Ex-Vegan (9 Years): I Went Vegan for My Health and Ended Up The Sickest I've Ever Been

Watch on YouTube · 2019-05-16 · 43 min

0:00 Introduce yourself if you like to and just start at the very beginning. What year you got into veganism, how you got into it and then just what happened?

[video] 0:10 Sure, so I'm Brighton Fuller and I got into veganism around the year 2010. I got into veganism because I

[video] 0:23 In the year 2009, I developed a mass on my face about the size and color of a globe grape. So this mass was

[video] 0:43 my face for about six months before it was removed I didn't know what it was I thought maybe it will just go away someone said maybe it's a sebaceous cyst you know I figured oh maybe it'll just go away so it was changing color changing shape some days I'd wake up it was bigger sometimes I'd wake up it was smaller sometimes it was more purple sometimes it was less purple But then it got to a point where it was just getting so changeable that I decided to have something done about it. So I consulted with many doctors and I think it's important to note that I had a surgery in my mouth just before it appeared. So a lot of the doctors that I saw didn't want to

[video] 1:41 touch it because they wanted me to go back to the doctor or the dentist who initially did the work in my mouth. And some of the doctors, they couldn't tell if it was a dermatological issue or an oral issue. The radiologist's impression was that it was hemangioma with subcutaneous fat tissue, something I really didn't understand. It also didn't make sense because hemangioma is like a birth mark, you have them from birth. So, it didn't make any sense, but I wanted to get this fucking thing off of my face, so... I was in my 20s. I said, OK, I want this thing off my face. So he said he will cut it out.

[video] 2:37 He cut it out, and he put it in a little dish. And I remember looking at it, and it was white. It looked almost like a mushroom. So then he stitched it up. I thought everything was OK.

[video] 2:57 I went about my life like a normal person and then about a year later I went to sleep looking like this, nothing on my face and then I woke up and I had the mass on my face, and it wasn't quite as big as it was at the end of when I had had it removed, but it was there overnight, and when I press on it, it was very, very tough, like very tender to the touch, and didn't feel like it was full of liquid or cyst or anything like that. So I went back to the same doctor.

[video] 3:45 I didn't really trust him to cut it out again and it seems like if you are calling like a landscaper to trim the hedges, they have to come back to trim the hedges because they don't get the roots out. I didn't really feel like going through this process again because it failed me. So I was online trying to figure my way out of this, and I found Dan McDonald, Life Regenerator on YouTube. So this is in 2010, which was, you know, at that time people kind of look at you like you got off a spaceship if you were juicing or that type of thing. I mean it wasn't really in the mainstream.

[video] 4:37 I had many consultations with him over the course of a month or two and

[video] 4:48 He said to me, he's like, you know, when you're raw, you know, you have to keep going with this. You know, you can't just stop. Like, this is for life. And so, you know, I'm desperate to get this thing off my face. Yeah, sure. Yeah, sign me up. So I began eating raw foods for the first month. And then I joined a detoxification group that Dan McDonald was spearheading on Facebook. And it was a three month detoxification program. And the first month consisted of eating only raw fruits and vegetables with no salt and no oil and no nuts and seeds. And then the second month

[video] 5:47 consisted of eating mono meals, and the third month consisted of three weeks juice fasting, one week water fasting. So, sure, okay, I'll do this. And I was transitioning overnight. I just did this overnight. I didn't think twice about it. I also think it's really important to note that even though I was a strict vegan for nine years,

[video] 6:23 I didn't consume red meat for over 20 years so maybe like 23 years or so I didn't consume any red meat whatsoever and also I never ate from age 15 on I never ate much meat or animal proteins whatsoever maybe just a couple times a year so I never really consumed much of that. So I think that's also important to mention. I meant to say that in the beginning. And the third month is when I really started to notice the differences. So that was the month that I was fasting. It was a juice fast and it was like a seven to ten day water fast, something like that. So this mass on my face started to really kind of go away and get

[video] 7:20 much much better and eventually toward the end of the three months it just went away and I didn't feel it on my face so I thought to myself like okay like for sure this vegan diet is especially raw vegan diet is the way to go like you know this is like the secret to health this is what everybody doesn't know this is what the doctor doesn't know this is what the You know, this is what, this is the answer. This is the key to my health. So I attached myself to this diet, not realizing that maybe it was okay short term, but, you know, not in the long term. So...

[video] 8:09 I ended up sticking with the raw diet for about six months after that, like not a morsel of cooked food. And even after I stopped being a raw vegan, I didn't really eat very much cooked food because I associated it with being dead food, with being toxic. Probably toward the end of that year, the end of 2010, beginning of 2011,

[video] 8:37 I started having severe pain when I would go to the bathroom. The pain was so bad that sometimes I would eat less because I thought if I ate less then maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

[video] 9:04 there was also accompanying with this pain, there was lots of blood, and I didn't realize this at the time, but Perhaps it was my system not able to digest all of these salads because I'm eating so many salads and so much fruits and stuff. And so my system, it was just too much so that I was actually causing what I later found out from my doctor was he diagnosed it as a

[video] 9:39 arterial malformation of the colon which I never had that before but basically it was like tears from so so much in undigestible food passing through so that took a very long time to heal it was at that point I found the very well-known Dr. Morse in in Port Charlotte, Florida. So Dr. Robert Morse, his office told me to buy the calcium magnesium supplements because it was a connective tissue issue. So I said okay, so I bought these supplements and nothing improved with the supplements.

[video] 10:38 So then, I mean, the pain was so bad and the amount of blood I was losing was so much, so I thought, okay I'll try his really expensive herbal detox formulas so I bought the detox kit and I don't know maybe this works for some people it's no disrespect to Dr. Morse or Dan McDonald at all it's just was what happened and so I took these herbs for colon cleansing because I was thinking that I was just toxic or I'm not doing this diet right. I don't know. So I took these herbs and that was really when it became the worst is when I was taking these herbs.

[video] 11:35 We're talking like maybe about a quarter of a cup of blood.

[video] 11:43 you know in the toilet like a lot and I went to return the herbs after you know a couple days or like a week of this because I just couldn't couldn't handle this anymore I didn't work so they wouldn't take the herbs back and then

[video] 12:10 They said that it's normal for me to have this happen and that it's just part of the detoxification and the cleansing. Their rationale was that I needed to get worse before I got better.

[video] 12:27 I never had this issue before at all. I began just eating less food because I was trying to avoid this pain and the blood. After I got off of the herbs, the pain and the blood was not as bad, but it was the worst when I was taking the herbs that were designed to kind of help this issue. So, anyway, so that's 2010, 2011 that I'm having those problems and

[video] 13:04 Those problems really actually didn't go away until I had to have a surgery on them, a ligation surgery last year. So I was living with that for seven years. I never associated it as being something wrong with the diet. I just thought that I was doing something wrong, and then I became very obsessed with food combining, and I thought, okay, well, I'm just not combining the right vegetables together, like there was some formula for this and whatnot. Not realizing at the time how closely gut health is related to psychological health, I began developing a lot of

[video] 13:53 psychological issues not really just sort of like typical depression but more like just like just sort of a crumbling of reality a crumbling of my sense of how to construct understandings of things and it really started to go downhill and I suffered through multiple hospitalizations, one involuntary and looking back I think that I didn't realize how closely related B vitamins are related to mood stability and how closely your gut health is related to neurological functions so I think that the failing of my

[video] 14:49 Digestive functions affected my my neurological health and so Even though I wasn't that Eating as much solid food I was getting in enough calories with by blending food and juicing food because that it was easier for for it to pass through painlessly and and that sort of thing I began to To get ankle swellings, some days were worse than others. I never really, I don't know, I just thought, okay, it's just water, weight, or something like that. I mean, this was just going on throughout all of this time.

[video] 15:42 I was just so attached to this diet for all these years. I never thought that all of my problems were from this diet. I thought that I'm not combining things correctly. I'm not taking the right supplements. I'm not paying enough money to have a consultation with the best diet. naturopathic doctor I mean I'm just basically blaming my way of doing this on my issues and there were a lot of people in the vegan community that were subscribing to that message too, where if it's not working, it's just because you're doing it wrong. And even up until about a couple of weeks ago, I still believed this to be true. I thought that I was just doing it wrong.

[video] 16:40 I wasn't combining my foods correctly and whatnot. Probably for the past year or two, I was getting so tired from eating that I would just... If I would eat some fruits and a salad... I would have to just crash. I would just stop functioning. I was so tired. I don't know what that was. I don't know if it meant I was pre-diabetic or hypoglycemic, but it was really affecting my eating cycles when I was eating, and I would try to time

[video] 17:27 my eating closer to bedtime so that I would just eat and then fall asleep after. Those are just some of the issues that were going on in the beginning and in the sort of the middle of this nine year, you know, hell, I guess. And then toward the end of the nine years, so the past, we'll just say the past year, I think things started really going downhill, so one of the things I noticed that was really

[video] 18:07 Alarming to me was that I would go for walks like I would normally do, but I would have a pain in my hip that was so, so bad. Like I had to just sit down and not move because the pain was so throbbing and so bad. It was like shooting down my legs. And I just, I went to see a chiropractor suggested, my guitar teacher recommended a chiropractor, so I said okay, and my chiropractor convinced me that my legs were uneven and that my spine just was not straight enough and that I just needed to have better posture. And so I believed this shit for like probably about a month.

[video] 19:03 And then the pain just got so bad that I sent him a text message and I said, please write me a script to get an x-ray. And I promise you 100% there's something else wrong. That's just how bad the pain was. So I went to get an x-ray, which of course doesn't, record soft tissue so but even just from the x-ray they could see that there was a mass in the femoral neck so basically and that in the in the hip socket there was a mass so they can't really tell if it's a tumor or a cyst from an x-ray.

[video] 19:54 So I went in to get an MRI about a week or two later and then also had a nuclear medicine bone scan. Yeah, so everything was okay with the nuclear medicine bone scan. There was no like uptake in a certain area which can be which can determine whether or not there maybe is cancer present in an issue, although in very early stages of cancer, it wouldn't really show up. So in the MRI, actually, they found a...

[video] 20:39 a tumor inside the bone, exactly where I was having the pain in my leg, so I had a mass inside the hip socket joint, and then also I had a lesion inside the bone. Now they also found one in the other side, but that was very small, so that was not causing me pain.

[video] 21:09 So I had this checked out and they said, well, you know, this is, it's their impression, because it's always an impression, a radiologist impression, they said it resembled an enchondroma, which is a cartilage, cartilage-like malformation issue in the cells, and that typically they are... The doctor said that typically these things are from birth and that it's not really an issue. So, that would be great if it didn't cause me any pain, but it was causing me so much pain that I had to cancel plans. to stay home and sit down because the pain is so bad. So I went on this super cleanse because I thought, okay, I'm going to buy like the best herbs on the market. I'm going to eat like raw. I'm going to do intermittent fasting.

[video] 22:09 Like I'm going to bust these tumors in my leg. Like I'm going to get rid of them. I'm going to, you know, go on YouTube and find all these like, you know, like Marcus Rothkrantz types. And I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to beat this. I'm

[video] 22:25 So I was thinking this way for like a year, thinking that like, oh yeah, so like when I get my, when they do the MRI scan again in a year, because the doctor told me to come back in a year, that I thought, oh yeah. When they do this scan, they're going to see that there's like no tumors, like I know how to bust tumors, like this is not going to, this is going to go away. So... I was thinking that I was so much smarter than I actually was. I was doing SCF tea. I was doing all of these things that are known to heal tumors, to my knowledge. I was eating very high raw foods.

[video] 23:10 mostly raw and then I went to get the MRI just a couple months ago from now so in like March I had the MRI and I was at the x-ray actually yeah x-ray MRI and I just MRI no x-ray and I

[video] 23:33 I was at the orthopedic oncologist's office, and he looked at them and he said that they're the same size, so they're just still there. And I said, well, why is it causing me so much pain? And he said, sometimes they can cause pain, but I can tell that while the doctor's looking at me and looking at my like results and stuff that he seemed actually pretty unsure like in his face like he just didn't seem like he knew what it was. I never really put it together that maybe my diet had something to do with it and really I still actually just don't know if it does because there's so much misinformation about tumor origins and the distinction between benign tumors malignant tumors. There's so much garbage and stuff on the internet.

24:31 I can't really, you know, I have a video about cancer if you want to watch it. It will reveal a lot of stuff. It's quite different than what people teach nowadays, but it's a too deep of a topic to get into right now.

[video] 24:46 Okay, I'll definitely check that out. Definitely have to check it out. I mean, I'm just learning. I'm just learning by the day here. So I never So I never really thought that my diet had anything to do with these issues at all. I didn't think anything was wrong with the vegan diet. I looked at people who were eating meat, and I really thought that they were dumber than me. That's what I thought. I was like, they don't know anything about health. That's really what I thought. I'd kind of seen some, like... you know, some YouTube videos here and there about people going back to eating meat, but I just thought those people were, like, weak-minded and just couldn't, just didn't have the mental endurance to do a vegan diet. Like, I just thought those people were, like, you know, they didn't have enough self-discipline. That's how delusional I was, you know, thinking about, like, how vegan diet is the best diet in the world.

[video] 25:45 The first day of May, I remember, actually, I was feeling so...

[video] 25:51 I was so weak. I was in line at the bank and my heart was just palpitating. This time my ankles are very swollen. I couldn't even put my pants on. I was like, what is happening?

[video] 26:11 And my heart was palpitating, and I just was feeling very dizzy and very not well. And I felt like I was going to faint. I just felt like I was just going to drop to the floor. I mean, maybe I was, and maybe I wasn't. Maybe it was all in my head. But I really felt really, really, really incredibly weak So I was just checking out some of these videos on eating meat. And by the way, I haven't eaten meat yet today, but this will be the 10th day of me eating meat. So I've only been an ex-vegan for 10 days. So I'm still transitioning through all this.

[video] 27:06 After that period of feeling really faint, I decided to go and have some meat, which was the first time I ordered meat somewhere in a very long time, because even as a nine-year vegan, I didn't eat much meat to begin with whatsoever.

[video] 27:27 So I started to do that, and You know, I can't tell you that this pain in my hips gone away or that all my issues have gotten better, but I'm hoping that they will. A couple of things actually I didn't mention before. It's just some issues or my teeth. So when I became a vegan, I maybe had about five cavities already. Now I have only five teeth that are not cavities. and I have maybe four root canals and also had teeth extraction. Sometimes I would just be eating like a date. This happened actually just a couple months ago. I was eating a date and I

[video] 28:18 was just chewing on it and I felt something really hard like a rock so I thought that I didn't get the pit and then I

[video] 28:31 I take it out, it's like a big chunk of my tooth. And that's not the first time that that happened. It happened a couple of times where I just constantly had like chunks of my teeth just like falling out. They're getting like so soft. And I had, I mean, I have the dental bills probably spend like, Just last year, maybe about $5,000, root canals, cavity fillings, just putting the tooth back together. I mean, even the past nine years, maybe...

[video] 29:07 Like, maybe $10,000, $12,000. Some vegans will say, like, oh, well, you need to just brush your teeth after you have fruit. So, like, I'm brushing my teeth after I have fruit. Like, that's not the – it wasn't the problem. I was not –

[video] 29:25 was brushing my teeth often and flossing often and Doing this oil pulling thing, you know coconut oil baking soda and all this time I'm thinking that I'm something's wrong with me. I'm not doing this, right, but then I I guess I just got to a point where I I was thinking, well, I have to try something else. Another problem was extremely poor circulation. I would turn the heat up. Now, I live in Buffalo, which is very cold in the wintertime, but I would turn the heat up to like like 80 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know what that is in Celsius, but in the wintertime, I mean, people would come in and be like, it is so hot in here. And I would just be like, no, it's not.

[video] 30:22 And like, sometimes I would even like turn it up like at night and like,

[video] 30:29 and I and then I didn't realize like just okay like something's wrong my body composition was just like a like a water balloon just basically like just fat fat and bone like just like just like a really like just squishy water balloon like no uh no muscle at all. And if I did do something to build muscle, like go walking or yoga, I could feel the muscle form. I said, oh, I'm getting muscles now. And then a week later or something, it was gone.

[video] 31:10 I would eat some rice or lentils or something.

[video] 31:19 sweet potatoes and my stomach was like, it was like I was pregnant with triplets in my third trimester. That's how it felt for like maybe an hour or two after I finished a meal, and I have a pretty flat stomach, so I was just like, what's going on? And I just thought, I guess I was still having delusional thoughts, thinking, well, I didn't combine my foods right. I should have done this or that. And I think I was just, my stomach was just saying, fuck you. Stop doing this to me.

[video] 32:10 So, so then, you know, I, I've been, I've been eating meat now for 10 days and I feel really strong. Like I feel my energy is really constant throughout the day. I don't feel like in my head I'm like, like all like just like, uh, rattled and stuff. I feel like I just have energy throughout the day. It's a very constant source and, sustain me. I'm not eating apples and oranges or having to go to sleep after I eat.

[video] 32:49 There's some other benefits I'm experiencing, but that's sort of a little bit about it.

32:56 In those nine years, did you ever cheat consciously or not? Accidentally, maybe?

[video] 33:02 It was one time where I had too much to drink at a wedding, as is pretty common. And I remember, from what I remember, I ate some crab cakes. And other than that time, no. Very strict. Even on long flights, if the meal had I've been on some really long flights like to Africa and to all over and sometime I was just too lazy to get the vegan option because I don't want to sit on the phone or I don't know what you have to do to get the stupid meal but I didn't want to I would just not take the time to do that and there would just be some like cheesy, meaty meal. And even on a really long flight like that, I was not eating that stuff.

[video] 33:59 I would have maybe like some snacks or something. But other than the crab cake incident, well, I guess it wasn't an incident. Maybe it was a good thing. But that was it. No milk. I never drank much milk. I never drank much milk, never had much eggs or meat, really, since I was 15 years old.

34:26 It all sounds very traumatic. How do you see the future of veganism? What do you think is going to happen? What is this whole thing? Is it a movement? Is it a trend? How do you see it?

[video] 34:41 I think that, well, it is definitely a trend. I think. And I think that the future of veganism, it depends on the amount of collectively shared, valid, documented, honest evidence that proves that it's not sustainable. I think that the more empirical evidence available and accessible to people

[video] 35:18 individuals, nutritionists and scientists that the diet is not sustainable will shape the future of veganism and hopefully carry more importance than something that's just simply like a trend.

[video] 35:35 I think it's videos like these that are disseminated across the internet that really can shape the future of it and maybe even just create a movement in health that may be a breakthrough in human longevity or even just understanding the causes of deterioration.

[video] 36:04 I think at this point in time that we know of, there have never been more vegans or ex-vegans on the planet that we know about. So this is like the point in recorded history that we are able to really ascertain what the future of veganism is and from what we can tell at this point, especially from people who have been on this diet long term is that it's basically it's like it's going through like a blender, like a Vitamix blender and it's being broken down into its smallest pieces and we're attempting to digest it. and with the greatest human effort that has ever been recorded in history.

[video] 37:00 And I feel like we're coming to realize that it was all just a bunch of indigestible fibers of delusion that turned into diarrhea that's eventually going to be flushed down the toilet. very well said did you have any vegan friends any contacts and if so what do they think about you quitting or did they themselves quit in this time i have one vegan friend she sent me some message like oh you know like she said i said oh i'm not i'm i'm eating meat now i'm i'm not a vegan anymore and she said she just said something like Like, oh, that's cute or something like that. I don't know. I didn't really have very many vegan friends. In fact, I was quite reclusive.

[video] 37:53 I think maybe even as a result of it, I didn't really have many vegan friends.

38:03 Do you feel regret now that you think back about this whole experience, or how do you see it?

[video] 38:11 It's really... I don't regret...

[video] 38:20 I don't regret it. I think that I just can't regret it because it already happened. I just feel that it's really been like a process of self-reflection for me to really look back and think about how I thought I was like so smart and that what I was doing was so much better than other people, compared to what other people were doing. And that it's just really a big... big learning lesson for me that I wasn't as smart as I thought I was, that veganism is not like an answer and that even though you think you might have all the answers about something and it's really hard for you to get outside of your box, there's actually

[video] 39:12 There's actually ways to escape the confines of your ways of thinking and to get out and branch out and actually do real research on health and be able to really get healthy. And I think people get into veganism, especially

[video] 39:39 young women I think of childbearing age get into veganism and they will get into it under the guise of all these stupid things like they're saving the animals and all this stuff and I really do strongly believe from what I've seen on YouTube that there are a lot of particularly young women that do have issues, body image issues that are getting into this because they, quite superficially, they want to lose weight and they want to look their best and there are biological underpinnings for why someone of childbearing age would want to appear, to look their best for things like mate selection and things like that. They may not consciously be thinking about it but I think that's really the root cause.

[video] 40:39 However, to sacrifice your health to do what you think will make you look more attractive to the opposite sex or even the same sex is both crazy and stupid.

41:01 Anything else you would like to add? Anything you experienced in this time that's noteworthy? Anything you would like to say to any vegans watching maybe?

[video] 41:10 I thought that it was a means for me to survive more healthfully and achieve radiant health, but it actually feels like it did the opposite and that

[video] 41:27 Life is about survival for any animal. There's no animal that I can think of that doesn't struggle to survive. We have to survive. That's perpetuation of the species. That's how... evolution works, and our ancestors that we know about did not evolve from eating only fruits and vegetables. Our ancestors had evolved from eating animal proteins, that's how we

[video] 42:07 got here. Unless some historian or some paleontologist can prove otherwise, that's how we arrived here. And now when we when we think that we can cheat like nature's design and sit there and pontificate about, well is this ethical or is this not ethical? Like no other animal is sitting there in its struggle to survive pontificating whether or not they should be consuming this animal or that animal. It's instinctual. It's a natural instinct to survive. It is the most It is the most natural thing. And that's how we came to be. That's why I'm here. That's why you're here. And the end of the story. It's just about survival.

[video] 43:01 And if I had to say anything about my experiences, that I could not survive any longer on this diet. Period.

43:13 All right. Yeah. Thanks a lot for sharing it.

[video] 43:18 All right. Well, thank you for listening to me.