Hi, my name is Elena (or just Lena for short) and I'm from Russia. Recently I have been posting some vegan recipes on my instagram account and a lot of my friends must be thinking: "Why the heck is she posting them? Is she a vegan now or what?". Being a vegan here, in a small town in Russia is pretty freaky, I'd say. That's why some people are wondering what's going on and are asking me about my diet. That's a really long story though and I 'm still debating if I'd like to share it because it's very personal. However it might be useful to someone so I have decided I will post it here at least for now. I'll start telling the story and then see how it goes. It'll take not just a couple of posts though. I think I could write a whole book if I could, but I wasn't gifted with a writer's talent unfortunately. Otherwise I'd have billions of $$$ now. :D
Well, it's true, at the moment I am on a plant-based diet, i.e. I do not eat animal products (meat, milk, eggs, etc., by the way, I have not eaten meat for three years). The only thing - sometimes (very rarely) I do eat fish caught by my husband 🎣😄 No, not in a store 😜 But on the great Volga river, on the Vetluga river, on local carp tusks and so on. 👌 In addition, I excluded all products containing gluten and the refined sugar. 😨 So you see, I can't call myself a vegan and I don't really like various labels though.
So sometimes I go to a store, look at the counters and think: "What can I buy to eat? Hmm... Nothing." 😆 Well, okay, I do buy food in the local stores, but it takes just a few minutes because my way is usually laid from vegetables/fruits straight to groceries, then from groceries to checkout. 😃 However the trend of healthy food is growing here. The range of products in stores is expanding. 😃
My girlfriend often asks me: "What the heck do you eat?!" A lot of things, actually 😏 I would even say that now my diet is much more diverse than it was before I switched to this type of nutrition. Although, considering my body (which, by the way, has always been like that, pretty thin, more or less), you can really think that I only breathe and absorb the solar energy but this is far from the truth (I'm not with breatharians and not sure I'd like to be there 🙈).
Why have I switched to this type of diet? There are a lot of reasons. Everything that I have experienced, all the knowledge that I have received was put into one big puzzle which I still continue to resolve with interest. So let's start in order, or rather from my early childhood, from the very first memories. 😌
Surprisingly, in childhood, for me "vegetarians" were some kind of mythical creatures. They lived somewhere, no one knows where, in the mountains of the Himalayas 🗻, probably, but no one has ever seen them. 😄 At least in my life I have not met a single vegetarian (in any case, none of my friends declared their type of food, even if they were one of those creatures xD), until I finished my university and got a job...
To be continued... :D