I'm back!

Phewf! I have finally gotten back to regular life after my week and a half away on a cruising adventure around the Atlantic. But I'll recap all of that once I finally gather the time to upload all those thousands of photos.

Tonight, I want to fill you all in on my most recent of lifestyle changes. (This sounds like I'm preparing ya'll for news about some gender orientation switch or something of the like, but trust me, I still love Mike. I just refuse to call this new lifestyle what it really is... a diet). GASP! I am now officially a vegan. I will only eat plant-based foods, no animal products. I'm not going on this "diet" because I feel I need to, but rather because I think it may make me better in the long run. Plus, I really didn't like meat anyway. The only really hard part is all that dairy. My goodness, I've been three days off the stuff and I feel like cheese and chocolate were drugs. Oh and ice cream. I want ice cream.

My mom thought about trying this lifestyle change with me until she tried vegan rice cheese. She nearly cried. It doesn't quite melt the way regular cheese should. haha

I do plan on being more lax on Saturdays though... a girl has to keep her sanity somehow, right? The one-day-off-per-week idea came more or less from Jenna Marbles. If she can do it, I totally can! The rest of my dietary change came from Alicia Silverstone's "The Kind Diet." I have notes in my phone typed out from the book, things to remember. Just a few include the fact that frightened animals produce cortisol and adrenaline right before slaughter and we can become stressed from eating their meat, dairy farmers pump their cows full of estrogen to allow them to keep producing milk till their udders become infected and swollen, and no other animal drinks milk from another animal (as human's do with cows) and not even from their own mothers past infancy. Oh! and it takes three days to digest meat. Silverstone backs all of her health and animal mistreatment claims with credible sources (trust me, when I found out what they do to little chickens, I checked.) And now, if I'm ever going to have eggs again, I'll have to buy a few hens and treat those ladies right. Mike suggested the name Clucker for one. Any other ideas? ;)

 These are the things I've been eating, and it's so perfect. I feel like I'm eating summer.

 Fresh veggies from my dad's huge garden!!

Eating rabbit food hasn't been bad at all. It's only the few moments I sit down and just think about the foods I can't eat that I actually begin to miss them. So far, I'm really glad I've taken on the challenge. I'll let you know how I feel this time next week....