- "Love & Marriage: DC" star Monique Samuels hosted a vegan dinner on episode two of the OWN series.
- She has been vegan for five years and transitioned by cutting one food at a time.
"Love & Marriage: DC" star Monique Samuels used to think vegans were "crazy," but she committed to joining them at the start of the new year five years ago.
Instead of going cold (plant-based) turkey, Samuels removed one food at a time from her diet. The process was a slow one. "I literally approached it as a journey," she told Insider during a recent interview.
"What I decided was, I'm going to start with what I eat the most and I'm going to take a year to eliminate that from my diet," said the reality personality who first stepped into the spotlight on "The Real Housewives of Potomac." She started with chicken and then pork.
Not long after she made the decision to go vegan, her family members took their own journeys. She invited them but did not force them.
"I talked to my husband, I talked to my children. I just told them what I was doing. I said, 'If y'all want to go along with it, y'all are more than welcome, but this is what I'm going to do,'" Samuels recalled. "After a few months, they ended up joining me."
Samuels noted that one of the benefits of choosing to pace yourself in going vegan is "if you do slip up, you don't feel bad." She began her journey in January and admitted that she slipped and had a piece of chicken in July.
By the end of that summer, she had officially cut it out completely. "I finally gave up chicken. When I tell you we ate chicken about four, five times a day," she said, adding that it was a triumph after having chicken "in every meal."
In the end, she did not even want to eat chicken anymore.
"I didn't even have the desire for chicken anymore and I could not believe it," she said. "I was like, okay, I'm one of those crazy 'I cannot eat meat' people."
Samuels' veganism even became a plot point on this season of "Love & Marriage: DC." On the second episode, she and her family invited their fellow cast members to try a vegan dinner. Even their castmates who joked about their distaste for vegan food enjoyed the meal.
The first season of "Love & Marriage: DC" is now streaming on Hulu. You can see the full vegan dinner in the second episode below.