Famous Vegans - Tonya Kay

Tonya Kay

She's an American dancer, actress, television personality, model, performance artist, freelance writer and nutritionist. She performs her own stunts, which include whip cracking, knife throwing, stilt dancing, flag and fire dance. She was a contestant on NBC's America's Got Talent in 2006, where she reached the semi-finals with Trey Knight's Stilt World dance company, featuring her fire poi solo. She also appeared as a contestant on five episodes of SciFi's Who Wants to Be a Superhero? and played guest roles on television shows like Glee, Criminal Minds, House M.D. and Numb3rs.

She is a raw vegan, pagan and Chaote and plays a leading role in the movie Bold Native, the first fictional film about the Animal Liberation Front. She also appeared in the 2006 video Vegan Fitness Built Naturally. You can find her website at this link.

Quotes by Tonya Kay:

"There are no challenges in this lifestyle because eating living vegan foods is truly something that gives me joy!"

"I went vegetarian when I was seven years old—quite unconsciously. ... that is the precise age at which I put the pieces together and associated the cows—whose noses I was petting in the cages at my grandparents' slaughterhouse—with the headless, skinned bodies hanging from hooks and bleeding from their necks in the next room. You see, up until that point, I sincerely didn't get the correlation. It took very little time from that point for my mom to recognize that her daughter would not eat the meat dishes at her dinner table. "Do you know what they call people like you, Tonya?" she asked. "Vegetarians." To which I replied, 'What's a vegetarian?'."

"I often wish for every child the blessing of a grandparent with a slaughterhouse. Too often meat-eaters today are just unconscious eaters. They purchase frozen beef and bean burritos packaged in neon wrappers and never see the cruelty, pollution and disease associated with their food choice."

"I remember clear as day the moment I went vegan. I was in my late teens performing on tour with Kenny Rogers. ... At about 2 a.m., the driver pulled up to a quiet truck stop somewhere in nowhere Tennessee. I crept into the sundries store out of sheer boredom and somehow saw all the neon-colored packages and shelf after shelf of product for what it was. I thought to myself, "Why does any of this exist?" And I decided to go vegan. It wasn't necessarily an animal-compassion epiphany that urged my personal transition from a decade-long vegetarian to a vegan. It was the desire to eat real food. ... So began my move toward the deep desire to stop being lied to and empowering myself to choose real food. I wanted to eat food, not products—and my transition to vegan was born of a desire for that freedom."

"My decision at twenty six years old to stop cooking my vegan food was based entirely on a friend's claim that raw food had reversed a major illness in her life, the desire as a severe manic-depressive to exist medication-free for the first time in my adult life, and the taste of the carob/avocado/date pie at Go Raw Cafe in Las Vegas."

"We are what we eat and I'd rather be a sexy young coconut than empty, puffy pasta - even if it is whole wheat!"

"I have found the raw vegan lifestyle to be 100% different health-wise than the cooked vegan diet. The benefits I am mentioning are directly related to eating living foods. In the past I was medicated for manic depression - today I am joyous and medication-free! Also, as a cooked vegan, I had acne that affected my self-esteem, now my 'problem' skin simply glows! I haven't been sick since going raw, not even a sniffle or soar throat, and as an athlete my body recovers in half the time it used to from strenuous activity or injury."

"Raw foods was not the cure for manic depression. But it was the support and foundation that I needed to get clean, clear and continue doing the work of finding true mental/emotional/physical health."

"If you are going to be on medications for whatever reason, you might as well get healthy while you are doing it. Not because raw food and exercise will cure you of this or that. But because treating your body and spirit gently and with respect feels good and you might as well get that out of life, no matter what medication you are on right now."

"I would like to dispel the myth that being vegetarian, especially a live vegan, is difficult. I have been traveling for five years now, without a home and a kitchen. I have thrived on this diet in every city in the nation and let me tell you, there is nothing easier or more fun! What is more effortless than finding a grocery store and carrying a few macadamia nuts and dates to dance class with you? What is more fulfilling than spending an afternoon with friends at the local farmer's market?"

"Too many dry nuts - they feel acidic, so I make my nut consumption specialized. But avocados? Every day. Sometimes several. They digest like the seed-bearing tree-born fruit they are, rather than a heavy fat, and especially important to me, they balance hormones."

"Vegan foods I find essential to my athletic training are leafy greens, like kale, romaine, green lettuce, and hijiki, nori, dulse and wakame sea vegetables. These foods have amazing alkalizing effects, which assure the body functions at its natural highest potential without inflammation, degradation, or exhaustion. Finally, water rich fruits, such as apples, kiwi, strawberries, cherries - AVOCADO! - they all have profound energy and mood effects. It's a natural high without the side effects."

"Not only are proud carnivores endangering their own and their children's long-term health, but they cannot consider themselves environmentalists while contributing to the water pollution and habitat destruction inherent to meat eating."

"The manure created from the billions of animals killed for food has to go somewhere, and often, it ends up in rivers and streams, killing millions of fish in one fell swoop. And simply consider the inefficiencies in the production of meat. It takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce just one pound of beef, but only 55 gallons for one pound of oranges. For the amount of water it takes to produce a pound of beef, a human could drink his required daily intake for 2.4 years. All in all, it defies common sense: Why not just grow food to eat instead of grow food to feed to animals that we kill to eat as food? Not very ecological—even by the most simple reasoning. "

"I noticed that everything with which I was replacing my leather belts, boots and wallets was made of petro-plastic and man-made materials—entirely non-renewable, non-reusable, non-degradable and manufactured in overseas sweat-shops. Yes, my new accessories were vegan, but were they green or even cruelty-free? I am, however, enthusiastic to share with you something that has renewed my faith in our common destination: Cherry Bombin' Wear, a woman-owned small business in Arizona that recovers used inner tubes from bicycle tires for sewing into rockin' ID cases, wallets, business-card holders, wrist cuffs and belts. No animals are harmed in their manufacture, the recovered material actually lasts longer than leather, and every item keeps another inner tube out of our landfills."

She has volunteered several times at the Elephant Nature Park, an elephant rescue and rehabilitation center in Northern Thailand where you can visit and help. She also supports the following organizations that help elephants: PAWS, The Elephant Nature Foundation, Elephant Voices, The Serengeti Foundation and HelpElephants.com.

"We all just want the chance to be a fine expression of our species. Oh, how it hurts me to see a living being robbed of its chance to be what it was born to be."

"Elephants, like humans, have complex relationships. They really love each other; elephants. ... I learned about my own relationships from them. That’s a big lesson."

"The elephant energy walks this earth and all our lives are better for it. We must do what we can now, when the time is right. Now is when we have a place where our contributions matter . If you want to restore your faith in life and feel powerful and effective, save an elephant. If you want to believe something matters, believe in this."

Quotes are from her 2005 interview with BodyBuilding.com, her interview with Raw Food Planet, her 2009 interview with Evolving Wellness, her Clean and Green Everyday blog.