Where's the Beef?

There’s this great scene in the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” where the heroine of the story tries to inform her Greek Aunt that her Non-Greek Fiancé is a vegetarian. She has to finally explain the meaning of this alien word; that the man doesn’t eat any meat. To which her Aunt responds:

“He don’t eat no meat?!” and abruptly brings the entire party of a hundred some odd guests to a screeching, horrified standstill.

Obviously without the crowd involved, I would say this somewhat approximates my husbands horror-struck reaction to my telling him that I was going to try becoming a vegetarian.

This causes a problem for Ted in several fronts; for one thing he and my stepson consume a diet that consists of about 50% animal products on Ted’s part and closer to 80% for Kyle. On top of that – I do most of the cooking. So if I’m cooking without meat, what are they going to eat? I’ve already been given the hairy eyeball for my forays into vegetable-over-rice dishes that feature things like portabella mushroom as the star ingredient rather than steak cubes.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, I know it isn’t – and I really love meat. I’m probably going to wind up cooking separate entrees for Ted and Kyle and myself – which is going to no doubt be a pain in the butt. However, I need to do something to jump start my flagging motivation and I’m thinking this 10% dietary fat plan might do it.

It’s pretty simple; consume no more than 10% of your daily calories as fat calories. The un-simple part is this is virtually impossible to do when one is eating meat one or two times per day – meat has huge volumes of fat. It also means limiting things like nuts, cheese, *sob* butter, chocolate… you get the idea. I can have as many fruits, vegetables, grains and beans as I like. Sounds good – but I admit I’ve never successfully managed to satisfy a desperate craving for cookies with fruit, no matter how much fruit I eat.

You know those successful dieters who give beatific smiles and say things like; “I really do love my apples as much as I used to love chocolate! I don’t feel deprived at all!”

Yeah, I want to hurt them. Bad.

I’m going to start small… phasing out red meats which are the worst offender – and moving onto the paler things like chicken and pork. I will continue to eat meat products such as eggs, cheese, milk, and for the moment – chicken broth. This is because 80% of the soups I make use chicken broth and I’m not sure how to phase it out, but I will be experimenting.

I started today; oatmeal with sliced almond for breakfast, Chinese veggies and basmati rice with a big pink grapefruit for lunch and tonight is home made pizza. Considering all the nuts and cheese going on today I’ll probably miss the 10% mark but I’ll input it all into the Daily Plate tonight and see.

The real trick is of course restaurants; places like Red Robin where I’ll have to watch everyone around me eating big, beautiful hamburgers. I don’t know how I’m going to handle that right now – although considering I only eat at such places once in a blue moon it can’t hurt to have ONE burger every couple of months or so, can it?

All I know is I have to do something different to re-motivate myself and get moving again, and this is going to be it – at least for now.

Into the vegetarian abyss…