Go Leasha! I would love to give you the push that sends you over the edge.

First, I would say gradual weaning is not the way I would recommend to go. Even though every meat free meal is an awesome step for the Earth, if you're serious about it, I would say to go cold turkey for a month, and see how you go. If you do it that way, you'll get a better of what the challenges are.

Second, I love meat too. I fricken loooooooved meat. Lordy do I miss salami. But the stuff I miss the most is the stuff my body needs the least. I can't even begin to tell you how much healthier I have been since I've been vegetarian. Doubly so since I've been vegan, but let's not get too extreme yet.

Slow cooker is your friend as a vego, and, I reckon, in Qld as well. It's a great and easy way to cook your beans and lentils, so you get heaps of iron and protein, and having that gentle heat going all day is so much better in the Qld heat than slaving over a hot stove for an hour or so. Yuck. Potentially solves your getting home from work late issues too.

I could go on for hours and hours and hours about this. i will, I always will, if you want me to. I have about a billion recipes to share too. See if you can get Shel to agree to a meat free month. You may very well find that you don't miss it at the end of it. OR, as Mel said, you might find that you do miss it, but when you go back it doesn't taste as amazing as you remember.

xx Your personal vegie coach (sorrry Mel, gotta share the love )

Roryrory it was Peter Singer that tipped me! I had read Animal Liberation, and survived it, but then a friend asked me to take his copy to a talk to get it signed, took DH, and that was it. We went vego that night, even though there was steak in our freezer.

There's not much B12 in dairy, but eggs are a great source. In this house we take Thompson's sublingual tablets, they're delicious. B12 is formed by bacteria, which is where other mammals get their sources. The B12 in meat comes from those animals eating other excrement. Yum.