Shock!

At the end of the month, I hadn't eaten meat or dairy in a month. So when I woke up and had a bowl of cereal, I felt it immediately. I've always had a low tolerance to dairy but I can usually hold down a bowl of cereal. Not this time. About 5 minutes after I finished, I felt my stomach breakdancing in my stomach. It hurt so bad and then I thought maybe that I shoul reintroduce it slowly instead of all at once. I couldn't hold down a bowl of cereal for the next 2 days. I was suffering kind of a reverse withdrawl, although it was kind of my fault for assuming that I could jut go back to eating normally.

Mentor Review

Fpr the MYP Personal Project, all students have a teacher that acts as a mentor to help them through the project. The mentor selects a topic from the list of projects that we want to do. Usully this will be an area that may be familiar to them, for example an art teacher may be paired with a student who wants to paint a mural. My mentor was chose my project because she is gluten-free and is pseudo vegan. She offered a lot of insight and gave me tips on where to get food. It was nice having someone who understood what i wa going through and was supportive of it. I could have done more on my part as far as scheduling meetings but, I'd say we worked together very well. She was a good mentor.

You can't live off salad

Salad. one of the first things I think of when I hear the word vegan. In the coming weeks before my diet change, I ate mostly salad to prepare my body. At first I didn't realize that I couldn't eat salad for a whole month. Thats when I knew this would be harder than I thought. While salad is vegan, it'd be the equivalent of only eating a steak for a month. It's not sufficient enough. So I started to explore other, more culinarily involed meal choices. Tofu and Seitan are popular meat substitutes and can taste very good when cooked and seasoned correctly. Vegetables and produce are obviously staples in a vegan diet. Stir frys and juices are ways to transform those raw vegetables into omething good. Speaking of raw vegetables, salad doesn't have to be just leaves and dressing. Corn, tomatoes, walnuts, and strawberries are wonderful ways to liven up a salad. Balsamic dressings are good but I prefer a raspberry walnut/hazelnut vinaigrette. Don't limit yourself to bland dry leaves and call it vegan. Explore the infinite possiblities and have fun!

Personal and Cultural expression

For my MYP project, I decided to go vegan for a month. The "Area of interaction" category that this best applies to would be Personal and Cultural expression. Veganism is a very personal choice and many people have many different reasons for doing so. From my experiences, I'd say a lot of people do it as a way of expressing their beliefs, or to live a healthier lifestyle. Morals or religion may play a part in someone deciding to change their lifestyle, making it a matter of personal preference or opinion. That is why, for my Area of Interaction, I chose Personal and Cultural expression.