I'd like to stop eating meat, but i still live with my parents and my mom who's a doctor already has a problem with me not eating much meat (also because i'm very thin) and she could never accept me being vegetarian. I know that i'll stop eating meat when i move out of home. For now, i can skip eating meat for several days and then eat some once in a while and limit myself to only some ham , chicken or fish, from time to time. Since i was little i always found it hard to eat meat, imagining animals being killed to be eaten and i could never even watch animals being killed in the movies , but i believed what was always said in my family, that men need meat and have a huge lack of proteins if they don't eat meat. That's what most people are conditioned to think. Now i've overcome that conditionment and understood that isn't true and how we don't need meat to be healthy, i understood that with the help of psychedelics and also by the example of some vegetarian friends who are perfectly healthy. Like already said, it's important to find a balance in everything we eat or do. Thanks for this thread,some very interesting information is contained in it, some answers really helped me find more of a rational proof for what i already intuitively know and i'm also enthousiastic to find so many vegetarian or vegan people at the same place. It'd be nice if it helped me to convince my parents, but they're so blinded for some things, that they wouldn't want to hear it at all.
Many people also justify themselves by saying that it's the natural cycle of life and that animals also kill eachothers to survive. If we act like that, than we should consider ourselves equal to animals. Even if we want to cosider ourselves equal to animals then if we really want to kill them for our pleasure or survival, we should do it by ourselves, without the use of weapons which make it easier, like they do. If we feel stronger and subject animals to our will only because they're weaker, that is exactly the same thing as slavery or treatement against Jews in the WWII. But if we consider ourselves superior to animals, why is that? Because we are more aware, have a higher state of consciousness. If that's true,one of the best proofs of a higher consciousness is not harming other beings for our simple pleasure.I think the humanity isn't there yet, but i believe it is the next step (at least in the more developed parts of the world).
Saying that it would be logical for me to be a vegetarian, otherwise i'm not really true to myself, but i know it's one thing to understand things in theory and another to integrate them fully in our lives and act on them, which is often the problem. At least i'm trying my best and know i'm on a good way toward it, it's just a question of time.