Why Vegetarian?

Hey guys!
So, as some of you may or may not know, I am a vegetarian. Not a weird thing, right? A lot of people are. Well you would think however I get asked a surprising amount about why I chose to go vegetarian so I thought I would write a wee bit about it and explain why I personally chose to go veggie. Here we gooo:

1)  The animals: when I was younger I really did not care about the meat that I was consuming...at the age of three I marched into a restaurant, announced "I SMELL BEEF" and then proceeded to eat an entire adults meal. I think that pretty much summed me up. Then as I got older I began to do more research into vegetarianism - not because I wanted to be one but I was just curious. I explored how animals were treated and I was absolutely horrified. I don't really want to go into too much detail about it but I have to honestly say that what I saw was worse than any horror movie I have ever seen. Also...how could you eat that little guy?! ^


2) Religious reasons: I am a Buddhist. Now whilst it does not say directly anywhere in Buddhism not to eat animals and many Buddhists are not vegetarians, I felt bad because the first precept is 'Do not harm or kill another living being'. It can be argued that you are not really harming the animals directly but I felt guilty and that actually took a lot of pleasure out of eating meat to the point where all I was seeing when I was eating it was the animal it once was.

3) My final reason was health and environment: my family ate a lot of meat, we were consuming it two or three times a day which is actually more than we need protein wise. The body does not need the amount of protein we were giving it and that results in the fats being stored. Since going veggie I have noticed a definite loss in weight. The environmental factor is that the meat industry is actually one of (if not the) leading cause of global warming and by not consuming meat you are cutting back the amount of resources used and pollution released.

I would like to clarify that this was not to pressure anyone into being a vegetarian or anything like that but simply to clarify the reasons why I went veggie. At some point in the future I would like to go vegan and see how that goes.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed :) xx