Ex Vegan (3.5 Years): From Athlete to Cripple

Watch on YouTube · 2018-12-08 · 35 min

[video] 0:00 I'm 20 years old now. I'm known as the runner on YouTube. I used to be the vegan runner that everyone knew me as. Pretty much my vegan journey started back in 2015, at the end of 2015, and I was a cross-country athlete. I had got third in my county champs, which is like a state in America. They have states in England. We have counties. I got third at that, which qualified me for the national champs for cross country. And I didn't do too well at that, but I wanted to try and aim to be a professional athlete. So I was looking for every quick fix, every answer. And what I ended up doing

[video] 0:45 was uh researching and i came across veganism i came across vegan athletes um so i gave it a go and i decided to create my youtube channel back in 2015 to document my training my races and it also helps a lot with athletes that want to try and get sponsored by a big company or corporation because then they can advertise um the brand uh to their followers um so i did that I started making vegan videos and I started making training videos and slowly I gained momentum on my channel. And at the same time my training was alright, it was on and off. So for the first year I didn't really notice much really change. I was just kind of eating normal vegan food. I was having loads of pasta and I'd do the thing that all vegans say where you have to replace the meat with something, which I never really understood.

[video] 1:41 But I'd replace it with like lentils or beans or some other high protein source. And then eventually I got so bored and sick of that dry food that I started buying all the vegan junk food. Like they make all these soy pies with like oil and pastry and I started enjoying more of that stuff.

[video] 2:04 As we came into 2016, the next track season came around. By that time, I had about five major injuries and I'd never been injured before I went vegan. And just to point out, I ran all of my PBs when I was like 14, 15 years old before I even went vegan. And now I'm 20 and I can't even run close to those times. since I've been vegan even though I'm training just as hard and not doing anything different.

[video] 2:38 So 2016 came around, the track season comes around so I do things like the mile on the track with 800 meters and I train for it and my shin, I end up getting fractured shin.

[video] 2:54 don't know why because I haven't I didn't ramp up my training or anything and I ended up having a fractured shin so I it took around about four months to heal that I could barely walk on it properly and so that was the whole track season just gone so my team and my club were pretty much like hang on where the hell's this guy gone he's pretty much not even done anything all year my whole all of my subscribers were like wondering what the hell why were there no race videos or any like updates on how my running was and this is where I started to try and make excuses and I don't really want to say it but lie to my subscribers on how I felt how my running was going and I started to That was when I started to get really worried because my channel started to grow, grow. I got to things like 6,000 subscribers and things.

[video] 3:52 And when I got there, I thought, oh, right, it's still growing, but I'm getting worse and slower and sicker. And everyone's just waiting. And all the videos, everyone would comment. They'd be like, come on, we want to see your race footage. And a lot of people on my channel were also top athletes, so athletes that had been at the national champs or regional championships for cross country or track. Or what on my team my county team on my club team and they were all like friends and they followed me But none of them were vegan So it was kind of like I was the lone warrior and I was trying to go out there and be like, oh look everyone You can do on a vegan diet And there I was just always getting injured so I had so then I went from 2016 I missed the track season and completely from a fractured shin. Then I recovered from that all the way through the track season. I didn't run at all for about four months. I didn't race. Then I came back to running. I started training again.

[video] 4:51 Slowly, I built up. And I got a fractured metatarsal bone in my foot. So another bone fracture. And again, this one took about two months. So this then took me into the cross-country season, where I then missed more of that. And this was heading into the 2017 cross-country season in January and February.

[video] 5:15 And, I mean, it's just been a never-ending cycle where I say, yeah, guys, I'm going to train for nationals. I'm building up. And then I either get injured, I feel like crap, or something goes wrong. Now, this is where the vegans will say you were doing it wrong. You weren't eating the right kind of, you weren't on chronometer. You weren't logging your nutrients. You weren't doing this, that. And this is the thing is I have videos of what I eat in a day. I had experiments where I tried fruitarianism, raw vegan. I tried cooked vegan. I tried literally my dad was so worried because he knew that the veganism literally has so many nutrient deficiencies. He was trying so hard. He was like,

[video] 6:00 researching everything like he was like because he's quite traditional he was researching everything he's like can you get all the nutrients and trying to find out and he's like oh he's buying like all these lentils and he was telling me to get all these like different types of red lentils beans rice legumes oats organic oats and so everyone was trying to help me Because they wanted me to perform and it's like all the subscribers were just sat there waiting. They were like, oh, ready, the big build up. And every year it would just be like, oh, and nothing would happen.

[video] 6:33 So, yeah, I tried raw veganism. I tried fruitarianism. I even came across some top athletes that inspired me like Tim Sheaf, who's also been a world champion free runner. Yeah. And I came across his fasting and things. I agree with a lot of his philosophy on ideas on the world and how it is. But the things where he did fasting and things, I thought, well, maybe I've got something like a buildup of toxins or from the animal products. So I ended up doing a fast. I ended up losing even more weight. I mean I've got a jacket on now but you might have seen in my last video I just kept losing weight I literally I mean I'm six foot four and I weigh like 145 pounds so I'm uh I have yeah I pretty much got desperate and I tried raw veganism fruitarianism I tried um and the last one I tried

[video] 7:32 was junk food vegan, which was where I was eating up to 7,000 to 8,000 calories a day. I was making my own chips with olive oil. I was buying burgers. I'd go out to eat pretty much three times a week to vegan restaurants with my mate. And I was like, yeah, I'm not eating enough. Other vegans were telling me, you're not eating enough. You need to eat more because you're so tall, your metabolism. So I was actually stuffing in food every single day. at 7,000 to 8,000 calories I was snacking on like these vegan bars and I changed to a different vegan bar which is called a Cliff Bar. And I had it and about a week after eating that for the whole week I pretty much had

[video] 8:20 Awful diarrhea and I couldn't like my stomach was so bad and I look on the ingredients a week later like oh Maybe it had something in it and it has like 12 different synthetic vitamins and manufactured minerals in it And I was like, oh, yeah, no shit like of course my body's getting rid of that So I was Yeah, so that's it 2017. We're in 2017 the cross-country season again, I have a foot fracture and

[video] 8:51 I did one or two races where I did absolutely awful kind of like my county level to see where I was at like if I could get selected for the team again and no it was absolutely awful So approaching into 2017 track season, I then got something called an IT band friction syndrome where my IT band was rubbing against the femur or my knee bone and it was causing so much friction that I could barely walk on it. So that was another one that I got which then took more months to heal.

[video] 9:27 It was crazy.

[video] 9:32 So yeah, just to go now into 2018, early 2018, this was when I was pretty much saying, right, that's it. I'm going to be junk food vegan. I'm going to eat as much as I can. I'm going to just make smoothies. I'm going to blend up 30 bananas. I'm going to pour sugar in. And I was actually spending so much money. I was actually spending probably 80% of what I earn on food. And my parents would even buy me tons of stuff as well, like there's this vegan ice cream you can buy, there's vegan biscuits. And I was literally just piling it in. I was probably crapping about four times a day. Then I got into the distilled water. about last year or a year and a half ago, and I was distilling my water because I know that the tap water is really poisonous and it's got toxins, the normal tap water.

[video] 10:31 So I was drinking loads of that without realizing that I was pretty much flushing out all the nutrients by drinking all that. So yeah, and any other things I noticed was my skin started to deteriorate, like psoriasis all over my legs, my stomach. My teeth, I had braces two years ago which did leave me with some stains where the metal things were implanted. But it got really bad and I just thought my teeth never used to be like this, my skin never used to be like this. I've lost loads of my old friends because I literally have serious depression. I'm always anxious about things. And I never had that state where I was relaxed, where I could look forward to races anymore. It was like I had that intense pressure of having to perform and to prove to my subscribers that veganism is the way, and you can do it as a vegan and save the animals.

[video] 11:32 So yeah, that was just a brief timeline. But to kind of summarize it all, now I am slowly on day four now of not being vegan. Yeah, the benefits haven't been like that. I haven't clicked and been like, whoa. But what I've noticed is my skin is when I shave, I used to have bumps everywhere. And like acne, underlying bumps all over my skin. And I don't have that anymore. It feels like it's smoothing out a lot. And another thing is, for instance, when I would go to sleep at night and I'd wake up in the morning after like eight or nine hours sleep, and I'd wake up and feel like I hadn't slept at all, as if I was still tired. And I just realized that in the morning I feel, it's not a huge difference, but I do feel as if I actually feel like I can cope with the day.

[video] 12:31 Whereas before I felt like I was just really struggling along. And my mom used to say, she was literally like, Brandon, you're 20 years old. You should be in your prime. And you're like, you have a bad back. You're getting all these injuries. And she couldn't understand why, you know, because she was more supportive of the veganism than my dad was. He was more questionable of it. And I was like, well, I don't know, you know, because I was in that state constantly where you think as a vegan person, Oh, it's something else. It's you know, I I was grounding myself barefoot two hours a day in the garden Thinking it was a 5g or the Wi-Fi I Was doing some insane things to try and heal myself and it wasn't working Nothing was working. Nothing would change how I felt I was taking a vitamin C supplement a b12 supplement a vitamin D supplement and

[video] 13:29 Then I started taking a vitamin B12 spray for the mouth. You just spray it in your mouth. And about five hours after taking that, my throat literally got swollen and I had all these white patches and ulcers in my throat and mouth. And it took me a few days to recover from that. And again, like the bars, I then look at the ingredients of the B12 spray and it's got like some aluminium metal in it. I was like, what the hell? I have a problem where I just do it out of desperation, I do things or I did things out of desperation to try and cure my suffering because I was in a lot of pain and suffering mentally and physically and I just wasn't happy so I was doing all these things, rushing and scrambling to now being on day four and I've had things like rare steak,

[video] 14:23 I've had raw butter from unpasteurized cows and I'm trying to, there's only two farms in my county that do raw milk and they're about 40 minute drive away so try and go out one weekend just see what that's like but other than that on day four I feel different, I do feel different I can't explain, you won't really understand unless you've been vegan and then you change. For instance, when I had my first egg, I got a huge erection.

[video] 15:00 I couldn't, I was like, what the, and I was like, what's going on here? I was just literally sat scrolling through Facebook and I had, I think it was something like crappy, I literally had eggs on toast on the first day.

[video] 15:14 with some of the raw butter and I was like I literally started feeling really I don't know I can't really explain it it's like energized or as if something that I needed I got back in and my body was like yes eat this you idiot why haven't we had this in three years um so yeah and another thing I've been watching a lot of Frank I think it's Frank Tufano um the YouTube guy, Carnivore, and he talks about facial development and jaw. And since I went vegan, I always had an overbite, but it has got extremely bad to the point where I can't actually touch my teeth on that side. My whole jaw is literally bent. That's the only way to describe it is

[video] 16:10 it's bent so literally my teeth are permanently touching this side and I can't even touch there's like a gap this big from where my teeth can't touch on this side and that affects my sleep massively and it was just interesting to watch Frank's videos I think it is Frank Tufano yeah yeah okay and he was saying about how certain nutrients and development of the facial structure in the jaw and how I pretty much was breathing through my mouth all night which would have made my jaw form outwards more and become deformed and I always had a constant blocked nose as well it's just these things that I just couldn't really cope with it was just getting too much the point where I really was deeply depressed that nothing would help I would have

[video] 17:04 friends all around me saying come on let's go out and get some vegan food you know look here's a vegan pizza free vegan pizza at this restaurant let's go and get it and i'll go and i literally just feel like sleeping um and up to date um i did a race last weekend i was still vegan then and that was when i was at my illest um we took about an hour to drive to a race in basingstoke in the uk And it was a Hampshire League, so it's quite a high standard race. It's got a lot of Team GB athletes in the race.

[video] 17:40 I started the race by mile one. I was in about 15th, 20th place feeling good. And then I just hit like something. And it wasn't as if if you do exercise and you get really out of breath and your muscles are burning. It was a different kind of pain because I've been an athlete since I was about 13, 12. And I can tell. when you hit your limit, you get the burning, you get the breathlessness, you get the kind of burning in your muscles from the lactic acid and your body's just screaming at you, you know, it can't get enough oxygen into the body and use it properly. And it was different, this kind of,

[video] 18:20 pain that I was getting was I would hit the first mile or the second mile and it would just be like a complete fatigue my breathing would stay the same my muscles wouldn't be burning but I literally couldn't hold the pace my body would just and I ended up finishing I started in 15th for the first mile and I ended up going back to like 195th

[video] 18:43 I was literally just walking the end part. It's humiliating because a lot of people know who I was in the community. They watch my channel. There I was, the vegan runner, claiming that veganism is the way for athletes. There I was, getting beaten by some of the older guys at the back. I was like, Yeah, that was the turning point for me that I thought, right, screw this. I've been humiliated enough. I've been pretty much just deceiving people about how I felt and how veganism truly was treating me.

[video] 19:24 and that's it that's when I made that video and I mean I was shocked the response I've been getting are amazing literally I think someone did maybe bought the dislikes because for some nearly all the comments are positive people even vegans are like oh yeah we support you we were just here for the running videos but for some reason it has like 500 dislikes so I'm that's a bit confusing and I know people like Dune Rider have commented on it and pretty much just come out with hate and you know on his... Oh, Durian Rider commented because he actually buys likes on his videos.

20:00 So that could totally be possible.

[video] 20:04 Dune Rider was another one for me. He was a big inspiration back in 2015 when I went vegan. He was one of the ones I was watching. and he kind of you know I got into the whole high-carb sugar I was putting sugar all over my cereal I was pouring sugar in bottles of water to take with me to training and now I look into I've seen the series that the people have created about him and I mean I don't really want to comment on it but because I know if you do that he will literally try and delete your channel I think I found out of a lot of vegans is I cannot really name names in terms of vegan channels because they will literally file lawsuits. They will try and take your channel down. It's like when I was vegan, the meat eaters, the other side, they still respected me. Whereas now I'm no longer vegan, it's like the vegans absolutely hate me and friends I used to have

[video] 21:03 who I was close with, they all of a sudden messaged me out of the blue saying I'm an animal abuser, I was never vegan, I'm an idiot, and they block me on Facebook and they just say they never want to see me again. I mean, that kind of tells me a lot.

21:19 Yeah, a true face of veganism.

[video] 21:21 Yeah.

21:22 I wanted to ask something. I noticed that your arms are quite hairy. Is that genetic? Did you always have it?

[video] 21:28 Yeah, I am really hairy. My dad's hairy. Okay. I have... Yeah, I'm very hairy, especially my legs. It got to the point where I had to start trimming my legs because it was literally looking like a head of hair. And I had a full mustache at the age of 11. So I shave every day. But my parents, they were saying that as a child, they gave me some hormones as a baby because they thought I had cystic fibrosis. So I think they kind of injected me with a load of testosterone and different hormones and it kind of fucked up and it gave me tons of hair. So yeah, it is annoying but it's something that I can deal with and I got it on my back as well. I just, you know, trim it or pluck it or whatever but it is annoying.

22:17 What do your parents think about you quitting veganism?

[video] 22:22 My parents are pretty relieved, to be honest. I've also got a younger brother who does football, and he was always saying that he thought, they were all saying it to my face, look, you're getting slower, you're always getting injured, you're depressed, try changing your diet. And I was like, no, no, it's because I'm not on distilled water, it's because I'm not adding pink Himalayan salt to my water for the minerals.

[video] 22:52 And eventually, and the funny thing is now, because I've been doing a lot of research on how pasteurization and what they do to order milk in the UK. And now I'm trying to get raw milk and having things like that. They're like, oh, whoa, whoa, calm down. Don't go the other way.

[video] 23:12 So they are kind of like smack bang average family standard diet kind of people.

23:19 Why do you think vegans always blame something else? It's never the fault of veganism when they get sick. Is it a mental issue or is it because it's more like a religion or what is it?

[video] 23:30 I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that a lot of the people we see who are vegan and they kind of get seriously ill are the ones that have YouTube channels or they kind of promote it or make money from it by selling nutrition plans, personal training, And they cannot just kind of come out and be like, oh, yeah, guys, I'm not vegan anymore. When all of their followers are vegan and they've got to maintain this kind of image that if they break it, then everything ruins. I mean, for instance, you saw with Tim Sheaf, he said when he made a video about eating salmon and eggs, his company Ethics had a huge drop in sales and people started attacking it. Of course, they were all vegans that attacked it and kind of boycotted it.

[video] 24:21 So I think if you're just a vegan and you try it yourself personally and you're quite low-key in your life and you don't go telling everyone, it will be a lot easier for you to just quietly go back to having animal products. But if you're someone like me and you had thousands of followers and you were documenting everything and You had loads of vegan friends vegan followers Then it's it's it's hard to try and Just blame it. It's you try and find any other excuse apart from the veganism That's the last reason that you want for why you're ill kind of thing.

24:56 If you get me, it's Yeah, I noticed that your patreon account has zero followers. Is it a new account or did you lose them? I

[video] 25:05 Yeah, I was getting about $150 a month and I lost them.

[video] 25:15 I don't want to mention any names, but the two big YouTubers that do the street interviews vegan, I was following their channels when they were very new, when they had literally a few thousand subs. and what i've noticed is it's really weird is it just blew up out of nowhere and all of a sudden i think one of them is getting up to eight grand a month from patreon i'm like who the hell's funding them this much do you know what i mean and they they have all these like um camera equipment professional stuff i probably know who you mean and they said themselves that they are employed so yeah obviously there's people who back it up yeah yeah And in terms of vegan athletes, I was looking up to, there's only really one top vegan runner that I knew of at the time. And he was running nearly at a world level, but he'd only been vegan for a few years.

[video] 26:12 And since 2016, he's got slower and he pretty much quit competitive running now. And he's doing like some crazy trip around the world, driving about in his car, camping and stuff. So, I mean, I look at other vegan athletes and it's just a bit, you know, if I go to a cross-country race or I ask, I like going around and I like asking people, so what's your diet? Like the fast athletes, I'm a bit annoying. They think I'm a bit annoying because I go up and ask everyone, what's your diet? What do you do? None of them are vegan. None of them are vegetarian. They all eat meat.

26:50 Where do you think veganism comes from and what is the future of veganism?

[video] 26:57 If I said the truth, I'd put myself in danger.

[video] 27:01 Because I know I've had stuff I say in the past gets my channel in trouble.

[video] 27:10 Yeah, a lot of, you know, you know, a lot of people won't know.

27:16 You can say whatever you want, you don't have to say.

[video] 27:21 Yeah, without, I mean, the normal people watching this, if I said the truth, they'd be like, they'd kind of discredit me and be like, you're a loony. But I think it's, yeah, it's definitely, what I think is going to happen is it's going to absolutely blow up. It's going to become a massive worldwide thing. you know there's pretty much the indigenous tribes are pretty much non-existent now they've all been eradicated pretty much eradicated and pushed off their land or given land to live on closed off reservations and nature places so it's like this constant we're all um everything's upgrading with the 5g how we're living the diets and it's definitely if you look at who's funding it how much funding it's getting the coverage it gets in the media It's just going to blow up and it's done nothing but get bigger and bigger and bigger every single year.

[video] 28:18 And I think it's, yeah, I mean, the dangerous bit is when these street interview guys go around, they're bringing the ethics as their main argument. And when you do that, the whole animal abuse side is when they're going to try and start talking about this kind of stuff in governments and law and parliaments and kind of allowing animals to have the rights so then it becomes illegal to eat meat or illegal to hunt well it's already illegal to hunt pretty much everywhere anyway but even here in the uk um i said to my dad oh can we go fishing and he was like um well we need regulations permits training um because literally everywhere the lakes the rivers

[video] 29:05 a lot of them they have like these enforcement officers that go around checking the fishermen if they have a paid license to fish there and it's like crazy like the amount of control now and regulations and yeah it's insane and no one questions it they're just like oh this is normal you know it's good so that's where I see veganism going I just see it exploding continually growing everyone just yeah that's where I see it going is it's just going to get bigger bigger bigger bigger bigger all the major food chains have now got vegan options where about four years ago they didn't so it's literally made a massive jump in about two or three years and yeah there are ex-vegans that come out and talk about it but

[video] 29:53 mean if you compare the vegan community on YouTube compared to the carnival community it's like nothing the carnival community is so small compared to the massive massive vegan community so yeah and I mean they've got people like dr. Greger for the science and in the live streams he does that treadmill thing and he says on his intros he goes through all the medical journals every year and and picks the most interesting ones so you guys don't have to. It's like he even admits he cherry picks it all. So it's, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's what I think. So it's going to explode. It's going to keep growing. And I think eventually it's going to become a worldwide norm.

30:38 Do you regret veganism now or how do you see the whole thing?

[video] 30:42 100%. I'm 100%. I've missed three years worth of where I could have been getting stronger, fitter. And more competitive as an athlete and I just pretty much Degenerated my body made myself weak and I've now got to spend months bringing back the nutrients and rebuilding myself because running alone running on its own is extremely stressful and it pretty much is is a catabolic state where you're eating your body and it's endurance. All the top Kenyan runners are pretty much anorexic. They look like they come out of a starvation camp or something. So running by itself is extremely stressful and you're pushing your body to the limits. But to then go vegan and limit all the nutrients

[video] 31:26 you're just asking to die pretty much and a lot of the athletes that tell me i was doing it wrong they weren't you know i was running up to 100 miles a week 90 miles a week on average so i'd wake up and run 10 miles in the morning and then in the evening i'd run another three or four miles because that's what the elite guys do um and i was lit yeah it was i was suffering so much if you could give a message to every vegan on earth right now what would it be

[video] 31:57 um it would be eventually you're going to hit that rock bottom where your body starts to eat itself and the reason that i it only took me three and a half years to get to that point was because of the amount of training i was doing if i was sedentary if i sat down all day and played computer games i reckon i could have lasted about 10 years on a vegan diet But because of my lifestyle where I'm training really hard and I'm doing lots of endurance running, I pretty much, I mean, even more than halved that time frame where I was training so hard that I sped up the damage pretty much. So I'd say, I mean, why not? Give it a go if you want. Give veganism a go. If you're an athlete, give it a go. And I guarantee you that if

[video] 32:55 If you're vegan and you're running better than ever by two or three years, please contact me and let me know what you're doing because I tried every single way. I was the vegan runner. I was the one in that community and I was getting all the help I could. I had doctors, vegan doctors. I had other vegan people telling me about personal training and nutrition and whatever I did, nothing helped. So on my channel, I'll just be documenting my recovery. and how my training and racing goes in the next few years. Now back on eating meat and trying to eat more raw animal products like raw dairy instead of pasteurized and the standard kind of average diet.

33:38 Anything else you would like to add? Any experience? Any symptoms you had or something you learned from it?

[video] 33:46 I mean, I could write a whole list out of symptoms I had.

33:51 How was your digestion?

[video] 33:53 Yeah, it was horrendous. I was farting all the time. My whole family would say, oh, that's a vegan fart. They had that saying, because it smells worse. I don't want to go into too much detail, but that's one massive thing I've noticed is when I go to the toilet now, it pretty much doesn't smell. I'm like, hang on, have I been? It doesn't smell anywhere near as bad as it did Looking back on it now, I pretty much had diarrhea for three years. I literally had no idea. So yeah, my digestion was horrendous. It really was.

[video] 34:39 I'd go on runs, and yeah, I won't go into detail, but it was really, really, really bad.

[video] 34:49 I mean, yeah. There's so much stuff. I put it all up on my channel. I couldn't name it all now, but there is my skin.

[video] 35:00 Just, yeah.

35:02 Yeah, people can watch the video for more information.

[video] 35:06 Yeah, I think mental health was the main one for me because I was freaking out so much. I would go for runs and I wouldn't be able to run over a few miles. It was that bad. I'd be exhausted and... So yeah, that's really all. Yeah.

35:22 Okay, man. Thanks for sharing.

[video] 35:25 Yeah, thanks for letting me on, man. Yeah.