Ex-Vegan (1.5 Years): I Feared for My Life Daily

Watch on YouTube · 2019-06-21 · 30 min

0:00 Introduce yourself, if you like to, and start at the beginning, how you got into veganism, what year it was and how it all unfolded.

[video] 0:09 Okay, my name is James and I'm in Sussex in England. And I got into veganism after being a lifelong vegetarian from about 8 or 9 years old. So it was the natural progression for me. to do that, having watched a lot of these Cowspiracy films and Earthling movies and things like that. So I first got into it in August 2017, roughly, and then pretty much stopped around about March this year. So that's about 18 months in total. As I said, it was a natural progression for me. I came from the ethical angle, really, with it. And I saw sort of all the marketing that was going on in terms of, you know, you can live healthy with substitute products, cheeses and milks and all this sort of thing. So I got into it. And for the first three to six months, I guess, you know, it felt pretty okay. You know, I'd detoxed.

[video] 1:09 I don't know if I had detoxed. I mean, in hindsight, I probably hadn't detoxed. But I felt kind of lighter, you know, because you can shed a little bit of body weight because you're not getting saturated fats, etc.,

[video] 1:20 And yeah, I was going about my business normally. That really kind of slowly, slowly deteriorated over the three-month mark to the 18-month mark. And when the first things that started to go wrong, I suppose, would be as general apathy, I guess, slight feelings of depression, which then sort of escalated into feelings of nihilism, not really understanding what our point is. Thinking too much about the cause, you know, you've got this kind of holy shrine that you're supposed to live, abide by, you know, in this religion that it patently is. You become consumed in thinking along those patterns every single day, day in, day out. So my whole kind of mindset and day-to-day thinking had become skewed. So that was probably one of the first things to go wrong. You know, there was a deep sense of existential crisis in a way. It was a very surreal

[video] 2:20 started very surreal sort of feeling and then following from that it was really a lot of the physical problems that started to go wrong on the first occasion was about May last year I suppose I was just sitting on my bed probably about 4 p.m. 5 p.m. and I felt a complete numbness down the side of my body arm went completely numb I had a complete sort of locked in almost It was, you know, almost like a paralysis, I suppose. So, you know, I feared the worst. I spoke to my mom, who was a nurse, and luckily over the course of a couple of hours, that sort of rubbed off. And then from there, that kind of nerve, I think it was nerve damage, from there it then escalated into serious pins and needles down both sides of my arm, both sides of my arms, both arms, I should say.

[video] 3:19 I'd just be watching TV, having my arm on rest like that, for example, not placing too much weight on it. And then all of a sudden I'm just going, wow, I can't even feel this. I can't even feel my arm. I'm shaking it off as if a fat guy had sat on it or something. And that would just persist. Oh, here it comes again, just shaking it off. That's only just recovered. I mean, I stopped this veganism three months ago, and I'm only just recovering from that and what I think is nerve damage now. That was actually one of the least serious things. I've got a whole plethora, a whole catalogue of serious ailments that accompany that. So, I mean, starting from, I suppose, most serious and working down, I suppose that would be one of the things that was up there. In addition to what I think was nerve damage, I started to have serious heart palpitations.

[video] 4:16 to the point where I called an ambulance on two occasions. It first started just out of the blue one evening, and I was just sat there watching TV, and my heart just suddenly kicked up, bang, bang, bang, bang, as if I just got off a treadmill having sprinted for five minutes flat. I stood up, and I'm extremely dizzy, and my heart's pounding like that. And then that would kind of subside. So for the first couple of months, that would sort of happen and then go away kind of quickly. And I kind of shrugged it off and I just thought, you know, well, I mean, admittedly, I was having a couple of cigarettes, not heavy, you know, no more than I had done for the last sort of 10 years prior. You know, I wasn't changing my behavior, my behavioral lifestyle at all.

[video] 5:02 and I wasn't drinking anymore, you know, my sort of lifestyle hadn't really changed, but I put it down to those kind of things, stress, et cetera. And then progressively that actually got worse. So I would be simply just, like I said, just sitting there watching TV. I then start to preempt this attack from coming on, and I can actually feel I'm about to happen. So I was around my parents' house one day, for example, just lying there around their living room, just chilling out, chatting, and I'm just like, wow, okay, this is about to happen again. You know, mom, get ready. So she says, what do you mean? And I stand up, and I just go bang, bang, bang, heart's going mental. I get a cold sensation down me. It then breaks into a panic attack. I'd never had a panic attack before in my life, you know. I'm a really sort of chilled out guy, and I'm shaking, and I'm on the bed just shaking like this,

[video] 5:58 And my temperature drops, I've got a cold sweat or a fever or whatever it was, and my heart's just going crazy. I'm not able to breathe properly, I'm kind of mildly hyperventilating in a way. So that was up there with one of the most serious things. Another serious ailment that came with it was in the form of severe dizziness. I'm talking a level of... dizziness that would be described as sickening and I feared for my life like I've never feared for anything ever before. I've walked off rugby pitches holding dislocated shoulders and broken noses and things like that and I've never been fazed by anything. This is a feeling of I'd just be walking down the street and all of a sudden I get a complete out of body experience almost.

[video] 6:52 I'm just completely dizzy, and I just feel like I'm observing myself almost from outside of my body, and I just think, wow, I'm about to drop. You know, I'm literally about to go, you know, I'd be with friends and I'd just go, sorry, hold on one second, take a ledge, take a seat. And it was, and I can't describe, you know, it's so hard to put into words that this feeling of sickening dizziness that would just come about me. And that would happen two or three times a week, you know, and I'd just come out of nowhere. And, you know, just to give you an example of how bad it was, I would want to make sure my phone was on charge 24-7, not because I wanted to check my Skype or my Instagram or my Facebook, but because I wanted to know the ambulance was going to be nearby. I'd already called the ambulance once. They came out to see me. Couldn't really put a finger on what was the cause. And I just wanted to make sure that my phone was there. I constantly wanted to have signal on my phone because I thought if something happens,

[video] 7:52 you know, I want to make sure that I can reach some emergency services. And that was my life for essentially several weeks. So that feeling of dizziness was awful. So yeah, I had the dizziness. What else did I have? So following up from that,

[video] 8:17 tinnitus in my ears. This was happening day in, day out. I used to have it as a kid, but then it went away for years, and it all happened at the same time as these other problems started arising. So I could tell it was all interlinked. I'm just sitting there at night, and my ears start going, really, really loud ringing. And I'm just going, what the hell is going on here? And it's happening in the daytime, it's happening in the nighttime, morning, afternoon. you know, moving down, I suppose, in the severity order, the hair starts falling out, you know, big time. I'm 31, and I'm not going to have this hair forever. You know, there's baldness in my family, et cetera, et cetera. But I would honestly go to have a shower, and within two minutes, I've got hair in my face, in my mouth, blocking the plug hole, and I'm running my hand through my hair like this. And instead of getting like one or two pieces, I'm getting

[video] 9:17 20 pieces, you know, 30 pieces, 30 hairs, I should say. My English is awful today. You know, absolutely awful, and I was going, wow, you know. And then really going down the list further, I mean, I could go on and on and on. You know, I've got, I had serious knee joint problems. You know, I felt like my knees were 100 years old. I'd be lying there at nighttime again, and I've just got pain here, pain there. I'm thinking, I haven't done any sport. Okay, I'll go to the gym, but I'm not that taxing at the gym. I just do my sort of normal routine. I'm not really pushing myself that hard. What could it be? What is causing this sort of pain? So that was the knee joint problems. I then had, okay, what else did I have? What didn't I have?

[video] 10:12 you know, going to the toilet, for example, I was needing to go to the bathroom to take a pee, probably in the region between 10 times to 15 times a day, maybe, you know, and it wasn't very healthy smelling urine in some sense. And then bowel movements would be between four and six times a day, something horrendous. So yeah, this was all happening at the same time.

10:49 What about bloating and gas?

[video] 10:52 I see you have a lot of documentary, a lot of videos about bloating and gas. I mean, yeah, I suppose so. You get a lot of people with these digestion problems. But because I think I've been vegetarian, I think before, and because you know, I'd probably not have the animal protein reserve in me. I think that was the last of my worries. I think the biggest, my biggest worries were the psychological, the physiological, you know, the brain issues, you know, and the nerve damage I think was starting to happen with me. I think I was fast forwarding through time. You know, a lot of these vegans are fine for 5, 20 years. A lot of people maybe are coping better than others with it. They have a better reserve of animal protein. For me, you know, perhaps it sounds ridiculous. I'd only done it for 18 months. But as I said, I was vegetarian before. And I know that I didn't have those issues then. And these issues all came together at the same time. And, you know, I still had a bit of bulk on me.

[video] 11:53 I'd known about the healthy plant foods. I've always cooked or eaten properly my bean dishes, my whole grains, the cruciferous vegetables, my nuts, my seeds. Before anybody says anything like that, that was my life before anyway. So I hadn't done anything different except for remove the animal protein. So yeah, digestion problems, yeah, as I said, I'm just constantly going to the toilet for number one and for number two.

12:24 Would you say that you got all these problems sooner than other people because you were a vegetarian before?

[video] 12:31 Absolutely, wholeheartedly, yeah. You know, as I said, as a vegetarian, I looked healthy, you know, I was 101 kilos, you know, which is 210 pounds, 220 pounds maximum sometimes, and, you know, strong guy. But at the same time, I mean, as a vegetarian, I still had the odd... I had feelings of depression quite often. I had erratic thinking patterns. I had sleep apnea, which is what I've grown up with from, I think, a young kid. I've still got it now. I don't know whether that's related or not. I can't pin everything onto this. I have to have an objective kind of viewpoint on it. But I would say that I was never a bastion of health, perhaps.

[video] 13:17 And I'd say that certainly, yeah, my transition into this veganism, that instead of me having a large reserve of animal foods or animal biology, you know, microbiome and protein reserves within me, whatever it was, I probably had less than an average person, which is why one year in, I was literally falling to pieces. So yeah, I'd say it was because of vegetarianism before. But that's great. I mean, that means I haven't wasted 10 years of my life living as a malnourished fool. And I've actually realized it sooner than a lot of other poor people who don't realize in time. But then going on from that, you know, just at nighttime, you know, I I almost think I had a stroke. I almost think I was suffering the beginnings of a stroke. I would lie there at night and I'd have these flashing images in my head.

[video] 14:14 I mean, just 10 minutes into getting to sleep, for example, I'd start shooting like camera flashes going off inside my brain, for example. I was having these weird turns of being on a roller coaster you know I feel like my my my equilibrium was completely disturbed I'd have these flashing lights happening and yeah that that was often when I was trying to go to sleep you know and I'm not a doctor I don't know I don't I know even less about nutrition and a lot of these youtubers but I know that there was a brain disturbance going on there which was

[video] 14:53 extremely scary one other thing as well was a constant was it was a sudden drop in temperature which you hear again and again i'd be lying there in my bed and um and it's not particularly cold i suddenly start shaking and my temperature just goes to zero and i'm literally in a ball like this i go from being quite comfortable to rolling over and just clasping myself like this and i'm just going jeez and it's it's like i've been thrown in thrown into the Antarctic. It's not just a little shiver. It's not just me going, oh, a little bit cold tonight. It was a complete homeostasis of being completely normal temperature down several degrees to feeling, oh my God, I'm freezing. I'd have freezing limbs. I'd come in from

[video] 15:44 being outside in 15 degree, 18 degree, 20 degree weather, and I'd come into the house, I remember this as an example, look down at my hands, my hands are blue, my nails are blue, I've got lines down my nails, And yeah, I'm just touching people. I'm shaking their hand. For example, in my job, I'm just shaking someone's hand on one of my friends. I'm shaking their hand and they're saying to me, wow, you know, your hands are cold. You know, this was happening as well. I had hypertension. Okay, I did have a little bit, maybe too much salt at times, but my mom took my blood pressure a couple of times. The doctor told me I had hypertension. But just to put it into context, you know, from a higher level, I was fearing for my life often. Quite often, I was advised by a cardiologist who couldn't see anything wrong with me, admittedly, to buy a portable ECG machine.

[video] 16:43 So this is a tiny little pocket device because he said, every time you have these episodes, you know, try and record it. So you put your fingers on this ECG device and it records the workings of your heart. So that, I mean, that was the kind of life I'd got myself into that I was having to carry around portable ECG. I was having to visit the doctor more than I've ever visited the doctor before. I'd had the ambulance called twice. I'd had my phone on charge because I was scared that I was going to pass out. I mean, that was basically what my life had become.

17:18 Did you also take supplements as a vegan?

[video] 17:21 Yeah, and I think a couple of those may have even added to the problem. I don't know, and I don't know whether any of this can be attributable, any of my symptoms can be attributed to the supplements. I remain open-minded about it, although taken as a whole, I will point the finger firmly at veganism. But, you know, I would say that perhaps one or two of these things were a result of the supplements. I mean, a B12 supplement, for example, I took, led me to feel extremely itchy all over. You know, there's one day I woke up and I had like a million little fires or little pinpricks going off all over my body. Just little, just itchy pinpricks. You know, just little itches going off all over my body. And I'm looking down and going, ah, shit, I've got a rash. You know, my clothes have been mixed with the wrong detergent or something like that.

[video] 18:19 You know, I've got bed lice or something, you know. But then after a day of having this, I'm like, I've got no physical signs. I've got no marks on me. I've got no red marks. I've got no white dots. You know, my skin looks great. Well, not great. It looks fine. But this was a weird sensation of just tiny little, you know, I attributed that to the B12 tablet. And as soon as I stopped taking that, that particular symptom went away and my itchiness went away. Um, so I certainly say that the B12 caused that. Um, I can't, I can't tell you whether other tablets have, I mean, I know that, um, you know, multivitamins, you know, I've, uh, yeah, I've not got on too well with some of those. Um, I think the Omega tablets probably helped, like algae oil. I mean, that's probably got some credibility. I didn't really have an adverse reaction to that.

[video] 19:18 But no, you know, the fact that you're hooked up to these supplements just shows that you're a patient. You know, I don't want to be a patient of the system. And yeah, I had magnesium, B12, multivitamin, Omega DHA. I had...

[video] 19:40 Zinc tablets, the list goes on and bloody on. Protein powder. So for anyone to say you're doing it wrong and all this crap, no, veganism was doing me wrong. As I said before, I got into it from an ethical stance. I just purely looked at it and thought, well, if I can't kill the animal myself, do I have the right to eat it? Is it right that I eat it? Clearly, no. I mean, I now look at it and think, well, actually, we've been desensitized to the whole, you know, we have become less human as a society anyway. I mean, our phones, for example, are an extension of us nowadays. We've become robots. We've become AI. So for me not to want to kill an animal now, I look at it and think, yeah, that's perfectly to be expected. It's the light, you know, it's the modern day age that we're living in. We're in a postmodern world of AI and IT, you know.

[video] 20:38 But at the time, I saw it as a thing where, yeah, I can't kill an animal. I think it's wrong. I've seen horrific things that go on. And I still stand by the abuse that can take place, which is horrific. But the actual act of living in alignment to what we're supposed to do and being a part of an ecology, I now look at that in a completely different light and see that what right is it? that I have, what right do I have to remove myself from that ecology simply because I'm deeming it as cruel, you know, or society tells me that it's cruel. I don't think that I have a right to do that. So no, my mindset is completely taking a change on that.

21:18 What do you think is the future of veganism?

[video] 21:21 Yeah, I knew you were going to ask that. The future, I mean, the reason I'm doing this video is because although you know, if you take 100 people, 100 vegans, although 99% will eventually drop out, I think, or somewhere between 90 and 100, I think, because their health starts to fail. It's as simple as that. It's such an easy thing to change, you know, if I'm eating a vegan diet and I'm and I'm fucking myself up, I can quickly go and change over to go and get some eggs or some bacon or something. So in that sense, nobody's trapped into it. So I think it won't expand. I don't think it will blow up to the level that a lot of people think it would. But because it's now being marketed as such a – because it's being marketed so well, you know, you've got – you know, it's become a package which is almost –

[video] 22:13 you know, irrefutable, you know, you can't argue against an idea that says, well, hold on, you know, the environment's going to benefit, you're going to benefit, the animals are going to benefit, you know, where, you know, it's like the best salesman in the world, you know, you sort of sit there and you go, oh yeah, do you know what, that's true, this is a win-win situation, so while that's happening, you know, I'm concerned that many, many people are jumping on board with it and perhaps doing It's probably going to be short-term damage, but I strongly believe that there's people doing long-term serious damage in it. You've seen the babies who have died from it. I can see in the faces of a lot of these YouTube people that it's doing their organs and their skin serious damage. So I'd say even though 90% of people are going to drop out, I still think that there's going to be one or two people who are so ingrained and entrenched in that mindset In that philosophy, you know, it's a religion. It is a cult, as we know.

[video] 23:11 And for them, it's not just about taking the step over to eating an egg anymore. It's become part of who they are. And they'd sooner lay down their life than make a very simple diet change. And those are the people that I'd really reach out to and say, you know, Don't do it. You know, I mean, if veganism was a guy, you know, what he did to me, I would have punched his head off his shoulders. You know, that's how strongly I feel about what it's done to me. And, you know, I'm simply projecting my message out there because I know there'll be people that will not get off the bandwagon and will carry on riding through to perhaps strokes, cancers, you know,

[video] 23:58 mental impairment you know as i said this existential crisis i had this feeling of complete you know what the hell is the point of being here you know i thought if animals are being killed i was thinking you know what have we got to live for you know you start thinking well you know and then you start thinking about trees being alive and i'm thinking well you know and now now plants are alive and feeling pain you start wallowing in this self-pity and if and if all of this is occurring to you on some level within people and especially the physical at people who I really think it can cause a strike everything it can lead to serious physical ailments then you know my message would be and don't do it you know the you know you you clearly

[video] 24:39 you're clearly drawn towards the texture and flavors of of animal foods for a reason you know you're making mock meats substitute meats for a reason you know these these fake turkeys and the fake bacons and everything and the sausages and everything it's so patently obvious that you're doing this because we're meant to be consuming animal foods and my only question now is what the ratio of animal food to uh plant food is or whether it is a hundred percent one of the i i don't know that's the only question for me but but the question that i've answered is a really clear question, and I don't care what study is thrown at me to counter it. And that is the question of, are we exclusively herbivores? And the categorical answer to that is a resounding no, 100%. So I tell people not to waste their time, not waste their energy.

[video] 25:30 do what we've been doing for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. Yeah, that's the future. Yeah, I think it's got a long way to go before more people are going to get hurt from it.

[video] 25:44 But, you know, it will be counteracted by common sense and people simply taking the option to say, I want to buy some meat. But, as I said, there's going to be a small percentage of those people who refuse to do that. What's worrying me now is the way that it's being marketed now and the sort of fail-safe, you know, it's...

[video] 26:08 It's no longer seen as a hippie movement, it's seen as a why wouldn't you movement. Why wouldn't you do it? And for those people, it starts as a health motivation perhaps, but then when you get into it, you then start looking at the broader picture of footage of animals being butchered, and you then become entrenched in this religion. And that just encompasses you and surrounds you and takes over your whole being. And for those people who are more impressionable than others, I'm worried for them. As I said, the physical ailments took one to three months to subside. The mental scarring I think I've taken away from it is only just subsiding now, three and

[video] 27:04 four months down the road you know I tell people how affected I was by it and a lot of people can't understand it and that's simply because I wasn't put in I didn't break my leg I didn't have a car crash so so on the outset you know people can you know you'd look at me and think oh You know, he's got bags under his eyes. He's got that gaunt expression. His skin looks rough because that's a typical symptom. But he otherwise looks okay. But when you start staggering these symptoms one after another over a long time, you know, it didn't need to be one single big event. I'm scarred by the prolonged suffering that I went through and the multitude and range of different issues I experienced. And I'm now looking back at that and just thinking, Jesus, man, like, you know,

[video] 27:52 was more i'm more affected by what happened to me than i thought you know i was fear fearing for my life um so yeah that's it's the mental side that's probably taken the biggest tax on me anything else you would like to add um anything else trying to think now um no i think that's probably the biggest list of ailments that anybody's come on here with. I mean, I've heard them all before on your videos from one degree to another. And I don't think you've probably met anybody with quite so many as I had. I don't know.

28:29 It's definitely some tough stuff you went through.

[video] 28:33 Absolutely. And as I said, day by day, I could get on with my daily life because I may only be experiencing one problem at a time. But the fact that that then subsides and another one creeps in, and then I go back to the same one, and then I have a new one, and then that goes away. You know, when I break that down over the course of the, you know, probably a six-month period, that happening, you know, I'm traumatized by it. And I simply add... Yeah, don't listen to these idiots on YouTube who use pseudoscience to propagate some fake idea that we're no longer part of nature. We are a part of nature, whether we like it or not. And it's just another attempt to dehumanize us and move us away from you know, what comes natural to us, you know, in the same way that all these other isms are, you know, these transgender isms, feminists, whatever it is, these ways of

[video] 29:32 normalizing things which are not normal to nature. Whether I treat someone the same or not is a different story. I'll always treat someone the same, but we have to sometimes just agree that this is one of our most natural things, in the same way as sleeping.

[video] 29:51 We can't change the way we sleep. It's like someone saying we only need three hours sleep a night. No, you don't. You need seven to eight hours sleep. It's that much ingrained in us from our ancestral history that you can't mess with it. You can't mess with it. So don't try and mess with it. And yeah, stay away from veganism.

30:13 All right, man. Thank you.

[video] 30:14 All right, man. No worries.