Veganism: Living on Oxygen

March 31, 10:29 PMNYU ExaminerCommarrah Bashar

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Me to the right is from freshamn year, but I hadn't changed much.

Veganism: Living on Oxygen

 Obviously I don’t subsist on oxygen alone. If you’ve ever seen me in person, you know that these curves don’t come out of thin air.

 (Not a pun)

 So, I’m a vegan. This means I don’t have meat or dairy products. Right now, you may be asking yourself “Well, what the hell does she eat?” and not only will I tell you in a witty and detailed yet somehow unpretentious manner, but I’m also gonna tell you how I do it and how much I do it for.

 …That’s what she said…

 Before Christmas break, I started reading this book called Skinny Bitch. Admittedly, I didn’t know that it was actually a sassy pro-vegan book masquerading as a diet book, but by the time I figured that out, I was already in too deep…Haha.

 Sorry.

 Anyway, I read about not only what they do to the animals but also what they feed them and was incredibly turned off by how much nasty stuff goes into my body when I partake of rapidly decaying flesh. I decided that if I was going to attempt being a vegan, break was the time to do it. I was staying on campus and my roommate and suitemate—along with their creamy dairy temptations…Ho, boy—would be gone so I could fill the fridge with whatever I wanted.

 Here are some tips and tricks for cheap vegans:

• Just because it doesn’t say ‘made especially for vegans’ on it, doesn’t mean it’s not vegan. You’d be surprised. Oreos are vegan. They’re so processed that there is nothing real in them, but they are vegan. The three dollar organic cocoa puffs at whole foods are vegan. Truth; they are made in a factory that processes eggs and milk, but I can’t afford to be picky.
• Sometimes Trader Joes is not always the cheapest. Not only can you find cheaper actual vegan products for less, but the place really isn’t vegan friendly. The store is very disorganized so you have to…hunt for your food? Granted, when they do have vegan products they are delicious (apple strudel, cherry chocolate chip ice cream) but again they’re pricey. They are the first place I’ve found with vegan butter though, worth the price. They also have the cheapest soy milk at 2.99 per quart (reg 4.99)
• Whole Foods has a wide variety of low price vegan food including tofurkey breakfast sausage and soy yogurt that comes in big. A lot of it is downstairs and to the left of the dairy products. They also don’t run out of food halfway through the day like TJs. I really enjoy the fake bacon. It tastes kind of like turkey bacon.

• What you can’t find, make yourself. There are plenty of websites online with vegan recipes for some of your favorites. My specialty is banana vegan banana bread. You can be creative too, like sometimes I throw in raspberries to give it a little more flavor.

 If you’re thinking about making the jump, what worked best for me was to be easy on myself and to really do it for me. I decided early on that this was going to be about me, not fitting into the vegan ideal, not becoming a food martyr for the animals, but me. If I wanted cheese one day, I ate the cheese. It’s hard to go from a milk chugging and rare stake loving unconscious about food one woman hurricane into a complete and total butter hater. So, travel the route of the flexivegan, and give yourself a break every once in a while. If you’re not into commitment, try on or two days a week going without. Even that would make a change in terms of your digestive tract’s clarity and health.

 Supplement your diet with calcium vitamins (special vegan ones at Whole Foods) and find a vegetable you like. I promise you won’t loose energy. I spend almost nine hours three days a week on my feet moving moving moving and if veganism wasn’t healthy, I wouldn’t be able to keep up. The worst bit is the smelly gas, but that can be avoided with eating ginger.

 The best parts are your skin clears up and you finally lose that baby fat you've been meaning to rid yourself of since the kids in the school yard first chanted 'farrty fatty two by four, can't get through the bathroom door.'

 I did to the tune of 20 pounds since I started this whole adventure. Don’t worry, I won’t disappear. Neither will you or your money.

 Bon Appetit!