Today I’m starting a new 30 day challenge involving my diet habits. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, I’m going to try a vegetarian diet. Actually it’s not that simple, as you’ll see if you continue to read this post.

Some background

I’ve considered changing my diet habits a lot during the past months and years, especially after reading several books on the subject. But which diet to choose? From one side you have vegan or raw people claiming that their diet is the healthiest. From the other side others are telling you that you got to eat what you are genetically supposed to eat (which usually means raw food and meat). Who to believe?

Generally speaking, everyone tend to agree that processed foods are bad, so at least I’m confident about that. However, when we talk about wherever eating meat or not, the debate is very high. It is true that there are studies showing strong correlations between animal food consumptions and several illness, but it’s also true that a 100% vegan diet can be dangerous in the long term due to the lack of certain nutrients (which, incidentally, are difficult to isolate, so don’t ask me to make a list of them). Another fact is that only certain people can go comfortably on a truly vegan diet (which excludes all diary), so it would be dangerous for those persons to start a truly vegan diet. The thing is that everyone is different and has different needs for their bodies.

A better solution

A better solution that I thought is to switch to a mostly vegetarian diet. Please keep in mind that what I’m going to say next is just my opinion which I’m about to test. I’m not a doctor so you should ask someone competent if you want to try something similar. Anyway, what I’m going to try next is what I think is the best of both world. Here’s my plan:

  • Eat vegetarian 6 days a week. No animal food or fish allowed. Also, I want to eat as healthy as possible. Some people switch to vegetarian diets and eat pizza 5 days a week, that would be worse than ever. I’ll also try to eat raw after lunch when possible, to see which effects I’ll have on energy and sleep at night.
  • Eat whatever I want 1 day a week. I think we need variety, so one day a week I can eat fish or whatever I want. Salad with tuna? Japanese restaurant? That’s the day for it. Variety reinforces our bodies, and I’m confident this would be a good ratio of meat vs non meat.

Is this the best diet? Hardly so, but I’m going to try and correct along the way. It is possible that I’ll switch to a mostly vegan or raw diet at one point, but I don’t know yet. I have to experiment.

What I want out of this experiment? I expect more clarity, energy, and better sleep. Those will be my measurements. Note that weight loss is not my goal, as I don’t need to drop weight at the moment.

I’m not sure if this challenge will be easy or not, but I’m willing to find out. I’ll give frequent updates about this experiment, including what I’m doing in order to switch to a mostly vegetarian diet.

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On a side note, my experiment of waking up at 8am each day is going well. Some days I go to bed at around 00.15, sometimes I’m more tired and I go to bed earlier. As I’m writing this it’s 00:55am, so there are definitely exceptions.

Update: I’m editing this in the morning, and I went to bed at 1:30am. Since I started this experiment I never went to bed this late, but I’m doing fine.