it all begins

The idea of eating healthier began last night (although technically talk of adapting a healthier diet has been an ongoing topic for quite a while now) after Brian and I watched documentary called Vegucated which follows the lives of 3 people that take part of a 6 week project to go Vegan. The film demonstrates unhealthy eating habits of modern society as well the cruel treatment of animals that are raised for food. Although both of us have unsuccessfully tried to adapt vegetarian diets in the past, we had no intention of becoming vegetarian or vegan prior to watching the film. Let's just say by the end of the film we had both decided we were going to go vegan. Well actually, I decided I could not live without diary products so I chose to only go vegetarian. This would be the start of our new dietary habits. 

We looked up vegetarian restaurants in Denver and after reading positive reviews about City o City we decided to go there to get a feeling of our new eating out option. We ordered the Seitan Wings (made from wheat gluten)  since we are both Buffalo Wings lovers and an 18 inch cheese pizza (half vegetarian, half vegan). As I had suspected, I wasn't too fond of the substitute cheese so I stuck to eating my vegetarian half of it. The wings were also very good. I think if you close your eyes, they  kind of taste like chicken.. or maybe not. At least it felt good to know an innocent chicken didn't die for us to enjoy that plate. Overall the food was good and the ambiance was enjoyable. We were excited to start our new vegetarian/vegan lifestyle. 

This morning we decided to continue watching documentaries on the whole vegetarian/eating healthy topic so we found Hungry for Change on Netflix. This documentary focuses on the hundreds of benefits of incorporating a raw food regimen as part of your diet. I 'm honestly not a big fan of most vegetables. In fact I hardly like any vegetables unless they are fried, sauteed, or in some type of sauce and even then I am very picky. Brian on the other hand likes vegetables and had actually already tried an all raw food diet but gave it up after 3 weeks because of the lack of flavor and how expensive it got. We both decided it was time we adapted more raw food in our diet. The idea became a lot more appealing when the film talked about juicing and how it is a very good option for consuming more raw food. We immediately decided we had to buy ourselves a juice extractor. An hour later we were at the store purchasing a Breville Juice Fountain Plus and a book called "Juicing". The book is an excellent source of juice recipes that describes what each nutrient does to benefit your body and what type of juice to drink for each type of disease. We will definitely use it as our beginners guide to the world of juicing. 

Brian holding our new juice extractor outside of the store

So in less than 24 hours we made life changing decisions. We decided to go vegetarian/vegan AND become natural juice drinkers. Our next step is to find a good all organic and if possible locally produced farmer's market to buy the ingredients we need to begin making ourselves all natural juices everyday. We still have lots to learn about eating healthier and finding non animal substitutions for all our favorite meals and to add to our list of challenges since we are both flight attendants, we will need to find a way to keep up with our new healthy diet while we are away from home while living on an entry level flight attendant budget. 

Tomorrow we will make our very first juice from the Juicing book. We plan on gradually starting to incorporate juices in our daily routine to get the feel and taste for it and hopefully within a couple of weeks we can try a 3 day all juice-fast to begin the cleansing process and continue on our journey to a healthier diet.