Ex-Vegan (1.5 Years): The Food Came Out the Same Way It Went In - Plants Ruined My Digestion

Watch on YouTube · 2019-06-03 · 47 min

0:00 Introduce yourself and start at the very beginning, how you got into veganism, what year it was and then what happened.

[video] 0:07 Okay. So my name is Levan. I am 22 years old and I live in Berlin, Germany.

[video] 0:17 I got into veganism in the end of 2016. I had a girlfriend at that time that was interested in healthy eating, healthy diets and bought into the plant-based way of eating.

[video] 0:39 I got attached to this topic and started researching about it even more than my girlfriend.

[video] 0:48 I became also very interested in it. When I was an omnivore, I tried to include more whole food, whole plant-based foods into my diet. More beans, whole oats, stuff like that. because I thought that was healthier than eating like corn flakes and meat all day. And I didn't really have any health issues. I just didn't improve my strength at the gym the way I wanted to. Well, yeah. But adding in those whole foods

[video] 1:42 plant-based whole foods, my digestion got a little bit worse. I had some bloating, overall pain in my gut sometimes. And I never had this before in my life. My digestion was pretty much fine my whole life. Eating a normal standard Western junk food based diet, including meat on a regular basis.

[video] 2:13 and then I started researching more about healthy eating but obviously in the wrong direction and came across a lot of vegan channels on YouTube bought totally into this and my digestion didn't improve but somehow I didn't make the connection between the way my diet transitioned more to plant-based and my digestion getting worse because I read the myth, you know, fiber is good for the digestive tract, good for the microbiome. Yeah. And then I don't know exactly when it was when I first decided to go vegan, but I think it was like in the end of 2016.

[video] 3:12 Then I had a small interruption on, well I think it was Christmas and there I ate some meat again, just a little bit but the bulk of my calories every day came from grains like rice and lentils.

[video] 3:36 I thought legumes are a great source of protein.

[video] 3:42 well yeah and then I went back to veganism for a couple of months and then in February I know that I cheated on that one last time I ate some sushi with salmon and chicken in it and then I was straight vegan because my digestion was so horrible I experimented with other ways of the vegan diet I got very quick into raw veganism for some time, like in later spring of 2017. Not a fruitarian diet, but I would eat a lot of sprouted buckwheat, for example, and some green smoothies aside with that.

[video] 4:38 most of the meals were smoothies actually the buckwheat that I sprouted for 48 hours I blended it with bananas and water basically and some cinnamon in it to get it down well this of course didn't work out for me and after a month or so I got very sick and didn't recover it was like a light cold or something but it didn't went away and then I craved warm foods and well someday I decided to eat cooked food again vegan of course and yeah felt way better I have to say that before I started veganism but being on a pretty much plant-based whole foods diet

[video] 5:38 I gained a lot of weight, of course no muscle mass. How? I was supplementing creatine at this time, but when I went completely vegan I quit supplementing creatine. I didn't feel a difference really, so perhaps it didn't work at all, but well, I stopped that and I think like three months into veganism I started losing weight. and I didn't want it to. So the heaviest I've ever been was like 103 kilograms. I'm pretty tall though so that's not a lot but I was always the more skinny guy and so this was for me it was a lot and then I went down to 95 kilograms like within three or four months into veganism. My strength

[video] 6:37 in the gym went down couldn't do anything about it I supplemented protein powders the whole time on the vegan diet plant-based protein powders like a mix of rice and pea protein which tasted horrible of course and yeah later in 2017 my digestion of course didn't improve

[video] 7:07 I was always eating a very clean, so to speak, whole foods, vegan diet, like grains, a lot of legumes, vegetables, nuts and seeds. basically everything Dr. Greger recommends in his daily dozens I ate that every day. The calorie surplus of about 500 calories on paper at least but I lost weight and strength and then in September of 2017 I went to Norway hiking through the Fjell and There we visited some friends after the hike and there I ate some meat again and I felt so much better. I didn't have problems with bread and gluten I had before on the vegan diet.

[video] 8:07 So I had to cut out gluten all the time, but in Norway I could eat bread like it was perfectly fine for me. I had no problems. My digestion improved just by eating some, what was it, caribou and salmon, some eggs, some butter, some cheese. And I didn't make the connection between the animal products in my diet and my improving health. I thought it was like

[video] 8:40 that I'm so relaxed there and on vacation and yeah the ocean, the good air and really crazy is that I didn't notice it and then I went back to Berlin and ate again the whole foods vegan diet and my digestion was completely wrecked again and I lost really really much weight on the journey in Norway because of course you can't carry enough to eat in the Fjell and I went down on I think 84 kilograms in Norway and I could gain some weight back in Berlin like to

[video] 9:36 the end of the year 2016 I gained like five kilograms again but not really a lot of muscle didn't improve my strength back to where it was and then my digestion got even worse it was on well yeah on Christmas 2017 yeah my digestion stopped working at all I was basically shitting my food out the way it came in, like four hours after the meal, really scary. The food felt scratchy in my gut, was really uncomfortable. The only benefit that came along with that was that I didn't have a lot of bloating when I didn't digest the food at all.

[video] 10:29 Was it also painful? Not really painful, not like the bloating. When I was really bloated and I was sitting somewhere where I couldn't fart, I had so incredible pain. It felt like I would almost explode. Really painful.

[video] 10:51 When my digestion was completely wrecked, was of course very weak but my digestion my digestive tract didn't experience that much pain well yeah so this crazy stuff happening that i didn't digest the food at all i had this for a couple of days once a month since i went back from norway but

[video] 11:22 got better after some days every time but not this time after Christmas it stayed like this for at least two weeks then it improved back a little bit and then it got worse again and I didn't recover I was weaker all the time lost even more weight and And yeah, that's the point where I started to visit several doctors. No, at least I think six overall. And nobody could help me or didn't want to help me.

[video] 12:04 Only I think in March 2018, I went to a doctor who made a stool test and that stuff. And then he found out that my gut microbiome was all over the place. Nothing was like it should be. I almost had no E. coli bacteria that's important for the digestion of protein. And I was down to 80 kilograms on that point. And again, I didn't want to lose a single kilogram. on a vegan diet. I only wanted to improve my physique, get healthier and make some vegan gains. Didn't happen at all.

[video] 12:55 in the end I took some probiotics and my digestion improved a bit but at the same time I had switched from my main protein source red lentils to chickpeas and I think that I was really allergic in the end to those red lentils that I would eat like on a daily basis and so switching to chickpeas was one of the reasons why my digestion improved a little bit but also the probiotics were helpful but after some time my digestion was getting worse again even though I was taking the probiotics daily and the recommended amount

[video] 13:52 and I was really frustrated by that I had many colds in the last six months being vegan and then I didn't know how to help me and I think it was in the mid of June 2018 that I

[video] 14:19 was laying in my bed being sick and then I stumbled across your ex-vegan interviews and yeah I watched those and I was really surprised and well yeah because all these people you've interviewed were talking about the same issues that they had that I shared

[video] 14:47 And so I was thinking like, well, I should give meat a try.

[video] 14:56 But we had some meat at home at this time. So I went to the kitchen and had some eggs. I boiled some eggs with some rice and ate some rice with scrambled eggs and avocado, I think. And I lied back to bed and I had no bloating. I felt calm. I felt strengthened. I felt better. And I was like, I had very high expectations though, because of what the ex-vegans on your interviews said, what they had reactions. And yeah, I was surprised because I wasn't disappointed. I felt really good.

[video] 15:39 couldn't believe how calm my digestive tract could be after eating a meal and yeah I felt great the next few days I incorporated some chicken and then even some chicken liver and all the symptoms I didn't even have noticed that I had those disappeared very quickly within the Well, or most of them within two weeks. And I wasn't completely carnivore. I ate white rice, sometimes some avocado or a bit of orange juice. I had sometimes fresh pressed orange juice, of course. But basically eggs, bacon. I love bacon and eggs. And well, chicken liver. I ate a lot of liver in the beginning. And

[video] 16:34 I felt so much better, but sadly, like two weeks after or three weeks after going back on an omnivorous diet, I ate a chicken leg on a party that was like, I don't know, it was really bad. And then I was very sick, shitting my guts out. And, um, yeah, I don't know what it was, uh, wrecked my digestion again. Then I went on a vacation. in the Alps was a bit hard to gain weight back in the Alps but I was eating predominantly eggs, meat and I drank a lot of raw milk there really really good stuff and well I think at the end of the sickness I had due to the bad chicken leg I was down on 78 kilograms

[video] 17:33 of course in the few weeks before that being back on meat I didn't gain a lot of weight and this was the lightest I had been like in the last four years or so really crazy I looked like a stick and then after the vacation I gained back a lot of weight like the first 10 kilograms I gained back where like lean muscle or lean body mass

[video] 18:03 took me I think three to four months to gain 10 kilograms and then in the end of 2018 in the winter time I gained even more weight but that's I think due to sweets I don't know but well yeah I took the probiotics after going back on an omnivorous diet and my digestion improved even further. The sensitivity I had towards dairy products decreased. I can handle now dairy products pretty good. My sensitivity to gluten also went pretty much away.

[video] 18:55 i only have to look that it is like sourdough bread also if i want to eat some and yeah but after i think six months i stopped taking the probiotics um also very expensive to take those on a daily basis and i expected my um digestion to get worse again but on a meat-based diet it improved further. So that's really nice and now I have to tell all the symptoms I developed on the vegan diet that I didn't notice when I was on a vegan diet because they came in very slowly, progressed over the time I only noticed those when I went back to meet and they all disappeared.

[video] 19:57 There are quite a lot, so let me read this. I have taken pictures of the list here on my smartphone.

[video] 20:13 So I will go through those as quick as possible.

[video] 20:20 Of course as I said I lost a lot of muscle even though I was eating like 200 or even more grams of protein per day.

[video] 20:32 didn't help at all, even protein powders. And I supplemented sometimes with BCAAs or essential amino acids, all the eight essential amino acids. My stamina went down really, really quickly on the vegan diet. I noticed that when I did squats that I went out of breath like in the first, the time of the first few reps. And I had to drop the weight significantly to handle the squats and not collapsing due to a lack of oxygen or I don't know.

21:12 It's also important to mention that the plants have protein inhibitors that don't let you absorb protein. Exactly. So it doesn't matter if you eat 200, 300 grams. Yeah.

[video] 21:21 It's only on paper. Yeah. And the essential amino acids are often, it's mostly the essential amino acids in those plants that are the compounds of those anti-nutrients like lectins contain a lot of these essential amino acids and if you have read on paper oh nice like red lentils contain 2.3 grams of leucine on 100 grams you're not going to absorb any of those amino acids because they are bound in these specific anti-nutrients, so fuck plant protein. It's really toxic, by the way. It contains non-proteinogenic amino acids. This is also counter to the protein amount that you can read on the package of like lentils or so. But the body cannot use it to synthesize anything.

[video] 22:18 And it has been shown that some of these non-proteinogenic amino acids are even neurotoxic. Well, yeah, they are toxins. So stay away from example like pea protein. It's really high in those. My libido dropped like many of your ex-vegan mentioned.

[video] 22:47 My heartbeats became irregular sometimes, like in the evening when I was laying in bed, I felt my heart stop beating for one beat and then it beat a bit quicker and yeah, really, really frightening actually.

[video] 23:11 After my meals, especially after drinking a smoothie that contained banana and something like that, I had palpitations. My heart was beating very quickly.

[video] 23:28 I became very, very tired after my meals when my blood sugar dropped down and I developed brain fog, like severe brain fog. I had problems to concentrate, to focus.

[video] 23:50 My short time memory was getting really bad. When I entered a room, I was in the room and standing there like an idiot because I had forgotten why I went there. I couldn't remember. This happened so many times a day in the end of my vegan experience.

[video] 24:20 I lost creativity. I can say that. I used to paint and draw a lot when I was a child. That was basically everything I was doing. Even as a teenager I painted a lot. On a vegan diet this completely went away. I didn't paint a single picture when I was vegan. Then I experienced tinnitus sometimes when I was stressed. I never had this before in my life and I didn't have it after going back on meat.

[video] 25:01 Overall I was really sensitive to

[video] 25:06 too stress. Um, it would really exhaust myself very quickly. I think that's a sign of B12 deficiency. I don't know.

25:15 Um, nerve damage also.

[video] 25:17 Yeah, perhaps, perhaps. But I recovered from this. Now I can handle stress very well. Um, in comparison, that's great. Um, actually all the symptoms I'm talking about pretty much went away or well went away completely on percent. Um, I had problems to fall asleep and my sleep overall wasn't that good. I would wake up several times in the night and couldn't fall asleep again.

[video] 25:51 In the winter 2017 to 2018 I was really really sensitive to the cold weather like I have never been before in my life. and it was actually a very mild winter here in Berlin but my hands were always cold not only in the winter but in the winter time when it was windy or just when I was walking out in the cold my forehead felt like it would freeze it was really painful and also my ears felt like they would become a chunk of ice

[video] 26:38 My nose, especially in springtime, was always clogged up. I was sneezing all the time, really annoying. I became sensitive to pollen due to, I think, due to gut damage through the lectins. I don't know, but I never had problems with this in my whole life. Even before I went completely vegan, I was eating so many legumes and there I experienced this the first time that my nose was clogged up and I would sneeze a lot when I was outside. And I couldn't breathe through my nose even at night so I became pretty much a mouth breather. Now it's slowly, I get myself back to breathing almost all the time through my nose because now it's not clogged up anymore.

[video] 27:37 yeah of course as I mentioned my digestion was horrible I had bloating I farted all the time like after some meals like every few minutes and they would stink like hell I had a ractation after my meals and when I woke up I didn't have experience any appetite within the first three to four hours.

[video] 28:15 I couldn't get myself to eat anything in the morning. I had to wait and I was then drinking a lot of water. I had also this extreme thirst. I was drinking up to six liters a day of water because I was all the time so thirsty. And I noticed the more animal fat I eat, the less thirsty I am now. I drink now like, when it's hot, I drink three to four liters a day at max, but not like six or even more liters. Crazy, really crazy.

[video] 28:53 And yeah, my bowel movements were mostly like diarrhea. acid diarrhea. Sometimes I was constipated but I think I never had, I didn't have once had a normal bowel movement when I was vegan. Watery stool as well, horrible, just horrible.

[video] 29:30 Sometimes Especially at this point where I didn't digest the food at all, I would feel my gut pulsating.

[video] 29:44 I think I could feel the food being squeezed through my gut as quick as possible. My body rejected this food. I had those stools with all the undigested food in it. I lost the bacteria, the healthy gut bacteria on the vegan diet and I didn't take antibiotics to make that clear. But it's, well, a lot of vegetables have these antibiotic properties, so I think that's because of that.

[video] 30:28 Then on my tongue I had this white coating. This became more and more on my vegan journey. Perhaps candida or I don't know. This went away.

[video] 30:45 My teeth got sensitive to cold things and I think my tooth enamel decreased a lot because my front teeth got transparent. I could see my tongue through them and another very scary thing when I was laying in bed trying to fall asleep I would notice that I stopped breathing sometimes and of course I didn't want to stop breathing and then I was like waking up more again and breathing actively. And, uh, I don't know why this happened, but I had never had that before in my life. And now it's gone again. Um, like some kind of epnoe really, really strange.

[video] 31:44 Um, when I woke up, my mouth was completely dry because I had to breathe through my nose and my tongue would feel like a piece of rock. and I had to drink a lot and it took me a lot of time, many minutes to get my mouth watery again. Totally crazy.

[video] 32:14 Well, I had blackheads on my nose and these bumps on my forehead, like my whole forehead was always covered with those little bumps a sign of poor gut health for sure they went away and also on my shoulders on my arms on my back I had these little bumps and they went away my skin is very good now I

[video] 32:51 got a lot of new liver spots on my skin. What I also noticed is that I became very kind of addictive to sunlight when I was vegan. Now, I feel good being a little bit in the sun. But when I was vegan, I was laying down in the sun as often as I could. I mean, leave off like a mouse. Yeah, I've googled it. I thought it was a liver spot. I've never heard it, maybe. Yeah, these little brown bumps on the skin.

[video] 33:29 The skin on my cheeks became very dry, didn't went away. I was trying to solve the problem when I was vegan with like coconut oil or something like that. It didn't went away. It stayed dry and

[video] 33:48 my another thing my sweat smelled very acid and I was sweating a lot I think that has been also due to the stress I was experiencing or yeah well I was so easily so stressed and my eyesight on the left eye decreased. Now it's improving again, but, um, that was really hard for me because I was so happy all my life that I don't have to wear glasses and I don't, I don't wear glasses now, but, um, my left eye is, uh, much worse than my right eye now.

[video] 34:42 I also noticed that I had, um, become problems seeing well in the darkness, like a bit of night blindness. Um, that's gone now again. But if I entered a room that was a little dark, I always turned all the lights on, um, well to see everything properly.

35:07 That's a sign of a vitamin A deficiency, which vegans think they get from carrots.

[video] 35:12 Yeah, I also thought that.

[video] 35:16 Also, I had sometimes this orange-looking skin, a little bit orange, you know.

[video] 35:24 My body was unable to convert the carotenoids and my liver wasn't able to detox those properly.

[video] 35:34 I had these dark circles under my eyes very much. And I had a nail fungus when I was vegan that's pretty much gone now. And then

[video] 35:54 I never had a diagnosis about this, but I would say I was getting depressed in at least the half a year on veganism. I felt really horrible. Sometimes I had like physical pain due to feeling so horrible, very strange.

[video] 36:18 My eyelid was twitching. sometimes and I couldn't stop it I don't know what that was but I only had this on the vegan diet and now it's gone again my wrists hurt when I was exercising doing like biceps curls also my bones felt really weak overall even when I was doing squats my spine would feel so fragile I cannot describe it any closer but I felt really fragile overall when I woke up in the morning I always had these really crazy glued eyes so I had to rub all the crap out of them to open them properly

[video] 37:21 I don't have this problem at all anymore. My lip was always

[video] 37:32 ripped on a vegan diet I had always a little split and it was hurting and I had this like consequently the whole one and a half years and now it's healed again and in the end of veganism I also noticed that I started losing her hair for sure so if I went through my hair like this I would have like 20, 30 hairs between my fingers. Didn't enjoy that either. Yeah, that's basically the list of all my symptoms that I can remember and that I wrote down. And I'm really glad that they are all gone. It's so crazy like being 80 or something.

38:20 Do you think it has to do with you being so tall?

[video] 38:24 Well, I think it has to do being more of a skinny guy because my body's surface in comparison to my body mass is so large. So I have to eat for my weight more calories like a fat small guy. Because most of the energy is leaving the body through the skin, our body's heat. And yeah, I had to eat a lot of volume of course. I, well basically the meals, I ate like three meals a day. And two times a bowl with rice and lentils and broccoli or some other vegetables. Sometimes a peanut butter in it. I don't know. This big with a pile on top.

[video] 39:24 It's so crazy. Two times a day and then one smoothie. My third and sweet meal, one and a half liters at least. Sometimes two liters.

[video] 39:38 yeah but but that was the only way for me to get enough protein in at least on paper and enough calories like three and a half or four thousand calories and I only lost weight and the more I ate the worse my digestion got so there was no way for me to gain any weight and people who aren't as tall they don't need to eat as much so they

40:04 in some cases don't damage themselves as quickly. I very often notice that people who are taller don't last on vegan diet very long at all.

[video] 40:13 And also I think I could have done better if I had eaten some junk food at least because it's more calorie dense, it has less fiber and less anti-nutrients, it has some added toxic well additions but it's not as packed with natural plant chemicals as these whole foods that are so good for you yeah and I also discovered chronometer of course and I was tracking all my

[video] 40:51 meals there and i was hitting every nutrient like at least a hundred percent um had always the caloric surplus of at least um 500 calories and uh well my dad my my health was up so did you also take a b12 supplement um i didn't only take a b12 supplement but also sometimes a zinc supplement for one month I took also a very high quality or supposedly a very high quality B-complex supplement but most of the time I was only supplementing B12 and D3 vegan D3 and the B12 supplement was

[video] 41:46 of a really good quality it was 1000 micrograms methylcobalamin that I took daily and a sublingual pill so the bioavailability should have been very good but obviously I experienced severe b12 deficiency well I felt so much better eating some liver again a head has have to do something with right a lot of the symptoms you mentioned yeah yeah sound like the thought deficiency yeah and i think actually that um these supplements you cannot really test them if they work um

[video] 42:31 I mean if you get a supplement and your blood levels of like B12 rise, that doesn't mean that your body can use it. So I'm now really skeptical about supplements.

[video] 42:50 I think most of them, if not all of them, don't work. And some supplements like calcium supplement have been shown to be really unhealthy, to cause atherosclerosis.

43:07 It calcifies the body.

[video] 43:10 Exactly. And D3 may do the same if you get a proper amount of calcium.

43:19 Why do you think vegans don't notice when they get these symptoms? How come they don't associate it with veganism?

[video] 43:27 I can't explain it because I was so dumb myself. I didn't make the connection.

[video] 43:40 I really don't get it why I didn't get it at that point. And to speak for myself, I didn't notice these symptoms until I was getting rid of them because I got rid of them so quickly. But they came in very, very slowly. So I actually had no chance really to notice them except for my digestion. That should have been obvious. I really don't know why I didn't get that. Well, but now I'm feeling much better and I hope that meat stays affordable for my whole life. What do you think is the future of veganism?

[video] 44:27 Well, veganism is a quickly growing movement, but most of the vegans don't last very long, so the ex-vegan movement is growing also very quickly.

[video] 44:45 through persons like you and your work, those ex-vegans have a community, they have other experiences that are shared and that match often with the experiences and they can find out the truth about health after being wrecked through veganism and I think that's a very good thing. Even people being not vegan but starting researching in the internet and then stumble across your channel or other ex-vegans before even becoming a vegan themselves is very good. It's good to have something against the vegan agenda in the internet.

45:35 Did you ever get into the morals? Did you believe that it's wrong to kill animals or was it all about health mostly?

[video] 45:41 Well, I started veganism due to health reasons. Very egoistic, so to speak. Over the time I thought it was a good thing not to hurt animals if it's not necessary. Now I know it is necessary and now I also know that on a vegan diet you hurt at least the same amount of animals like on an omnivorous or carnivorous diet. So it isn't an argument at all.

[video] 46:22 And no, I wasn't really into ethics.

46:25 It's actually interesting that in all of these countries like the United States, Canada, they are breeding more animals now than ever before because they export them to Asia.

46:35 So they're not doing anything, the vegans. Yeah, exactly.

[video] 46:39 It's like shutting down the

[video] 46:47 energy producing Kohlekraftwerke here in Germany if they are shut down in the future we will import coal-based electricity from other countries so it will get more expensive for us but it will not make any difference and same with the vegans like China the Chinese are consuming so much more meat than

[video] 47:19 decades ago if the Canadian or the US or the European meat industry cannot sell their products here well the world is globalized they will sell it somewhere else it doesn't make any difference yeah the ethical vegans always pissed me off well that's basically is it is from my side okay thank you yeah thank you