Quitting Dairy

I've learned something in the past few months that classification can be meaningful to people, so in full disclosure I'm just going to blurt out what I eat now and why I'm somewhere between Vegan and Vego...I don’t eat dairy, I don’t eat meat, I do eat honey and I do eat our chicken’s eggs. I still wear my leather shoes, am certain I have a woolly jumper tucked away somewhere and a bunch of cosmetics I have no idea on how they were tested – I’m transitioning, let’s say.

Pot Pie and Oblina - our backyard chickens

I've spent 30 years of my life eating meat and dairy, I've lived with vegoes and probably quietly scoffed or looked shocked when someone said they were vegan. Stuff like “what can you eat?” or “I could never ever do that” definitely came out of my mouth at some point. I'm pretty open minded but I used to think vegans were quite odd and now that I'm somewhere on the other side of the fence, it's really funny to look back because I think for most of my life I was probably the odd one. 

I didn't wake up one day and think “gosh you're odd, lets change”. It's been instead, an interesting past year, worthy of sharing (at the very least for its story value). I don't expect you to change how you eat by the end of this, I don't even want you to feel guilty about what you eat – because what you eat you probably enjoy and is also probably super delicious, I just wanted to share my story :) 

How it all began (prepare for a bit of gross-ness) 

Around a year ago I started to notice a rash on my ring finger which at its peak even spread to the opposite ring finger (still slightly baffled by that).  As someone who has sensitive skin, allergic reactions are the norm for me but this existed on the extreme end. I'd be woken in the middle of the night, unable to stop the itch, which led to raw hands and tiny blisters (sorry grossness!!). I was super self-conscious and started googling ways to mind-play it out, I figured, if I could just stop itching my hands all would be good. After failing the mental game I lathered on steroid creams (the usually fix) and yet found myself back at square one, solution-less. I decided to pay attention to when the irritation flared. It quickly become obvious the culprit was dairy and just as obvious that I was going to be in denial about it. 

The first step - cut out milk. 

Dairy free milkshakes, almond milk and a soy coffee :)

This was easy, I'd simply substitute almond milk into my morning chai or when a recipe called for cow's milk. Almond milk is a lot thinner than regular milk but I found simply using all almond milk in my tea was fine rather than using a water/milk ratio :) A year later I'm going to bold and say I even enjoy almond milk more! Butter was also pretty easy because I was never the hugest fan, they also have butter substitutes in the supermarket and of course my favourite thing ever avocados! 

Next was all those sneaky (and less sneaky) food that dairy is in. I would say my overall consumption of packaged foods has since decreased because of this, probably a good thing but at the time only managed to seriously bum me out. Thinking I could no longer have things, made me resentful and angry and just like some sort of diet I 'd break down and buy some cheesy corn chips knowing the ramifications :P I've never really been on a diet but I imagine it has a similar, denial, indulge, face-the-consequences cycle. 

I then became reduced to scouring the health food section paying far too much for a 5 piece bar of ‘dairy free’ chocolate. It tasted horrible and I found myself eventually stopping eating chocolate. Probably a good thing but when you’ve already lost so much, it sucked. Had younger Fee done a bit of research she would of found that a lot of dark chocolate over 70% is dairy free *gasp* so I’m happy to report that delicious chocolate is back in my life:)

delicious chocolate and some randomness because I wasn't sure what photos to put in here :P

Prior to this I was also one of those people proclaiming “Ahh I don't eat that much dairy”. I want to seriously backhand younger Fee because when faced with cutting out cheese I quietly wept inside. Actually I'd only cut back my cheese consumption to about 80% because god damn if anyone was going to deny me a cheesy pizza! So the itch wasn't completely gone but I'd reached a pretty good compromising place. 

Spoiler alert! I am now 100% dairy free and the last 20% was really easy, or much easier than my brain had convinced myself otherwise and simply came down to making a commitement to myself (and finding some yummo substitutes).

I'm going to put a pause in the story and place the next stage (the meat part) into another post because it’s a tangent all in itself. I wanted to start at the beginning and the beginning was a rash and next time is the story involving our cat Gremlin!

If you want to go straight to my beginners guide for eating vegan you can pop on over here!