If you’ve ever wondered what you, as one person, can do to make big changes, there’s good news. You can have a real, positive impact on yourself, the lives of others, and even the health of the planet with one small change that’s easy (and delicious) to make.
To understand the effect you can have on your life and the world, it helps to understand the truth behind an often misunderstood spiritual concept: Karma. The popular concept of Karma is that good deeds beget good fortune, and bad deeds beget punishment.
That’s a great premise for novels and movies, but it doesn’t work in real life. Bad things happen to good people all the time, while people who do bad things sometimes never even suffer an annoying case of dandruff. So what is Karma?
At Integral Yoga Institute, my teachers—people who have been studying and living Yoga for decades—explained Karma in an almost scientific way: Every action has a reaction. Toss a pebble into a pond and ripples will occur. The ripples are the reaction, the Karma, of the pebble meeting the water.
So your actions have results, and those results can have varying degrees of impact. And while we don’t think our choice of what to eat for lunch has much impact on anyone but ourselves, a new book tells us that it can change our lives and even help change the world for the better.
The Reducetarian Solution is a book that came from an idea put forth by Brian Kateman and Tyler Alterman: What if we just reduced the amount of meat we eat? We all know that eating meat is a loaded issue filled with passionate arguments, philosophical debates, high emotions, and quiet personal preferences.
None of those change facts. Eating meat to the degree most Americans currently is bad for our health, for the environment, and for animals. But strict vegan or even vegetarian diets don’t work for everyone.
In The Reducetarian Solution, Kateman assembles a series of essays that propose a great option: How about less? Just reduce the amount of meat you eat. The essays illustrate how this one small change can improve your health, keep money in your wallet, and have a lower impact on the environment. You can create amazing benefits even if you only skip meat one day a week.
When you see the recipes in the back of the book, you’ll be tempted to reduce your meat consumption more often. My meat-loving husband has already dog-eared several recipes he wants us to try.
You can make a difference. Get a copy of The Reducetarian Solution, and check out their website for more info and lots of delicious recipes. Change your life, and even help save the world, in a lunchtime. It’s good Karma.
You can get your copy of The Reducetarian Solution here.
