Lifestyle changes are the hardest ones to make and one of the biggest lifestyle alterations that anyone can attempt voluntarily is to become a vegetarian. Often individuals find it more comfortable to become part of a support group whilst making lifestyle alterations; think of Alcoholics Anonymous, Weight Watchers or giving up smoking. Joining a support group can help the beginner vegetarian too.

The advantages of being a member of such a support group are manifold, but some of them are encouragement, advice and friendship. You may not require the friendship, yet you might like to socialize with other vegetarians so that you can see how they cope with eating out and basically just fitting into a society designed by and for meat-eaters.

However, whether you propose giving up your old friends or not, you may find yourself gravitating away from them after a while quite naturally. Remember the old expression: ‘Birds of a feather flock together’? This is fairly standard.

You will have worries substituting something else for meat; you will become worried that your diet is deficient in some nutrient; you will be asking yourself which restaurants serve truly vegetarian food and plenty more.

Your newly discovered support group friends will be a immense source of encouragement and advice in this sphere. You might not like the concept of a ‘vegetarian support group’, yet you could just as easily join a vegetarian dining club or vegetarian cookery class, the impact will be the same – you will learn and you will create new friends.

If you have trouble locating such a group by the regular methods of your local Yellow Pages and an Internet search, try going to the local community centre, where there may be yoga groups – a couple of the attendees will be vegetarians that you can ask. Or go to you local health food shop and ask there Likewise you could ask at a martial arts club or a Hindu Indian restaurant. If all else fails, you could start your own club.

If you organize your own club, find a sympathetic bar or restaurant that will prepare your meal suggestions for that night at a reasonable price. After a time, I am sure you could build up a lovely little club of twenty people and the landlord might let you have your own room to dine in once a month like the Masons.

If you think that this is too much in the early days, you could just set up a blog. A blog is an interactive web site, where you and others can post relevant information. If you keep the name of the blog relevant to your town and vegetarianism, you should find that other people looking as you once did will find you, whereas you discovered no one. Once you have built up a group of local, on line vegetarian sympathizers, you could suggest meeting once a month in the flesh and take the dining notion from there. An advertisement in the local paper would help as well.

If you would like to know more about Welsh food, food in general or cooking eggs in particular, please go over to Traditional Welsh Recipes