Chile Sostenible - Sustainable Chile: Join the Vegan Challenge

November is vegan month and a team of 6 brave people from the Santiago office decided to take-up "The Vegan Challenge".

The idea is simple: most of us eat way to much meat and dairy and trying to eat more veggie food for a few weeks is good for us (most vegans have a lower BMI than the average person and quite a few of us are overfed but undernourished) and for the planet (more info on the impact of livestock on global emissions can be found here).

The challenge had 3 categories:

GOLD - Full on vegan for 3 weeks
SILVER - Vegan before 19h. The idea is to eat vegan during the day and then have whatever you feel like for dinner.
BRONZE - The idea is to avoid meat and have at least 1 vegan meal per day. This meal cannot always be the same one: if one day it's breakfast, the next day it could be lunch or dinner.

The reasons for undertaking the challenge were varied: from trying to lose a little bit of weight or learning to eat more varied foods to a bet that went horribly wrong.

Several resources where put in place for the challenge:

A great movie to motivate all of us: Vegucated - very similar to "Supersize me" but the other way around!
3 vegan buddies were at hand to answer day to day questions (what to eat, where to buy food ingredients, exchange recipes...)
Some fancy websites with recipes (after all, we were not doing anything that Oprah had not already tried before!)
Doing this as a team. The most challenging thing about eating veggie food is dealing with the social component of food. Let's face it, chilean culture is not exactly vegetarian friendly at this point in time so doing this as a group was much easier.

The results? well, as it probably was to be expected, the results varied quite a lot! Some people loved it, they lost weight, felt much more energetic and they thoroughly enjoyed the chance to get creative with their meals. Others found that they could not stick to it as they travelled a lot and felt they could not be in control of what they ate. Some people found it very difficult to plan their meals as they were used to having food available everywhere and at all times (but the vegan options are often not so readily available in Santiago).

Overall though, it was a fun and enriching experience to try. Some photos here: