I consider myself a “flexitarian” or perhaps “meat-curious”. I’ve been 99% vegetarian for ten years now, for no particular reason. Vegetarianism has been good to me. I’m sure without it I would have never discovered my love of cooking and the huge variety of cusines I enjoy- my family are fairly food dull meat’n’potatoes people and vegetarianism stopped me from following them.
But I’m also a foodie, and it seems wrong for me to cut myself off of so much of the wonders of food. So I try to make exceptions for exceptional meat. I’m not going to be cooking hamburger helper on weeknights any time soon, but when I go to a real exceptional restaurant (or, alternatively, some amazing street stand or taco truck) I’ll go for some meat.
Now I’m moving to Cameroon, which is going to be a real challenge. I still can’t picture eating meat on my own at home, but it’s surely going to come up socially. I guess it’s just one more ajustment to make.
I was vegan for about two years, vegetarian for one. I started as a vegan for health reasons - I lost about fifty lbs eating as a veg. Then I moved from NYC (vegan mecca - it’s so easy to be a vegan there) to Virginia, where it was much more difficult. I had also moved back in with my parents for awhile, pending a decision on where the then-SO/now-husband and I were going to live, and my dad had a habit of grilling…a few steaks on the grill and I was a goner.
I still don’t eat a ton of meat and can easily go without meat for several meals to several days, but if I want to order a steak while out, I order a steak.
I was a fish-eating vegetarian, if there is such a thing. I did it for two years, and started eating meat again when it became too hard to maintain my diet. I moved to a very small town in Colorado, and found it too difficult to find all the foods and specialty products I had grown accustomed to. But I’ll try it again soon. I live in a much bigger town now, and it’s the right thing to do.
I’m sort of coming at this from the opposite perspective; I’ve recently had a marked downturn in my interest in eating meat. I don’t think I’ll ever go full vegetarian, but I can see myself not eating a lot of red meat any more. Chicken and seafood I’m a little less sure of; I don’t like chicken that looks too much like a chicken (I can kind of see where your husband is coming from, WhyNot), and I don’t like any fishy-tasting seafood. I think I’ll probably settle somewhere around where most of you former vegetarians are; eating what I like, and that not including a lot of red meat.
I was a vegetarian for two years or so. It was supposedly because it was healthy, and at the prodding of my then-girlfriend. It ended up being quite unhealthy, avocadoes, cheese and ice cream are a bad diet.
What ended it? The smell of Whataburger! On Christmas eve, if memory serves.
Like Ol’Gaffer I was raised vegetarian. I believe it was mostly my mom’s doing. Anyway my parents eventually went back to meat probably when I was about 7 or 8 but me and my sister refused and told them it was yucky. And the thing that finally got me was … a friend’s McDonald’s birthday party I’m pretty sure that was my first animal meat. How sad is that?
I went vegan to see if I could when I was about 25. I lasted 6 months but damn I missed cheese. Then a few months later I was on a long road trip and I decided to eat what I wanted when I wanted it.
I still wouldn’t mind being a vegetarian but I’ll have to learn to enjoy cooking first, something I hate.
I was a vegetarian for about 10 years. 6 months vegan and decided that just controlled my life. about 7 years no meat products but did have eggs, a bit of dairy, and sometimes lard (only cooking oil in some places in China at that time). When I moved to Japan I added seafood as there just aren’t that many vegetables in Japan.
I gave it up after being married to a carnivore for a couple of years. It was a stressor in a marriage that had too many stressors. One day I decided my marriage was more important than my diet. It’s not like my wife pressured me or gave an ultimatium. Much more that I said “honey, we’re having a rough time and here’s one thing I’m doing on my own volition to take an issue off the table.” That was more than 10 years ago.
I would prefer to be a vegetarian and I’m sure I’d be 10 pounds lighter.
I was a vegetarian for six years for reasons of health and weight loss. At first it worked like a charm. I dropped forty pounds during the first four months, and I went from being a classic couch potato to being able to hike twenty miles in a day, or bike ride one hundred miles. Starting in the fourth year, things started going wrong. I got a cold, soar throat, constand coughing, and those things persisted for eighteen months. I eventually decided that it was probably a weakened immune system due to lack of calcium, iron, and/or vitamin D. For the past year or so, I’ve put small amounts of meat in my diet.
However, I still think that avoiding meat is the key to staying thin and fit, so I follow these general guidelines:
I eat meat not more than once per day.
I never eat a full serving of meat.
Over half my meat is seafood.
I never eat fast food.
I never order meat dishes at restaurants.
In general my meat comes from small additions to dishes, such as pepperoni on a pizza or a small amount of chicken mixed into a burrito filling.
I was a vegetarian for somewhere around 3 years because of a relationship I was in, and the mid 90’s quasi-hippie group I was running with made it easy to keep up with.
I fell off the wagon for a Wendy’s Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger.
While this may be true, this thread is not evidence of it. In the OP, you asked for stories of ex-vegetarians, and so you got a self-selecting group of people for whom (as you put it) “meat-eating has some pretty serious hooks.”
If you started a thread asking about current vegetarianism, you would have gotten completely different answers, many of them for people for whom meat-eating has no hooks at all.
I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian for 20 years, and raised my children vegetarian from birth.
Last year I decided to indulge in fresh Salmon on a cruise to Alaska, and it was heaven on earth. I guess I became bored of an exclusively vegie diet, and I continued to eat occasional fish after that. When I began dieting, it was much easier to find convenience low-cal foods that included fish and small amounts of poultry, so I began using those. I still won’t eat a main course of chicken or turkey, but don’t mind small amounts of it in a dish of other ingredients now. Only if I go out to dinner do I have a full serving of seafood. I have not yet bought fish or chicken to cook at home, but may consider using ground turkey in chili.
My kids still prefer veggie: one is 19 and one is 13. My oldest’s experiments with mcchicken mcnuggest didn’t persuade her to eat poultry, and my youngest has no interest in meat of any sort.
I might consider a BLT, but I’m not interested in red meat or pork otherwise.