Ex-Vegan (4 Years): I Did Veganism "Right"

Watch on YouTube · 2018-08-28 · 37 min

0:00 If you want to start and just talk about how you got into veganism and when it was and what happened and so on. Okay.

[video] 0:10 Yes, so in October 2014 I went vegan because I was struggling with a lot of acne on my face. I had cystic acne and I was very into health so I always knew it must be something that I was eating but every time I went to the doctor they would give me creams and pills. I went on Accutane first and it solved it but after six months it came back. Then I went to a beauty specialist and she She just wanted to sell me a bunch of creams, super expensive creams. I thought, I don't think I'm going to find the answer in there, so I started to research myself online. I came across plant-based diet, veganism, and with a lot of anecdotal stories of people getting rid of their acne.

[video] 1:06 as if veganism or a plant-based diet was something that the masses didn't know about, as if the doctors were hiding it. That's the way they were speaking about it online. So I thought there must be some truth in this because I'm seeing the before and after pictures of people with their symptoms and how they were clearing up their symptoms.

[video] 1:28 And then it took me, I think, three months before really deciding to go that route because I was skeptical a bit at first. But yeah, just after basically, I think, brainwashing myself with all the videos, I decided to do it. And yeah, the first two weeks, my skin did clear up. And I still incorporated some meat and some cheese still because I wasn't fully vegan. I didn't really do it for the animals or for the environment at first. And yeah, I felt positive effects. I felt a little more energetic and my skin started to clear up. I had more energy. I wasn't grumpy anymore in the morning. But now that I look back, I do think it's because I reduced all my processed foods.

[video] 2:20 I used to eat a lot of processed food before going vegan, like ice creams, cookies, and chocolates, together with my normal diet. And I got rid of all of those. So I think initially that's what gave me that boost. It wasn't because I was eating more bananas that I just suddenly felt better. I think it was the removal of all of that. And then I watched, two weeks after I watched Earthlings and that was really shocking to me. I've never seen a documentary that long just focusing on the torture of the animals. And I got very emotional. I cried when watching that. And I think because it was so emotional and fear-based, it made me go vegan 100%. From that moment on, I stopped eating the animal products.

[video] 3:14 And also now looking back, it wasn't really based on logic, but more on emotion. Because I didn't... investigate further if veganism or a vegan diet could be something I could do for the rest of my life. I thought it was the right way to do because I wasn't contributing to the animal, to the slaughtering of animals, to the environment, the pollution of the environment and it was ethically a better choice I thought at that time. So I'm not really digging deep into the nutritional part of it.

[video] 3:52 I went on Rawtail4, so I saw Freely the Banana Girl and I saw Durian Rider in the beginning, and they were talking about how much energy they have and how long they were doing this vegan diet. I think at first I was watching all these people that they persuaded me more also on an emotional level.

[video] 4:21 Yeah, showing off their body and this is so good and I'm doing such a good thing for the planet and Yeah, and I think the whole first year I ate raw to four but then I noticed I Didn't feel as good as I was doing in the beginning. So I started looking for other information. I checked dr. McDougall Dr. Furman talking about the starch based diet and also Furman was more about the fruits and the vegetables, also Dr. McGregor. So I started digging a little bit more deep into the research that was done into veganism and the vegan diet, plant-based diet. And I think for two years I ate a whole foods plant-based diet, so including the nuts, seeds, vegetables, legumes,

[video] 5:18 fruits, just incorporating everything they said you needed to be a healthy vegan and to thrive on a diet like that. But eventually, I think towards the third year of me being vegan, everything just started to get harder for me. Just life in general was harder to live. Just doing workouts was tougher. It didn't feel like working out anymore because before I went vegan, I was very active.

[video] 5:50 I did a bunch of sports. I was very lively and upbeat and always happy. I wasn't struggling to feel good or feel happy.

[video] 6:04 in 2017, the third year of me being vegan, everything started to get so tough. And I was constantly looking for things to make myself feel better. So I started doing meditation, yoga, buying all these supplements. I eventually stopped eating grains and gluten because I thought, yeah, that could be probably a problem. And so many more symptoms started to arise. And I kept on looking for

[video] 6:34 Yeah, things to solve those problems. But it also clicked somewhere in my head. Why am I having all these symptoms? Why is life getting so much harder to live if this is really supposed to be a good diet for me? But I didn't want to give the fault to the diet because I was, looking back now, so brainwashed that veganism is the way to go and there's no other way to do it better. Everybody around me, even though most of the people in this world just eat meat, eat animal products,

[video] 7:13 I know that this is the way and they are wrong. So I had this judgmental feeling towards the people around me that I knew it better and I wouldn't listen. I wouldn't even listen to my mother anymore, even though she gave really sane advice that probably what I was doing wasn't right, but I thought I was doing a good thing for myself.

[video] 7:35 I also made a list of all the symptoms that I was having. And I'm also really happy that along my whole journey, I kept a journal. So I almost wrote every day what I was feeling. And now in these last two weeks that I'm not vegan anymore, I look back at all my journal entries and it was really like a story of some depressed person. It was always negative and always negative. Yeah, when I read it back, I really felt like I was really struggling with my life. And I'm really glad that I actually kept that journal to look back. And the symptoms that I was having, especially also in the last half year, they got really worse. It was severe anxiety. I didn't want to meet up with people anymore. It took me months to reply to messages.

[video] 8:34 Just a normal message of a friend saying, hi, how are you? Do you want to meet up? And I wouldn't reply to it. I just stared at my phone and just put my phone away. I didn't want to have contact with anybody. Even though I knew it was better for me to see people, have friends, I just didn't feel like doing that anymore. A worsening of my negative thinking patterns. So... I would go into these thought cycles that would go so deep that I was even thinking of ways to not wanting to exist anymore. Yeah, basically suicidal thoughts, and those were really scary to me because I thought to myself, why am I thinking these things? This is not normal, but I would never blame it to my diet.

[video] 9:29 I thought it was just, yeah, there were just mental problems, but those could have nothing to do with my diet, because this is a good diet for me. And I started also to binge a lot and to purge, because I felt really sick of the foods that I was eating, especially in the last year. I was trying to eat more fruits, but my body just felt like it it didn't want these foods anymore. And even just when I was eating a pancake, I tried to incorporate more cooked foods, but I didn't even feel like eating those. I remember that after just eating some rice with tofu or beans, I would feel like purging out these foods right away, even though I knew my mind was telling me

[video] 10:21 I shouldn't be doing that, but it just didn't feel right in my stomach. I knew that that was also a really bad thing to do, to purge out my food, but I didn't tell anyone about it, because I was also a person that didn't want to be the victim.

[video] 10:44 Yeah, I wanted to show other people I was struggling, so I always kept a happy face and everything is going right with me, but even though I was purging and binging and silently, when we were watching a movie, for example, I would go to the bathroom and purge out the food really quick because I didn't want to have that in my body. My skin was becoming really bad, even though in the beginning it cleared up. It never really cleared up completely throughout my whole journey of being vegan. It did get better, but now this last year it just kept on getting worse and I got cystic acne around my jawline. And I kept watching videos from raw foodists telling me, you need to cleanse your body, you're dirty, you need to go on juice fast, you need to do water fast. I got a rebounder to help my lymphatic system.

[video] 11:40 I listened to these people also religiously because I thought that they said they cleared up all these symptoms through eating this way. So I thought I had to do the same.

[video] 11:52 But yeah, it just never got better.

[video] 11:56 Also, my hair started thinning out a lot. The ends were splitting. It wouldn't grow either. It took me such a long time to get a little bit of length in my hair. My body on my skin became saggier and drier. I started to get cellulite on my legs and even on my arms, which I never had. So that was also a weird thing. And people kept saying to me, you're just getting older. But I don't think at my age, I'm 25 right now, and these things shouldn't be happening to me at this age already or maybe even ever if you're just nurturing your body in the right way. And the cold hands and feet were really bad. Every time after eating a smoothie or just having a salad, my hands would go completely numb, and my feet around my mouth and my lips would go blue.

[video] 12:54 My boyfriend always mentioned, like, that's not right. There's something wrong with the, yeah. there's something wrong with the way you're eating and yeah I didn't reject him saying that but there was still this voice in my head saying you're doing the right thing even though the people around me started to see these symptoms as something bad I had the last

[video] 13:24 I think two weeks before I decided not being vegan anymore I got really thick swollen eyeballs or the eyelids and every morning I had a really thick crust on my eyes that I couldn't open my eyes and I had to go to the bathroom to put some hot water on it to finally open my eyes and it was super itchy.

[video] 13:46 So these symptoms started to worsen and

[video] 13:52 One thing that made me the most concerned that I really it gave me a little push to

[video] 14:00 Yeah, look outside of veganism, it was this one time that I was laying on my bed, I was reading a book, my boyfriend entered the room, and I wanted to lift up my neck from the bed, but suddenly a really hard pain rushed through my neck, all the way down through my spine,

[video] 14:22 I just shouted from the pain that it was so bad, and I had no idea what it was. I had to roll over, and my boyfriend had to lift me off the bed, because it was so painful that I couldn't move my neck. I got very worried.

[video] 14:40 A little bit later I went to the kitchen and tried to make dinner and just lifting up my arm or just moving my neck, I would scream from pain and I dropped on the floor. My boyfriend and his little brother were really shocked about it because I never felt such a pain in my life just by moving up my arm or moving my neck. That was also a huge sign that something was wrong with me and my body.

[video] 15:10 I already talked about how judgmental I was being towards people and how I was being very mean towards my parents.

[video] 15:19 Always also feeling the need to exercise every day. If I didn't exercise, I would feel really bad about myself, also physically and mentally. I lost my period for four months when I was eating a raw food diet. I was also always obsessing over food, always constantly thinking about food. After a meal, I wanted to eat more and more, and that also, I think, helped or it aided to the bloating that I constantly was having. My stomach was always protruding, and food was coming back up through my mouth again, and it burned sometimes, and I would fart it, and I burped so much. I lost a lot of muscle. Before I was vegan, it wasn't even a thing I was thinking about to go to the gym or have a more muscular body.

[video] 16:12 I played soccer for three times a week and did some body exercises at home. And now, during my vegan journey, I was constantly exercising and going to the gym and I couldn't Yeah, grow my muscles, it seemed. I was just getting fatter or I was getting skinnier, but I could never sustain my muscle mass. And that I noticed in the last half year comparing my body to how it was before I was vegan. It's a really huge difference. And that, yeah, I saw the saggier skin and the loss of muscles, the tooth sensitivity, which I still have now.

[video] 16:56 Just eating an apple or drinking some lemon juice would hurt my tooth so much that I could even barely brush my teeth. The last year I started to get joint pains, pain in my joints.

[video] 17:14 I remember also this one time I got, for two weeks I had almost 40 degrees I remember that day very well. Me and my parents were having a meal. They were eating chicken and I was the one eating fake chicken. And after that meal, I got sick and they did not. And I was blaming them. Yeah. Or I was blaming my mother for probably you put the spoon of the chicken in my food or something. And I got a bacteria from that. I was like making up all these things in my head, but they were completely fine. But I wasn't. So there was something in probably the vegan chicken version or I don't know what it was, but something made me so sick. And

[video] 18:06 That could have been something else as well, but that was a significant thing that I was thinking back about, that probably my immune system just kept on weakening, and I couldn't handle things anymore, like food allergies and those kind of things, even though my parents basically eat everything, and they weren't sick, or they aren't having as much trouble as me, just going through their days. Also, my sun allergy got worse every spring. I would get a rash on my arms and legs, really tiny bumps, and it would itch a lot and get really red. And that kept getting worse each year. Every spring, I used to have it only on my arms, but now this last spring, I got it on my legs, and I got it on my neck, and all the way up through my shoulder. So I noticed that was getting worse.

[video] 19:05 I also became very emotionless.

[video] 19:09 I wouldn't feel any anger in the last four years. I wasn't angry at anything, but I also didn't feel any passion or deep love towards something. Literally, I felt emotionless, and it started also to get worse throughout the years. My period pains got also worse. As a kid, when I was a teenager and I got my period, I was the one that never had period pains. I remember at school, when girls would talk about it. But since going vegan, they progressively got worse, and I got really depressed before I would get my periods. And my periods would also get a lot longer. So I would have before it would be just a couple of days, maybe four days, but now it would be more than a week. And I thought that was also something wrong with that.

[video] 20:06 And just all of this combined in the last half year, it really

[video] 20:15 Yeah, it brought me to a place that I was just laying in my bed and I never prayed to God in my life or I never prayed towards something but I was crying in my bed a couple of times and just wishing or asking for someone to help me out of this because life was just getting so hard. And I didn't know what to do about it because I didn't feel like anybody was understanding me. And everybody around me was just feeling good and they're grounded. My boyfriend is very grounded. He doesn't have any mental problems. He's very healthy. But I'm supposedly on this healthy path, but I'm just feeling worse and worse and worse. And yeah, eventually... It led me to finally also step out of the paradigm of veganism.

21:13 Okay. So it was all the health issues that made you quit. Yeah. Do you regret it all or how do you see veganism now?

[video] 21:22 Yeah, now I really see it as something that is not healthy for humans. It's not... I remember there are cultures... In Ethiopia, at the Orthodox Church, they have a 90-day period where they don't eat animal products. It might be alright to do it in that sort of scenario, but not for a long-lasting diet for the rest of your life.

[video] 21:54 You're lacking nutrients, and most of these people don't even realize it, as I was. I didn't realize I was missing something, because I always told myself, there's nothing in animal products that I cannot find in plants. Plants will provide me with everything I need. So that close-mindedness brought me to this path, and I think a lot of people doing veganism

[video] 22:22 probably can be in that same mental space. For some it might take just a year of going vegan and they run into these problems. For others it might take 10 years, but eventually they will run up into a wall. Just through my experience, I don't think it's a healthy diet. I am grateful for going through the experience and learning so much.

[video] 22:52 But if I could, yeah, in some way, I do feel regret, a little bit, because I feel like I've lost four years of my life, in a way. The way I lost friends, lost connections. I actually made my body worse than better. So there is some regret, but there is also a part that I learned a lot from this. I need to be more open-minded than I thought I was.

23:25 You said you lost friends? What happened?

[video] 23:29 Well, in the beginning I was pretty militant about it because I thought, well, there are so many animals are dying and many people are losing their health over eating animal products. So I have to tell this to everyone. That was my mindset in the beginning. I have to tell this to my friends. I have to tell this to my parents because I know something they don't really know. And this is going to be beneficial to them because I'm already feeling a lot better than I did before, so I want the same for them. And I wasn't really...

[video] 24:08 I did post about it on my social media in the beginning, and I noticed people were very annoyed by it, but at that point I thought, how can you be annoyed by this? This is the truth. People should know about this. How can you be angry about me sharing that if you eat less meat, we will save the planet and stuff?

[video] 24:31 I started not to go out to eat with friends because I didn't want to have meat around me. If they would eat meat, I didn't want to sit at a table where people were eating meat. I started judging the people around me more.

[video] 24:50 didn't like being around me in that way. Even though throughout the years I learned to not be focal about it anymore, I tried to keep it really for myself. In the beginning I was more loud about it, but in the last years I thought like, I'm just going to do my thing, you just do your thing.

[video] 25:10 But it was still something in my head that I kept judging the people, even though I wouldn't say it anymore. It was still something taking up my energy in my mind. And yeah, just me being more depressed, feeling low, being so judgmental, I think I just repelled people from me, even though I wasn't even being vocally so loud about it anymore. But I think in somewhat way,

[video] 25:42 I think it's also hard for the people around them because I remember people saying to me, ìOh, sorry that I'm eating eggs right now. Oh, sorry that I'm eating this piece of meat right now.î And I would be, ìNo, no, it's fine. Just eat it.î But people feel really uncomfortable with somebody who is vegan or they have such a restricted way of eating. It's not so fun being around a vegan, I feel now.

26:10 Did you get into B12 or any of those supplements?

[video] 26:14 Yeah, yeah, I did. Because I kept on reading or researching more about it every time some symptoms popped up. So the B12, I got the chlorella, the spirulina, the nutritional yeast, the zinc supplement, the vitamin D3 supplement. There's some amino acid supplements I got. Eventually I got a raw vegan protein powder. Yeah, there were so many supplements, but nothing made me feel better. I spent so much money, even though I thought veganism, with being vegan, I'm actually spending less money. But now I calculate, now that I'm eating animal products again, I spend way less money than I was doing being a vegan.

27:05 Wow.

27:08 What do you think is the future of veganism? What's going to happen with the whole movement or what do you think veganism even is?

[video] 27:16 Now that I dug a little bit deeper into it from another perspective, I really see that in some way it may be population control of the people, because I also experienced or saw this trend that people were getting vasectomies, or the men were getting vasectomies, and women losing their period without even caring about it. And some people say, a lot of them don't want children. And, yeah, so it is as if they're trying to control the people in not such an obvious way, so they make them feel good about themselves, that they're doing something really good, so they don't question themselves or what they're doing. And combined with not feeling mentally so well, it feels like they're trying to...

[video] 28:14 yeah control people in that way and yeah I don't even think it is such a great thing for the environment because I was for example buying so many fruits from countries all over the world and when I thought about that that also needs transportation they also need to cut down forests to grow all these unnatural foods and I'm buying them

[video] 28:42 So probably I'm polluting the environment more than if I were to be just getting my butter from around the corner from my farmer or just getting the foods locally. So there's a lot of things that are wrong with veganism actually and I think there is something more negative behind it than good.

29:09 Okay. Would you like to say anything to any vegans who are watching? Anything special that they should now understand?

[video] 29:18 Yeah, I would say a big thing is to keep an open mind. So, it might feel as if you found a holy girl, or at least that was in my experience like that. But still, keep an open mind to other information. Don't become too biased about only wanting to listen to information from plant-based doctors. Because there are so many doctors in the world that are not plant-based and they also have knowledge. You need to be open to that as well and to all kinds of information and look into history and

[video] 30:06 Yeah, don't let yourself be close-minded and don't be biased about veganism.

30:13 Okay, I have another question. I'm not sure if it's too private. I think you're open about it. Because I never watched your videos, but I know that you made those NoFap videos. Would you say that that had something to do with veganism? That you maybe lost some sex drive or something like that or anything like that?

[video] 30:32 I now definitely think so, because like I said, I kept on feeling worse throughout the years, and I was always looking for something that would make me feel better. So I thought, okay, NoFap looks like a challenge, and I hear people feel better about themselves when they do that. Or like mentally and physically, I hear they got benefits from it, so I tried it, and I did initially feel a lot better in the first two weeks. But now looking back at it, I think I just lost a lot of sex drive. My libido went down a lot.

[video] 31:10 And then it becomes a lot easier to do the NoFap challenge. and uh yeah later on throughout the years i i was also questioning that uh i'm not feeling very great so all these things that i'm actually adding to my life are not really sustainable or long lasting so now looking back at that nofap journey as well um i do think pornography is not a thing you need to watch every day or it's beneficial towards your life at all so i i That's the thing I'm still the same about, but the masturbation thing, I went really spiritual with it, I was floating about it, I thought it was a spiritual journey or something, but now that I feel a lot more grounded, I look at it in a different way, and it's not as bad as I was thinking before.

32:07 Okay. Did you believe that killing animals is wrong, and do you still do?

[video] 32:14 No, I don't believe it is wrong. And I think throughout my years of being vegan, I never thought it was really wrong to do.

[video] 32:24 Because I never was against hunting, for example. I always thought to myself, if I would live in a natural world and I needed to hunt for my food, I would do that. I wouldn't have a problem with it. But because I live in the city and we have our supermarket,

[video] 32:42 I was justifying myself. But I never really thought that killing an animal for food was bad. I did think the way they do it in the factory farms wasn't the right way, and I don't want to contribute to that. Yet, yeah, it's a part of us. It's a part of how we humans live on this world and how we live together with the animals. That's how I see it.

33:09 Okay. Anything else you would like to add?

[video] 33:19 Maybe there's one thing or maybe two things that I want to say.

[video] 33:27 My whole mental health came back after me literally eating one egg and a grass-fed butter that I put in my meal.

[video] 33:41 It was so significant that I now realize that food is very important for our mental state and for our physical health, and it should not be overlooked. I got a lot of comments that it has nothing to do with your vegan diet, how you're feeling, or you were not doing the diet right, but people seem to overlook the diet part, that there are nutrients that you need to have to have this base of feeling good, or have a base of general happiness. And that's what I noticed at the dinner table, that after that egg and after that butter, suddenly I felt this tingly sensation going through my brain, and I suddenly calmed down and got so relaxed and not tense, And I didn't feel the need to look for food afterwards, after that meal.

[video] 34:36 Everything just calmed down in my head and around me. I always would look at this room here, the living room, as a really terrible place. I felt so claustrophobic and so dark that I had to go on the balcony to breathe air. But after eating that egg, everything became so beautiful and as if my eyes started to work better even. And another thing that I want to add, I think it was one week before I decided to eat an egg. And that was also a funny thing. The last half year, I was obsessing over eggs in some way. I was always constantly thinking about eating an egg, but I never wanted to do it. But I watched this movie, and I think it was about the bombing in Japan.

[video] 35:30 And it was about a story of a young guy and his little sister and they had to survive throughout the bombing time, the war time. They lost their parents and it was really hard for them to get by. And the only things they had for food was rice. and a couple of fruits sometimes, but it was actually a vegan diet, they didn't have meat or animal products anymore throughout that whole time. And his little sister died of malnutrition, even though they were eating rice, and they had sometimes a couple of fruits here and there, and of course they went periods of time without food.

[video] 36:17 But suddenly, now in the last couple of days, it reminded me of that they were actually eating vegan foods that should be nutritious, even though the little girl died in the end. That's also a thing I just wanted to add.

36:34 Yeah. It's very hard for vegans to understand this because they believe that eggs and saturated fat causes heart disease and so on. So it's very evil to them. And to make them understand that that actually helps you mentally and makes you healthy, it's almost impossible because they're brainwashed, essentially, and it's really hard to get out of it. Yeah.

[video] 36:57 Exactly.

[video] 37:00 okay thank you for sharing yeah you're welcome it was nice for you uh to do this interview together