Ex-Vegan (9 Months): I Wanted to Heal My Eczema but Veganism Made It Way Worse

Watch on YouTube · 2019-06-09 · 15 min

0:00 You can introduce yourself if you like to and just start at the very beginning, how you got into veganism, what happened and then how it unfolded, the consequences, everything.

[video] 0:11 Alright, so to begin with veganism, what had gotten me into it was just a few friends and having kind of brief contact with the idea of veganism through a few documentaries. That was kind of my initial exposure to the darker side of like factory farming and that kind of thing.

[video] 0:37 So, yeah, my knee-jerk reaction to seeing all of that was to just not do really any real research into what was going on and what veganism like was doing to people and really to just, yeah, without research, just go. full on into it. And because of the documentaries I had seen and some of the other videos that I had seen related to the cruelty surrounding some of that, I was pretty adamant about veganism. So when I saw that the health problems I had had going into it were not going away and that they were slowly getting worse, I kind of tried to ignore it, tried to find a way around it within the narrow confines of staying vegan.

[video] 1:38 So a little backdrop on what actually happened, those pre-existing conditions I had going into it. When I was five, I had an ear infection that, for that I was prescribed Zithromax, which is a Z-Pak antibiotic.

[video] 1:56 It's notoriously strong with many side effects related to the heart, but what it did for me was it gave me leaky gut at the age of five, essentially ruined my intestinal lining and I had many severe food allergies. From then on, I essentially couldn't properly digest most foods and I spent the better part of probably ten years trying just about every thing that we could think of. We went to different naturopaths and doctors just around Arizona and it was like a constant thing just trying to figure this out. But we as a family weren't really aware of what was going on so I continued to eat a lot of things like sugar and rice and this kind of stuff was still part of my diet and we didn't really know better.

[video] 2:56 Yeah, that's the problem that I had been dealing with that manifested itself as eczema. When I was a kid, it was on my legs. It was all over and it was to the point that I would wake up and peel my pajama pants off, like that kind of thing. And then later, as a young adult, it also showed itself on my hands and on my arms. So it was getting to the point around this time when I had been vegan for about four or five months already that

[video] 3:27 daily it was debilitating and it was pretty unbearable pain. I could look at my hands and my fingers and my knuckles and the skin on the top of my hand was swollen and red and I couldn't function. I was living in an intentional community at the time and I was surrounded by a lot of people who were fairly understanding of what was going on. So that was a good thing to have, but I had no idea what to do about it. I kind of continued to ignore this for whatever reason for another four or five months or so until around January of 2018, so a little over a year and a half ago. I had had a friend who was having some thyroid issues. This was in the community and they were on a ketogenic diet.

[video] 4:25 told me about it and tried to get me to at least start eating eggs or something. After a point, I was getting really tired of just being sick and feeling like I was dying. It had become really apparent to me that veganism had made me dependent on foods like legumes and grains and sugar that just wasn't helping anything. And it was just getting worse. January of 2018, kind of overnight, I stopped. I said this, I don't care what I have to eat. I cannot keep doing this to myself. So, the first thing I did was I reintroduced meat. At the time, it was still like cooked meat and just kind of what I could get. Living in the community, we had our own beef CSA.

[video] 5:22 And it was all pastured, grass-fed, and extremely high-quality, nutrient-dense food. So that's the meat that I had started eating. I started cutting out a lot of foods, like beans and legumes was the first one. I saw a drastic reduction in inflammation when I did that.

[video] 5:43 After that, within another month or so, I had cut out grains completely. And then within another month of that, I had cut out all processed foods and boxed, store-bought canned goods and sugary foods and I started only drinking water at that point. So, within a three-month period, my diet had essentially flipped from one pole to the other and I started eating fish. raw eggs and raw milk pretty regularly and I also started doing a lot of bone broth. I would cook it down for about three days at a time and then consume that on a regular basis.

[video] 6:23 All of this combined together with also just being very adamant about not breaking step with these new eating habits was

[video] 6:38 It was profound. It was almost, definitely not instant, but within a two or three month time span, I saw the eczema on my hands and my fingers completely disappear. Raw meat and other raw animal products and organ meats in particular are a big part of many indigenous diets and that it's a part of our kind of natural diet. And I was introduced to the works of Ajaanis Fonderplanets and kind of how he healed himself with a lot of problems there. I did a lot of research into Weston A. Price, like a lot of people, in particular nutrition and physical degeneration. It's just rich in information.

[video] 7:26 And that brought me to about this most previous winter, sometime around December or January. I was doing some work trading further north and was introduced to backstrap salad, which is just raw deer backstrap. And that was kind of the first time that I started to play around with the raw meats and that kind of thing. And as I was put in that environment where I was forced to eat seasonally, and here the winter is being very cold and pretty long. You're mostly just dependent on maybe whatever vegetables you were able to get during the summertime and process, but generally speaking, it's just whatever animal products you have. That's kind of what I was subsisting on when I was doing this work trading up north.

[video] 8:23 I saw the very last of any health issues that hadn't resolved themselves completely disappear. For example, during the first few months of turning around my diet, I had seen the eczema on my skin go away, but some of the scarring on my legs from when I was a child hadn't quite gone away, and there would still be a day or two at a time when I could see scarring very prominently, something may resurface for a day or two and then go away. And this completely disappeared. at this time. It essentially was as though nothing had ever happened.

[video] 9:09 Whereas before, if for whatever reason I ingested a food like rice or sugar or fruit, whatever it be, if I was in a situation where I ate something like that, I would have broken out in past times. But when I did that now, despite that I know it's not necessarily like a healthy food, like if the situation demanded for whatever reason that I do that, I wouldn't have broken out like I would have before. Because that weakened gut lining always just caused like an instant violent reaction.

[video] 9:46 So what I saw was like really not just a band-aid like what I had been told to do, just cover up my symptoms, like this was a real healing of the problem.

[video] 9:58 Yeah, it was life-changing.

10:00 Anything you would like to say to any vegans in general who want to consider going vegan for health?

[video] 10:05 I see morally why people aspire to it. I mean, just as far as us as a species, it doesn't make sense. It's not our diet. And the problem that I had had when I was vegan was I was always lethargic. I could not bring myself to function normally as far as energy levels go. I kind of had to just because I had to work and I did not have much of a choice, but generally speaking, I was dragging my feet. And that's another thing that I see. I think any diet where you're constantly having to get blood tested and you're constantly having to look for ways to boost your energy and become dependent on sugar and caffeine and any diet where you're not feeling ready to take on the day and really go out and tackle life is not something's not right. You should not have to be so dependent on outside sources and so closely monitoring yourself to make sure that you don't degenerate.

[video] 11:05 Another thing I think worth mentioning that I noticed was I knew a handful of other vegans when I was living in this community at the same time that I was vegan. And while I had only been vegan for nine months, many of these people had been vegan for a number of years or even decades. and something that I observed in all of them, without exception, was that they had all over the years developed serious dental or bone problems.

[video] 11:40 And in one of these cases, the joint problem with the knee was because of an outside injury, it was not necessarily directly from diet, but after that external injury had occurred, their knee never fully healed and it had been upwards of five years since the injury and it hadn't healed. And then with the other vegans I knew, it was a constant battle with cavities.

12:09 Right, you need fat soluble vitamins for that and they don't get vitamin A, vitamin D, K2 and so on. That's the main problem. How do you see veganism? What do you think it is? Where does it come from and where is it heading?

[video] 12:26 I think initially it comes from, I mean, just, you know, I can only offer my perspective on these things, but I see it as just a disconnectedness from our nature, our human nature. And I don't necessarily think that anyone in particular is to blame for that. I think in a way we have domesticated ourselves far enough from our natural environment, that we're raised in an environment where it's too easy to forget where we come from and what we are and who we are. It's very easy to kind of take on this mentality that we're given. And I think veganism is one of the byproducts of that kind of self-domestication. And I mean, you see it. kind of bleed over in the minds of most people who conform to that kind of mentality in general.

[video] 13:21 Because even a lot of people who aren't necessarily vegan or vegetarian definitely in some area within them believe that more vegetables and less animal products equals healthier somehow. It's just part of the whole idea that comes with that. And where do I see it heading? Hopefully nowhere, but I don't know where I would see it going. It looks as though it's kind of become popularized by the mainstream and it's now being pushed on a lot of people just socially and that's a really disappointing thing to see. It's because it's not something we should be promoting. It's something we should be questioning. The only benefit that I do see to veganism is that it gets people to demand higher quality food.

[video] 14:22 That's one commonality I can see between the two diets, but aside from that, it's generally just causing great nutritional deficiency in a society that already is suffering from great nutritional deficiency.

14:38 Did you take any supplements yourself during the time?

[video] 14:43 You know, I supplemented B12 for a short while when I was vegan, but that was another frustration for me that I kind of shoved under the rug. It's like, if this is how we're supposed to be eating, why do I need to supplement? Yeah, you shouldn't be needing to supplement anything if you're eating whole, complete, nutritious foods.

15:01 Right.

15:03 Anything else you would like to add? Anything you experienced during the time? Something important you would like to mention?

[video] 15:09 I mean, I suppose as far as healing goes... Kind of the experience that I came to was that healing is a threefold process of mental, spiritual, and physical coming together in that way. But you can't have complete healing of the human organism without addressing all three of those things. The diet definitely plays a huge part in that. obviously being, you know, one third of that healing process. And for a lot of people, that's kind of the missing link, especially, as I mentioned, in this culture that we're in where there's a lot of misinformation.

15:49 All right. Thank you.

[video] 15:54 Yeah. No, thank you for having me on.