Let’s do a quick thought experiment.

Why do two different products have different prices? What determines the price of a thing?

How about we make it more specific. Take chocolate.

You may have noticed that there is a difference between a Hershey Bar and that $4 artisanal bar of organic fair trade dark chocolate that supports Amazon Rainforest protection.

Not only is there a difference in quality, but there is a BIG difference in price. That Hershey Bar is made in a factory, in an industrial process that has used every modern tool to create efficiencies and reduce costs. The least amount of resources are used to maximize profit.

That artisanal $4 bar was likely made my hand in a much more traditional, lower tech way. It was less efficient to produce and thus costs waaaay more.

What does this have to do with cows?

Well there is this notion that many environmentalists have that grass-fed beef is somehow better for the environment than industrial beef.

Now before I go any further let me be clear: I am not saying anything about the ethical or nutrient differences between the two products. Those can be discussed in later posts.

Why was industrial animal agriculture created? Why has it done so well to the point where 99% of animals raised for food in the United States are raised on industrial farms?

If it’s one thing industrial agriculture does well it’s efficiency.

It treats the farm like a factory.

That certainly leads to some pretty nasty unintended consequences (this is where the ethical conversation applies), but treating animals like inputs and outputs in a factory has created a very efficient system.

Meat can be delivered for cheap.

That’s why you get 12 nuggets for $0.99 or two burgers for $1.49.

Use pasture raised chickens and grass-fed beef for those items and you’d be paying 5-10 times as much for your lunch!

So what does this have to do with the environment?

In terms of the environment efficiency is usually a good thing. A more fuel-efficient car saves you money and also emits fewer greenhouse gases per mile on the road.

A more efficient air-conditioner does the same, just like a more efficient thermostat, heater, laptop, or refrigerator.

Well from a greenhouse gas perspective cows are no different, and in this analogy believe it or not, industrial cows are the hybrids.

They use fewer inputs (energy) to produce the same output as a grass-fed cow.

That’s why it’s cheaper.

Grass-fed cows also need far more land than industrial corn-fed cows. It’s another inefficiency of grass-fed cattle, and another reason why their meat costs more.

This means that most people cannot afford grass-fed meat, making it a less viable solution for meeting current demand for meat. There’s no question that switching to only grass-fed animals would have some benefits, but one outcome would be far reduced meat consumption.

Don’t get me wrong — neither are a good way of feeding 8 billion humans and growing. Cows are inherently inefficient converters of solar energy. Solar energy converted to plant energy can feed billions of humans.

In fact, the food fed to the world’s cattle would feed an additional 8.7 billion humans if we fed people directly instead of through a cow first.

But at least when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, the grass-fed cow is more like the Cadillac than the Prius.

Years before I went vegan I was vegetarian, and for the longest time my last major holdout was cheese.

The stuff is admittedly delicious.

And even though I knew it was horrible for my health, the environment, and the cows, I felt as though I was addicted.

Knowing this and wanting to be vegan, I tried to find good substitutes. After all, veggie burgers weaned me off beef, almond milk was more delicious to me than cow’s milk, and even other fake meats sufficed in times when I was really jonesing.

So one summer on Cape Cod, my friends and I picked up a package of “rice cheese.” This was 6 or 7 years ago and this seemed to be the best available option on the shelf.

We took it back to our house and opened up a few slices to try.

And it. was. disgusting.

Truly gross. Terrible flavor, awful texture. Just unpalatable.

We tossed the slice out onto a trail in the woods (we lived on a nature sanctuary). Over the next few days I’d pass this slice everyday on my walk to work, and after a week it hadn’t been touched.

Not one bite, nibble. No insect or ants swarming. Nothing.

It was clear. Nature had decided. THIS IS NOT FOOD.

In that moment I declared “I guess cheese is just the one thing they can’t replicate.”

I resigned myself to needing to simply give up that flavor altogether in order to be vegan, and it took me a few years before I could finally let it go.

Well, the funny thing is a lot has changed in the last 6 or 7 years. Not only have meat substitutes become so good they trick meat eaters (I just tricked an entire Final Four party with Gardein Chik’n Tenders — no one could tell they weren’t meat!), but cheese substitutes have officially arrived.

There are a few brands I’ve tried and actually enjoy. Daiya was the original brand where I started to think “ok maybe they’re onto something…”

The latest is Follow Your Heart. My parents love this stuff and while I’m staying with them I have to say I indulge as well. The flavor and texture is spot on.

More artisanal options are popping up everyday as well. In Minneapolis the world’s first vegan butcher shop, The Herbivorous Butcher, sells incredible vegan cheeses that I promise you would fool your most diehard cheese addict.

And in New York and L.A. vegan cheese shops are popping up everywhere.

It appears 2016 is the year to surrender to vegan cheese.

As an illustration of just how good these alternatives are, I present the case of my father.

Growing up he and I shared a Sunday afternoon tradition where we would make what he dubbed the “perfect lunch,” which was a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.

Long after I went vegan he kept this tradition alive, and I was bummed I could no longer participate.

Those days are over.

Today his perfect lunches are entirely vegan! He’s switched to Annie’s vegan tomato soup (which he claims is better than his beloved Campbell’s!) and his grilled cheese sandwiches are now entirely made with Follow Your Heart vegan cheeses!

Wow!

Incredible.

If he’s making vegan grilled cheese sandwiches and still calling in the “perfect lunch,” you can bet this stuff is good.

If cheese is your last holdout before going vegan, or maybe ditching dairy is your first step into veganism, explore the world of vegan cheeses. We are lightyears away from the days of rice cheese rotting on a wooded trail. This stuff is good.

COWSPIRACY: http://www.cowspiracy.com/
EARTHLINGS: http://www.nationearth.com/
FORKS OVER KNIVES: http://www.forksoverknives.com/

Note: This video contains some footage from each of these documentaries. I do not own this footage, but use it to urge others to see these life-changing documentaries! Please watch them! Cowspiracy and Forks Over Knives are NOW STREAMING on NETFLIX! Earthlings can be purchased through their website linked above!

Are you a glass half full kinda person or do you see it as half empty? If you are like me, you see it half full.

That is the approach I take to eating out as a vegan. There are certainly times when it is more difficult than others, but my experience in 90% of cases is very positive and easy.

That is, if you live in a big city.

But we’ll get to that. My glass half full experience eating out goes like this: when you are vegan, the menu shrinks considerably.

For many people it can be frustrating to have so few options, and I will admit when I go to a vegan restaurant where the full menu is available to me, I am almost overwhelmed and also overjoyed to have so many choices.

But there’s a catch — sometimes choice isn’t a good thing.

The Paradox of Choice

Have you ever heard of the paradox of choice? There is an excellent TED talk on the subject by psychologist Barry Schwartz (watch).

In it he discusses how more is not always better when it comes to choice. I won’t spoil his talk for you, but one example he uses is salad dressings in the grocery store.

If you go to a full supermarket in the United States and stand in front of the salad dressings you may be alarmed to find tens if not hundreds of choices. Twenty different brands offering ten different dressings each — how do you possibly choose?

Some may say, “this is amazing! God bless America for giving us 200 salad dressings to choose from!”

But the research paints a very different picture. The research suggests that you will be far less happy with your choice than if you only had just a handful of dressings to choose from.

With 200 options, you have a 1 in 200 chance of selecting the “optimal” dressing. When you get home and try it out, you will likely be thinking about the other 199 you passed up and wondering if you made the right selection. This likely won’t be a conscious thought, but it will influence how satisfied you are with your decision.

If you only had a handful of choices however, you will feel more confident that you selected the right dressing, and you will feel happier about it. So say the respondents of surveys.

Enter Vegan Eating

Is it just me or have menus in America ballooned from one or two columns to six or seven pages of two to three columns each? There are simply too many items to choose from!

If you are an omnivore and you are reading this, when was the last time you sat down at a restaurant, looked over the menu, selected something to order and immediately closed the menu without second guessing it? I’d wager it doesn’t happen too often.

The reality is you are likely to select something, then have a friend tell you what they are thinking about ordering, then you reconsider yours, then you ask yourself the impossible question of “what do I really want right now,” then you have to scan the menu with your nebulous answer to this question loosely held in your mind, only to find now you have three or four items you are choosing between, and then the waiter comes and your friends are ready and you say “oh just start and by the time they get to me I’ll have decided,” thinking that the pressure of a time deadline will force a moment of clarity, only to discover you are no closer to making a decision than you were a moment ago, because your foolproof strategy only really bought you about 10 seconds, so now, feeling the pressure from your friends, the waiter, and every other patron in the establishment you blurt out almost at random one of the three dishes you have narrowed down from the 97 choices, hoping and praying, dear god, did I make the right choice…then you sit there in the agonizing twenty minutes before your food comes, convincing yourself that you are absolutely sure that you chose wrong and were really craving the soup and salad and by the time your food comes you are disappointed because you know it isn’t what you wanted and you sit with the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you could have been that much happier had you ordered something different, and now you pin your hopes on dessert where the menu is much shorter, only 12 options, and the cycle repeats itself until you go insane and swear off all future dining out excursions and decide to make your own meals from scratch from now on and so you head to the grocery store ready to make that darn salad you were craving only to find there are 200 salad dressings waiting on a shelf for you that you have to choose from.

Ever been there before?

Well for better or worse, it’s not like this as a vegan.

Our menu gets instantly shrunk the second we sit down to look at it. Depending on the restaurant and style of food, it may get shortened to literally one item, or zero if you forgot to read the menu before arriving at the restaurant (#ProTip). Most of the time, in a city, at a restaurant that isn’t a steakhouse, you are likely left with somewhere between three and ten options. There’s always a salad, that’s your fall back. Oddly, you almost always have to say “no cheese, no meat please.”

But at Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Ethiopian, Middle Eastern, etc, there are usually several options that are vegan or can be easily made vegan. Indian cooking can definitely have ghee (clarified butter) or cheese or yogurt, so always ask the waiter how your food is prepared (#ProTip).

Some restaurants will “finish” their dishes with butter, which just means they douse it with melted butter right before serving you. — gross!

Always ask.

Mexican is also relatively easy, as you can usually order rice and beans a la carte, with some salsa, guacamole, tortillas, etc. Again, always ask, as some refried beans have lard in them, and occasionally tortillas do as well.

Nearly every Mexican place will have veggie fajitas as well, which you can get without sour cream and cheese. Remember, the vegetables may be cooked in butter, so ASK!

Pizza places are almost always more than happy to make you a cheese-less pie, as they are used to people with dairy allergies. So ask!

Sushi is great, just get veggie rolls Some miso soup is made with a seafood broth, though I think it’s rare, but ask anyway. Also some Asian-style sauces use fish sauce, ask.

Another #ProTip: download the Happy Cow app. It is incredible, especially when traveling, as it will tell you all the vegan friendly restaurants in the area!

When eating out is hard

I recently took a weekend trip to Cape Cod, MA, a place known for their seafood. I struggled.

Eating out in cities as a vegan is incredibly easy. In rural parts of America it’s near impossible at times. I ended up ordering a loaf of bread at breakfast, a cheese-less pizza for lunch (delicious!), and a side order of grilled potatoes and grilled mixed vegetables for dinner.

I swore to my friends “it’s not usually this hard.” But it happens, and you have to take your lumps. If you believe in what you are doing, it isn’t so hard. And the more restaurants encounter vegans who are willing to assert their needs, the more it will get easier. In fact the day after I got back I read a headline about dozens of Cape restaurants that were trying out new vegan entrees in October — ah just missed it!!

Eating out as a vegan in 2015 is easier than it ever has been, and all signs point to this trend continuing. For now, enjoy the small menu that affords you the luxury of not being paralyzed by too many choices! Read the menu ahead of time, always ask how your food is being prepared, and don’t be afraid to order off menu if need be. It will only get easier next year

For more on foods you don’t have to give up as a vegan, check out my video!: 5 Foods You Don’t Have To Give Up As A Vegan!

And stay tuned next week for the second part of the Vegan How To series, where we will discuss what to look for on labels.

I have shared a bit about my personal weight loss story, on my website and in my videos, however I have been a little bit vague about the details. This has not been intentional, but rather a reflection of how it happened.

See, I didn’t actually try to lose any weight at all! I was invested in my personal health and weight loss happened. I like to put it like this; “weight loss is a symptom of a healthy lifestyle.”

I simply improved the quality of my diet and lost weight as a result. That’s all well and good, but I do want to provide some specifics about how I actually lost the weight.

Ditch The Dairy.

When I think back to my weight loss/health journey, there is a very clear inflection point. It happened in 2012 and has nothing to do with Mayan prophecies.

I was nearing my heaviest weight of my life and was about to start a graduate program for health promotion management. I was passionate about health and actually thought I ate pretty good.

I was officially a “pescatarian” — a vegetarian who eats seafood (aka an oxymoron) — though I only really ate seafood once a month or so. For the most part, for about 99% of my meals, I was a straight up vegetarian.

That meant in addition to eating plant-based foods I also ate milk, cheese, ice cream, yogurt, and eggs.

But here’s the thing — I switched to almond and soy milk in 2008, so I never drank milk. And I stopped buying yogurt for the house in like 2009. And I stopped eating eggs straight up in like 2010. And it’s not like I ate tons of ice cream (though I won’t say I avoided it either).

So really my diet was like 98% vegan + cheese.

Ah yes, cheese was my sticking point, as I think it is for so many people.

So in early 2012, at my heaviest, I was cheese addicted. I admit it.

And then I watched Forks Over Knives, twice actually. And upon the second viewing decided that I needed to go “vegan at home.” Up until this point I was buying cheese for my home-cooked meals and eating cheese, ice cream, and eggs in things at restaurants.

I wasn’t yet ready to go fully vegan but I was ready to go “vegan at home,” meaning stop bringing any animal products into the home to cook with or eat. And since I was a poor grad student I ate most of my calories at home. But, I was still grabbing slices of pizza occasionally when out, and not freaking out if an entree I ordered had a little parmesan or something.

Here’s the kicker:

This seemingly small change caused me to lose 20 pounds!

Was I eating massive amounts of cheese prior to this change? Well I feel safe here.. but I have nothing to confess — I don’t think my cheese consumption was exorbitant.

And yet it was like something clicked in my body and the pounds just started coming off effortlessly. Seriously.

So, here are 10 reasons why you should #DitchTheDairy for good right now!

Bottom line: you don’t need dairy in your life. It’s bad for your health, terrible for the cows, and awful for the environment.

Switch to plant-based milks (almond, coconut, soy, etc), plant-based yogurts and ice creams made with those products, and if you are hankering for cheese still after you’ve kicked the addiction, try nutritional yeast or GoVeggie “Parm” and Daiya or homemade vegan cheese substitutes! I don’t miss it one bit, and I love the way I feel being dairy free

Dairy was the last animal product to go from my diet, but in all honesty I’d recommend it as the first for anyone only willing to cut one out.

Related Post: How To Replace Dairy In Your Diet