6 tips for new vegans
While going from vegetarian to vegan was a pretty smooth transition for me overall, being newly vegan can be overwhelming, emotional, and isolating. Here are a few tips coming from my experience that I hope can give new vegans a bit of guidance.
1. Calm down. For many people, going vegan comes with a lot of passion and strong opinions that seem to all flood in at once. It is overwhelming for everyone involved when you overload the people around you with all of the information you’re learning. Share information about your new lifestyle in moderation and engage in thoughtful, calm discussion with others, avoiding judgment. Instead of flipping out at your brother for putting cheese on his salad, try to channel excess emotional energy into something positive like activism or volunteering, get involved with the vegan community, and be patient with friends and family who just don’t get it (yet).
2. Start cooking. One great benefit of going vegan was being inspired (and forced) to learn how to cook. Sure, you can get by on convenience foods, restaurants, and minimal cooking if that’s your style, but there is so much amazing vegan food to discover through cooking. Before I went vegan, I didn’t have a lot of variety in my diet. Even when I was vegetarian, I rarely would use beans and was convinced that I didn’t like tofu because of the spongey, tasteless cubes I occasionally would put on my salad at my university’s dining hall. In fact, I can barely remember what I ate aside from mac and cheese and bagels with cream cheese. Once I went vegan, I got excited about trying new food and started cooking, first replacing my favorites with vegan versions, then branching out to try new things. This helped me feel satisfied and committed to the diet without feeling like I was missing out on any of the foods I used to enjoy.
3. If you’re hungry, eat more. When I was vegetarian, once in a while I would try to go vegan, which would usually last about a day. I ended up being hungry every time and convinced myself that going vegan wasn’t for me because I felt weak and hungry every time. The problem was that I was not eating enough calories. I was replacing mac and cheese with salad, omelettes with fruit, etc. Plant foods are often less calorically dense, and you will likely need to eat more food to get the same number of calories you were getting on a non-vegan diet. Which brings me to my next point…
4. Track your nutrition, and supplement when needed. Use a food tracker like MyFitnessPal or Cronometer to make sure you’re eating a varied enough diet to get all the necessary nutrients. After a week or two, you’ll get a good idea of how much you’re eating, what you may need to supplement, and you most likely won’t need to continue tracking. Even if you’re eating fortified foods like nutritional yeast and tofu, it’s wise to supplement B-12 as it is not naturally available in plant foods, and being deficient in B-12 can have severe health consequences.
5. Pick your battles. When people find out you’re vegan, sometimes they get defensive. I have a whole post about this here. It’s tempting to fight or argue with people who constantly antagonize you, but for the most part these people are the ones who are not willing to engage in a thoughtful discussion, and they just want to get a rise out of you. Feel free to ignore the haters and bacon-jokers if you want, and save your energy for those who are genuinely interested in learning more about veganism.
6. Accept mistakes and move on. Oh no, those chocolate chips you just ate had milkfat! You didn’t know l-cysteine or confectioner’s glaze weren’t vegan! The waiter forgot to tell you that the peanut sauce was made with honey! Don’t beat yourself up about mistakes. It’s impossible to be a perfect vegan, and these things can and will happen once in a while. You can’t go back and undo, but you can move forward having learned from little mishaps. Freaking out about mistakes is not an effective reaction, and it makes veganism look harder to those around you. While it’s important to strive for minimizing animal exploitation as much as possible, accept that mistakes will be made, and be kind to yourself.