On cravings and unforseen difficulties

"I think that allowing ourselves fish has made me not really miss land animals," Alex said to me, when I questioned whether or not he'd had any cravings.

He's right for the most part. I think we'd both be a lot worse off (craving-wise, anyway) if we'd decided to cut fish out. I have a lot of respect for people who are able to do this, but we were being realistic when we outlined the first month of conscious eating.

We have, however, been more thoughtful with regards to the fish we've eaten. Check out the sushi post for more details.

We went out for dinner last Friday with a friend of ours and her friend who came with us ordered a steak. Smelling it and seeing it (and hearing him rave about it) was definitely hard, but we stayed strong and persevered.

My only flirtation with undoing (so far) came in the form of a tweet from a delicious pizza restaurant in Seattle. It was simple but it made my mouth water.

I immediately reported it to Alex, part of me hoping he'd say, "Okay let's go!" But, when it comes to carpaccio, he has more will power than I do and held strong. The sad thing is that I won't even be able to eat it next month because I think we'll be dairy-free.

The hardest thing so far has been finding lunches to take. This seems like such an easy thing, but has proven to be difficult. We used to take leftovers for lunch the next day but since I started volunteering we stagger our dinners and eat leftovers the next night as dinner. This works fairly well, dinner-wise, but makes lunch difficult. We may reevaluate this soon.

The first week we thought we'd make it easy and just take cans of soup. As we stood in the aisle, reading ingredients, we were surprised to find just how many vegetable soups contained some form of meat, if even just chicken or beef broth. We managed, but it was an eye-opener.

This week we've been taking pitas and that has been tasty and filling. I already have a recipe to try for next week to mix it up. But, like I said, I have a new respect for those people who live this lifestyle.