Eat Your Veggies
Raise your hand if you have been personally victimized by Regina George. Okay, now keep your hand raised if you, like, sometimes eat vegetables but probably not enough. Yeah, me too. But today I’m here to tell you what literally nobody wants to hear and what you maybe haven’t heard since you were a seven-year-old eating off a sectioned plate because different foods touching each other was weird...
Eat! Your! Vegetables!
I mean, or don’t. I’m not the boss of you. But I personally am trying to step up my vegetable game and I want to talk about it on here because it is not just another round of “I’m going to get skinny by eating salad” [my favorite game in high school—also known as “I’m going to get skinny by eating salad and then feel super dizzy and probably end up eating a full pint of Ben & Jerry’s in the middle of the night”]. So yeah, anyway, I’m eating vegetables and not because I think they’ll make me thin.
I’m doing it for two reasons: (1) The environment! Sustainability! Less meat consumption = good!, and (2) vegetables have lots of nutrients and are part of a balanced diet. My argument here is twofold and I am signposting the two folds for you [I just watched an instructional video on topic sentences and paragraph structure, sorry not sorry]. Let’s get to part one.
I. The Environment
A. Eating beef is bad for the environment
B. Little things add up!
C. Doing what you can feasibly do is worth doing.
No, just kidding. I’m not going to outline this. But basically the above could work as the TLDR of this portion of the discussion. Essentially, even as opposed to other meats like pork and chicken, beef farming is significantly worse for the environment. This is because raising cattle takes much more land than other livestock, but also because cows produce a significant amount of methane gas—actually “causing almost 10 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and contributing to climate change.” And get this—“avoiding meat and dairy is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth.” Yeah, I linked my sources. Yeah, my hyperlinks are pink.
But wait, Quinn, do you mean we should all go totally vegan? Nope, I don’t. Although yes that would be better, I’m personally not at a point where I’m able to do that in my own life, so I’m not going to ask anyone else to do it either. Luckily [?] for us non-aspiring-vegans, there is large variability in impact between different kinds of farming. And beef checks out at pretty much the worst. So I like to think of it as a small change I can make in my diet that, if I seriously commit to and potentially spread around to other people, can make an impact—or at least can add up to one on a larger scale.
Personally, I’ve done some experimenting with going vegetarian, and I don’t think I’m totally there yet—although I know some awesome people who are and everything they cook looks amazing! But I am trying to cut out beef entirely and cut down my meat consumption more generally also. My cost-benefit analysis? Easily worth the “cost.”
Because the cost isn’t that big. I don’t eat much beef to begin with, but there are so many easy substitutions. Here are the main things I’ve had to cut out: (1) steak tips—easily substituted for chicken breast with BBQ sauce. (2) Ground beef in tacos—get ground turkey, throw some taco seasoning on it, thank me later. (3) Hamburgers—honestly not the world’s biggest burger gal to begin with, but do I really need to discuss the plethora of available substitutes? I mean, turkey burgers, chicken burgers, veggie burgers, grilled portobello mushroom tops... the possibilities are truly endless. I have sampled the full Morning Star line of veggie burgers, so let me know if you need recommendations [Tomato Basil Pizza easily tops the list but you will have to scour for a grocery store that carries them. Go with the Spicy Black Bean if it’s not available.]
And hey, it’s not all-or-nothing. Try it for a week, see how it goes. You can still have the occasional steak if that means something to you. But honestly, beef is an easy thing to cut and it’s highly worth doing. Although I am still eating chicken, pork, and turkey for the time being [seafood is my personal nemesis but it is relatively environmentally friendly too], I recently did a week of going full-on veg. Not vegan [I could never part with the two primary men in my life, Ben and Jerry], but vegetarian. I’ll write a blog post recap on it soon but the main point is that it was WAY more doable than expected. Let me know if you try any and all of these ways to eat more environmentally mindfully.
Alright, now on to part two. As I think everyone who went to elementary school knows, vegetables are good for you! They’re “healthy” [as you know, I could have a large scale debate about what, if anything, that words even means, but we’ll let it rest for now] and you “should” eat them because then you can be “healthy” too.
Debates about the terminology of “healthy” aside, I believe that for a long part of my life, I conflated the terms healthy and skinny. This is actually something that I’m still working on as part of my own body image/holistic health journey and probably something I’ll be working on for a while. So, for much of my life, I’ve had this idea in my head that vegetables are healthy, healthy is skinny, ergo vegetables lead to skinny. Except... no. That’s not why vegetables are healthy, not why I’m eating them, and also just a huge misconception. I don’t even think that I need to say this on this blog but just in case you need a reminder: healthy does not equal skinny.
So, while my primary motivation for including more vegetables in my diet [i.e. subbing veggie options in for meats, especially beef] is the environmental benefits, I also want to be thoughtful about the nutritional benefits. As essentially a lifelong dieter, I find that I often go on “secret diets”—in other words, I’ll restrict or favor certain foods because of an outside reason that has nothing to do with weight loss, while secretly still hoping to lose weight. Perfect example: I went on a high-protein, Atkins-esque diet briefly in college for the stated reason of “I need to eat more protein and that is good for me because of my high activity level and sports.” Except that sneakily buried in my goals for that diet was a not-so-quiet voice saying “and if you eat more protein and fewer carbs, you could actually lose weight.” Yeah, not-so-secret weight loss diet.
With this knowledge of myself, I want to be very intentional in upping my veggie intake. The thought process is not and cannot be veggies make me healthy, healthy makes me skinny. Rather, it’s going to be veggies make my body, my mind, and the environment healthy and they allow me to consume a balanced diet with all the nutrients that I need to perform well in various areas of my life. As you can see, it’s never quite as easy as “healthy” food ➡️ thin body.
One last note: as any ardent follower of the Instagram page @quinnruns knows, Quinn has been not only running, but also cooking recently. So if you have any veggie-friendly recipes, send them my way! And to any other aspiring veg-heads, best of luck to you! Doing what you can do is doing your part for the planet.
