lol "more isolated from society" .  wow.  I can hear my grandmother saying that....except she wouldn't use such fine vocabulary.  She would have phrased it more like "people already think yer weird" .  She does refer to me as the strange one. OMG I have a nose ring and went to college....everyone look at the oddity!  >:D

I am SO glad i found this thread!  I just became a vegetarian too (3 weeks ago) and have been judged by most people and even encouraged to eat meat again (by my own boyfriend).  I just found this website litteraly 10 minutes ago.  I was tired of feeling alone in this journey.  I feel very good about my decision, i feel more in touch with my body, my skin is glowing more i think, I just feel plain good!  I was expecting to be judged by people, I knew it would happen.  I've never preached about it, i simply tell them I'm doing it for me.  But my boyfriend of 8 years, who is a meat and potatoes kind-of-guy has been anything but supportive.  I guess i didnt expect him to support me, but at least to respect my decision...well, he has not been respectfull. 

It's definatly a hard transition, when it comes to how people around you treat you until they respect your decision.  In the mean time, thank goodness for websites like this one, where everyone is in the same boat.  Everyone understands it seems. 
Just know that your not alone going through these new changes without the support of anyone close to you.  (I havent told my mother either actually)
Good luck and hopefully people around you will stop giving you greef for doing such a positive life change!

Yeah I'm really glad I found this site.  I'm not even vegan!  I'm just vegetarian and it seemed like when I came home from college, no one got it.  Not my friends or my family.   They didn't understand why I chose to do it and no one thought I'd stick with it (even though I told my parents only 6 months after I started!).  They basically think if I don't eat what they prepare, I'll just starve then go back to "normal." And sometimes it's come down to me just not eating.  And then I find this place and these people understand what I'm going through and inspire me to try different foods.

My advice is don't give up.  I never had any positive physical reactions to becoming veg, but it felt right and I haven't regretted it and my parents still try to tempt me with meat but I don't crave it and I smell it but it doesn't tempt me.  It's deeper than that too.  Animals shouldn't be bred just to die to feed us.  It's cruel.  Stick with it kid. ;)b

i was vegetarian before i became vegan my freshman year of high school.  my parents were supportive of it (and my stepmother actually told me that for my reasonings, it didn't make sense to be vegetarian and not vegan!) but then family members started telling them things like, "she's only doing it for attention, she's only doing it to control you, she's only doing it to ___" (and they would say this RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME as if i wasn't even there!).  then my parents started to take their advice.  they stopped buying food that was vegan friendly unless it was something that they wanted for themselves.  i guess they figured they would starve me out of it.

so, basically, i lived off of baked potatoes, french fries, and slices of bread that i would microwave and cover with ketchup, mustard, or whatever condiments i could find.  sometimes i would eat a can of peas or something.  prior to being vegan, they bought tons of fruits, vegetables, and "vegetarian foods"... but once i became "vegan" that all ended.  plus, they would get absolutely pissed when i ate their food since it would be a whole can of peas at a time or whatever.  but what else was i going to do?

when people tell me that they don't think that being vegan is doable because it would be impossible in their house, i can only imagine it would probably be no harder than it was for me!

i ate school lunches when i was able to afford it.  my parents wouldn't give me money for lunch, but sometimes when i did the laundry i could find a few coins.  i even had reduced lunch at around $0.75, but i still didn't eat lunch most days.  on the days that i did, i usually could only eat french fries or baked potatoes.  sometimes i would steal some of the a la carte fruits while my friends were walking through and getting their lunches.

by the time i had been vegan for a year i was SO READY FOR A POTATO FAMINE!  now it's like pulling teeth to get me to eat potatoes, bread, or canned peas.

after about two years they finally figured that maybe it wasn't just a phase and that they were not going to just starve me out of it.  you would think i would have lost weight, but i ballooned up so much since everything i ate was deep fried sugar!

everyone supports me now (8 years later!), but now i'm an adult, live on my own, and buy everything i need.  i could have probably used that support as a teenager... especially since they wouldn't let me get a job (which would have allowed me to buy my own food).   i'm pretty sure that if i even brought it up now, they would deny every bit of it.

i hope other veg*ns (past, present, future) had an easier time and more support than i did!

moral: stick it out, if i was able to do it, you can too!

Rainbowdust, how awesome you are to have dealt with all that and not taken the easy way out. I'm glad they've finally come around - although it's easy when it isn't right under your nose! - and may I just say that it makes the petty bitching that I've received seem like nothing.

:)>>>

i hope other veg*ns (past, present, future) had an easier time and more support than i did!

moral: stick it out, if i was able to do it, you can too!

Sorry to hear that you had such a rough time growing up a vegan.  I can't imagine having parents that withheld even the basic foods needed to be healthy.  I don't think my mom really liked the idea when I veggie back in high school but she bought me the fruits and veg I needed.  Granted everyone else ate them too but I could always count on them being there. 

Congrats on having such a strong will and holding your ground even in the face of such assholes.  (sorry, I know they're you parents but still!) 

My mom was pissed.  She wouldn’t cook any differently (when she cooked) – everything had meat in it.  She would not buy me anything “special”.  I ate the same stuff as you – canned corn, mashed potatoes, bread, junk food like oreos – that was about it.  My mom would not give me money for lunch either. 

wow, that sounds just like how my situation was.

except my parents pretty much always had food on hand.  when i would say i was hungry but didn't have food, they would say, "we have lots of food, you just choose not to eat it".  that lead into behaviours that they later found to be annoying and needless, like food hoarding.  when i was able to get a job (when i was eightteen, so three years into it!) and i would buy my own food, i would not allow ANYONE to eat it but me unless they asked first.  i would get sooooo mad when other people would touch my food because i didn't make much money and i knew that everyone else could eat everything in the house, but if they ate all of my food then i would be hungry without any money to buy more.  i would want them to pay me back when they would eat my stuff without asking, but my parents didn't think it was necessary since they said that they bought food and didn't care if i ate theirs.  but that was just it, i DIDN'T eat their food... even after they relaxed and went back to buying normal, healthy foods like fruits and veggies & were okay with me eating it again.

now, i don't have that same sort of reaction to food.  i don't mind if someone eats all of my food because i know that there will always be more.  but back then i had a really bad habit of buying canned, boxed, or frozen foods (things with long shelf-lives) and i would NEVER eat them, ever, "just in case" there was ever a time that i was hungry and had no food.  like, i wouldn't even eat them when i was hungry with no other food because "what if there was a time in the future where i would need them more?".  i know that was wasteful, but if you look at my mentality behind it, it made perfect sense!  (i never realized any of these behaviours until i was out of that situation in the last year or so)

i think that living through that & not having it the easy way made me a really "relaxed vegan" compared to other people on here.  i might be wrong in thinking that, but it was in no way easy and i had to be really practical about everything.  i mean, if i refused to live in a house with meat in it, i would have been homeless!  i see a lot of people on here that say that they don't allow meat in their house*, but for the first seven years of my veganism (plus the eleven years of vegetarianism prior to that), i lived with my parents & they ate meat & other animal products (dairy, etc)... so i never saw just simply having it in my house as a major issue.  when my wife and i met, she was very much NOT a veg*n.  we had her food in our apartment because i didn't see anything wrong with her still living & eating the way she had been (i wasn't going to force any sort of change on her).  now she's a vegetarian, so obviously we don't have meat in our house... but if we ever have a non-veg house guest, they are certainly allowed to bring their non-veg foods.  (*none of this is meant to be offensive to the people who do have the "no meat" rule)

i guess that is sorta off topic, but i was wondering if maybe your experiences had the same sort of effect on you?  that might be an interesting factor between the different points of views among the same essential idealology of vegetarianism.  like, why some people do it this way and other people do it that way... or why this issue is important to those people but not as important to these people?  make sense?

Wait...they were your parents...you were a freshman in HS and therefore a minor, and yet they were angry if you ate "their food"? WTF?? Were you expected to get a job and buy your own food in 9th grade, here?  :o

I'm sorry to use this sort of language, but that's really fucked up. (And my descent into profanity shows how strongly I feel about it.)

Rainbowdust, how awesome you are to have dealt with all that and not taken the easy way out. I'm glad they've finally come around - although it's easy when it isn't right under your nose! - and may I just say that it makes the petty bitching that I've received seem like nothing.

:)>>>

thanks, guys.  yeah, i'm glad that they finally did come around, too, especially since now my little sister is a vegetarian but leaning towards veganism.  she gets all of the luxuries i didn't get, like soy/almond/rice milk!  i'm glad for her.

and, yabbitgirl, i agree.  if your child depends on you for food, you should probably feed them instead of trying to starve them out of their "loopy ideas"!!

what's really effed up is that they were totally supportive of it for the first, like, two or three months because they thought it was great that i was so determined to make a change to help others.  it was when we went to christmas at my dad's mom's house (and then my stepmom's mom's house) and all of their parents, my aunts & uncles, etc started saying that stuff like that i was just trying to control them and that they shouldn't support me and they should just stop buying me food and refuse to make anything special (which didn't even make sense because i always made my own food anyways being the only veg in the house even before being vegan)... that's when they stopped being supportive of it.  that's when they followed the advice of their peers... who, of course, assured them they were doing "the right thing" & urged them to continue doing what they were doing.  funny, my aunt is a principal at a middle school or high school (forget which) & my uncle (her husband, my dad's brother) is a teacher & coach at the same school.  nice, right?  they were the main ringleaders in this whole anti-vegan crusade!

my stepmom would sometimes "take sympathy" in me and buy me some food... like tofu, soymilk, or whatever... but she would warn me that i had to hide it from my dad or else he'd get really mad at her.

i will never, ever, EVER force my diet or views on someone.  i will never have the view of "in our house you eat like us and think like us".  if my children decided that they wanted to eat meat and they were old enough to truly understand where it came from and why we were against it, i would let them.  i would never do it like my parents did.  i might not agree with their wanting to eat meat at all, but i strongly feel that doing what my parents did was wrong... even more wrong than letting my kids eat meat would be.  i'm really big on freedom of choice, even if it isn't the same as my choice.

wow, that sounds just like how my situation was.

except my parents pretty much always had food on hand.  when i would say i was hungry but didn't have food, they would say, "we have lots of food, you just choose not to eat it".  that lead into behaviours that they later found to be annoying and needless, like food hoarding.  when i was able to get a job (when i was eightteen, so three years into it!) and i would buy my own food, i would not allow ANYONE to eat it but me unless they asked first.  i would get sooooo mad when other people would touch my food because i didn't make much money and i knew that everyone else could eat everything in the house, but if they ate all of my food then i would be hungry without any money to buy more.  i would want them to pay me back when they would eat my stuff without asking, but my parents didn't think it was necessary since they said that they bought food and didn't care if i ate theirs.  but that was just it, i DIDN'T eat their food... even after they relaxed and went back to buying normal, healthy foods like fruits and veggies & were okay with me eating it again.
...

i guess that is sorta off topic, but i was wondering if maybe your experiences had the same sort of effect on you?  that might be an interesting factor between the different points of views among the same essential idealology of vegetarianism.  like, why some people do it this way and other people do it that way... or why this issue is important to those people but not as important to these people?  make sense?

Yeah my parents are osrt of the same way.  They buy food I can't eat or they'll add bacon to green beans so I can't eat them.  Yeah, hoarding food is instinct I suppose.  I do it.  I have 4 siblings and I hide food sometimes, but my parents do it too.  THey hoarde food in their room so we can't eat it or they'll put it in the pantry but specifically say not to eat it.  That's not healthy, but it's the enviroment I was raised in.  At school, my roommates and I seperate our food, but I'm okay with them asking to eat it.  But I don't judge my friends for bringing meat over and eating it.  I don't think I'm really uptight abotu that.

Yeah my parents are osrt of the same way.  They buy food I can't eat or they'll add bacon to green beans so I can't eat them.  Yeah, hoarding food is instinct I suppose.  I do it.  I have 4 siblings and I hide food sometimes, but my parents do it too.  THey hoarde food in their room so we can't eat it or they'll put it in the pantry but specifically say not to eat it.  That's not healthy, but it's the enviroment I was raised in.   At school, my roommates and I seperate our food, but I'm okay with them asking to eat it.  But I don't judge my friends for bringing meat over and eating it.  I don't think I'm really uptight abotu that.

so do you hoard your food because of habit and because it's the general learned behaviour of your household or do you do it because you're afraid you won't have food otherwise?