2012 - yes, 2012 was the year it came together.  2011 is the year I started cleaning up my act after seeing this wonderful helpful wellness doctor (Mimi, SheIsWell.com) for several months - I learned a bunch of things (she changed my life in so many ways) about me:

• DIET COKE IS POISONOUS! Remember my post on that from 2011?  Every time I have ever accidentally had a drink w the fake sugars in it - it's reconfirmed each and every time.  BAD.
• Beef.  Meat and Arry do not go well together, particularly beef, rabbit, and pork.  I really dislike the taste of chicken and pork any ways, so no big deal.  Over the past year, every time I think I'm having a craving reminiscing about my once love for delicious hamburgers... and I eat one, I end up with nausea, deep aggravating sickness where I gag with each breath of air and I go stumbling around gasping for something bubbly ginger ale to stop the sickness.
• Alcohol.  My love for boozing and schmoozing was not helpful to my health.  My liver was not functioning - and with each toxic super processed "food" I ate, each dirty martini I ingested, and the late night hot dogs and pizza was being compounded on top of the last toxic thing I had put into my body to exponentially disable my body further and further away from health...  I still struggle with this.  I try to manage it by minimizing my time out on the social scene.  
• Dairy.  Oh dairy.  Cheese.  Pizza!  Cream cheese.  Sour cream.  Yogurt.  ...  I used to and still do LOVE the taste of these wonderful decadent dairy products...  However, as I started cleaning up my act and my awareness of how much what I ate or drank was affecting my health and happiness...  (similar to the feelings of nausea when I eat certain very rich meats), I would notice this disturbing gross unpleasant after-taste whenever I ate dairy.  WHY!? I have no idea...  it doesn't go away very easily either.  Experience this a few too many times, I've learned to dislike dairy - dislike what it does to me.  My nutrition major friends at Cornell would tell me, "dairy is for baby calves - not human adults".  I should have listed to them a decade ago.
• Processed ____.  Bread.  Cookies.  Refined sugars.  Pasta.  All sorts of processed machine genetically modified chemically enhanced non-foods are not good for me.  Pasta is my weakness - so I still eat pasta (but the super kinds made from Quinoa and quality grains).  The other stuff - tastes pretty good going down, but then when I started becoming more and more aware of what I was eating, it seemed to be counter-intuitive to be putting that sort of stuff into myself after all the other efforts I was putting in.  After all, (see list above), I learned that there are some unsavory-once-thought-to-be-delicious things I used to enjoy eating that were no longer enjoyable and helpful to me. 
  

So where does that leave me?  It leaves me mostly vegan (because I'm human).  I've been mostly vegan for about a year now and have been becoming more and more so to this day.  I feel healthier.  Cleaner.  ... and then learning, reading, watching more about the way food is produced today... well, as you know, they say ignorance is bliss...  So what do I do as I get to know more and more... 

I have a choice: 1) make a change or 2) pretend to be ignorant and continue on.  Decided to make the change - and thankfully, my husband is in full support.  I'm healthier, happier, less sick, supporting the other mammals who have feelings (like my sweet Mochi puppy), and... lessening our carbon footprint.  :)

~Arry