“Good article in the school paper. Makes me want to be a vegetarian. A little. Have you felt any different physically since you started it?”This is a message I received in my Facebook inbox earlier this week. Until being prompted, I honestly had not set down and really thought about how I feel after these two months of being a vegetarian. I have realized it is not so much how I feel as how I do not feel that stands out.

Over the past two years, I have had walking pneumonia, bronchitis on two separate occasions, strep throat, at least five sinus infections, and the flu. Really, if I were able to publish my medical records for the past two years, they read like “How is he alive?” Since becoming a vegetarian earlier this semester, I have not had so much as a runny nose.

I am not saying that there is an absolute relationship between my extreme diet change and not having to take to my death bed this year. However, I imagine there has to be some sort of connection between my healthier lifestyle and my lack of sickness during it.

According to Americashealthranking.org, Tennessee ranked 44th in overall health in 2009. I realize that this rating didn’t come necessarily from people like me who are prone to sickness, but it is still reflective of many factors in our state, including rate of tobacco use, and also poor diet as the rate of obesity in the state is 31.2 percent.

Maybe I just lucked out this year, but I assure you, not one word of my prior health record was exaggerated. I am not a health professional. I am not a nutritionist. I am simply a guy who went vegetarian and has not been plagued by the seasonal illnesses that I often found myself battling every winter pre-vegetarian. Earlier this year, I eliminated meat from my diet just to try it out. It turns out that becoming a vegetarian is one of the best and possibly healthiest decisions I have ever made.

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