Ex-Vegan (4 Years): Nutritionist Realizes That She's Starving

Watch on YouTube · 2019-02-12 · 23 min

[video] 0:00 I'm Megan. My YouTube channel is Megan Remini and I found veganism because I was looking for a solution for my acne, but I took a drug called Accutane. I don't know if anybody's familiar with it but it's very harsh pharmaceutical and it pretty much almost killed me. I had been trying to see doctors after I was on the drug to fix my digestive issues that I had and I went to several specialists and nobody knew how to help me post Accutane so I got desperate and I went to a Chinese herbalist in downtown Toronto. And she gave me a bunch of herbs to boil. She told me that my body was toxic from the drug and that my liver and kidneys were pretty much on the verge of failing because of the toxicity. And then she suggested that I go on a plant-based diet to detox the drugs. So that was the first time I ever heard of it.

[video] 1:00 At first, I didn't really listen to her because it sounded a little bit crazy to me. And I just started with the herbs just to detox at first. I went back a couple weeks later. I was doing a lot better. But she said if I didn't listen to her diet recommendations, then I wouldn't get 100% better. So I started researching it. And that's when I found all the documentaries on Netflix. I found Freely's channel on YouTube and a few other things. vegan influencers at the time and I slowly got obsessed with it because I thought it was gonna be you know the cure-all end-all diet so my acne had gone away from Accutane but now I had a bunch of digestive problems and so as I started eating vegan the problems got a lot better I felt really good for about the first one to two years.

[video] 2:00 But the first after the first year, I couldn't do fruit anymore. I was doing smoothies every morning. And about an hour after my smoothie, I would have to take a nap. I was so exhausted. So that's the first time that I noticed blood sugar issues. I decided to go back to school at this point, because I thought that I had discovered, you know, the greatest diet of all, And I picked the school called the Institute of Holistic Nutrition. It's in Toronto. It's like an alternative healing school. It's like a private college. So their curriculum is not vegan at all. But because I was vegan going into the school, I didn't really listen to a lot of what the teachers had to say. So I remember several times the teachers were talking about it's not very safe to do a strictly vegan diet. but I just thought that they were being biased and they weren't up to date on the research.

[video] 2:55 So I started noticing a lot of health problems around the second to third year that I was vegan. I was vegan for four years in total. I asked my teachers at school different things that I could do for the health problems and they would suggest different supplements and stuff, but they had never really mentioned that it could be caused by the vegan diet.

[video] 3:19 I had noticed that my muscles, I work out a lot, so I had noticed that in the gym, my muscles, when I would do squats, it almost felt like my muscle was tearing in the middle. I would get like a burning sensation in my muscle, and that was the first time I had ever experienced that before in the gym. So as that sensation got worse and worse, I just stopped squatting I thought that my body just needed a break my muscles were taxed I was going through like a lot of stress in school with all the assignments and So I had decreased my workouts and my weight because I couldn't handle it anymore And then I started getting fatigued like extreme fatigue so I would take naps like throughout the day just to be able to to cope and

[video] 4:07 the biggest symptom that I had noticed that I had burning back pain in my spine at the top and my posture was getting like increasingly worse family and friends were noticing that like my posture was kind of getting hunched over I had been in a car accident right when I kind of around the time where I discovered veganism and I had injuries to my neck so I thought that that was the reason for my back pain. So this whole time that I was vegan, I kept making excuses, not trying to blame the diet, like, oh, it was the car accident, it was the Accutane medication that I was on, etc., etc. But over time, about the third year into veganism, when I was almost done school, I noticed that my symptoms were getting worse. And I was so determined because of the ethical

[video] 4:59 Reasons I first discovered it because of health and then the ethics kind of started coming into it so I was so determined to stick to the diet that I Kept asking my naturopathic teachers like what can I do for this symptom? What can I do for this as I'm learning in school about nutrition? I And so throughout this time, when veganism started not working for me, I started trying supplements. So I would supplement with iron or D3 or magnesium for the muscle pain and stuff like that. And I would get a little bit of an effect at first, but it would just wear off. And then a couple weeks later, the supplement wouldn't do anything for me and I would have the symptom again. But I started supplementing with B12 from the beginning because I did my research.

[video] 5:47 on that so I was always supplementing with B12 and so as I'm in school I'm starting to realize as I'm studying nutrition that it's very hard to get all that I need on a vegan diet and I was probably missing a lot of things so I started using chronometer putting all my food in and realizing that I was coming up short on a lot of stuff so I would supplement with the stuff that I was coming up short on trying to formulate the perfect vegan diet and during this time my symptoms are getting increasingly worse but I was just pushing through because of school I wanted to finish school and it was

[video] 6:29 you know, the healthiest thing that you could do. There was a lot of vegans or vegetarians in my class, but I had one teacher and we jokingly called him bacon grease because he was constantly talking about how healthy cholesterol was for you and bacon was for you. And we didn't believe him at all. So I remember him telling us that long-term vegans have mental health problems and this and that and warning us. And I wanted nothing to do with it. Like I didn't even pay attention. So it wasn't until I hit rock bottom towards the end, towards the fourth year that I was vegan, that I really started realizing that it's not working for me. I couldn't even get out of bed. I was in so much pain. I was cold all the time. And I live in Canada, so it was really difficult, like a cold that I never felt before. It was like in my bones cold. And my fingers and my toes were always ice cold.

[video] 7:28 I could never warm up no matter what. Even if it was warm in the house, I couldn't warm up. My back pain was getting increasingly worse. It was almost like a nerve sensation burning up and down my spine, especially in the top part of my back to the point where once the pain got so bad, just from walking around, doing average daily activities, I would just have to take a nap because I couldn't stand the pain anymore. And I had muscle pain and joint pain throughout my whole body that no matter how much turmeric or magnesium or all these supplements that they had taught us in school for certain issues, none of that was really helping. It would diminish the symptoms a little bit, but it wasn't solving anything. So I started realizing that something serious was going on. While I was in school, I got my blood work done and my vitamin D was low, my iron was low, my B12 was low, but it wasn't like critically low.

[video] 8:30 And so a year later, once I was done school, I got my blood work done again and the vitamin D, the B12 and the iron were like critically low. And so this whole time I had been supplementing since the first blood work test with those vitamins and my levels didn't improve, they actually got worse. And one day I had like I had been craving eggs so bad to the point where like I dreamt about an egg yolk one night and I woke up the next day and I was like I can't do this anymore. So I went to a vegetarian restaurant in Toronto because I was scared for somebody to see me buy eggs because you know I was known as the vegan. And so I went to this vegetarian restaurant and I ordered two eggs and I asked them to make it like the eggs pretty runny, the yolk, because that's what I was craving, like the runniest yolk I could get.

[video] 9:26 And I dipped some bread in the yolk and I like ate the eggs so fast. I was so ravenous. And I was just sitting in my car just waiting to see what was going to happen. And about 10 minutes later, I just got this like rush of energy and rush of warmth through my body. And it's pretty emotional for me because at that moment I realized that I had been starving myself for so long in the name of veganism. And so I almost felt this sensation in my brain, like a tingling sensation. And so that's when I started researching pain on a vegan diet, problems with a vegan diet. Once I had that experience, because I still wasn't convinced that that's what I needed or that it was healthy, because that's one of the number one things that they tell you is eggs are pretty much deadly.

[video] 10:26 So I started researching. I found your videos. And the one video that stuck out to me, I don't remember who it was, but somebody was talking about eggs and somebody was talking about the sensation in their brain that they felt. And it just clicked to me. And then I started binge watching your videos and I realized that all of the symptoms, I had a lot more symptoms. There's so many to even remember, but all the symptoms that I had, everybody else had, like everybody in your videos had the, or was going through the exact same thing or have the exact same symptoms. And I realized how critical and how bad my health was at that point. So I started researching more because at the time I thought, you know, you're a little crazy with the raw meat. And then I started researching more. I started eating raw eggs and raw fish.

[video] 11:20 And the first time that I had a raw egg was like the best bowel movement that I had in the whole four years of veganism. I was really my bowel movements were never normal or consistent. It was either extreme diarrhea or extreme constipation and the doctor had told me after Accutane that I had IBS. It The herbs kind of helped that, like the symptoms from that went away. And then about the first year of veganism, I was fine. But the longer into veganism, the IBS symptoms got worse and worse. And so I just realized that if this diet was so healthy, that my symptoms wouldn't be getting worse and I wouldn't be getting new symptoms. I would be healing if it was working for me. Um, so ever since I've started incorporating, um, the raw eggs and the raw fish, I have so much energy.

[video] 12:18 Like I can, I finally feel like myself again. I can get out of bed. I can go to the gym. Uh, last week for the first time I started squatting again. I didn't have the shooting, tingling, burning muscle pain that I had had for years. And, um, I'm convinced that

[video] 12:40 does not work for everybody that's why I started one of the reasons why I started my youtube channel and I put out my ex vegan story I think that if I would have seen your videos sooner or if somebody would have told me that there's flaws in veganism or that everybody can't do it I would have saved so much damage on my body I think that the the image that's portrayed right now is way too much of the vegan side and there needs to be like a shift of people explaining that it is very easy to get deficiencies or get sick or have health issues on a vegan diet and I just want to prevent other people from going through the damage that I did like I every single day I was suffering was like being in bed and being in pain when I literally could have just changed my diet and fixed it

[video] 13:38 But because there was plant-based doctors out there supporting this and telling me that it was the best diet, even though my school wasn't, I thought that they were up-to-date on the science and they knew best. And so that's why I stuck to it, because doctors essentially were promoting it.

13:57 Did they also teach you in school to take the supplements, that they are healthy for you?

[video] 14:02 So they taught us, they teach us a lot about Weston A. Price in my school. They taught us that food is the most important and use herbs as medicine. And then if somebody is like critically ill, you can supplement a nutritious diet with added supplements just to help boost them and help speed up the healing process. But they taught us that the diet was the most important thing.

[video] 14:32 Yeah, I actually have a little quote from one of the books from my school, from one of the pages from Weston A. Price, and it says, Do not practice strict vegetarianism or veganism. Animal products provide vital nutrients not found in plants. And I remember reading this to one of my vegan classmates and laughing about it in school, not realizing I was going through it.

14:55 What about all the classmates? Do you have any contact with them? Did you lose any vegan friends? How does that work?

[video] 15:02 So I still have contact with some of them. The vegan ones, yeah, they still talk to me. They think that it's working for them and it's healthy. So by all means, I mean, and my boyfriend is vegan. So I met him about two years into my vegan journey. And I'm still with him. He's still vegan. So the people that are around me that are vegan, they say that they're healthy and they're thriving and they don't want to go back. So I'm not sure if it can work for some people. But I think that for most people, they're going to come in contact with serious health issues.

15:42 They don't mind you eating meat?

[video] 15:45 That was the hardest thing. So I was so scared to tell my boyfriend that I didn't want to be vegan anymore. I couldn't be vegan anymore. I was scared about his reaction because we had talked about...

[video] 15:59 everything that a vegan couple talks about like we don't want to feed our kids animal products and this and that and I would never do that I don't want like meat in the house and you know all the extremism and so I was terrified because of those conversations to tell him like this isn't working for me anymore you know I ate some animal products and I feel so much better but when I did tell him he was like you're the only person that I would watch eat a whole cow so don't worry about it I just want you to be healthy and happy and Yeah, so that was a big relief. He was pretty much the only person that I cared about his opinion about it. But yeah, everybody still talks to me from school that was vegan. They're still vegan. But on my social media, I had a lot of people unfollow me. They weren't close friends. A lot of people unfollow me, comment a lot of nasty comments. And it seems to be like the number one comment is that I did it wrong.

[video] 16:57 But I was in nutrition school, and I was talking to naturopaths and doctors and nutritionists, and I had supplemented with everything that they say you should supplement with, and it still didn't work for me.

17:11 It's very hard to get vitamin D in Canada anyway, and there's no proof that any of those supplements even work. This is why it just kept going down.

[video] 17:24 Yeah, my vitamin D levels didn't improve until I started eating animal fat. That was the only thing that helped. So what I did was I incorporated animal fat and then I was taking the vitamin D supplement still.

[video] 17:41 And my levels were finally improving even though I was taking the same vitamin D supplement the whole time I was vegan. The exact same supplement, nothing was improving. Accutane also damages your liver a lot and I know that the liver is responsible for cholesterol recycling and manufacturing so I think that that was an additional issue that I had was that there's some liver damage going on there and so that I probably needed more dietary cholesterol to kind of help that issue. Yeah.

18:20 What do you think will be the future of veganism?

[video] 18:25 The way that it's going with the lab meat is really scary to me. I know you talked about how beneficial the bacteria in raw meat is. and I don't see how they're going to replicate that bacteria in a lab. They actually say it doesn't have bacteria in it and that's why it's clean meat. So, I'm scared that, because I would like to have a homestead in the future, I'm scared that the laws and regulations are going to push people into the cities and off of homesteading and farms or you won't be able to have animals on your farm because of these laws. So, that concerns me. I think that they are trying to push people into more of a fake diet than they already are. I see a lot of vegans promoting McDonald's and fast food.

[video] 19:17 And it's really alarming to me that they think a GMO burger of wheat and iceberg lettuce is healthier for you than eating, you know, an egg or a steak. Because if they really understood nutrition, they would understand that there's like nothing, there's no nutrients in a white bun and iceberg lettuce and a corn patty compared to an egg or a steak. Like your body runs off of amino acids and fatty acids. If meal after meal after meal you're just eating carbohydrates, where are you getting those nutrients from?

19:53 Do you regret going vegan now when you look back?

[video] 20:00 I regret it because I feel like I did a lot of damage to my body that I have to recover from now. I have nerve damage in my back.

[video] 20:10 And my brain fog was extremely bad. I also helped a lot of people go vegan during this time. And so making my video, like explaining everything to people was kind of like, there was no way I could get in contact with every single person that I helped go vegan because people were messaging me on my social media and emailing me and I was kind of giving them diet plans and advice and stuff while I was in school. on what I was doing. So when I had the epiphany that it wasn't working for me and that was the cause of my health problems, I felt so guilty that I had put all these people on a vegan diet. I didn't know how they were doing. I didn't know if they were suffering with the same thing. And so I had first came out on my Instagram

[video] 20:56 explaining to people that I'm not vegan anymore and why and a lot of people actually messaged me saying yeah I started incorporating fish but I was too scared to say anything I was too scared of the backlash you're really brave and so I realized that a lot of the people that I had helped go vegan had already started incorporating animal products again and because it wasn't working for them either.

21:16 Right. Anything else you would like to add? Something you experienced during the time, something important you learned or something you would like to say to any vegans who are watching?

[video] 21:31 It's hard to remember every symptom that I had and every problem that I encountered because I Literally felt like I was out of my body. So the first time that I had that egg, like I always felt like I was in the clouds And I again like the common thing that everybody says is you feel like you're having like some spiritual awakening But I was actually like disconnecting from my body and I realized that when I ate that egg Like I felt like my spirit just came back down into my body and I was more grounded I was instantly like more calm

[video] 22:09 But what I would like to tell everybody or vegans to understand is that it's fine if they want to be vegan. That's their choice. Everybody has a choice to pick the diet that they want. But this idea going around that everybody can do it and if you don't succeed on it, you did it wrong and you're a horrible person and this and that is just not true. I still now care about animal welfare. I make sure that I buy from local farms and make sure that I get the most ethical as possible raised animal products. There's different models that you can fight the animal welfare issues that are going on and the food system issues that are going on. It doesn't have to be strict veganism.

[video] 23:03 I think that if people stopped fighting back and forth with, you know, this is the right diet, this is the right diet, and realized that the problem is the food system, the problem is the corruption with the food system, no matter what you want to eat, it would be more effective. We would be more effective at fighting the problems, but people are so focused on no vegans the right diet no this is the right diet that we're missing what's going on behind the scenes like we're missing what's happening it's passing our eyes because we're so focused on this all right thank you megan thank you