Active Mondays and vegetarian Thursdays
Text: Mariola Weindich-Mašek, photos: Mariola Weindich-Mašek, Anna Plaszczyk
11 January 2018
Have you ever heard of the "meat-free Mondays" - it was started by Paul McCartney in 2009. For us, it was an inspiration to start a different pro-health action.
The mission of our portal is to promote an active, healthy and environmentally friendly lifestyle. We know that sometimes its hard to get motivated to change our habits dramatically and we also know that it takes up to 21 days to change one habit into another. It is also important to change your life gradually. We have for you an idea of how, in small steps, exercise more and eat more healthy food. It is good to start a week actively. After a weekend we are often lazy, we return to work unwillingly and it is harder to get back to a steady rhythm. Therefore, we encourage you to find on Monday an hour for sports activities.
Book your time on your favourite sport, the one that first of all gives you pleasure. In this way, you can do something for yourself. Monday will be associated with something pleasant, and perhaps soon you will find that you want to spend an extra day in a week on physical activities. Active Monday is a milestone towards a healthy and long life. It is estimated that as many as 5.3 million deaths in a world in 2013 were caused by a lack of physical activity. For comparison – every year 5 million people die because of smoking.
Physical activity is, unfortunately, not all - we should not deceive ourselves. A diet is also very important. Therefore, we encourage all of you, no matter what your favourite diet trend, to make at least one day a week as a day without meat. You do not have to be a vegetarian or vegan immediately. If you like meat - we encourage you to become a vegetarian in at least one day a week. Eating less meat will have a positive impact on your health, but it is not the end.
Few people are aware of the fact that the meat industry contributes to the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as it consumes huge amounts of water (in order to produce 150 grams of beef almost 2000 litres of water are needed). Whats worse - the meat means tons of antibiotics, hormones, genetically modified feed and the remains of dead animals; the farm animals, in order to grow faster, are "fed" with it. Additionally - farm animals often live in terrible conditions, without any access to sunlight, run, etc.
We encourage you to implement our action "Active Mondays and Vegetarian Thursdays." It would be the best if you could engage the whole family in it! Of course you can change the week days. Do it your way, let it give you pleasure and motivation to further actions.