March of the Hot Vegan Army

http://www.layoutsparks.com/1/51436/hot-army-guy-pose.html

Note**: I have NO idea if this guy above is vegan, but my point is that he COULD be and still look like this!!!!

If you've been following this blog for a while, you may be familiar my concept of the "Hot Vegan Army."

Basically, this is my mental list of famous vegans and vegetarians that I find personally attractive. I will grant you that physical beauty may not seem like the most admirable trait to appreciate about a person. However, these individuals have also chosen to reduce the cruelty-factor of their daily lives, which indicates to me that they are also beautiful on the inside.

Also, as far as I can tell, just about all of these people appear to engage in regular physical exercise, which is just a good idea. We just get the one body in this life, so we might as well treat it nicely and enjoy the heck out of it and its capabilities.

What I intend to demonstrate with my posts on the Hot Vegan Army is that vegetarians and vegans are not a group of self-denying, hermit-like creatures who are physically debilitated because they don't eat meat. In fact, they're pretty darn strong, healthy, and frankly quite easy on the eyes.

When you care enough to respect yourself, as well as make choices to help promote increased quality of life for animals, that makes you pretty hot in my book. And this is my book :-)

This month, since it is "March" after all, I intend to make it the "March of the Hot Vegan Army," and chronicle a new hot vegan or vegetarian every day, right here on this blog.

My hope is that at least one person out there will feel inspired by these individuals to try a vegetarian diet for themselves (or for the animals, or both). I will also add each person spotlighted here to the "Hot Vegan Army" tab you'll find at the top of the page. I hope you'll follow along and check this page each day to add a new inspiring face to your mental list, and to think of them when you order lunch, go to the grocery store, or do take-out.

I also hope they will inspire you to take better care of yourself, because there is nothing - at all - wrong with that. You deserve it.

I'm here! I'm here!

I do apologize for all of my tardiness and unexcused absences...but I swear I had a good reason, honest!

For the past month, I have been off having my semi-vegan way with the world all over the place. I have had the good fortune to have met 3 successful and inspiring vegans, including at least a couple of virtual rock stars of the vegan universe. I am totally going to gush hopelessly about all of them, so I think this will have to be the first of 3 installments...

The whole big hero-worship-inducing mess all started about a month ago. I had already bought the book Thrive a little earlier this year, having discovered it during one of my frequent forays on Amazon.com. I started reading it and I found it to be very enlightening regarding the effects that certain foods can have on the body. Some of you may be familiar with the book's author, Brendan Brazier, as a notable vegan athlete. In fact, he is not just an athlete, he is actually a career tri-athlete. I will have to admit to you that, like much of the world, I have not often thought of the words "vegan" and "athlete" as belonging together. I just don't picture Arnold Schwarzenegger pumping a bunch of iron and then heading home to refuel with a package of veggie dogs. But you know, when there's a will, there's a way.

Thrive has a lot of reasonable and valuable information to offer, and clearly Brendan Brazier has done his homework. Being me, I tend to take everything I read with a grain of salt, but I didn't see a lot of sensationalist information in this book. I tend to get nervous when I read about all kinds of obscure superfoods I've never heard of, and only rarely does some new "out there" nutritional supplement make it into my regular rotation. A notable exception of course is spirulina, which I posted about fairly early on here.

But anyway, I am straying from the point. The results seem to speak for themselves. Brendan Brazier succeeds as an athlete, and, even more notably, as a vegan athlete. It is such a HUGE challenge to navigate the physically taxing demands of the Ironman triathlon, even under "normal" circumstances. And honestly, from my point of view, veganism is a thinking man's game. It takes some effort to plan nutritionally-rounded meals for people with average activity levels, nevermind for people who have just biked over 100 miles and think to themselves, "You know what would be awesome right now is a marathon. Let's DO this..."

So when I found out that Mr. Brazier himself would be giving a talk and doing a book signing at my local Whole Foods store, I was totally all about it. I mean, why not go see and be inspired by someone who has accomplished something that most people would have thought impossible?

So I went, I saw, I got my book signed. I also stood there awkwardly in the book signing line and I asked this successful author and owner of the extremely popular Vega nutritional foods line if he was from Canada. Yes, he is from Canada. And he is also very nice when talking with awkward hero-worshipping semi-vegans who meet him in supermarkets.

So to the Hot Vegan Army with you Brendan Brazier! And I'll see you in the bulk dry goods aisle....

P.S. He IS that tall.