Let’s everybody write their story here.
How did you become vegan/ vegetarian?
And why are you still vegan/vegetarian at the moment?
I wanna hear your story Andy! 
xDDx
Jesus!!! i don’t remember well… I was 11 when i started… to be more precise stopped eating meat.
Had to fight everybody around, to let me eat what I want! I was very lucky that my brother Sergio became veg 2 months after I did. together we could fight my parents easier… 
So how did I do it. Well it was that period of my life
when people usually ask a lot of questions like what is the sense of life, what is good and what is bad etc. I went through Bible, then through some Buddhist books, then some Dao so I got different ideas and answers to these err… question…
Also I was practicing martial arts… it happened so that I was going to Kung-Fu classes with guys much older then I was. And there were a couple of them visiting a Krishna temple and preaching about Krishna a lot. So thus happened the introduction to vegetarianism i.e. I found out that it is possible to
not eat meat and be healthy and what is not the least important strong. Cause the strongest guys from our club were vegetarians.
So how exactly did I stop?
Well… I was eating meat that day, probably wasn’t too hungry so I was playing in my plate with it. Looking at my food very carefully. Then at one moment I started noticing all these veins, the bones, muscle tissues the skin. And I thought: Shit!!! This is very similar to what I consist of… How can I eat it? I wouldn’t like to be eaten like this, so why do I do the same to others… There were a lot of other thoughts about this but since then I stopped eating meat…
That’s my story.
The End.
Cool story, thanks Andy!
Do you still practice martial arts?
I practice Jiu Jitsu - used to kickbox but had to “retire” because of a severe elbow injury (dislocation).
xDDx
Wow!!! No way! Do You practice Ju-jutsu!!? 
Wow! amazing!
I started to practice jiu-jitsu last spring it’s almost one year… And I just love it.
Here is a Ju-jutsu website I made for our Association:
I’ve always wanted to do martial arts but never had the guts to take a class. 
anyways… I was 11 too when I became veggie. I remember I was in the car with my mum, dad and sister on vacation in France. We were on the motorway and this huge lorry went past with hundreds of chickens in small cages, I asked my mum why there were so many chickens in the back of the lorry and she just smiled and said that they were probably going to the slaughter house to be killed for meat. That’s when it kind of hit me that i’d never really comprehended the meaning of ‘meat’, I was really mad at myself for never questioning it before, and thats how I became veggie, it wasn’t until 2 years later that I learnt about the horrific conditions and the suffering the animals go through, so that didn’t really have anything to do with my decision to go veggie, but it is the main reason i still am veggie.
It’s kind of scary really that the only reason I know about the conditions of livestock is because I AM vegetarian, it doesnt really leave much hope for the people out there that arn’t vegetarian, they may never know about how animals are treated before they reach their plates. I had a friend that was cooking a chicken dish for her mum on mothers day, she rang me up to ask how to cook chicken as she hadn’t seen it raw before, she just presumed chicken was white before you cooked it, she wasn’t sure she’d bought the right thing. Shocking!
Indeed it’s shocking.
What stopped you?
Hey Andy!
It’s almost a year for me too! <<== although i was on the sidelines for 6mths with 3 ruptured ankle ligaments A badly delivered O-soto-gari took me out good and proper!
Love the site - the graphics are brilliant!
I love jitsu though … there’s nothing like paying to be thrown around like a ragdoll! I must be a masochist 
xDDx
No you’ve got to be a sado-masochist to like jitsu.
Yeah… it happens. I’m quite lucky though, I only got my elbow stretched once… had to heal it for several months… But I love jitsu, it’s like magic sometimes.
Why I’m vegan
(Well, I’m lapsed - it’s quite a struggle convincing those around me that I’m not crazy - trying to get back into it because I feel greasy and horrible…) 
Had a lifetime of weight problems, joint pain, lethargy, etc. This reached a crescendo in my final year of university, when I was obese, plagued with tension headaches and sickness, had an immune system that let every bug known to man through, and my skin broke out horribly. I was regularly told by medical staff and family / friends that I was suffering “stress” or just a hypochondriac. Noone could understand why I was so fat and ill when I always exercise and watch what I eat. Eventually I read a little about lactose intolerance, and figured it may be the problem. One day I surfed the net for dairy-free recipes and hit the vegan website. Lost two stone that summer and hardly get headaches any more!
Hey, BigBecka!
Welcome to the forums!
So you have become vegan for health reasons?
Nice start!
For how long have you been vegan?
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the welcolme, it’s been really good to read everyone’s stories on here, I was starting to feel rather alone in the world! 
I’ve been vegetarian and on/off vegan for about two and a half years. Though my Dad’s been vegetarian for years (and makes the best vegetarian italian food when let loose in the kitchen), so I was used to the idea of not eating meat. (My mother’s as vehemently carnivorous as he is vegetarian, so I was bought up on meat and dairy).
It seems you’ve been vegan for some time? As a town-dweller, it’s kind of scary to see everyone’s ethical reasons for being vegan - I consider myself fairly intelligent, but I’d never really questioned where milk came from
Do you think it’s easier to convince everyone else that they are crazy?
Yep, I’ve long thought it’s everyone else who’s crazy! I’ll try that one
You know, at some point somebody thought, I’m going to take my cow’s milk, leave it in a bucket to go mouldy, wrap it up in muslin and leave it to go mouldy some more, then call it cheese and eat it. Weird thought…
Heh, this is just a dirty trick called positive thinking
laughs I was 11 when I became a vegetarian, too. What an interesting age…
I had never really connected the word meat with animals. ‘Chicken’ I understood, but words like ‘pork’ and ‘beef’ I did not. I couldn’t connect ANY food that I ate with a living, breathing, feeling animal.
I was driving back home with my Dad from somewhere and he stopped at a light, and I peered out the window. Of course, what met my eyes was a…a…beaver or…duck…or some mangled roadkill on the side of the road. It’s insides were everywhere. When we got home my Dad offered me leftover steak and it looked exactly like the roadkill, which got me thinking.
So I looked up some stuff online…about slaughterhouses and everything…and watched some videos…and I knew right away that I just HAD to be a vegetarian. It was right around Christmas time so I requested books on vegetarianism, and my Mom got the idea.
How I stopped eating meat? Easy. I ‘just didn’t.’ Well, it was harder to imagine myself eating meat than it was to stop.
hm…
It’s quite amazing that already 3 users wrote that they became veg*ans when they were 11.
It is interesting… I know what you mean about not connecting meat to animals. We were taught a very idealised version of farming in school (Daisy the happy cow, in a straw hat, has to be milked every day or she’ll get ill. The sheep cavort around happily). The concept of slaughter and meat was neatly avoided until we were older, and the technicalities of dairy were never brought up at all.
Is there a legal way to educate children about this? From this post it’s obvious that children are more open to expressing compasion to animals and to become vegans.