Why would anyone want to be a vegan?

A very commonly asked question, "Why would someone ever want to be a vegan? They can't eat anything but salads, and it's not healthy."

First off, there are TONS of reasons to be a vegan, and those two statements are entirely untrue, vegans can eat almost any dish that an omnivore can, just by not putting in the meat, or eggs, or dairy (or whatever else) Or they could put in a substitute! There is probably a vegan substitute for just about everything non-vegan, I'm not promising all of them will be realistic or good though.

Also, veganism is usually a lot healthier than an omnivorous diet. It lowers blood sugar, lowers cholesterol, usually lower in fat, and many other things.

The myths of vegans not getting protein is also not true, it's extremely easy to get enough protein, and most people actually get too much of it, in fact, I think it would be pretty hard to not get enough protein, unless you're living off of salads and potato chips, which wouldn't be good for anyone.

Here is my personal experience with veganism, and also the two friends that went vegan with me also said similar things happened to them, we did it pretty casually just a "Hey, I'm kind of curious about veganism, I'm thinking about going vegan for a week, do you want to do it with me?" "Sure, that sounds cool." And then after that week we said "That's not too bad, it's not actually that hard, do you guys want to keep going?" "Yeah, lets see how it goes." and then after about two months of it, our bodies had flushed out all of the nasty stuff it had gotten from meat and animal products, and we felt GREAT, we felt so wonderful, had so much energy, and felt so healthy!  And we're all still vegan, and never planning on going back, we also got a new friend to try out veganism. :)

Here are some more "official" reasons to go vegan.

http://www.nursingdegree.net/blog/19/57-health-benefits-of-going-vegan/
http://www.goveg.com/factoryFarming.asp
http://www.goveg.com/healthConcerns.asp
http://www.goveg.com/environment.asp
http://www.goveg.com/theissues.asp

Here are some guides to going vegetarian or vegan:

http://www.goveg.com/vegetarian101.asp
http://www.vegcooking.com/makingthetransition.asp

There are also WAY more links that could help you, but I don't think you'd be likely to read hundreds of links.

Hope this post was helpful to all of you thinking about going vegan (or just started thinking about it from reading this)! There is one thing that I don't recommend doing, and that's going from omnivore to vegan, you should at least be a vegetarian for a month before going vegan, otherwise your body will go through withdrawal, and make you probably give up.