mrsbadmouth

I have three dogs and three cats, you'll never get me out of there.

That's easy. Best $20 I ever spent, in the parking lot of a Walmart!

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7048/6936957425_0d50d6587f.jpg

Chester getting a heating pad after having hip surgery.

The $20 went to animal control, he was already fixed and four years old so he was on discount.

Hello, fellow Buffy fan!

Just watching the commercials for P90X2 scares me. Pushups. On. BALLS. On the other hand, a whole fresh set of Tony's bad jokes is tempting...

It depends on where you're looking, but a lot of college students have yearly leases but want to leave in the summer, so they sublet. Craigslist has a sublet section.

Yeah, silk isn't a big deal and I didn't even know the dress I have was partially silk until I looked at the tag the first time I needed to wash it. Usually I can tell when things are silk now, or have wool or bunny hair in them. The only difficult thing when it comes to silk is trying to find affordable ties.

I don't live in Denver, but have you heard of Vegan Coloradical?

http://www.vegancoloradical.com

Keep using them or donate them. I have a black dress that is partially silk, i've had it for almost ten years and I keep it around because it is pretty forgiving if I lose or gain weight and I only wear it if I need to go to a funeral or something else dressy and requiring black. I absolutely hate shopping and hate trying to find dress clothes even more, so unless it falls apart or a cat pukes on it, i'm keeping it. I had a few wool sweaters which itched like crazy anyway, so I just took them to Goodwill, dropped them off, and then went in the store and bought a few new sweaters for a few bucks.

I guess the debate between keeping and donating depends on how much money you have to burn. If you can't afford to replace all of your animal-based items at once (and really, not most people can) just use them and replace them one at a time. It can be difficult to find really nice vegan dress shoes, and they are pricey. The same with nice vegan coats, it's really hard to find a pea coat in a standard store that isn't at least partially wool. I promised myself that I would suck it up and buy myself a Vaute Couture coat this year, when I first went vegan I was living in TN so I just wore hoodies all winter.

http://www.vautecouture.com

http://www.mooshoes.com

http://store.veganessentials.com/footwear-c3.aspx (if you check the sale section, sometimes there are shoes)

http://www.alternativeoutfitters.com

You can hate me too, that's your decision

But I already said that I didn't hate anyone, so I don't know why you keep saying this. Nevermind that you aren't the one who says that you hurt animals for fun so my post wasn't even addressing you.

No one can be 100% vegan, we're all fucking ourselves out of that title simply by using computers, and yes, most medications are tested on animals. Those are things that there aren't an alternative for. It's fairly easy to avoid household and personal products that aren't cruelty-free/vegan, and it's really easy to get clothes without silk/wool/leather. Like Richard said, you can buy stuff used. My husband bought a motorcycle and if there's one without leather seats, i've never seen one, but he got it used and then all of his gear is vegan (except his boots, which are from his military service and were issued to him, another example of something he couldn't avoid).

I don't hate anyone, I just take issue with someone saying they're vegan and then saying they still shoot animals and fish, which involves hurting the fish.

I'm sure one could try to argue that veganism is just about not eating or using animal products, but hunting and fishing is using animals for your entertainment, regardless of if you're eating them or not, regardless of your reasons for pursuing the vegan lifestyle. Being vegan for health doesn't make non-vegan things more vegan just because they don't personally concern you, is what i'm saying. Like if you wear leather and use all cleaners and personal products that are tested on animals and have things like carmine, lanolin, etc...those things aren't vegan (and most of them aren't healthy to put in/on your body).

My whole family hunts. I'm the only vegan in the family and I do it simply for health reasons. I was diabetic before I started eating vegan, and now I'm not. I have no problem going hunting because anything I kill will get eaten by my family. I don't bow hunt even though I am an Ojibwa, because I think bowhunting is barbaric. If you're going to kill something, do it quickly. I also fish, just because I really love it. We bass fish and we practice catch and release. Veganism is not a religion to me, it's a health choice. I think you're going to run into a lot of vegans like me because of Dr. Neal Barnard.

I am going to try and sound like as little of a judgmental asshole as possible, but it's probably not going to work.

I really hope that I don't run into a lot of 'vegans' that think it's okay to shoot animals and hurt them by sticking hooks in their mouths for fun. There is a difference between not eating animals (I believe that's why people started using the term 'plant based') and being vegan. Killing animals isn't vegan. It's like saying you're a pacifist right after you walked up to someone and punched them in the face.

Wait, a trainer told you that if you continue to work out five days a week and eat 2100 calories, you're going to get fat?

Wait, is eating feces NOT vegan?!

(Every time someone brings up B-12 I remember to pull the bottle out of my desk and pop one, so thanks!)

When I make tempeh bacon, I try to make a double or triple batch to use on sandwiches throughout the week. It might lose it's crispiness a little, but it reheats and tastes fine.

We got our first family computer when I was seven years old and I haven't gone more than maybe three days since then without touching one.

I guess I don't have a lot of devices, but that's because I don't have a lot of money. I have a Zune that's pretty old for an mp3 player, a cell phone that is a glorified alarm clock, a five year old laptop, my desktop, and if we're counting digital cameras, my rebel which is also five years old. We actually have two xboxes because we don't have cable and that's how we watch tv, one was my father-in-law's, he's a total gadget whore and when we ditched cable he told me I could have his to watch t.v. on. I also have an ipod touch that's a loaner so I can play games with people, that was also from my FIL because he got an iphone to go with his four other ipods, ipad, and he has docks and bluetooth speakers and every other accessory for each. He also gave us his old GPS so he could get a nicer one.

Basically, I don't buy new toys unless the old toys have broken, and all of the stuff I currently have has survived pretty well so it's all really out of date.

When i'm standing in line I usually go for the 'stare off and daydream' option.

Drew Barrymore was vegan? I know she was vegetarian and then started eating fish because her "body was craving protein" (eye roll right here).

Angelina Jolie's statement made me really mad because no one had heard about her supposed veganism until she decided to say it almost killed her.

And Natalie Portman's exact issue was that she was having trouble finding vegan baked goods for her cookie cravings. A millionaire. In LA. Having trouble. But she has always been wishy washy about being veg*n so that wasn't much of a surprise.

It only cheapens veagnism by grasping for any famous name to add to the roster of people to say "So-and-so is vegan, so you should be, too!"

 

Sometimes people will ask me what celebrities are vegan, and the only ones I will always say are 100% are Emily Deschanel and Joaquin Phoenix (oh, and Geezer Butler), because they're both long-term vegans and activists. Sometimes I will say Weird Al is 'almost vegan'. So many people announce their veganism, do work for Farm Sanctuary, then a year later they're on Jimmy Kimmel talking about bacon wrapped meatloaf or tweeting about how they had egg whites for breakfast (ahem, Ginnifer Goodwin and Bob Harper).

And yes it exciting when Ozzy and other people say they watched Forks Over Knives and changed their diet, but no-fat 'plant-based' eating is just the latest fad diet, and after the next new thing comes along, a lot of those people will follow that. But by publicly announcing these things, they're bound to influence readers to investigate veganism, and if even a few of them stick with it, there are more vegans in the world. Yay!

I'm not a fan of violent sex offenders and obviously I don't follow Mike Tyson around, but i'd like to think that people can change and be rehabilitated.

Maybe it's because i'm not wearing my glasses, but you look more like a troll.

There's a difference between being sure of yourself, and wanting to get in an argument. I know that veganism is a good thing, but to me it's a label, not what I "am". In reality, there's just a list of things that I'm against, and that can loosely be termed as veganism, in a simplistic way. If someone asks me if I am vegan, then for simplicity, I will say yes. But on the other hand, if someone says "will you eat this?" and I say "no" and they say "why?", I will say "because it's got X in it". I don't take the opportunity to say "because I am vegan" - that's not why in fact, it's just a label. To say "I don't do this because I am vegan", is like putting myself as part of a group, and then that person reacts, judging you on everything they think of vegans.

 

There's no need to take that leap, and I wait as long as possible for another reason: If someone gets to know you before they know you're vegan, they often have a better view of you because they have not had their view clouded by their preconceptions. Then once they eventually do find out, they already think you're a cool person, and veganism is then linked with you, rather than you being linked with veganism. So veganism looks better because of it.

 

It isn't about being apologetic, it's realistic. People on the whole don't understand veganism, and even have a problem with it (ridiculous). But that's where we're at at the moment. Confrontation and pride doesn't get through to many people in my experience.

I stand by what I said earlier, but I agree with you. I'm very non-confrontational, and i've been a vegetarian for 18 years so i've heard every joke and jab and it gets old. When I was a kid, most of it came from friends parents/my mom's friends and I had to be respectful, but now that i'm an adult I don't want to hear anyone's crap. I've been at my job in a very small, very conservative office for two years and no one knows that i'm vegan, I don't think they've even picked up that I don't eat meat. We never order pizza or things like that so it's been pretty easy to avoid, and if push came to shove i'd probably tell them that I have a dairy allergy (which isn't entirely untrue, I WILL get really sick).

I don't think i've ever responded to 'would you like x' with 'no, i'm vegan' because most people don't understand what that means. I usually just politely say 'no thank you', but sometimes people can be really jerky and persist. I went to a friends-of-a-friends birthday party, and my friend insisted on asking if the cake had eggs to see if I could eat it (I knew the answer was no), the hostess zoomed over to me with a cupcake and shoved it in my damn face and insisted it was okay because it's was only the egg whites (and y'know, milk). She was really bullying but I looked like the asshole.

 

But then again, vegan is a 'way of life' whereas plant-based diet refers only to eating habits and does not necessarily mean one is vegan.

And that is why I prefer the term 'vegan'. It's not just a diet for me.

I just mentioned on the ppk that I like Ginny because if she isn't sure about something, she will say so instead of making her own assumptions.

I let my father-in-law borrow it because he was looking into losing weight and was confused about all of the info against soy, so I marked that chapter from him. And when I pointed out that it was written by R.D.'s he said, "Yeah, I noticed that a lot of the articles online are really biased, like there was an anti-soy study I found that was funded by a dairy council!"

Shiny!

It's good to know that you do this with injuries, I have a lot of stuff that holds me back physically and i'm sticking with it but the progress is just so, so slow. And i'm not even going for a bodybuilder look!

I was in girl scouts but only for the camping trips!

Same here! We never set up in front of stores and honestly, I never really sold cookies either. My mom took the sign-up form to her office and for years no one had a Girl Scout but her so I got plenty of orders that way.

As soon as the bell ringers appear in front of my grocery store, I start entering through the Pharmacy door.

My eczema is actually worse in the summer, I think it's because i'm more active and I garden, so I am showering and washing my hands a lot more often (mine is almost exclusively on the palm of my left hand and my thumbs). Or should I say, the peeling skin is worse in the summer, I don't actually get more bumps in more places.

From years of dealing with it, I can tell you that the best thing anyone can do is destress, keep your skin moisturized with a good lotion, not some stinky crap from the mall (I like Nature's Gate), try not to overwash, switch out your soaps/laundry detergents for something gentle, and the hydrocoristone cream should help with the itching. I've never been officially treated for mine, but I believe if you go to the doctor they will give you a steroid cream.

I don't know about the night sweats, but excessive sweating is also thought to be a possible cause of eczema outbreaks. The kind that I have is usually linked to excessive sweating (but I actually don't sweat very much, so who knows):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyshidrosis

I found out that dairy was a big trigger for me, after I switched to soy milk and yogurt it got a LOT better. I've gone gluten-free and low sugar for periods of time and those don't seem to be an issue for me, but everyone is different.

Hmmm, is there something you didn't eat before being vegan that you now eat regularly? I have eczema and there's no one cause, but certain foods can exacerbate it. Stress seems to be the one universal trigger, and for me I avoid using soaps with artificial dyes and perfumes. Mine appeared long before I was vegan and I have no idea what suddenly triggered it (I was 17).

Here's some info about soy from a vegan RD:

http://www.theveganrd.com/2011/08/soy-isoflavones-and-estrogen.html