Stories

When, How, and Why I Became Vegan (part 1)

By David Askaripour | April 15, 2007

In this series I’ll take you through my journey of being a person who — lovingly — ate 8 servings of meat per day, took body building supplements, and weighed 220 pounds to becoming a vegan. The journey was long, beginning in February 2004 ‘til this day. It’s my hope to inspire, educate, and motivate anyone interested in reaching the pinnacle of health — I hope that my story can help get you there. I’m with you.

I, like everyone else, am still on a journey. Currently, I just began experimenting with the “raw food” diet and transitioning myself to become 50 - 100% raw in time. I’ll share my struggles and feats with you on that front as well.

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Here we go:

I’ll never forget the day. It was February 22, 2004 and I was visiting my brother at college at the University of Hartford, CT. My friend Brian and I went up there to hang with my brother and his fraternity — Tau Kappa Epsilon. Bryan and I were also in the fraternity.

I remember people staring at me and saying how much weight I had lost. You see, all of my fraternity brothers up there knew me as a 220-pound muscle-head. Little did they know that for the past few months prior that I had cut out red meat altogether.

So, naturally, I lost weight. About 30 pounds since they last saw me. During those few months I began reading books about health. My younger brother, Danny, introduced me to John Robbins’ book “The Food Revolution.”

When he first told me about the book, I laughed in his face and told him that I would never — ever, ever, ever, — become a vegetarian, let alone a vegan.

But, being the curious person that I am coupled with my voracious appetite to learn, I gave the book a chance and that’s when my entire life changed.

As the days pasted and I got deeper into the book, I began to see and understand the deleterious affects that meat had on the body. I began to see how the government and food agencies had hidden agendas to push certain foods in our faces in order to slyly coax us to purchase milk, bread, and meat. I began to see how scare tactics such as “daily protein and calcium amounts” were used by the milk and meat producers via commercials and print to “force” us to purchase these items. And not only purchase, but to “make sure to consume a certain amount per day.”

While reading this book, my eyes began to open and I knew from that point on that my outlook on health and the things I’ve been putting in my body would forever be changed.

After the completion of the book, I immediately knocked out all red meat. I was still consuming chicken and fish, though.

I remember going home after a break from college and my mom asking me why I wasn’t eating any of the meat. At the time, I felt bad and almost ashamed that I no longer had the desire for her beef platters. So I stated: “I’m just in the mood for chicken, thanks mom.” I’ll always remember how she looked at me quizzically while hesitantly I picked away at the chicken. I guess she was so used to me eating pounds of beef until I my stomach was stuffed.

part 1 | part 2

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Stay tuned for part two when I get into the details of how my fraternity brother reacted when I became full-blown vegetarian. It wasn’t pretty.

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