This Vegan Thing Is Going Quite Well

The rather surprising amount of bad cholesterol in me inspired me to see what would happen if I cut it. Being a huge cheese fan and Trader Joe's just having opened near me, with its utopically cheap Stilton (always a bit of a Brit, you know), I kind of upped the ante on that before the holidays. And being a huge cheese fan I've never gone all the way before. So here are my conclusions after about three weeks:

1) The unpleasant hypocrisy of eating animals has gone.
2) I feel “lighter”—groan, that's what they all say isn't it?
3) There is some kind of reward response in your dopamine to eating things with cholesterol. Once you've kicked that the vegan thing is very pleasant—in a different, less rapidly cycling way.

3) Isn't surprising given that your cell walls use cholesterol. I imagine that humans have developed all those savory, salty cover-ups for cholesterol like mold on Stilton as a way to make it even more palatable. After you eat it, your body for sure says “Hey, well done! You did something right!”

I ate a small cube of cheese early on in this process and the absence of cholesterol in my diet made the taste of a liquid cloud of fat palpable—for the first time in my life, that wasn't nice.