Going green, turning yellow.

Yes, I thought, as I struggled to maintain a balanced “tree pose” while humming like a Tibetan monk, If I do this every day, give up diet soda and continue to eat Macrobiotic Vegan foods… I will live to be a hundred and thirty. I violently fell out of tree pose, but the class was over anyway. I scraped up my mat and grabbed my bottle of water. Not just any water, eiher. Melted Himalayan Snow. So crisp. I made my way back to my ”studio apartment”/psychiatric penitentiary cell and shoved my dinner in the microwave. “What’s that?” My roommate’s boyfriend asked. “Oh… uh, vegan Thai dumplings.” “Oh, so it’s made of, what, cabbage and nothingness?” “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” Expensive nothingness, sizzling and collapsing in a recyclable plastic container.

This is not the first time I’ve been deluded by the promise of extremely healthy habits. This time last year, I was militantly vegan, not to save cute animals or the planet, but rather, my waistline. Instead of eating normal, human portions, I would fast throughout the day and then cook “Blinner” (similar to ”brunch”, only with all three meals combined) out of tofu-based, environmentally friendly items. For a short time, this worked. I lived near a Whole Foods and had access to a seemingly endless parental credit card that financed my addiction. My vocabulary of obscure vegetables grew exponentially, just like my anemia. I told myself I was healthy, quietly ignoring the fact that I was eating enough soy ice cream and tofu-puffs to cancel out my efforts altogether.

I had a real come-to-Jesus moment when I first went to Germany, a country where “vegetarian” dishes often include ham. Having eaten nothing but bread and coffee for several days, I realized what an unrealistic lifestyle I was imposing upon myself. Besides, it’s impossible to be fiercely anti-dairy in a wonderland of cheese and chocolate. I think my pancreas thanked me in the long run. And, considering how overwhelmingly retentive Germans are about recycling, they could probably kill cows until the end of time without changing the size of their carbon footprint.

I’m glad I ultimately chose to eat the occasional animal, since being a vegetarian on the meal plan isn’t exactly buckets of fun. One of our better dining halls recently did away with it’s “vegan night” (“the one night a year I get some protein,” according to my friend Emily). There are still options, technically, but one can only eat wheat pasta and cheerios for so long. Just like blinner. We’ll see how long the yoga lasts, too.