VEGAN WEEK CHALLENGE RESULTS

Finally, the vegan week challenge has ended and almost all the participants resisted until the end of the week. The total number of people participating was 6 and all of them put a lot of effort and did their best to turn into vegans for a week, however some of them faced some difficulties and gave up after some days.

At the beginning of the week they were all very excited and as soon as I gave them detailed information on the challenge they immediately went to the supermarket to do their first vegan shopping as shown in the picture below. 

They then followed some of the vegan recipes I gave them and also invented some themselves.

Here are some of the vegan dishes they prepared:

Vegan risotto 

Cous-cous with mais 

                                                                    zucchini and vegan cotoletta

Pasta with vegan ragú

In my opinion, the interesting part of the challenge was to then receive the feedback from the participants and analyse the reasons that made some of them surrender and which are the one that encouraged them to carry on. When I asked the participants their opinion on the vegan diet their feedback helped me a lot to understand what people think of this diet which was really teaching and interesting. 

POSITIVE ASPECTS OF BEING VEGAN👍

All the participants felt healthier after having eaten a week vegan as they ate more vegetables and fruits. Furthermore, some of the noticed that they had a better skindue to not consuming animal’s fat and eating more veggies. They also discovered some new foods that they had never tried before such as seitan and tofu hamburgers and many legumes such as lentils and beans. Many of them enjoyed vegan products such as soya yogurts and declared that from now on they will eat them instead of normal yogurts as they like them better. One last positive aspect from this experience was that they enlarged their knowledge about nutrition as they learnt how important it is to have balanced meals and they developed some new skills such as recognizing which foods contain animal’s products and which don’t and they discovered that dairy is present in most of the common products.

NEGATIVE ASPECTS OF BEING A VEGAN👎

However, there were also some downsides during the challenge such as not being able to eat some of their favorite foods as they contained dairy products. In addition, it was hard to eat vegan at home as the rest of their families ate normal and they had to resist to temptations such as sweets and meat. Some of the participants even felt more tired than usual which in my opinion is really strange as usually eating vegan makes people feel more energetic and if this didn’t happen in their cases was probably due to the fact that they have been eating normally until now and in order to benefit from this diet their body has to adapt to this change and it might take longer than a week. One of them even noticed that she gained weight and what might have caused this is the fact that she ate more than usual in order to make sure she had all the nutrients which is a good thing to do for the first period of eating vegan but then with time it gets easier to balance the meals properly making sure to eat the right quantity of food. One last difficulty that they faced was the fact that when eating at restaurants there weren’t almost any vegan options. 

Most of them told me that they could never be vegan as they like meat too much and can’t imagine a life without eating it. I totally understand them as I passed through that phase myself and the key to renouncing to all of those tasty foods is one: having a motivation. In fact, thinking that being vegan was good for me and my health helped me to turn 100% vegan. 

Creating this challenge has been an amazing experience that I would like to repeat in the future as it has been really teaching and fascinating.💖