Vegan Experience

About

(THE NEW NEWS)
This is no longer an "experiment" and has become an "experience" so I'm changing the name.
Also I'm now on a quest to loose weight while being a vegan on Weight Watchers.





STATS:
Height - 5'9"
HW:204 (1-1-2011)
SW: 199.8 (3-10-11) Day started WW
CW: 171
UGW:140 ish -I'll know when I get there

WEEK 43

22 inches lost
Old dress size 20/ New Dress size 10

5% Lost Goal - (met 4-14-11)
10% Lost Goal - (met 5-19-11)
G#1: 186 New Sandals (met 4-21-11)
G#2: 174 - Clean out old clothes (met 6-9-11)
G#3: 160 - Get my Momma/Baby panda Tattoo
G#4: 150 - (I'm not setting a reward for this.. it doesn't need one..150 is reward enough)
End Goal: BE HEALTHY and stay that way! (not sure what weight that is.. I'll know it when it happens)

Weigh Day = Thursday

(THE OLD NEWS)
It started as a four week trip into the world of a vegan diet as an experiment for hubby's job...
... the trip is now ongoing and we are learning as we go.
Along for the ride is our non vegan offspring who thinks chicken is a major food group.
This blog is about what we ate..what we found.. and what we have learned as we go...as well as a little kid torture (that's what parents are for right?)


mohandasgandhi: I’ve posted information about this issue before but I want to bring it up again, particularly in lieu of the lawsuit against Chicago over their egregious mismanagement of water supplies and invasive species, most notably, the asian carp. This article from The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel features a number of infographics and highlights the new reality faced by Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes in general: Today, for the first time since the 1800s, there are no commercial fishing boats operating out of Milwaukee. The boats are gone because the fish are gone. Our lake might appear from the shore as blue and beautiful as ever, but that’s not the lake Dan Anderson sees through eyes creased and scorched from decades spent on the water and under the sun. He sees a liquid desert. Lake Michigan is essentially devoid of life and its natural species have been driven out by overfishing (but by a much lesser degree) and invasive species, most notably the zebra mussel, the quagga mussel, and the asian carp. David Lodge disagrees with me slightly: The historic harvest rates were unsustainable, but that’s not the problem today. “The decline of the (commercial) fishery going on right now in Lake Michigan and Huron doesn’t have anything to do with overfishing,” says David Lodge, a biologist and Great Lakes expert at the University of Notre Dame. “Clearly, that was a major driver in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that’s not what’s going on now. Now it’s changes in the food web that appear to be driven by invasive mussels.” The primary suspect is the quagga mussel, which arrived in the Great Lakes as a stowaway in the ballast tanks of freighters that carried them across the Atlantic. Still a rare find in Lake Michigan until just several years ago, the mollusks mysteriously and suddenly went viral. Today they smother the bottom of the lake almost from shore to shore, and their numbers are estimated at 900 trillion. Along the way they virtually have eliminated from the lake their better known cousins, the zebra mussels, which also arrived as hitchhikers aboard ocean freighters. Each Junior Mint-size quagga can filter up to a liter of water per day, stripping away the plankton that for thousands of years directly and indirectly sustained the lake’s native fish. Much of that food supply has now been sucked to the lake bottom; for every pound of prey fish swimming in the lake today, there are an estimated three or four pounds of quaggas clustering on the lake bed. “In the last five years, the base of the food web in Lake Michigan has changed more than any other time in the last thousand years,” says Gary Fahnenstiel, an ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 900 trillion sounds unbelievable, right? My family had a cottage on Lake Michigan for several decades and the mussels have completely taken over aquatic life. There came a year when nearly every square inch of the lake bottom was covered with these things, almost as if it occurred overnight. The beaches are now composed of the mussel’s shells, covering the limestone ridge created by glaciers millions of years ago that extends all the way to Niagara Falls. They’re a nuisance for humans because they’re like little razorblades and they cling to nearly everything, however, their greater nuisance lies in their devastating effect on marine life. It’s absolutely incredible how quickly these little creatures wiped out the lake. I saw it within my lifetime and I’m still rather young. This is why we have to be careful and treat our ecosystems with delicate care. One small mistake can wipe out an entire food web in the blink of an eye.

mohandasgandhi:

I’ve posted information about this issue before but I want to bring it up again, particularly in lieu of the lawsuit against Chicago over their egregious mismanagement of water supplies and invasive species, most notably, the asian carp.

This article from The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel features a number of infographics and highlights the new reality faced by Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes in general:

Today, for the first time since the 1800s, there are no commercial fishing boats operating out of Milwaukee.

The boats are gone because the fish are gone.

Our lake might appear from the shore as blue and beautiful as ever, but that’s not the lake Dan Anderson sees through eyes creased and scorched from decades spent on the water and under the sun.

He sees a liquid desert.

Lake Michigan is essentially devoid of life and its natural species have been driven out by overfishing (but by a much lesser degree) and invasive species, most notably the zebra mussel, the quagga mussel, and the asian carp. David Lodge disagrees with me slightly:

The historic harvest rates were unsustainable, but that’s not the problem today.

“The decline of the (commercial) fishery going on right now in Lake Michigan and Huron doesn’t have anything to do with overfishing,” says David Lodge, a biologist and Great Lakes expert at the University of Notre Dame.

“Clearly, that was a major driver in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that’s not what’s going on now. Now it’s changes in the food web that appear to be driven by invasive mussels.”

The primary suspect is the quagga mussel, which arrived in the Great Lakes as a stowaway in the ballast tanks of freighters that carried them across the Atlantic. Still a rare find in Lake Michigan until just several years ago, the mollusks mysteriously and suddenly went viral.

Today they smother the bottom of the lake almost from shore to shore, and their numbers are estimated at 900 trillion.

Along the way they virtually have eliminated from the lake their better known cousins, the zebra mussels, which also arrived as hitchhikers aboard ocean freighters.

Each Junior Mint-size quagga can filter up to a liter of water per day, stripping away the plankton that for thousands of years directly and indirectly sustained the lake’s native fish.

Much of that food supply has now been sucked to the lake bottom; for every pound of prey fish swimming in the lake today, there are an estimated three or four pounds of quaggas clustering on the lake bed.

“In the last five years, the base of the food web in Lake Michigan has changed more than any other time in the last thousand years,” says Gary Fahnenstiel, an ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

900 trillion sounds unbelievable, right? My family had a cottage on Lake Michigan for several decades and the mussels have completely taken over aquatic life. There came a year when nearly every square inch of the lake bottom was covered with these things, almost as if it occurred overnight. The beaches are now composed of the mussel’s shells, covering the limestone ridge created by glaciers millions of years ago that extends all the way to Niagara Falls. They’re a nuisance for humans because they’re like little razorblades and they cling to nearly everything, however, their greater nuisance lies in their devastating effect on marine life. It’s absolutely incredible how quickly these little creatures wiped out the lake. I saw it within my lifetime and I’m still rather young.

This is why we have to be careful and treat our ecosystems with delicate care. One small mistake can wipe out an entire food web in the blink of an eye.

(via therecipe)

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