By Michelle Alvarado, Guest Contributor

Michelle Alvarado is a contributor to Cria Vegano Magazine, and lives in Chicago with her family where the winters seem to never end!

The winter season can be tricky with little ones, especially if you live in places that snow. Personally, it can be painstaking to even get in the mood to leave the house when the weather is in the single digits. Once I do muster up the courage to leave the house, I never regret it. My 19-month-old, Joey, enjoys it, too—we’ve just learned to layer like pros.

We’re fortunate enough to have found a moms’ group where we not only get together with our little ones and chat, but we get a good indoor workout in as well. The best part is that Joey gets the opportunity to socialize and make friends with kids of all ages. If you’re able to join a local moms’ group, whether it’s a vegan, church, or Meetup group, I highly recommend it.

The library has become a favorite go-to during the winter. I must admit that before I had my son, I only went there to pick up books I’d called in ahead of time for my preschool class. When he turned one, a friend of mine suggested a play date at the library, and Joey ended up having a blast!

A lot of libraries have story times, a play area, and even allow you to sip on some coffee while you sit back and talk with other parents. And don’t forget to take advantage of that library card! You can pick up some books to read at bedtime. But don’t be like me, return those books on time!

We live in a city where there’s a nearby children’s museum. When my husband and I took Joey, it did not disappoint! Holy sensory stimulation—it was magical! We played in a huge water table, built structures with glow in the dark tiles, and played house. Our little musician thoroughly enjoyed the music exhibit. And the staff at the small café even worked with us to put together a vegan-friendly snack!

This activity wasn’t free and is usually best to pay for a year membership if you plan on going more than a couple of times per year.

If you like brisk, chilly weather and you are an outdoorsy family, going for a nature hike at the nearest park is a perfect winter activity for you. You get to breathe in the fresh cold air, get a little exercise and can work together to spot different types of animals. Some parks even have nature centers where you can take a break and thaw out.

As Joey gets older and I learn from other mamas about how to stay busy during the cold winter months, I look forward to watching him participate and stay active. There’s so much to explore out there!

If you’re staying indoors today, don’t forget the latest issue of Raise Vegan is out now, and our mini magazine, Raised Vegan, is available to purchase!

You spoke, and we listened.

You want only the best and most relevant information in your inbox, so we’re transforming our Vegan Living and Advocacy Blog into our new Action Alerts email list!

Our Action Alerts will tell you quick, impactful ways to help animals, including requests to—

• Sign a petition for more vegan menu options
• Post on a company’s social media page for vegan versions of your favorite meals
• Volunteer for leafleting, vegan food events, or campaigns
• Much more!

If you’d like to stay up-to-date on new vegan products, advocacy tools, and to receive vegan recipes and updates on our work spreading veganism, sign up for our twice-monthly Vegan Outreach E-News.

Thank you for your support and for doing all you can to end speciesism!

Thousands of people have told California Pizza Kitchen they want a vegan cheese pizza.

We need your help to keep the momentum going!

We’ve pre-written an email to CPK’s Customer Feedback Department. All you need to do is sign the email and boom—CPK knows yet another person wants a vegan cheese option on their menu.

By catering to the millions of vegan, dairy-intolerant, and health-conscious consumers, CPK would become the largest pizza company in the US to offer a vegan version of one of America’s favorite foods.

Take less than a minute to help get California Pizza Kitchen to add vegan cheese!

In this article, Alison Lenton, PhD, discusses the process of making a significant behavior change. Although changing any habitual behavior is difficult, understanding the process better can enable us to put ‘setbacks’ and ‘stagnation’ into context and see them for what they are: not failures, but an integral part of making any significant change.

Faunalytics’ 2014 Study of Current and Former Vegetarians and Vegans asked a mostly-representative U.S. sample of people age 16+ to report on their current and former eating habits and their attitudes toward meat and dairy consumption. Of the nearly 11,400 people who participated, approximately 12% were either former or current vegetarians or vegans. For the purposes of this blog, some of the study’s key findings were:

• The current failure rate of remaining a lifelong vegetarian/vegan (veg•n) in the United States is 84%. In other words, 84% of participants who had previously attempted a veg•n diet reported eventually giving it up.
• By the time the survey took place, approximately one-third of those who attempted to become veg•n lapsed within 3 months, and over half (53%) gave up within 1 year. And there were some (12%) who gave up even after having been veg•n for 6 or more years!
• Approximately 30% of “failed” veg•ns had also experienced previous failures. That is, nearly one-third had failed more than once to become veg•n. Nevertheless, 37% said that they want to try veg•ism again.

Given these results, it would appear that it is fairly difficult to transition from being omnivorous to veg•n, but any big change in habitual behavior can be difficult. Let’s look at why that is.

The behavior change process

Successful adoption of a new habit depends on the following (for a more complete summary, see this document from Faunalytics):

• Motivation, intention, and planning—you have to want the new behavior, you have to intend to undertake it, and you have to make plans to achieve it as well as plans for surmounting the inevitable obstacles
• Know-how—you have to understand how to enact the new behavior—and belief—you have to believe that you can do it
• Resources—e.g., adequate emotional, physical, cognitive resources in both the immediate and longer-term choice environments
• Positive reinforcement and absence of punishment—you have to perceive that the new behavior yields additional benefits and fewer costs
• Social and environmental support—do your friends/family understand or do they sabotage and challenge? does the environment provide you adequate opportunity and resources to enact the new behavior?
• Self-regulation abilities—are you any good at controlling your momentary desires/impulses? are you any good at directing yourself toward longer-term goals?
• Practice—repetition makes challenging behaviors easier and is key to their becoming automatic, which is when the behavior no longer requires conscious intention/thought

Add to this that the new and old habits then compete with one another for dominance. That is, for an old behavior to be replaced by a new behavior, the right internal (intra-person) and external (environmental) circumstances have to be in place. To illustrate, consider the following recent model of behavior change (Kwasnicka, Dombrowski, White, & Sniehotta, 2016):

According to this model, even after an initial change in behavior, the old and new ‘habits’ remain in conflict with one another. This is because the probability of one or the other habit dominating at a given point in time and in a particular situation depends on competition between the two habits’ different motivations, the distinct emotional resources required to enact or suppress them, the particular levels of self-control they demand, and just how automatic the associated behavior is (or has become). As the model points out, the new behavior may ultimately win out if it is practiced again and again, across different situations and over time.

As a result, when one initiates a change in behavior, it is not uncommon to find that the old behavior continues to pop up now and again, at least until the new behavior becomes automatic; as illustrated by the figure below (also from Kwasnicka, Dombrowski, White, & Sniehotta, 2016).

And even then, it isn’t as if the old behavior and all of its triggers are completely erased. Think of it like how computers write files onto the hard drive: Writing a new file does not necessarily overwrite the old one. Remnants of the old file continue to persist and can be brought back into competition with the new file given the right (or, perhaps, wrong) circumstances. So even with everything in place, there will be setbacks: It takes time for a new habit to dominate the old one.

The fact that so many former veg•ns ‘failed’ but tried again—and want to try yet again—may actually be part of the process of becoming veg•n. Indeed, the 2014 Faunalytics Study found that the ‘failed’ veg•ns were more likely to indicate that they transitioned to their new diet over a matter of days/weeks, whereas for the ‘successful’ veg•ns, it was reported to be a lengthier process. In other words, it may be that the ‘failed’ veg•ns in Faunalytics’ study are simply at an earlier stage in their path to veg•nism, and many will still ‘get there’ in the end.

The findings also hint that any attempt at becoming veg•n may be successful to some extent: Those who ‘failed’ the strict test of maintaining veg•nism still reported eating less beef and pork thereafter than those who never tried to be veg•n (though we note that these data are correlational and, thus, causal conclusions are tenuous).

Overall, we suggest that taking a longer view of the process of becoming veg•n is both a theoretically and empirically valid one: For most people, becoming veg•n isn’t like a light switch that is flicked on at full brightness and never again flicked off. The process of becoming veg•n is more like a dimmer switch: Change is incremental and can sometimes move backward. Perhaps, however, once the dimmer is ‘on’ at all, there is at least a glimmer of light.

With that in mind, we recommend that animal rights and welfare organizations focus on informing people that becoming veg•n is a process made up of a series of smaller, achievable steps. This is because goals that are perceived to be feasible are more likely to be set in the first place than are goals deemed too daunting. These organizations should also give people explicit advice as to how to take those initial steps (e.g., simple rules-of-thumb such as “always choose the tofu option” and “when offered cheese, say ‘hold it please!’”), as research indicates that those with concrete if-then plans—especially plans that include strategies for managing potential obstacles—are more likely to achieve their goals.

At the same time, advocates should continue to advance the general message that these small steps lead somewhere: Veg•nism reduces animal suffering and death, not to mention that it improves human health and the welfare of our planet. To the extent that we can make the process of becoming veg•n seem more manageable to people, and get people to understand that it is indeed a process that includes stagnation and setbacks, then we expect that more people will set upon and, ultimately, stay on the path toward veg•nism.

This blog is a variation and extension of one Dr. Lenton wrote previously for Faunalytics.

Take two minutes to help both dogs and farmed animals!

Los Angeles community members, along with ten veterinarians, started a petition to get all six city animal shelters to feed their dogs plant-based food. LA Animal Services Commissioners voted in December to do a 60-day feasibility study to analyze the benefits and risks of making the switch.

According to the veterinarians, a plant-based diet could eliminate harmful chemicals found in meat-based dog food—which may help prevent canine ailments like cancer and allergic dermatitis*—while also sparing the lives of thousands of farmed animals who are used in the food.

We need your help to make it happen!

*Heinze, C. R., VMD, MS, DACVN, Gomez, F. C., BS, & Freeman, L. M., DVM, PhD, DACVN. (2012). Assessment of commercial diets and recipes for home-prepared diets recommended for dogs with cancer. Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association, 241(11), 1453-1460.

Vegan Outreach is thrilled to announce that we worked with international pizza chain—Piola—to add Follow Your Heart’s Mozzarella Cheese to the menu at ten of their US locations.

With Piola’s large global presence, we hope this change will send an important message to other chain restaurants—cheeseless pizza is a thing of the past for dairy-free diners. The demand for vegan options is booming, and thankfully Piola was in full agreement when we approached their corporate team.

We know their vegan and dairy-free customers are excited for this change, and we’re confident the option will be successful.

The vegan cheese is available at the following locations:

Every time a student is handed a Vegan Outreach leaflet, it’s because someone like you made a donation in response to a request like this.

All the work Vegan Outreach does for animals is fueled by donations. We’ve done a lot of good together—this Spring semester we’ve handed leaflets to 822,916 students and showed 7,924 students virtual reality slaughterhouse footage.

But there’s so much more to do, and we need your help!

Without you, this work for animals is at risk of slowing—or even stopping.

A generous donor has pledged to cover all our overhead costs for the fall, so 100% of your donations by May 31 will go directly to fund outreach that makes people vegan!

Please donate now to keep our work for animals going! With overhead costs covered, your donation will go directly to spreading veganism.

All the work Vegan Outreach does for animals is thanks to the generosity of the donors who fund it—from our successful campaign to get vegan cheese in Piola, to the grassroots outreach we do on college campuses worldwide!

We’re ready to do even more to spread veganism, but we need your help to do it!

A generous donor has pledged to cover all our overhead costs for the fall, so 100% of your donations in May will go directly to fund outreach that makes people vegan!

With overhead costs covered, 100% of your donation will go directly to:

• Pay for booklets that inspire students to become vegan
• Feed delicious vegan food to non-vegans, changing their perceptions and opening their minds to veganism
• Put vegan options on restaurant menus, making vegan eating easier for everyone
• Connect people struggling to go vegan with mentors, so they don’t fall back into eating animals

Several donors have already stepped up, but reaching our goal by May 31 is not a guarantee.

You could be the reason we meet our goal. You could be the reason more people go vegan!

Please donate today to keep our work for animals going! With overhead costs covered, your donation will go directly to spreading veganism.

Thank you!