Over the years I have had my share of difficulty eating vegetarian. For me, I haven’t had meat cravings or things like that, so it has been challenges with eating well and finding good things to eat. Here I’ll look back at some of the mistakes I have made.  This post will look at the mistakes – I’ll cover how to fix them in a future post.

Junk Food Vegetarian

This is probably the easiest and most common pitfall that us vegetarians can fall into.  When you can’t easily get fast food and don’t have time or the know-how to cook much, it becomes all to easy to grab for the nearest bag of potato chips and soda.  I was (and occasionally still am) a junk food vegetarian for far too long and managed to pack on about 35 pounds.  This becomes a dangerous cycle because then you have less energy from the junk food so you feel even less like making healthy things.  Also, your body adjusts along with the amount of food you consume – as you consume more food you get hungry quicker and want to eat more and create another bad cycle.

Frozen Foods

This is a step down from pure junk food, but I feel it is still a mistake.  While frozen foods from companies like Morningstar Farms and Bocca Burger are great, I spent too many years relying on them to feed myself and my family.  The Morningstar Farms Chik’n products have been popular with my kids, but they have a long list of ingredients and are full of wheat, dairy, soy, and eggs.  As I discussed in another post on food sensitivity testing, one of my sons and I discovered we have wheat sensitivity.  Relying on these foods and consuming them too much I feel has contributed to ear infections and congestion problems for my kids and myself.

Child Care

My 3 kids have all been vegetarians from birth and all have been in some amount of pre-school child care.  We had several situations where they were fed real chicken nuggets, fish sticks, and spaghetti with meat sauce.  I can’t do anything to change this, but I consider it a mistake that I wasn’t more on top of who was feeding my kids.

Final Thoughts

While eveything in life is give and take, I can look back and clearly see things I could have improved about my vegetarian eating.  I am very glad that I have chosen a vegetarian lifestyle and feel that even with my mistakes I am better off, and the world and the animals I have saved certainly are better off.

Do you have any vegetarian mistakes you have learned from, or things you just don’t know how to fix?  Be sure to comment and let me know.