Ex-Vegan (20+ Years): WARNING, I Tried Every Vegan Diet

Watch on YouTube · 2018-06-26 · 65 min

0:00 Introduce yourself, tell your story, how it started.

[video] 0:04 Okay, my name is Eleni. I am 51 years old, turning 52 in July next month. I grew up in New York and my mother was always into various cleansing diets, detox diets, and hence I grew up eating that way. very cold food, natural hygiene oriented. Dinner also Gerson influenced as well, because her mother was a patient of the late Dr. Max Gerson. Her mother had CLL, and she kept her CLL in check with a Gerson diet. But in the end, she succumbed to diabetes and actually had to have a leg amputated. The Gerson diet is very high in sugars, stewed fruit, oatmeal, carrot juice, you know what I'm talking about.

[video] 1:02 But there was liver, was part of it, and I remember when my grandparents used to come visit, the liver was there, and I think they pressed it. We had a Norwalk juicer, and they pressed the liver. To me, it was absolutely repulsive, and any kind of meat that my father ate at the table with blood and veins, I found it absolutely repulsive. so I was never attracted to eating such foods. At 12 years old I had a friend who her mother was a macrobiotic cooking teacher and I used to go to her house and for the first time I tasted food that had salt and tamari on it and it was comprised of brown rice and beans and seaweed and I thought it was absolutely delicious compared to the cold

[video] 1:56 salads and watercress soup and baked potatoes and steamed vegetables that I was being fed for dinner. So I embarked on reading up on mathematics, and I took some cooking lessons from her mother. And all through my teens, I was interested in reading books on nutrition. I read Weston Price's book, Nutrition and Food. Excuse me.

[video] 2:32 Okay, so I read Weston Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, and Jethro Closs, and Dr. Vogel, all of those books, Norman Walker, all of those books. So I was interested still in other modalities aside from macrobiotics. I should also mention that during my teenage years, I didn't have any menstrual cycles. I had no menstrual cycles. So my mother sent me to a gynecologist, she was an Indian woman, and she gave me hormones to take, and I took them for three months, and it induced a menstrual cycle, and then I thought, oh, this is too much, I can't do this anymore, I don't like this. I don't like the side effects I'm getting, menstrual cramps, all of that. So I stopped taking it.

[video] 3:28 And at 16, I started having massive gut issues. And I didn't know what was wrong with me. So they sent me for a colonoscopy. And I had my first and only colonoscopy back then. And all they did was tell me that I had irritable bowel syndrome, IBS. They didn't really give any solutions for it. So I continued eating grains and beans and seaweed and all of that. And then after I was 18, 19, 20, around the year of 21, I went to study in Beckett and Brookline, Massachusetts with Michio Kushi. I became a math-botic teacher and counselor. and I married a senior mathematic teacher.

[video] 4:25 So we got married, and shortly afterwards, I went to visit some family in Sweden. And again, I wanted to have children, but I couldn't because I was infertile. I was not ovulating. I was not menstruating. And for years, all of the mathematic teachers would tell me, oh, your body's just detoxing. Or I would hear from people that were natural hygienists, oh, look, your body's so clean, you don't even need to have this, right? So my hormones were all screwed up, totally screwed up. But we went to Sweden, and I remember I ate raw marinated reindeer. And I will never forget how I felt that evening. We were at a restaurant, and the restaurant is now closed. but it was one of those shallow-on-cellar restaurants, and it was absolutely delicious.

[video] 5:22 I felt, my body felt warm, energized. I felt fantastic, and the whole trip I was eating herring, eggs, butter, really, oh, game broth, anything. I could, you know, reindeer meatballs with chestnut sauce, any kind of animal food I could get my hands on, and I felt fantastic. My twins were actually conceived that month. I got pregnant with twin girls and I gave birth to them at home, healthy, at 42 weeks. They weighed seven and a half pounds each. I had a midwife help me. The birth and delivery was very easy, but I reverted back to a metabolic diet during my pregnancy with the addition of some fish and some butter. When the twins were about three years old, I discovered that we were constantly sick.

[video] 6:21 We were always getting a stomach flu, vomiting, we were deathly ill all the time. So, I went to an acupuncturist here in Boulder, Dr. Bob Floss, he's pretty well known, and he scolded me, and he said, why are you feeding these twins? brown rice and beans, he said they cannot digest it, you know, you should be eating gruel. I thought, okay, well we'll try that. That didn't help. Didn't help at all. So the next few years we just spent with great digestive discomfort and distress. I was always bloated, my stomach, I was constipated, my gut just never felt well.

[video] 7:08 I also noticed that the twins' teeth, they were still breastfed, they were about three years old, they were still breastfeeding, and their teeth started getting discoloration, and I thought, oh, I need to add some fish and butter to their diet. So I did, and the teeth started straightening out. Fast forward a couple of years, I was then about 28, 29 years old, I was pregnant with my third child, and We had already began to change our ways within the mackbotic community. My ex-husband back then was writing a lot of articles about the deficiencies in the diet. He had had children from a prior marriage, and they had been involved in the Boston Dutch mackbotic study for rickets because they had rickets. And that was a big study. One can still find it online. It's still available.

8:04 I've seen it.

[video] 8:06 Yeah, you've seen it, okay, right, the deficiencies in the diet. He had another daughter who, by the age of 18 months, all her teeth had rotted out. They were all black. I never had that with my children. I have six children, and I never had anything like that. So what happened was I was pregnant with my third child, and a friend of his met Sally Fallon. and she had just come out with her Nourishing Traditions, or was coming out with her Nourishing Traditions cookbook, and he'd done a radio interview with her, and he said, you guys ought to, you know, read this book and get on with this, because it's really important stuff. And I thought, oh yeah, you know, I remember, you know, we all read Weston Price, yeah, but we read Weston Price, we just didn't follow the advice. We knew, we thought, oh, well, we're not eating refined foods,

[video] 9:01 We're eating brown rice and beans, and these are whole foods, and this is healthy, healthy plant-based diet, which it wasn't because it's devoid of a lot of minerals and, you know, vitamin A, D, all of that, everything that's available in animal foods. So I read the book, and I shifted over to a nourishing traditions diet during that pregnancy. I became extremely inflamed. extremely inflamed. I was soaking kamut. I was eating grain. I gained so much weight during that pregnancy, but I had a very easy birth. My son was born in less than an hour. It was completely painless. But afterwards, I felt like a truck ran over me. My joints ached, and I thought, ooh, I don't know what's wrong here. There's something seriously wrong. At the same time, I had a friend that I met through mackbotics. She had melanoma.

[video] 10:01 And she came to mackbotics from a long-term fruitarian diet.

[video] 10:07 And she was hoping that the mackbotic diet would help heal her melanoma. So she began eating mackbotic. And this was several years. I'm going back now several years before the nourishing traditions.

[video] 10:25 diet happened in our family, she wasn't getting better through mathematics. So basically, I'm not sure how she met Agnes, but she met Agnes von der Planitz. She actually became his lover. And she started healing. And at the same time, I was very worried. We were very concerned about her. Oh, look, she's eating raw dairy. She's eating raw meat, raw eggs. What's going to happen to her? But her melanoma healed, and not only did that happen, she completely transformed her body, and to this day, it's been the most magnificent physical transformation I've ever seen on someone, because she had that typical fruitarian, dry, you know, the hair gets dry, the nails get dry, the skin is all withered, she was skeletal-looking, just terrible. And she became this amazing, luscious, gorgeous woman.

[video] 11:24 I mean, just drop dead gorgeous from this. And I remembered, you know, well, why don't I just go on a primal diet? And at the time, Pat Connolly, who she was president of Price Pottinger Foundation, she was a mentor of mine. And I called her and I told her what my problems were. And she said, you know, you've got to read this book. We want to live. And so I got the book, and then I contacted Agenis, and I started on a primal diet. I lost all my weight that I had gained during that pregnancy. The inflammation went away. Everything was great, except four years into doing a primal diet, I started getting very hyperadrenaline syndrome. I couldn't sleep at night. biking at night. I was running. I couldn't sit still.

[video] 12:23 I actually don't really know what went wrong. So I went to see a classical homeopath and I started on some constitutional remedies and I got better. And I then switched to a paleo, just a straight paleo diet. And at that point I discovered I was pregnant with my fourth child. And we moved to Vermont. And I was pregnant with my fourth child. I stayed on a paleo diet. I became a Weston Price, whatchamacallit, chapter leader there. I hooked up with a man named Doug Flack of Flack Family Farms. So we used to buy all our grass-fed meat and raw dairy from him. And I just stayed paleo with

[video] 13:14 some raw paleo. You know, I still had a lot of cravings for raw meat and fish, and I ate raw dairy, and I just ate a few cooked vegetables, and I had, again, a very healthy pregnancy. I hardly gained any weight. I gained 10 pounds that pregnancy, and my daughter was healthy. After the pregnancy, I felt a little bit weak, so I started eating more cooked, like, beef stew and bone broth and things like that. Then I got persuaded into going back to veganism. All this propaganda. My ex-husband at the time was working with some well-known living foodists that are quite well known to this day. And I switched over to a living foods diet. And then at that point, the sun food diet was coming out. I tried the sun food diet.

[video] 14:14 remember spending a lot of money on all this crap, like powders and superfoods and just a bunch of crap. And I thought, oh, well, maybe this is the way to go, just eat a raw vegan diet. So I was eating a raw vegan diet. I took a raw vegan certification, food prep certification. I became a certified live food.

[video] 14:43 Please don't throw it out. OK. And I started.

[video] 14:53 It's OK. You can sit here. OK. So I was eating that for several years. And I became pregnant again, once again, with a fifth child. And I started the pregnancy out as a raw vegan.

[video] 15:15 During the pregnancy, I started craving raw eggs, raw fish, so I would eat that from time to time. Then, after the pregnancy, I went back to raw veganism. I felt pretty bad. I was going through a divorce at that time. My son was about 10 or 11 months old, the fifth child.

[video] 15:41 I got involved with someone else, and he was a raw vegan, and we both were gung-ho on the raw vegan diet, and I tried numerous raw vegan regimes. Dr. Cousin's Rainbow Cuisine, I tried, oh boy. I mean, you name it, I did it. I can't even remember all the raw diets I did. And I had my children on the raw diet as well. So everything I made, you know, I had a little boy, He was about a year old. He was breastfeeding, but he was also starting to eat raw foods. So everything I made, first I did raw gourmet. Then I realized my gut couldn't handle it.

[video] 16:26 And I will go back to something. I forgot to mention that in my 30s, I did find out I had celiac disease. So that was a root cause of a lot of my issues. And I really don't. do well eating any grains at all or legumes. And that's why I thought, oh, well, the raw vegan diet, a lot of the raw vegan diets don't include grains or legumes. So I thought, this is ideal for me. I can get my protein in with sprouted foods and super foods. And that didn't work out. And so I kept trying. OK, well, I'll try a low glycemic raw vegan diet. OK, I'll ditch the super foods. OK, well, that isn't working. Now I'm down to, I can't really digest anything. So at the time, I was part of a website called Give It to Me Raw, where I had made a lot of raw vegan friends.

[video] 17:23 And I started a group on liquidarianism and breatharianism, because I thought, this is the final chapter for me. I can't digest anything. I'm just going to have to live on liquids. And I have twin daughters. And at the time, they were doing the diet with me, and we all felt like total shit, just total crap. Our guts, we called it the raw pregnancy gut. I mean, our guts would distend like I was six, nine months pregnant. It was ridiculous. Then I thought, well, now there's 80-10-10 diet going on. Everyone's jumping on that bandwagon with the Doug Graham proletarian diet. I'll do that. I did that. It put me in bed for 18 months straight. I couldn't get out of bed. My daughter, who was about eight years old at the time, my fourth child, one day at school, she just was sitting in a chair and she just passed out in the chair.

[video] 18:22 Another older, one of my older twins, she had an anaphylactic reaction after having some sort of fruit and had to be rushed to the hospital. So we were having all these symptoms. I had no energy at all. I had constant chronic fatigue. I was really at the end of my rope. And it was at that point that, and I was living in Vermont, eating fruit and tropical fruit, cherimoyas, whatever, and romaine lettuce as the 10% protein. I just was a wreck. My hair was starting to fall out. I was an absolute wreck. So at that point, we were actually moving from Vermont to Colorado. I went to a naturopath here in Colorado, and she gave me a blood test. And she wanted to hospitalize me right away.

[video] 19:17 My thyroid stimulating hormone was over 650, over 650. And she said, you could go into a coma at any point now. I think you should be hospitalized so we can get you on IV.

[video] 19:34 hormones, and I refused hospitalization. I was B12 deficient, I had high homocysteine levels, I had just every deficiency, zinc, I was pre-diabetic, I had everything going on blood-wise, and she said, you really need to stop this. So at that point, I contacted a couple, Roman and Auntie,

[video] 20:01 I think they were living on a boat somewhere. They were raw Instinctos. I contacted them. And I said, look, I feel like total shit. I need to do something. And she said, well, what are you craving? Why don't you just eat a raw Instincto diet? And I thought, I want to eat oysters. I want to eat bison raw. I want raw yogurt. I want raw butter. I want raw cream. eggs anything she said go eat it do it you know and so I did the rotten stink dough diet for about three months and I remember I was primarily living on oysters I just couldn't get enough oysters into my body every day but aside from that I was also eating a lot of royal jelly raw royal jelly and I was just trying to rejuvenate my body and everything was going fine

[video] 20:57 Except, once again, I reverted back to vegan diet, once again, maybe six months later. And so I went back on a vegan diet. This time I thought, well, if I have a cooked vegan diet along with some raw food, maybe that was the problem. I shouldn't be all raw anymore. So, I started that, and again, I started feeling like total crap, and at that point,

[video] 21:37 I looked online and I met other people that were doing the same thing, and I thought, okay, I'm doing it wrong. I have to cut the oil out of the diet. So I cut the oil. Oh, now I have to add vegan protein powders in the diet. So I added those. Then I cut those out. And it was always an experimentation on what would be the optimal plant-based diet for myself. And all the time I was feeling like total crap. Total crap. So I did that for myself. numerous number of years. And then Stephen Guntry's plant, he didn't come out with his plant paradox book, but his information on lectins came out. And I consulted with him. And I thought, ah, now here's my problem. I have an issue with lectins. And a lot of these foods that I was eating as a raw vegan are extremely high in lectins. So this is my problem.

[video] 22:33 So if I just go on a diet where it's a low leptin diet, I'll start to feel better. So I did that, and I didn't really get any improvement. His diet is basically, he wants you to go as low in animal protein as possible, especially for people that have the APOE4 genotype, like I have, where he says that your body can't process saturated fat. So instead, he wants you to consume a liter of olive oil per week, and eat a lot of salad greens, and fish, and eggs. And I tried that, and the olive oil, it just doesn't sit with me. I don't come from an ancestry where olive oil is even in the background. I find that butter is my best fat. Butter is absolutely my best fat, but I didn't discover that until recently, and when I was raw primal.

[video] 23:29 So, I did that for a few years, and then I thought, you know, this really isn't working, maybe I'll just try again, I'll try one of these Dr. Esselstyn diets, you know, because I'm an APOE4, I can't have any fat now, you know, otherwise it will clog up my arteries, and I'll just, you know, I'll have heart disease. So I did that, and I felt like total crap. And at the time, I was actually pregnant with my sixth child. I was 44 years old. And my midwife kept saying, you can't diet while you're pregnant. You can't do this. You have to eat some animal protein. So I started eating some eggs. And this is back in 2011. I gave birth to a very healthy 8 and 1 half pound baby boy, you know, 44 minutes of labor on my 45th birthday at home. He was fine.

[video] 24:27 But afterwards I had gained a lot of weight and I was feeling again very inflamed from eating a vegan diet. I got my blood test. My blood test was crap. I had symptoms. It showed that I had prediabetes. I was again deficient in zinc. But all the other markers were very good. I get these spectra cell intracellular vitamin tests done. at least once a year, the nutrient analysis test, just to see where I am nutrient-wise. And I was very high in everything else, even vitamin, the pro-retinol, I was high in. So I thought, well, I must be doing something right aside from the zinc and aside from the fact that I'm now again pre-diabetic. But it didn't really make a connection. I was still trying for years to

[video] 25:21 work out what is the optimal vegan diet for myself. I didn't know whether it was the pregnancy that had affected me, having a baby at age 45. I was extremely lethargic, once again. I couldn't get out of bed, I couldn't exercise, my joints were hurting, and I thought, okay, Now I'm going to try the autoimmune paleo diet. So I tried that. And I got marginally better. And I went to see a holistic MD. And he said, you have to cut out all these nuts that you're eating, and seeds, and all of that, and just concentrate on eating grass-fed beef and broccoli. And I thought, OK, what a prescription he gave me. Just eat grass-fed beef and broccoli. And I didn't want to do it. So I started eating fish. like wild salmon a couple of times a week, and I thought, oh, well, this will definitely do it for me. I'll start feeling vital and energized, and it just didn't.

[video] 26:21 And so then I thought, well, I'll go on a Terry Walls-type diet. Maybe that's good, because I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's when I was 20 years old, and I've had Hashimoto's for many years, for all these years, although I'm not your typical Hashimoto's patient, because I don't tend to be overweight. or have dry skin, or dry hair, or hair falling out, or any of that stuff. So I did the Terry Walls diet for a while, and that was OK. But I was still having problems with digesting plant fiber. And I realized the plant fiber is the issue for me. Excuse me. Julian, it's not until July 22. So that's next month. How many days?

[video] 27:12 I really honed in on, okay, this is a plant fiber issue. What if I go back to doing what I did many years ago and just having the green juice, like Ajna said, and then eating a ketogenic diet? So I did that for three months, and this is recently. I was ketogenic for three months, and I did green juices, and I still felt like crap. I felt like total crap just eating I think the ketogenic diet, I don't do well on coconut oil, and I wasn't really using coconut oil either, or any coconut, anything. I don't. It's like one of the worst foods for me, is coconut and coconut products. Again, it's not in my background. It's not in my genetic background to be eating coconuts. So I did ketogenic with green juice, and I didn't really feel good. And then I started hearing a lot about the carnivore diet.

[video] 28:12 So I thought, you know what, I'm going to do something completely radical. I'm cutting out all plant food, all plant fiber. It's going out of my diet. And I did that. And I started feeling fantastic. I was eating raw and rare seared steak. And I just did that for two weeks. And I thought, well, I feel really good. But in the long run, I don't think this is going to be very good for me long-term because you're still missing a lot of things so I thought you know I really should go back to eating more of a primal diet and that's what I've been doing except I don't do the green juice and I don't do any honey and I don't eat any fruit so when I did that the shift was night and day I started waking up at 5 a.m. I started running I started working out again

[video] 29:08 my sex drive came back, and that was a big thing for me, was I had zero sex drive the whole time I was a vegan. It was like gone. I was an asexual person. Like I said, I'm turning 52. I have regular menstrual cycles every month, like clockwork. I'm not in, I don't have hot flashes. I don't have anything like that going on. My hair, the other thing was I do get my hair highlighted at an organic salon twice a year. When I went back, she said to me, wow, she said, your hair is in such good condition, I don't know why, and I thought, oh yeah, it's my diet, it was one thing that, you know, showed up, that was the first thing was my hair, started getting really, like, silky and smooth and fantastic, and I'm trying to think what else, I just, I'm a different person now, I feel totally different, different. My mental clarity is really sharp.

[video] 30:06 The other thing is I did have issues with memory. I was having short-term memory loss, and I thought, you know, this is not good. One day I left a teapot on for eight hours in my house, and I thought, you know, I really have to do something about my brain because, you know, it's either I have diabetes of the brain, you know, I'm going to I have Alzheimer's. I'm at risk for Alzheimer's with this APOE4 genotype. I have to do something. So that's why I decided to make the shift to a keto diet. And I thought the keto diet would really help my energy levels. It helped them minimally. It didn't help it like what I'm doing now. So what I do now, I do do intermittent fasting. I do only eat one meal a day. I still have excess weight to shed from being vegan, because I gained quite a bit of weight.

[video] 31:01 And I eat raw eggs, raw fish, raw meat, raw dairy. I eat a lot of butter, cultured dairy like kefir is a favorite of mine. I don't have access to raw goat milk anymore. I used to have a lady up the road that had goats, and we used to get raw goat milk from her, and I used to make it into kefir.

[video] 31:24 Sometimes I do have an occasional raw coconut water kefir. I like those on occasion. But I drink mineral water. I don't drink regular water. If I'm thirsty, I have mineral water or kefir. I like my kefir with raw either duck eggs in it chicken eggs or even quail eggs, I think that's absolutely vitalizing and fantastic. I just feel like I'm a person again. I feel like I'm in my body. Once again, in my body, I got a check about six weeks ago with my holistic doctor. I have to for my thyroid, so he checks my vitamins and minerals and everything is right on par. I don't have prediabetes anymore.

[video] 32:17 all my blood sugars are completely normal, my zinc is completely normal, everything is absolutely fantastic, I feel just so vital, it's like I want to scream, you know, off the rooftops, and I get a lot of flack too from vegans for what I've done, but I don't really care, I think that most vegans are very, very sick, I think they're sick mentally, they're sick physically and they just can't reconcile the two. They have some things off. I always said, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? I don't know if they were mentally off to begin with and the diet made it worse or the diet made them mentally off. I'm not exactly sure, but that's pretty much my story in a nutshell. Being in the raw vegan community and

[video] 33:13 the macrobiotic community and some of these other health communities, I've seen a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that people don't talk about. I used to be in the business of counseling people nutritionally, so I had a lot of sick kids that were weak and sick vegans coming to me, and nothing could ever turn them around except starting to eat animal food and completely changing. their mindset and diet, but I think it takes a big wake up call to do it and not everyone is willing to do that. I know people think I'm extreme for how I eat now, I don't really care because I feel great.

[video] 34:06 that's pretty much it. Really, do you have any questions?

34:09 Yes, so how long were you vegan altogether then? Approximately.

[video] 34:15 I can't even, you know, I went vegan for long stretches, like 12 years, then it would be another 7 years. I would call myself a cyclical vegan, because I would do a vegan diet for maybe 4 to 7 years, and then pretty much at the three to four year mark even the two-year mark in more recent years is when the deficiencies would start showing up and I would start feeling like total crap the first sign for me always was digestion very poor digestion I think most well I don't know about most people I just know I can't process plant fiber very effectively it's really not so great for my system I do well on animal products. I feel that the animal products are easy for me to digest. I'm never bloated. I don't have any digestive issues at all. And I think people are like plants.

[video] 35:13 If the plant is not getting enough nutrition, it's going to show up in what the plant looks like. And I don't understand why vegans can't understand, oh, their skin is bad, their hair is bad, everything's bad. They just can't see it. It's very difficult for them to see.

[video] 35:32 I would say I was a cyclical vegan for most of my life, although I would do periods of paleo diet, raw paleo, and primal diet. I did the nourishing traditions diet back in my late 20s, so I had periods of eating animal food. They just weren't very long. The longest was the raw primal diet, which I did for four years, and then maybe paleo for a few years, and raw paleo. It's been pretty much my whole life, basically. The difference that I feel now is night and day, so it's totally irrelevant. It's all in the past. I won't be dealing with nutritional deficiency anymore. I feel like I'm getting

[video] 36:21 everything i need you know from a d k all the k vitamins all of it um and i don't feel like i have a need for eating plants or fruit so you decided to do this video because now you're definitely done with veganism oh i i will never ever ever go back to being a vegan again i got my life back i got my life back this way like i said i was chronically fatigued I couldn't do anything. I was sleeping. Sometimes I would sleep 17, 18 hours a day. 17 or 18 hours a day, and then the rest of the time that I was up, I couldn't function that much, and I was looking to get back into bed. I wasn't popping up out of bed at 5 a.m. like I do now. I'm up out of bed. I want to go exercise outside. I want to get sunlight. I feel vital, I feel really vital and healthy. I do.

[video] 37:23 And I feel like everything's changed. My skin got better, even though I never had bad skin to start with, but I feel like my skin has improved and my hair, my nails definitely, for sure. My nails had started to peel at the end of them, so I had that going on. My teeth, as a raw vegan, I had sensitivity with my teeth. That was terrible. That was really bad. So I couldn't even eat fruit. And in recent years, I couldn't even ever eat more than a piece or two of fruit because my teeth would get sensitive. The other thing was I discovered I was allergic, or I wouldn't say allergic because that would require like an anaphylactic reaction, but I was very sensitive to tropical fruit. Any ingestion of tropical fruit for me would cause a three to five day ocular migraine.

[video] 38:22 And it was absolutely horrible. And it was at that point I realized, oh, you know, these plant sugars were really, really bad for me. And it, like I said, it kept showing up in blood tests. This glucose insulin reaction I would have on the spectra cell blood test. And the recommendations would be reduce refined sugar. And I thought, I didn't even eat refined sugar. This is just fruit. But the fruit was affecting me like refined sugar would. So I'm not opposed to maybe eating some berries maybe in a couple of years in the summer or a piece of temperate climate fruit grown in the summer. I'm not really opposed to it.

[video] 39:09 eating a piece or two, but I feel like I still have healing to do within my system, and it might take a couple of years before I completely am healed from my years of damage that veganism caused me. As a child, I will also say I was riddled with cavities. Despite eating an organic whole foods diet, I just wasn't getting the proper nutrients I needed. Very occasionally growing up, I would be exposed to raw milk. And at that point, there was a raw milk ice cream that was sweetened with maple syrup or honey. I remember eating that as well a couple of times in my youth. But it wasn't like I was getting regular proper nourishment for teeth and gums and healthy bones. I will also say that when I was raw primal, I used to measure about five foot four and a half.

[video] 40:09 During my raw primal years, in my late 20s, I grew, and I grew, I'm just under five foot seven now. So I thought that was interesting. And I've heard other people say the same thing. I have a friend, Chris Van Dyke, and he says that his jaw is actually changing with the ingestion of raw kefir. He's also raw primal. And he said from the K2, his jaw is changing shape. So it's getting a lot of fantastic benefits. So these are foods that I feel are really important that are missing on the very popular carnivore diet, which I think the carnivore diet is a definite reaction to a long-term vegan diet. At least it was for me. But in the long run, I just didn't feel like it offered enough nutrients because you're only eating primarily steak and water.

[video] 41:06 I know some people eat eggs and maybe, I'm not sure what else, cheese maybe? I'm not sure, many people don't really do dairy on it, but I felt it just wasn't well-rounded enough for me. And I did notice two weeks into the diet, I noticed plaque built up on my teeth, which was interesting. So I thought, oh yeah, I really have to do something about this. And then as soon as I started incorporating The raw kefir and more raw eggs, that went away on its own. So... Excuse me. There's a button on the side there. Sorry about that. So I'm trying to think... Yes, that one. I'm trying to think, any other questions you have for me?

42:00 What do you think would have happened if you didn't eat the raw meat and all of that in between? If you would have been straight vegan for 10, 20 years?

[video] 42:08 I probably would have been in the hospital. I probably would have been hospitalized. I know I was never one of those very skinny vegans. I actually gained weight on a vegan diet. I'm actually slimmer. I have a very low normal body weight. It's always been like that my whole life. When I eat animal food, I'm much slimmer. But when I went vegan, I would go up to maybe 112, 115 pounds. Normally, I'm about 107 pounds. And I think that the illusion of having weight on me kept an illusion of health, if you know what I mean.

42:50 Yeah.

[video] 42:51 Yeah. And so even though I felt very weak and sick, I didn't... necessarily look it from the outside because I had put on some weight from I guess all the sugars and stuff, but probably nutritionally maybe I would have been hospitalized. Definitely after my 18 months of 80-10-10 stint, you know, when the naturopath wanted to hospitalize me and I refused, probably had I continued going on an 80-10-10 diet had I stayed on it, I would have absolutely ended up hospitalized. And I have heard that people have died at Doug Graham's water fasting retreats. I think there's a lot of cover-up in these raw vegan communities. There's a lot of covering up. There's also some that are cheating behind the scenes.

[video] 43:49 There's one very famous superfoodist who we caught here at a Japanese restaurant. My children were a japanese restaurant with their father and he had ordered pork gyozas tempura and a whole bunch of other stuff and he promotes himself i mean he is one of the biggest promoters of the raw vegan diet and you don't want to say his name david wolf okay david wolf i've been with other raw vegans that are big raw vegans in the community. I won't say who they are. They're friends of mine, and they have been eating meat. They have been eating meat out, lamb, raw, rare lamb, seared steak, sashimi, all of it. But they continue to preach a living foods diet. I think it's absolutely fraudulent. It's absolutely fraudulent.

[video] 44:48 You know, for me, I can't live my life like that. I have to Be honest in what I do. I would never promote something that I'm not actually doing. Behind the scenes, I'm sneaking meat or cheese, and here's a really interesting story for you. My ex-husband, this is back in Brookline, Massachusetts, back in the day in the 70s. He was working. He was a macrobiotic counselor, and he was working at the natural food store Erewhon. He was a manager there at Erewhon. And Ann Wigmore's center was right in Brookline as well. She had someone from her center come in. He was a man. He would come in twice, I think twice a week it was.

[video] 45:34 And this was for her. She would get seitan, you know the wheat gluten wheat? Seitan and big blocks of cheese. And they had to be wrapped in a paper bag so that no one saw. And this man would pick it up. from my ex-husband and it would be delivered to her. So that's what she was doing on the side. So all these, I don't know about all these people preaching these diets, but a lot of them are completely fraudulent. Then we get into the women that are these detox specialists and they're, you know, obviously using Botox, they've got silicone. Breast implants and all this chemical crap in their bodies, and they're preaching, you know, eat while vegan, it's the cleanest thing you can do. And I've challenged some of them, and I'm usually blocked or whatever. They don't like what I have to say to them. So that's the whole other side.

[video] 46:34 It's very narcissistic.

[video] 46:38 I don't know that I would stop it. Stop. I don't think I would call it an industry. I would say it's just a narcissistic kind of alternative lifestyle. People posting pictures of what they eat every day, their torsos, their tits. I mean, just everything. It's absolutely vile to me. It's like an extreme level of narcissism. I just don't. you know, I don't like it, so that wasn't one thing I noticed early on in the raw vegan community, was the amount of narcissism involved. And I thought, wow, you know, this is really, really strange.

47:17 Even most of the vegans that I knew, they also cheated. But they usually cheat with dairy or eggs. And to them, that's not meat, which it isn't. But then they can say that they are kind of not eating animals. And to them, because they kind of get mental issues, it makes sense to say that they are kind of vegan or vegetarian. They just don't eat meat, so they're raw or something. It's kind of allowed just because they're starving and they want it.

[video] 47:46 Oh, yeah, they're absolutely starving, which is why they make all this food. Like they make these nuts and they color it with beets to look like meatloaf and things like that. And the food is absolutely disgusting. It's absolutely vile food. I mean, you eat that food and I can't even recall back to the days when I ate that crap. I would take a few bites and my gut would start hurting immediately. Here's another funny thing. When I was a raw vegan, that's one thing, I did the Hippocrates diet for four years straight. Four years straight, I walked around in Vermont with a hot water bottle stuck in between my stockings because my abdomen and my limbs were so cold.

[video] 48:36 I would also, every time I would do a yoga session, I would feel extremely dizzy, and I just didn't feel well. I just never felt well. I was always dizzy. I fainted numerous times. I just didn't, I felt like total shit. I mean, it's shit diets that make you feel like total shit.

[video] 49:00 I was a wreck, I was a walking wreck, yet people thought I was the epitome of health, and I was not the epitome of health. I felt like a fraud a lot of the time, because I didn't really tell people how I felt, I just touted the raw vegan diet. Oh yeah, it's great, anyone that's sick, anyone that has cancer, anyone with any sort of illness should just go raw vegan and they'll cure it, and we all know that that's

49:33 Did you believe that killing animals is wrong?

[video] 49:38 No, I was never into veganism for animal rights. I was just repulsed at blood and veins that occurred in meat. Now it doesn't bother me at all. One of my favorite foods is grass-fed beef tartare, or just thinly sliced. with raw egg on top. It's delicious. It's so nourishing. It feels great. So, no, it wasn't an animal rights thing. I've been told that I'm completely unethical now for eating meat. I don't really care, because ethics had to start with me, whether I was feeling good or not, and I was not feeling good. So, it's either meat or the animal. Who is going to die? It was going to be me. I would have died. I believe I would have died. And I had tried just eating dairy and eggs or occasional fish, and it wasn't working for me.

[video] 50:37 It didn't bring me the vitality that I have now every day on a daily basis. And I definitely feel vital every single day. And my mental clarity, it's night and day. And I feel sometimes I just liken it to a primal state of mind. It's a different type of mindset that you're in. There's really not a lot of, I wouldn't say thought involved. It's more instinctual. It's more intuitive.

51:11 Did you take B12 or any of that stuff?

[video] 51:14 I did. I took during my years, I don't remember how many years I spent as a... Dr. Gabriel Cousins raw vegan, but he was touting the Premier Labs research liquid B vitamins, so I took those. I still felt like crap. And just so you know, he takes several thousand dollars worth of supplements every month. That's what it takes for some of these people. It takes a lot of supplementation, and even with the supplementation, it's still not

[video] 51:51 an ideal diet to consume because you're missing the supplements are toxic anyway regardless of what they claim they're all toxic you don't need to take supplements as long as you're eating a nutrient-dense you know full spectrum diet there's no need for supplementation and that's what my primarily belief is and my primary argument with vegans is if you are indeed obtaining a full-spectrum nutrient diet, you would not need to supplement. Now, I get arguments back about the B12. Well, B12 is manufactured in our intestines, or if you eat unwashed produce and, you know, stuff like that. But no, no, it's required in larger amounts. And who are these people that consume that? Where are their blood tests? They won't ever show their blood tests.

[video] 52:48 Some of these vegan blood tests online are an absolute joke, too. There's that fully raw Christina. Have you ever seen that one?

52:55 Yeah, I made fun of it.

[video] 52:57 With her triglycerides, with her really high triglycerides, and it's, what, Dr. Garth Davis saying that it's completely normal? I thought, what a fucking moron he is.

53:07 I had a video about it. And he ignored the triglycerides. He didn't even mention them.

[video] 53:15 right it was just I thought are these people and the doctors are they so off the mark that they don't even have the proper training to distinguish you know that the girl or the woman is so you know she's got diabetes or pre-diabetes because all she eats is fruit and some greens I would say that he was paid some money to do the video it's highly possible it could be very likely that Yeah, you never know, and it's all about promoting this paradise health. I waited for paradise health for many years, and I thought, well, one day I will feel healthy. One day. I just haven't detoxed enough. I haven't detoxed enough. I remember back on the GiveItToMeWrong forum, someone had lost their teeth, and they were told that it was a detox, that it was an actual detox.

[video] 54:16 And the same with the hair. You lose your hair, your body's detoxing. You lose your menstrual cycle, your body's detoxing. No, no, no. You're not getting cholesterol to manufacture your hormones. You don't have vitamin D going on. You don't have A. You don't have K. You don't have 50%. you know, different nutrients that are only found in animal foods going on, you know, for the proper functioning of your, and optimal functioning of your body.

[video] 54:50 It's really, it's a joke. It's an absolute joke. And there's that guy, this is an interesting one, he makes fun of you. His name is Casey, the vegetable police.

[video] 55:03 That guy, he was on Give It to Me Raw, that forum, for years, Casey. And this is, what, I don't know, 10 years later, and he still hasn't cleared the acne off his face? Shouldn't that be a wake-up call for people?

55:18 Should be.

[video] 55:19 It should be, but it isn't. They still continue. They're still continuing, well, you know, maybe if I try a ketogenic vegan diet I can clear up, you know, my acne. I mean, good luck with all the plant fats doing that. Personally, I wouldn't do it, but that's me. I think the plant fats would maybe cause acne for me. I've never had acne, but...

55:45 Where do you think veganism is heading and do you think that someone's pushing it or where did it come from? What is it about?

[video] 55:54 I do think, I know my ex-husband and I talk about this all the time because he always, always said this is an agenda 21 thing. This is population control. For me, it's population control.

[video] 56:11 First of all, you know, you go vegan, you lose your sex drive. Right there, that's population control right there. Because if you don't have the proper hormone functions going on, you know, how are you going to, that's amazing for population control. Let's just, you know, we'll get right to the heart of it and just reduce your sex drive. So right there. Then if you do manage to have sex drive and have offspring from it, the offspring are usually weak.

[video] 56:43 it's like pottingers cats how many generations will it take you know and I've seen some pictures well a classic one would be John Robbins kids have you seen his son and grandchildren they're classic classic examples of physical degeneration classic samples and there are many classic examples of physical degeneration going on so you get weak beacons you either can't have sex because you don't want to, or you're infertile, you know, you're not producing, I mean, vegan men have lower sperm counts, that's actually been documented, and maybe if you're a woman, you're not menstruating, you're not ovulating, so there you go right there, but if you do manage to do this, then you've got weak offspring, weak people, weak minds, very weak minds, because

[video] 57:39 They're being, you know, fed a controlled kind of, you know, I'll say New World Order diet, you know. And now it's where I see veganism going now is with the plant doctors. So I think they're a big part of it in pushing the plant-based diet system. And those plant doctors, they're into grains and beans. So they're actually into, you know, all that.

[video] 58:11 destruction that is occurring with the soil and everything. They don't realize that they're part of the problem. They're not part of the solution. But they just see like, oh, we're going to buy our boxed almond milk and keep everything low fat. And we're going to eat grains and beans. And everything's going to be fine. I don't know how they're fine. I do know some people that eat that way. Some even long-term, they're seemingly fine. I don't know what their blood tests look like. That would be interesting to see what an intracellular nutrient test looks like on them. I don't know. Or where their hormone levels are at. Are they aging rapidly? Some of these raw vegan women proponents, they've already gone through menopause in their mid-40s.

[video] 59:05 I don't think that's... I mean, I think on a natural diet, one would extend their, you know, fertility.

59:15 It's detox.

[video] 59:17 It's detox, right. I got hot flashes at age 43 because...

59:21 It's the high-frequency plants.

[video] 59:25 It's the high-frequency plants. I'm detoxing, so the hot flashes, ooh, you know, make me up a formula so that I can get rid of the... hot flashes, but I've seen videos with some of these raw vegan proponents on this topic, and I'm absolutely astounded that there isn't a connection made.

[video] 59:51 But yeah, I definitely think there is a definite agenda to it. Well, recently on my Facebook, while I posted, what's his name, Kellogg, You know, the Kellogg series, he had an agenda with making corn flakes because he was against masturbation, and he wanted people to reduce their sex drive through vegetarian diet. So it started way back. It's just a continual process now.

[video] 1:00:26 And a lot of people argue, well, grass-fed meat can't feed the whole planet, and there's that argument. coming from the vegans and so on. But a few years ago, I also decided I would not eat anything that wasn't grown within a few miles up the road from me.

[video] 1:00:49 So I can actually get anything I want. I can just walk down the road, right across there. I can get duck eggs, grass-fed meat. raw dairy, anything I want. If I wanted to eat vegetables and fruit, I could get it from that farm as well. And it's a biodynamic farm. I can get lamb. I can get anything I want there.

[video] 1:01:13 So I think as far as sustainability, that's a way more sustainable practice than to have food shipped in like you know, coconuts and all this other, avocados and all this other stuff that vegans rely on.

1:01:31 Would you say that you regret being vegan or did you learn something from it? Was it just a life lesson?

[video] 1:01:38 I think it was a life lesson. I don't regret anything really because everything I've ever done in my life I don't regret. I view them as life lessons and I'm always learning from my experience and that's the way I approach life. I like to learn from experience. So it was definitely fun. There were definitely some very, very big wake up calls along the way that I didn't heed attention to.

[video] 1:02:04 But, you know, I mean, it's all great now because I feel great and I'm getting better every day, every day. I never, ever thought that I would gain my vitality back. And that was a really scary thought for me. I thought I really lost all my chi. I've lost it all, and I studied Chinese medicine too, that's what I'm trained in, and it was just, wow, I'm never going to be able to replenish these vital fluids and everything that I've lost through veganism, but no, not true, because I'm doing it on a daily basis, and I feel so much better now. There's really no, the difference is night and day. My labs are better. Like I said, you know, I have the vegan labs to show my blood work, and it was not optimal, except for my vitamin levels. They were, well, except for zinc, but the prediabetes and all of that.

[video] 1:03:02 And during, I even had high cholesterol during one of my blood draws. Not that I care about that. I had some elevated liver enzymes, some flagged kidney function. I don't have that anymore. Things were, and I believe that those were all caused by sugar issues, pre-diabetes.

1:03:27 Okay. Anything else you want to add or anything you want to say to vegans, for example?

[video] 1:03:34 Just not really, because they have to come to their decision on their own. I'm not ever going to tell anyone how to eat or what to eat. I guess people can learn from my mistakes. I really tried to make a lot of different vegan diets work for me, but none of them did work out for me. And I always blamed myself, thinking, I knew I wasn't doing it wrong. That's a typical response. Well, you didn't do it wrong. No, because I'm someone that does things correctly.

[video] 1:04:14 I thought, well, it's just me then. It's my genetics. It's my constitution. Vegan diets just don't work well for me. And I think there's an extent of truth to that. And maybe for some other people, they can exist more on a plant-based diet. I don't think Northern Europeans can. That I will say. Being a Northern European, I don't think it's optimal at all to try and eat a plant-based diet. Terrible, a terrible thing to do. So maybe if you're from a tropical climate, you will have better luck as a vegan. I know a lot of vegans have to move to tropical climates because they feel like such shit living in colder climates. But I'm never cold anymore, and I used to be. I live in a four-season climate, and it gets pretty cold in the winter. I'm never cold anymore.

[video] 1:05:13 Yeah, I mean, vegans, good luck, really good luck. You know, there's a honeymoon phase, and then the deficiencies start creeping in. And your mind, there's a lot of mental masturbation that occurs, your mind creates a lot of different excuses for what's going on in your body. And you try and supplement you try and tweak things. And like I said, good luck.

1:05:41 Okay, is that it?

[video] 1:05:43 Yeah.

1:05:44 Thank you.

[video] 1:05:44 Thank you for having me on.