Ex-Vegan (9 Months): A Strongman's Story

Watch on YouTube · 2018-05-15 · 8 min

0:00 Do you want to introduce yourself? Sure.

[video] 0:02 My name is Jess. I'm from Northwest Pennsylvania. And this is my ex-vegan story. Okay. How long were you vegan? About nine months. I started last year.

[video] 0:16 I had been doing a lot of strength training and working on internal energy development, doing Qigong and a lot of meditation and

[video] 0:29 A lot of the people that I was becoming aware of were recommending a plant-based diet to enhance this and I thought I would give it a go and I went all in.

[video] 0:41 I guess in April I started in 2017. I was vegetarian for about two weeks and then I went full vegan right off. Veganism turned into fruitarianism over the summer and At first, it was good. I had lots of energy. My body was light. I lost like 15 pounds overnight, but I kept losing weight. My lifts initially went up, which it gave me really good feedback. I felt stronger, and then it just started to decline. I tried to mask it by changing how I was training. I had been doing a lot of heavy lifting, a lot of like barbell and heavy kettlebell stuff. And I started doing more athletic stuff with like clubs and lighter implements and getting back into martial arts. So I didn't really notice it as much.

[video] 1:40 yeah yeah did you take supplements and stuff i didn't that's the one thing that i wanted to avoid i wanted to be completely natural right and i later found out that it was completely unnatural a lot of the things that they were recommending they just they weren't working i had to eat 4 000 to 6 000 calories a day just to maintain my body weight And it just wasn't enough. Yeah. Yeah. Did you have friends who were vegan and stuff? No, but I'm a, I'm a strength coach. I work with people like a personal trainer and I found myself recommending a plant-based diet to a lot of them. And thankfully they all resisted, but, uh, yeah. Um,

[video] 2:35 I wrote it out until December of 2017 and I posted a picture of myself online and I was really proud that I had such a lean physique. And then somebody mentioned that I needed to eat a candy bar and it made me look at myself and really question like, all right, what are you doing? Why are you doing this?

[video] 3:00 I added in eggs and some chicken and some dairy and like overnight my body weight shot back up like six weeks later I was 20 pounds heavier and all my lifts were improving I had better energy yeah there's a lot of misinformation going on right now and people need to be aware because a lot of young people are falling into this and it's not what they say it is yeah what do you want to say to vegans?

[video] 3:31 Go vegan and die.

[video] 3:35 No, in all seriousness, you guys should do some homework. They're saying a lot of really good things and really positive things, and you think you're gonna save the animals, and it isn't true.

[video] 3:53 There's a circle of life for a reason, and if you're choosing to remove yourself from it, you're choosing to remove yourself.

4:02 What do you think is the future of veganism? What's going to happen?

[video] 4:07 I think more and more people are going to get sick and hopefully more people wake up before it's too late. There's a really big push for this right now. More and more kids are falling into it and I'm seeing old ladies at the grocery store going vegan and vegetarian and I lay my steak down next to them and they look at me all disgusted like how could you and it's ridiculous. I grew up on a dairy farm. I had raw milk and meat and eggs the whole time growing up and It was awesome. I had the good life and I didn't really realize it. And then after I got out of school and got away from the farm, I started eating a lot of processed junk and didn't really care so much until I started getting back into health. And I just wanted to improve my health as much as possible. And that's how I eventually got back and got into veganism. And it didn't work.

5:09 Anything else you want to add? Any experience you had that you remember?

5:18 There was recently a case of another baby that had crickets and it was vitamin D, B12, iron, zinc deficient just now. And the parents are in court now because of it. And this is going to happen a lot. Vegans don't realize this.

[video] 5:36 There's so much pressure for people to switch into this diet, and nobody understands it. Nobody understands the long-term effects. They don't understand what it's doing to their body. They can choose not to eat meat, that's fine, but in the end, your body is still eating meat, whether you're taking an animal product or you're consuming yourself. Good point.

[video] 6:02 So... You know, I love animals too. I do, but you know, I love people more.

[video] 6:18 So just be informed, be aware.

[video] 6:24 You might not realize it right now. It might be a year down the road. It might be three years down the road, but something's going to go. Something's going to break and it could be too late. a lot of people are getting messed up.

6:37 Alright, thanks man.

[video] 6:42 Thank you. It's a 60 penny barn spike and some light leather wraps.

[video] 6:53 Back in the day, old time strong men would use implements like this to demonstrate how strong they were because they didn't have modern day strength equipment to measure. And the 60 penny spike was kind of like the benchmark skill of the old timers.

[video] 7:20 Usually a couple hundred pounds to close.

[video] 7:46 Just like that.