Anyone else joining in.

After a bit of a health scare which led to me have an endoscopy down my throat (this is not a nice procedure!). Advised need to lose some weight .

So decided to try and cut down a bit.
Am doing vegetarian January as could not face cutting milk out of my diet .

Wife is doing vegan so we are both eating vegan main meals.

Am enjoying it so far with some great recipes from

The Gaia house cookbook which I would definitely recommend.

And the best bit is I can really look forward to Lambruary !

I’m not, but eating more healthily is on my list for the new year. I might do a watered down version. Veggie 4 days a week or something like that. I guess I should decide on something specific, or it won’t happen at all.

Lad I work with went Vegan for 3 months a couple of years ago - lost a fair bit of weight, and brought his blood pressure down. His first meal after at the end of it was cornflakes with milk. Not just because it was breakfast - that was what he was missing most.

I’ll be interested to hear how you get on with it.

I've been vegan for a few years now. I started it one year by doing a 'trial week' in October/November sort of time to see how I'd get on, before I committed myself to doing Veganuary. I found it OK (I was a vegetarian before that so it was only about cutting out the dairy and egg products) and carried through December and January, thinking I'd go back at the start of February, and just stuck with it.

I found it easier to adjust than I feared. I didn't have any negative effects or feel tired or constantly hungry etc. I probably ate better because the restriction made me focus on what I was eating more and so I put more effort in to varying ingredients with the stuff I was making.

However I also never got these miracle benefits that you hear about. There's a bit of a cultist sect of vegans on social media who are like those Juice Plus people, who want to say 'I went vegan and I had sooo much more energy it was unreal, my skin used to be spotty and it all cleared up'. I felt a bit healthier but nothing ground breaking.

What I also noticed was how your system adjusts and when you haven't had dairy products for a while, your system isn't used to them. One time I was at a conference and they were serving coffees, they only had cows milk so I was like yeah ok I'll have it anyway. I hadn't had anything with milk for over a year at this point and I immediately found it really difficult to drink and got stomach cramps. That was pretty much my no turning back point that locked me in as vegan.

I'm not hardcore though and I don't tend to tell people I'm vegan unless it is out of necessity, because it tends to start a whole conversation about my dietary choices that I cba getting into a big discussion about. I won't buy any more leather clothes, but I still wear my old leather jackets because I figure its more environmentally damaging to throw stuff away and buy new, so I try to get the most wear out of everything as I can. Also I don't scrutinise the ingredients of everything I eat if I'm out, so sometimes some stuff I eat might have milk whey or whatever in. If it's in small enough amounts for my system not to get upset by it, I don't mind. If you are that sort of 'imperfect' vegan then some people like to latch on to it and call you a hypocrite.

A few years in to it, I'd say the pros are I eat more healthily and take more pride in cooking now than I did. I find it easy to stay slim and in good shape (although I run a lot anyway) and despite getting older, my running times did improve after I went vegan. Also my blood pressure - which used to always be on the borderline between normal and high right from being a teenager, fell a lot and is bang in the middle of normal range now. Is that directly because of being vegan, I don't know. Most likely, because being vegan made me pay more attention to eating healthily and my general lifestyle improved, and running more has boosted my aerobic fitness.

Cons are that I spend a bit more on food than I used to and I find travelling abroad a nuisance as depending on the country, a lot of places are not very vegan-friendly at all. But in the UK it's easy now.

Good luck to anyone trying Veganuary or even just experimenting with replacing some meat/dairy things every now and then. I find it more constructive to support others in doing what they can at their own pace rather than being a zealot about it.

Game Changer on Netflix. i knows a few lads who've gone vegan after watching it. Personally i could cut meat out of my diet, but never cheese.

Been vegan for a few years now. Far easier than i expected, although it is easier than ever before being vegan, especially from a social aspect.

My main tips would be:
Supplement B12
Don't shy away from healthy fats from nuts, seeds and avocado.
Make sure you're eating enough.
Use the 'plate method' initially to portion your food.

I'm getting there.
I've just fried a load of mushrooms to go along with my bacon, eggs and sausage breakfast.

Veganism is not for me, but I've been eating 'clean' for several years now - although not in a super zealous way; and I don't have a YouTube channel full of bro-science nonsense and wild claims about the miraculous benefits.

I did it as a kickstart to a new year thing some years ago, and found that I lost weight, felt better, and cooked a lot more than I had previously done; so now I eat almost 100% clean on weekdays, and relax slightly at weekends - and 2-3 days a week are meat-free, which is way easier than it seems when you have decent recipes. My grocery bill is lower than it was when I ate processed food, but my time in the kitchen has increased a fair bit - so I just tell myself that cooking is a new hobby, and I try to cook in batches, so that once or twice a week, I get an evening off.

I'm glad that plant-based diets are becoming more normalised - because it does look increasingly likely that for future generations, it won't be a choice - they'll just have to.

My doctor said I should watch what I eat. I said I do, I never take my eyes off it.

Just cooking steaks now and they are making my mouth water...

I wonder if vegans get the same feeling when mowing the lawn.

Soon going to took into a lovely baked potato only trouble is it comes with lashings of beef stew nom nom

No but, they will be rightly smug at not having to kill another being just to feed themselves.
I'm not veggie or vegan but, their morals of sustainable living etc do seem a little better than most of the meat eaters.

Fundamentally, if you have to produce food, to feed up animals, so that you can eat them - by producing plant based food for humans to eat and effectively cutting a link out of the food chain, you can feed more people, which, at some point may prove critical.
However, in a cruel twist of irony, this would mean the end of the livestock trade and we would probably end up concreting over even more of the countryside.

I would love to go vegan but like meat too much so massive respect to those that can do it