With every New Year comes a resolution, and despite all our good intentions, the diets and other healthy lifestyle promises are often crushed under the weight of the New Year’s Day hangover.
We’ve broken ours already.
For those of you who are more strongly willed (read: less pathetic) than us, we congratulate you, for the rest of you we have come up with a solution: A meat-free month.
Today is the first ‘Meatless Monday’ of the 2014, and thus the perfect starting point to a 30-day meatless commitment; PETA has created an online pledge, you can find it here.
But how far will you choose to go?
Vegan or Vegetarian?
Choose vegan and you’re up there with the big guns. It’s tough, Beyoncé could only hack it for twenty-two days, but even then the results were obvious.
It’s a big commitment, but it is easier now than it has ever been before, with plenty of meat substitutes to minimise the shock. Bill Gates has even invested in manufacturing egg substitutes so he can have convincing vegan mayonnaise.
It would be a quick way to shed those holiday pounds.
Lots of celebrities are vegan for non-weight loss reasons (as we looked into last year) but it’s impossible to overlook the blatant impact on their physique. Natalie Portman is a vegan all year round, her motivation may be the animals not the body benefits, but she never seems to have a problem with love handles, post-holiday or not!
Choosing vegetarian isn’t a cop out though, it would be a lot easier, but you would still get a healthy detox out of it as long as you don’t coat everything in cheese!
Any dietary choice that involves boosting your intake of fruit and veg is going to boost your appearance, and who wouldn’t want better skin and shinier hair?
Either way you’d be doing the environment a favour by cutting your meat consumption. Who knows, maybe if enough people stop eating steak it will stop snowing in Egypt.
Got Meat. 
A few changes a week can make big impacts on your health and the environment. I love cooking vegan and vegetarian food and have many recipes if you need a place to start!
Thanks, I have been perusing your recipes and I’ll definitely be trying out the babaganoush! I have never managed to figure out how to do it properly and it’s my favourite thing
Oh good! I have made a few batches just in the last week because everyone loves it so much 🙂 let me know how it turns out!
good luck with your resolution! I don’t think I could live without eggs and good cheese forever, but I’ve surprised myself with a few delicious accidentally vegan meals 🙂 meatless ma po tofu and paneer curries are some very tasty options!