I have spent a lot of my life struggling with committing to vegetarianism. I really, really want to do it, but I love food. I have tried going vegetarian multiple times, but the logistics of it was too hard for me to manage. It was easier just to eat meat. Plus, I am not the biggest green food fan.
I’ve have tried many different types of vegetarian, kinds where fish and chicken are okay, the kind where dairy and eggs are fine, getting back to this is my main goal. I thought that making a diet change was hard before I started a family, it is harder now. I don’t have the money to be making two separate dinners every night, or even the time to modify already planned dinners to meet my dietary requirements. There have been news stories about the morality and health risks of having children be vegetarian (yes, I know children can be vegetarain in a healthy way, but I know my son would not eat, like at all), so I had to think about how I could manage time and money while providing acceptable meals for all members of the family.
With the New Year a month and a half deep, I still haven’t nailed down my whole “eating better” resolution. While searching for a plan that would work for us, and becoming more and more turned off by meat, butchering a chicken made me feel like a monster. I came across the idea of Flexitarain.
It’s pretty self-explanatory, but let’s break it down. Flex, as in flexible. ‘Tarain’, which means a practitioner or believer of. So, a person who practices flexibility, in the context, to their diet. Now, in this diet, how flexible you are, is entirely up to you. My family already does, one to two meatless meals a week, Meatless Mondays FTW. This week, is out first week of flexitarian, I dropped the adults down to three animal protein heavy meals, I had some flexibility with some dinners that my son could have meat while unknowingly to him, my husband and I eat a veggie option. Surprisingly, working the meal plan this way, our grocery bill was about $15 cheaper than usual. So, that made me happy right off the bat.
Seeing how this week goes, and repeating the same thing next week, 3 meat meals and 4 meatless, we will drop down to two meat based meals. I am mostly focused on dinners, breakfast and lunch I generally already go meatless. Some people decided to have two meat days a week. I like this because I can go out to eat anywhere and have the whole menu open to me. So you can have your bacon, and eat it too!
