PREFACE

Why did I decide to write Pre-Vegans? I've been involved in the vegan community since early 2014 after taking over a Meetup group called South Florida Vegans. If you're not familiar with Meetup, it's a great platform for you to discover new people, events, and hobbies in your city. I highly recommend you check it out. Before I go into the birth of SoFlo Vegans and what led me to writing this book, I think it makes sense for me to share my own vegan origin story.

My story begins back in 2006. During this time I wanted to improve my health. I wasn't happy with my physical appearance, so I started exercising…I wasn't seeing the results that I wanted. I’ve always heard that diet is a big part of losing weight, so I found a program online called Beyond Diet. The program provided pages and pages of PDF documents explaining in detail how different foods affect your body. I was able to break down and understand what I was putting into my body. As a result, I started eliminating certain foods from my diet. I had stopped drinking milk and eating cheese. I was still eating meat and poultry. After I went through an online course, I stopped eating red meat and slowly but surely introduced more fruits and vegetables.

I wasn’t eating very much poultry or seafood once I did. I had a work associate that was vegetarian and one day she told me about her lifestyle.

That conversation is when I decided I wanted to be vegan. It wasn't because of the animals or the environment, it was because I wanted to challenge myself. That was my initial reason for going vegan. I'm sure you'll hear in this book, there are a lot of different reasons people decide to go vegan. Fast forward six to eight months from that initial conversation and I'm rocking and rolling. I have a routine down, and it was easy for me because I'm the type of person that can eat the same thing every single day and not get tired of it. I was consistent until summer 2009 when I took a trip to Los Angeles.

At the time I was running an organization called Anime 3000. I remember it vividly because this was the same summer that Michael Jackson died and the convention center was right next to the Staples Center where they were holding his funeral. Seeing a circus of people dressed in cosplay alongside a swarm of news vans and thousands of distraught MJ fans is a sight I’ll never forget. So here I am in Los Angeles, away from my creature comforts, and I end up falling off the wagon. In hindsight, it's pretty funny if you consider how big of a vegan destination Los Angeles is. I didn't know that at the time, just that I had to buy food from the supermarket because I didn't know which restaurants had vegan options. I wasn’t a good cook, and I struggled to eat whole fruits and vegetables. If Happy Cow existed in 2009, I didn't know about it. The iPhone had just come out two years prior. I fell off the vegan wagon. I always joke that I’m probably the only person that has ever ceased being vegan after a trip to LA. I came back to South Florida and fell back into old habits until 2013 when I decided to go vegan again. This time I wanted to arm myself with knowledge, so I decided to join an online community on Meetup called South Florida Vegans that held local potlucks for its 400 members.

In 2015, the organizer of the group decided to step down. I saw this as an opportunity because it was at the time I’d been thinking about forming my own vegan community. Building and growing organizations came second nature to me because I’ve done it for wrestling, anime/manga, music, and education. I wanted to do the same thing for veganism, and call it Vegan Cartel. This initial concept would eventually become SoFlo Vegans. Over the next two years, I ramped up SoFlo Vegans and launched officially in the Spring of 2017. Since then we've gone on to host over 300 plus events, worked with several nonprofit organizations and supported countless businesses and festivals in the region.

This book is to showcase the various reasons why people go vegan, and to drive home the fact that the best thing you can do to ensure your success in this lifestyle is to be clear on your why. Whether it's for your diet or the animals, be clear on your why. This will strengthen your own beliefs, and reinforce the support system that’s growing around you. The best advice I can give you is community, community, community. Surround yourself with likeminded people that are going through the same journey as you and have fun. Connect with people and don't be so hard on yourself!

I hope this book will provide you with insight, and will provide you with ideas. At the end of this book, we provide different resources you can access. We have a guide to get you started, an online guide where you can watch videos and tips, and other resources that will make your journey a little easier, and a lot more enjoyable. Thank you so much for purchasing this book and I look forward to connecting at an event near you!