The dip
After about nine months of pure veganism, I started to feel tired. Not just the usual fatigue we all get from time to time; this was deep and relentless. I was young but felt like an old woman. My energy levels had started to wane. I'd fall asleep in my chair when I got home from work. Many times, I didn't have the energy to answer a phone call or socialise with friends. Everything started to feel like a massive chore. My hair started to appear thinner and I developed dark circles under my eyes. People said I looked 'tired' and often asked if I was feeling okay. I'd say I was fine, but I wasn't. And I was STARVING ALL OF THE TIME!
Weirdness
Later came the first signs of anxiety. Normal everyday things started to bother me. Self-consciousness. Standing in a supermarket queue was really stressful. I'd worry that I wasn't packing my items quickly enough. I'd start sweating, blushing. It was a completely alien experience. I'd worry about upcoming events for days. Gradually, I started avoiding these stressful situations. I even took to late night supermarket shopping to avoid the crowds. My friends would invite me places but I'd make excuses not to go. I started to withdraw.
I didn't connect my deteriorating health to veganism. I put this down to everyday life stress. In my head, I was grateful that at least I was vegan. Imagine how much worse I'd feel if I ate meat! I went to the doctor and started taking a beta-blocker. Later, I was prescribed anti-depressants. Nothing worked though. I still felt terrible. I was also getting pains everywhere so I started taking ibuprofen and paracetamol.
Sneaky
There were cravings for cheese. Really strong cravings. Somewhere near the end of my first year of pure veganism, I started sneaking in a bit of cheese here and there. The guilt was massive. I was ashamed too, never admitting to ANYBODY what I was secretly doing.
This went on for 17 years. I would go for long periods, being the best vegan I could, but sometimes having the odd cheese butty or cake (including egg) or milk chocolate!
Downward spiral
About a year before I gave up vegan/vegetarianism, my exhaustion was absolutely crippling and I could hardly remember what day it was. It was like having Alzheimer's disease.
Drugs
Eventually, consultants diagnosed me with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. Along with this I still had the anxiety and depression and had started having severe migraines (I was hospitalised for one migraine because they thought I'd had a stroke – I'd gone blind!). It was the worst period of my life. I was taking maximum doses of Gabapentin, Co-codamol (codeine), Tramadol, Propranolol and Mirtazapine. I was like a zombie but couldn't sleep. I could hardly move without flinching with pain. I took months off work and eventually retired on health grounds.
In Part 3:
- Research
- Craving
- The Awakening
- Recovery
- Now
- Why
Catch up on Part 1 of my vegan roller coaster ride here.
Response to misleading vegan information
Humans are not herbivores
Ugh all those drugs make it seem like it made things worse! That they were floundering for treating symptoms without really understanding what was going on...
I won't pretend to know what's going, but if I were to describe it, it sounds like your body went on strike :) But I will see how this story ends.
I'm thinking as to whether or not there's an alternate explanation, so I'm glad someone on the flip side is discussing with you. As for me. Maybe I can get away with just fishy-tarianism!
That's the way with the health industry -- it's all about juggling symptoms rather than getting to the root cause of the problem.
Great to hear you're a fishy-tarian lol. That's probably the healthiest route of them all (if you add some beef sometimes ;p). If only I could stomach seafood!
Cheers
Anj x
I agree.
I don't know how you can't stomach seafood... it's ambrosia Anjkara!
It's a torture. I love the flavour but can't get the texture. The sight also puts me off. Yeah, I'm a weirdo.
:p
Anj xx
Now I understand what you said yesterday.
I can't wait for read the end of the story! :)
I support the movement "HUMANS AREN'T HERBIVORES"
That's great news. Nice sausage :D
Cheers
Anj x
Im glad you like my sausage Anj.
Cheers
It must've been quite a difficult experience anj.
I think that at times, suppressing oneself can be detrimental. That's one of the factors.
There are vegans who are happy being vegans and there are meat eaters who are happy to be one. ^^
You suppressed yourself too much and was worried what people might think and what you should be. ^^
Glad you got out of it anj xx
Thanks Dawn. It was a bad time when the health probs started. The anxiety was caused by the malnutrition.
Happy to report I don't give a shit what people think any more hahah :D
Anj x
Hahahah I know and that's what I admire about you. Im still not at that stage completely.
I tried turning vegan a couple of years ago because I wanted to please an ex gf before.
This was one of the hardest thing I needed to do because I love medium-rare steaks!!
I had to get a lot of supplements and I got my protein from seeds and nuts. It was an ok lifestyle but I reverted back to my meat eating ways after we broke up.
I hope it works well for you.
Lol, classic reasons for giving up meat hahaha. I know so many that went vegan/veggie to impress someone they fancied :D
OMG Steak is one of my true loves too!
As a lifestyle, I think it's no harm to try for maybe a week or two. These days I don't go a day without animal products.
Cheers and thanks for your lovely comment.
Anj x
This is my 3rd year as vegan, and I am training harder then ever atm.
All i do is add seeds, nuts and fruits on a solid diet, u can´t get nutritional deficiency from this kind of food. Meat will only hurt your body!
It takes some knowledge i guess, but we sure are not carnivores, no human could live off a pure meat diet...
What did you eat during this year? If seeds,nuts & fruits wont help add herbs,spices and seaweeds, nothing good can come from meat or cheese that nature cant provide.
Going vegan is the best of initiatives and I really hope that it works out for you, at least in some way so you wont have to eat animal products or medicines against your better judgment.
Peace
Thanks for your comment clausewitz. I appreciate it.
I ate all the nuts, seeds, berries, veg, herbs, spices. I took the supplements. There are so many ex-vegans (from my era), who've tried this diet long term. A famous one is an ex-activist vegan -- Lierre Keith. She's on a lot of youtube vids. Worth looking into her. She has done irreparable damage to herself with the vegan diet.
The problem is that the vegan diet does not contain essential nutrients. Some people, I hear, anecdotally, can live quite well on this diet. We're all made differently, I suppose. Unfortunately, this diet wasn't for me. It made me so ill. Really really ill.
Meat and cheese are from nature too. They're completely natural :)
Humans can live on meat and animal products almost entirely. I'm including a pic if it'll let me, showing a culture that lives on raw meat and blood. They have virtually no disease.
Sure meat and cheese is natural :) but the protein content is on a much much complex level and might be dangerous. Alzhemierns, taupathies , prion disease all origion from meat proteins.
There are unique diseases in meat eating populations and cannibalisitic populations, like Kuru. They are just surfacing now and have been hard to diagnose earlier!
Wierd that you coulden´t take up the nutritions from those food sources. We need amino acids not proteins and it is almost impossible for the body to digest some of the more complex proteins, which is the reason for these kind of diseases. They the fastest growing group of diseases!
We also know for sure that cheese and meat = heart attack, this is a no brainer the fats can´t be handled bu the circulatory system. Sure it is about life style as well but with identical life style the meat & cheese eater suffers higher risk.
I ve done biopsies on aortas from heart attack patients my self, the smell is unreal, disgusting. The aorta is black and necrotic with fibers growing out of it, sick to see, I cant touch animistic products any more!
Could it be something with your gut bacteria? They are really important for vegans!
Thanks for a nice reply :)
Kuru is very rare and caused by cannibalism – eating the brains of their dead relatives. I wouldn't suggest we eat humans unless we were in an emergency situation (zombie holocaust, plane crash in a remote location, stranded, etc.) :D
It's not weird that my body couldn't process the vegan diet. It's because I'm human. And Humans are not herbivores. More details in that link about our physiology and why our digestive system is not designed to subsist on vegetation.
The info you've got about meat, cheese, fat causing heart disease and Alzheimer's is really outdated and inaccurate. It's not based on actual scientific evidence. If you follow the history trail back to when it all started, you'll find Ancel Keys, a scientist who fudged the data to make them fit his hypothesis that fat causes heart disease. He simply omitted the data that didn't fit! Up-to-date research shows that sugar is likely one of the major bad guys. If you want, you can have a look at Cholesterol – it's not the bad guy. I go into a bit more depth there.
I'd be interested in reading the studies showing these 'fastest growing unique diseases' in meat-eating populations. I've not seen any. Can you share the links if you have them? I'd really appreciate it. Always wanting to learn more about these things.
Meat is easily digested. You will never find lumps of meat in your poo. But you will find lots of plant matter – sweetcorn, nuts, fibre.
Gut bacteria. I think you're onto something there. The vegan diet may have also disrupted my gut biome causing some extra problems there.
Thanks for your response.
Cheers
Anj x
Cholestrol is healthy, needed by many cell surfaces and brain cell functions to run smoothly.
The stroke by ruptures in blood vessels, are caused from pockets between the aorta walls, when they rupture they smell rotten. Its the phosphate from cheese and meats that cause necrotic, sick tissue formation here.
This is shining trough more and more with 2017s progresses on plaque diseases which I work professionally with @ a world leading medical institute.
The late age progression and time frame needed for the disease to fully express itself makes it likely that we just now are seeing the repercussions.
There are so much statistics and research done during 2017, why not start with CDC ? 5 million Alzheimer patients in USA alone. Unique for western world, affecting 1 / 50 and rising faaaaaaaaast!!
https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/publications/aag/alzheimers.htm
CDC again: almost a million heart failures a year USA.
https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
Theses statistics match so well against fast food spreading from the 70´s and forth, along with depletion of nutrition in soils. We eat sludge, that´s my professional opinion along with many others i work with!
Personally i think that it all comes down to the proteins expressed in suffering animals. The proteome changes totally in deperssed paitnents, this means a new phenotype at a cellular level. Proteins like heat shock 10 is usually seen at very high concentrations. These help cancer progression. Just saying proteins is just not proteins, they are 1 of 17,000 different molecules with different active functions.
Stay healthy, thanks for your insight full comments!
Thanks for these links Clausewitz. I'm gonna read them today and get back to you later.
Cheers :D
Anj x
Researchers from the National Cancer Institute in Maryland tracked the eating habits of 536,000 men and women between the ages of 50 to 71 for 16 years.
It is the largest study so far to link the consumption of both processed and unprocessed red meat to an increase in death rates from a total of nine different diseases.
The results, published in the British Medical Journal, revealed that people who ate the most red meat were 26 percent more likely to die of nine diseases than those who consume the least.
Death sounds pretty severe : /
Notice how she doesn't actually list what she ate, the quantities of what she ate, how often she ate, ANYTHING. She doesn't mention what supplements she was taking, if any.
We have no evidence whatsoever she was actually ever a vegan. Her diet was not being monitored. She provides no blood test result scans (even though she claims to have been a vegan for 17 years). None of the prescription slips for these drugs she claims to have been prescribed. What doctor would prescribe such drugs without doing a blood test? What was her weight, as recorded by a medical professional?
There is no reason to believe this person was ever even a vegan.
Yeah, that's right. If anyone has a NEGATIVE experience with veganism, they must be a liar. Keep kidding yourself.