Don't get me wrong as I love vegetables but as a part of a whole meal and not the entire meal. There are certain meat meals that are incomplete with vegetables - Sausage and mashed potatoes with onion gravy, an English Sunday Roast dinner, Thanksgiving supper and of course Christmas dinner.
I can recall sitting down some 13 years ago to a family Christmas dinner with 17 different vegetables on the table to choose from and choose I did to the extent that it took a good 5 minutes of eating before I could locate any of the meat that I had mange to completely cover. Organically reared black breast turkey I may add which made the finding of it all the more enjoyable.
I used to claim that no meal was complete unless it had a meat element to it - even cauliflower cheese was not permitted. It had to be served with a side order of back bacon and whole grain bread.
Saturday evenings were often corn on the cob night which as a child I hated with a vengeance causing my parents to have to cook something separate for me and of course it had to have meat. Now I am perfectly happy to eat corn on the cob and try to do so at least once a week if I can. I normally eat it off the cob accompanied with a nice rare cooked steak or possibly with BBQ roast chicken.
So what has all this got to do with vegetarianism?
A few years ago I was introduced to the benefits of detoxification through fasting and colonic irrigation and was given a whole mass of books and articles to read that had for a few seconds convinced that meat, cheese and milk were the devil's own creation and would be the death of me. Some further reading gave me balance to this and I now see the benefits of eating vegetables exclusively but also eating meat when I want to, which is most days.
I am sure that in a few more years time there will be a report that states a little red meat each week is good for you. We were born with incisors, canine and molar teeth so the medical profession is catching up on what our bodies have been telling us for millenia.
I have another detox session coming up - just 10 days this time but with a 7 day pre-detox plan that involves eating lots of raw vegetables and drinking copious qualities of water. Sugars, salt, fizzy drinks, meat, cheese. cooked foods, processed foods are all excluded so it is going to be an interesting time.
Fortunately due to some careful planning, I wish, the run up to my detox is during the annual Vegetarian festival here in Phuket or some places around China where many people abstain from meat, alcohol and other toxic influences for 9 days. This means that I shall not be alone in my suffering but also that there will be plenty of places where I can get vegetarian foods. I shall just have to ignore the fact that they are all cooked but that does no real harm.
On the subject of harm one thing I shall not be doing this Vegetarian Festival is joining in with the piercings that go on as part of a cleansing ritual with young men and women forcing all kinds of weird objects through their cheeks as an offering to the gods. It is said that the gods protect them from pain but I am not so sure about this.
I will be in enough pain abstaining from meat, alcohol, sugars, cakes, breads, carbs and a drastic increase in my exercise regime without forcing foreign matter through my cheeks.
Last time I carried out a detox I lost 14 kilos and the aim is to do the same again.
Why you ask? As I told the owner of the last detox center I visited by purging the toxins form my body I make room for a whole new bunch of them which if I did not do I would overdose eventually. They were not impressed but had to acknowledge the accuracy of my sentiment.
