them as ‘chicken wings’ in McDonalds. I can’t see how this is not bad for the public health and the environment – in the race for low-price meat, the food industry is leaving us with antibiotic resistant germs. (And even worse: food snobs, who only eat stuff coming from Bio Company shops.)

So here is my plan: I quit being a part of the problem and will reduce my food consumption to a more eco-friendly level, with the following:

  • Emerge new defaults: breakfast with cereals, choosing hummus and falafel when eating out (kill all the chickpeas!)
  • When buying non-vegan products, going for organic: looking for meat directly from farmers
  • Not buying minced meat or similar all-in kind of products
  • Keeping track of my food: keeping meat products below 500g a week

Please be aware of the fact that I’m in no way more clever than you with this. I’m not a doctor, have no idea of biology, fitness, health – so you better don’t follow anything you read here.
This post might be a good food for thought though. And please, feel free to send me further readings, hummus recipes, or just get in touch and encourage me / tell me I’m a fool on Twitter.

I might return to this topic later, if anything significant happens – although, I would be surpised if that was quite soon.

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My first pizza dough

Another rainy afternoon spent inside, I decided to a make pizza – including the dough -, on my own. (And the Sun came out in the end!)


one shouldn’t take gastrophotos with a phone…

Being into healthy food and cooking to some extent, making my own pizza dough is something I wanted to do for a long time now. It’s cool. It’s tough. It’s a man’s job.

And it’s not that hard either. Following Jamie Oliver’s recipe – being unlucky with the video pages which were down at the time -, I managed to do everything in about 75 minutes. That includes cleaning the table in the beginning and cutting up the slices in the end, so I probably will do this again – and encourage everyone to try it once. As for me, the next step will be the Chinese boutsa from scratch.

Served with Syrah from Sicily. Bliss!

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Addiction

Berlin is famous of being kind to drug addicts: regardless of what you take it’s easy to get it, will be relatively cheep, and in case of an overdose the doctors know exactly how to get you back to life. For a long time I kept clean – but the city sucked me in, and I developed an addiction.

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The Saturday market at Boxhagener Platz is a vibrant place to get fresh food of all sorts: vegetables, spices, meat can be found here as well as beautiful cakes and cottage cheese ice cream – and of course, since Germany has a seaside, fresh fish is all over the market. The goods are coming from the farmers themselves, and the shopping experience lacks the pharmacy feel you get in Bio Company shops. Another point why food markets are great.

For the hungry who looks for something different than thai takeaways or döner kebab, this place is the best to be in a Saturday luchtime. The smell of grilled meat and sausages are coming from the direction of the caravans, which is also the place where I discovered the object of my addiction: the smoked mackerel.

These fish dishes are coming with horse radish and algae salad, and you can choose between a filet sandwich and a whole fish. The price is between 3.5 and 5.5 euros (after 4pm its usual to get discounts). Regardless of the format, the taste is heaven, and we could have it every day – but since the food market is only once a week, we are safe. Until we find another sugarman.

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