This post focuses on the "how" to go vegetarian/vegan. 

 

Well, we now know, that eating less meat is the way to go, so we already know the "why" to go vegetarian/vegan.  Now it's time to figure out how to achieve that. All of these tips have helped me a lot and are based on my experience with a plant-based diet. If you try eating less meat, this advise will hopefully help you a lot. 

These tips have helped me the most:

Don't go vegan from one day to the other.

After years and years of eating meat, drinking milk and eating eggs, your body will need some time to adapt to this new healthy diet. A vegan diet normally contains up to multiple times more fiber than a "normal" diet. This might be very healthy in the long term, but can cause quite some trouble if you stop eating animal products within days. Some very common problems related to that are bloating, which can cause horrible stomach ache, a feeling of tiredness (see below) and even diarrhea.

 

Give your Body some time to adapt

Be sure to give your body the time it needs to adapt to this change. You can do this by gently decreasing the amount of animal products you consume over a longer period of time.

However, if, for whatever reasons, you don't want to consume any animal products from this day on, there are quite some other tips and tricks to avoid especially bloating (which is the most common of these problems). 

Drink tons of water

The one that has helped me the most was to drink lots of water after each meal. This will prevent the food from getting stuck somewhere in your stomach and helps your digestive system to work properly. 

 

Find out what exactly causes your bloating

Another important thing to do is to find out what exactly bloats you the most. In my case those were apples and flax seeds, once I stopped eating those everything got worlds better.  

Get the energy (and nutrients) you need

In general plants contain way less calories per weight than animal products. This can be helpful if you want to lose weight, but can also cause some problems if you are new to eating plant-based. Some people might think that vegetarian/vegans only eat salads and may wonder how they can survive by doing that. But here's the point, they don't!

Eat energy-dense foods

There are pleanty and pleanty of different vegan foods (99% of all foods are actually plant-based) and leaf greens are among the worst in matters of calories per weight. A healthy vegan diet contains many things like beans, nuts, avocados, grains, starchy vegetables, dates and seeds which are very high in Vitamins, proteins, healthy fats and carbohydrates (the fuel your body and brain mostly runs on). Eating more of these energy-rich foods will help you stay fit and energetic on a plant-based diet. 

 

A healthy mix is the secret 

Well, of course you shouldn't consume just nuts and avocados, that's just gonna make you fat. The secret lies in the combination of all kinds of foods. Your meals might consist of carbs (like rice, pasta or bread), fiber- and vitamin-rich greens (like salad) proteins (like beans) and fats (like olives or avocados). This will ensure that you get ALL the nutrients you need 

 

Meat substitues can do the trick

if you are new to eating plant based these can help you a lot to overcome this craving for meat and animal products. Believe me or not, vegan alternative foods mostly taste nearly the same as the animal products they resemble. Nowadays most stores sell stuff like vegetarian sausages, vegan chicken filet, plant-based milks and all the other animal products you can imagine (there even is a vegan egg-alternative, I haven't tried that yet though). If you feel the urge to consume meat or cheese or whatever (which is very normal and will quite probably happen) just try these alternatives, in my opinion some of them are even better than their animal counterparts. Over the long term eating lots of this might not be the healthiest(since most of it is made from soy and gluten), but these products certainly can be very helpful for beginners.    

that's right, no animal had to die for this delicious peace of heaven ;)

Obviously there are many more tips and tricks, but unfortunately I have no more time for today. However
IF THIS POST GETS UPVOTED TO ABOVE 1.50 SB$ I WILL MAKE A PART TWO OF THIS LIST
so if you enjoyed this post please consider upvoting and resteeming it! :)

Otherwise this will be the last part of my WWAGUM series. I hope you enjoyed this series and hope it changed your view on these crazy vegetarians/vegan ;)

This has been it for today, thanks a lot for taking your time reading this :)
Greetings from Austria,

Alex