I have been a vegetarian since I was a teenager, so in fact about half my life!

I never liked meat or fish, and once I realised that the meat was dead, the idea of dead things just freaked me out, so I stopped eating them.

As I have got older my diet has become much healthier. At first I ate a lot of carbs (pasta with tomato sauce was one of my staple dinners), whereas now I eat a lot more protein in the form of beans, some quorn, nuts, seeds, yoghurt, lentils, quinoa, tofu….I never even used to like beans on toast!

I find it hard when on holiday (especially in Europe where they don’t understand it- like the royal family “what about wafer thin ham?), and I don’t like going for dinner at other people’s houses as I don’t want to be the fussy awkward one . Plus I get annoyed in restaurants when they claim a dish is vegetarian but then it has parmesan (one of the few cheeses that is always made with animal rennet).

I don’t mind other people eating meat, my boyfriend eats meat and we cook it at home, so I never try to stop anyone eating meat. But to me the idea of something dead getting into me is quite horrible, so we would always cook meat and my things in separate pots/ dishes as I don’t want any of the meat “juice” leaking into my food.

I do eat eggs (free range eggs or ones from my Mum’s chickens), and I have milk and yoghurt (organic because I don’t want loads of antibiotics in my system and the animals are cared for better). It does not cause many problems because now I know which products are veggie friendly (and lots of companies are happy to help- I recently had some goats cheese which didn’t say either way, so I emailed them and they replied to say they only even used veggie rennet)- the hardest ones are yoghurt because of the gelatine and also the cochineal.

Typical meals for me would be oat based breakfast (either porridge or bircher/ normal muesli and fruit), lunch might be home-made soup, or a sandwich (tofu/ cream cheese/ nut spread) with some veggies and a piece of fruit. Dinners include bean and vegetable bake things, bean chilli, mexican bean wrap with kidney beans and veggies, pasta with home-made sauce or pesto and veggies (have not made a good home-made pesto yet), or quinoa/ lentil based bakes. For snacks I would have cereal bars (but good ones like nakd or seed stacked, not special K and whatnot), dried fruit and nuts, or oatcakes.

I do baking, but limit this to the weekend; in the week if I fancy a sweet dessert (most days!) I might have yoghurt or soya yoghurt with something sprinkled on top (hello Bear Granola), something stirred in (eg linwoods cocoa berries mix), and maybe some fruit in there too. Or sometimes some dark chocolate.

So there you go