Ex-Vegan Couple (5+ Years): Experienced Declining Mental & Physical Health + Accelerated Aging

Watch on YouTube · 2019-03-02 · 68 min

0:00 Hi everybody, I'm here with 2xVegans. You guys can introduce yourself if you like to and talk about when you got into veganism, what year it was and how you got into it and then how it unfolded.

[video] 0:12 Okay, I'm Tracy. And I'm Don.

[video] 0:17 And Don and I have been together since 2010 and we both had previous experiences with being vegetarian or vegan. So we'll go into some of those older experiences too, but especially focus on the most recent five or a little more than five years that we were together vegan. And I just want to say too that, like I was saying earlier, I grew up in the 60s in Chicago where people are pretty disconnected to their food source, but at the stores there was not this produce paradise that is what has become or evolved to.

[video] 0:57 When we were growing up, we were still in a time period where there really wasn't the variety of plant foods that there is now. So it was quite different. And people still accepted eating meat and drinking milk as part of a regular diet. So that is both our backgrounds, being from the Midwest especially. So anyway, you want to start first? Sure. So my name is Don Matas and I have been I have a history of experimenting with diet since I've been 18 years of age and I'm 58 now so 40 years of experimentation and I started out back when I was around 20 roughly was my first foray into eating a vegetarian diet and not long after that I got into a vegan approach

[video] 1:56 through macrobiotics. And at that time I was single. I didn't have much support for that. As Tracy said, where I lived was Ohio. That was, vegetarianism was off the radar for most people at that time. We're talking about 1984, 85, something like that.

[video] 2:25 So my first attempt at veganism lasted about three months and I got sick. I mean I couldn't eat enough food and I had a lot of digestive problems so I gave up and I just was reading books and I thought that I just did it wrong. I didn't have the support, I didn't have the knowledge that I needed in order to make it work. I ended up going back to eating um fish and dairy products and sort of eating a semi-vegetarian diet so i don't want to make this too long but basically i did that kind of thing for about uh 30 years i you know later met my first wife she was into macrobiotics when i met her we together tried a vegan diet for a while and uh she would get extremely anemic

[video] 3:21 get up out of bed and practically fall to the floor because of not having enough blood going to her head. So low blood pressure and anemia. And so we would go for extended periods of time eating a vegan diet. And I would lose a lot of weight. Every time I tried a vegan diet, I presently weigh about 158 pounds. And the first time I did it for an extended period of time, except for that first time I just told you, I went down to 124 pounds. I just couldn't eat enough food to meet my physical activity expenditure. At the time I was working as an apprentice in a seaweed harvesting firm and I was extremely physically active and I couldn't eat enough plants to meet my energy requirement.

[video] 4:19 And of course I wasn't getting very much protein either so it was a lot of muscle loss mostly because I'm not overweight and never was.

[video] 4:29 And I was attempting to heal a skin condition. I have psoriasis. I've had psoriasis since I was early teens or earlier. And what kind of got me hooked on veganism was that Every time I went through one of these periods where I was unable to meet my energy requirements, so I was in a negative energy balance, I didn't know at the time, but I was in ketosis basically because I'm eating up my own body tissues, etc. I didn't understand that back then, but that's a very anti-inflammatory state and my skin would get better. So I would think, oh, I cut out animal products. And my skin got better, so I hooked up those two things in my mind. So that's why I kept going back to that every time I added food back, or added animal products back, gained back some weight, then the skin condition would get worse.

[video] 5:26 And I'd still be eating essentially a plant-based diet, but with some animal products. And so in my mind, I got the association that adding animal products back to my diet made my skin worse. Every time I cut it out and lost a lot of weight, my skin got better. So I kept thinking it's the animal products. I just need to figure out a way to eat the plant-based diet and maintain my body weight, meet my energy needs and all of that. So even with my first wife, I wasn't really able to do that. I could never really stay above like 145 pounds. I was generally 15 to 20 pounds lighter than I would be if I was eating a highly nutrient dense diet and never had the strength or stamina, but

[video] 6:13 Um, to kind of put it all in a nutshell, I did that back and forth multiple times, sometimes going for five or 10 years at a time, eating vegan, trying to make it work, doing different cooking techniques, different proportions of plant foods, et cetera. And always would get as the time went on. from the beginning you would start to get, especially eating a lot of beans, get a lot of gas and bloating and it would just get worse and worse the longer I ate the vegan diet. And the skin, as I said, would only get better if I was either starving myself or taking some either herbal medication or medication with it. So I was still trying to figure out how to make it work.

[video] 7:07 For one year I worked as a live-in macrobiotic cook. So I thought that was the year that was going to really work for me because I had the social support and I was doing all the cooking for other people and cooking all the right foods and all of that. And in that year, not only did my skin not get better, but by the end of the year, I was the finger ends of my fingertips, the heels of my feet, the ends of my toes, they're all cracking. And when I added goat milk and butter back to my diet, all that healed up very quickly. Um, and then, uh, when I was about a year or two after I got married to my first wife, um, not only was my skin not getting better, I was kind of maintaining that low, lower, but not optimal body weight around 140, 145.

[video] 8:06 and still trying to figure out how to heal my skin, the psoriasis lesions actually started progressing and taking up a larger portion of my skin and went to areas like my scalp that had never been on. So, as I said, I got that association made, so I kept going back and I kept thinking that it was the animal products, the fat, the protein or something that that was causing the skin to get worse even though the skin didn't actually get better if I was in a sort of sustainable vegan diet.

[video] 8:47 So then that went on until about 1990s and then I learned about the paleo diet and I thought maybe this is the solution because you have the best of both worlds. You have all these, you eat all the high nutrient density plants like the greens and and fruits and maybe some sweet potatoes, and then you eat the meat, and maybe somehow that will work for me. Well, I did that for 10 years. My first wife and I wrote this book about the paleo diet. A pruritus rich paleo diet. people should notice as a produce-dominated diet and cookbook because I was still believed that plants were, I really strongly believed that in my parents' generation the mistake they made was that they didn't eat enough fruits and vegetables and plants, whole plant foods, and that I still had in the back of my mind that eating too much meat even beyond a certain point must be some kind of cause of disease.

[video] 9:48 So then I'm going to kind of condense that It was roughly 10 years that we were paleo. And then my first wife and I got divorced. And then she got a diagnosis of breast cancer. And I have a friend who is a medical doctor and PhD at UC San Diego. He does research into cancer and diet.

[video] 10:20 his focus is on prostate cancer and his belief is that a plant-based diet, a whole foods plant-based diet, vegan diet, is the solution for cancer because of some experiences that he had. So that influenced me when my first wife got breast cancer to think that, again, it's the animal products that in the paleo diet were the cause of her problem. And so, because I was having some prostate, prostatitis symptoms myself, and I have prostate cancer in my family. I was thinking, well, I don't want to go down that path that my first wife went down. So I'm going to go back to trying a vegan diet. And that was after I met Tracy. So we were together then. And that's when we started my last attempt at a vegan diet, and it is going to be the last for sure.

[video] 11:17 It was five and a half years, and in the end I think the results were worse than what I had any of the previous attempts, even though I thought I had more knowledge and was going to make it more successful, I think it actually turned out worse. So that brings us up to where Tracy and I met.

[video] 11:39 So in my background, uh, my dad was a very meat and potato, but you know, he grew up during the depression, so he would also eat, you know, spam and processed cheese and just a lot of junk. And he was a hundred pounds overweight and he had a minor heart attack. When I was young, he smoked, he drank every day. So he was the epitome of unhealthy and I wanted to be anything but him. We clashed in every way and especially just values. And so. Because when we would eat vegetables, sometimes it would be canned. And if we had rice, it would be, you know, minute rice. My mom also has her little quirks, you know, everything has to be quick and fast. So when I was a teen, I don't know, maybe high school, this place called the Heartland Cafe opened up in my neighborhood of Rogers Park, which was

[video] 12:32 know not a place where there have been many restaurants yet or anything so it was like literally a few blocks away and my friends and i would go and hang out there it was a cool natural place you know and they served all these huge salads with sprouts and seeds and cheese and like all this really great stuff and you can go and get like you know huevos where you get the tortillas and the eggs and the bean of the day and brown rice you know and cornbread and all these textures real gritty whole grain bread were exciting to me at the time because it was not what we were eating in our family. We did not eat brown rice. We did not eat beans. You know, we didn't have big salads with all these greens and sprouts. So I was really turned on to this kind of way of eating through this Heartland Cafe when I was young. And so off and on, I think I went vegan or vegetarian. And I can't even really say exactly because I

[video] 13:27 I just, like Don, always believed that vegetables were nature's pharmacy and they're the healthiest foods. And so I went through periods of time where I would just eat, you know, vegetables, stir fries, maybe tempeh, tofu and rice and whole grains. And I was on a mission to help people eat whole grains because I figured Americans don't eat whole grains, you know, and I heard studies say whole grains are good for you. And I just tried to write, I wrote, I wrote four books on a macrobiotic vegan plant-based diet. And I thought I was going to be the one to help people make a whole food plant-based kind of macrobiotic style diet simple because most macrobiotic people aren't very simple. And so off and on through the years, I would eat a vegetarian or mostly vegan diet. And then at one point I was living in Aspen, Colorado, which is 7,000 feet of elevation.

[video] 14:23 And I was working in very physically demanding jobs in a restaurant and catering and, I mean, carrying heavy stuff around all night for hours. And I was trying to be vegetarian. And so, you know, when we're working, we're not supposed to be eating.

[video] 14:42 I had a really lifelong history with, hypoglycemia I was probably pre-diabetic and just never had it checked but so trying to not eat meat and then run around all night and then not be able to eat I started to have worse and worse hypoglycemia symptoms so if I could sneak some bread or fries that was the only thing I could so then my diet started to be way less healthy than I would have liked I always considered myself to be a healthy eater and Though I say that now in retrospect, I see all the ways that I wasn't. So we can go into denial. But the other thing that started to happen was I started to get really bad rain holes. I mean, I was very active. I mountain biked up in the mountains. I was hiking 14,000 foot peaks all through Colorado. I mean, I was very physically active. My jobs were active. My lifestyle was active.

[video] 15:38 I would do this winter race up the Aspen ski mountain, you know, just snowshoeing up. And I mean, I would, my hands, my fingers would turn completely white, painful, painful until the blood started to circulate again. And not only that though, the whole time I was in Aspen, it was when I first started to realize that for someone who seems so physically active and so health conscious, why am I always having all these symptoms? Like that was the first time it started to click in my head. I have bloating, I have digestive issues, I have skin breakouts. I had all these issues. And so I started to see an acupuncturist and then I started to get some relief. But when I first moved to Aspen, I was sick with a fever four times in one year. And even before I moved there, I got pretty bad hepatitis A from eating bad shrimp, raw shrimp in Mexico. So I had then started to develop this

[video] 16:36 kind of constitution that was way more deficient than I used to be because I just started to get zapped with all these pretty major illnesses and so over time I went up and down through periods where what happened is when I was working in the restaurant and I was trying to be vegetarian there was a paradise cookie place right off the alley from our place and when the workers were done from there they would bring us a big box of cookies at the end of the night and of course I hadn't eaten all day so I mean I would wolf down chocolate chip cookies because I was like oh sugar you know feed my veins right so obviously the more I was eating these kind of you know refined flour products the worse I was starting to feel the worse the Reynolds got and all of that So at one point I finally had, I started to see all these different doctors.

[video] 17:33 I did all the different tests and they tell you, you know, eat this, don't eat that. And it's all these complicated lists and blah, blah, blah. And all of it was like, not really helping. But when I would try these diets where I just did food combining, I was at least feeling good because there would be times where I would eat meat and vegetables. And then there'd be times where I'd be eating starch and vegetables, but wouldn't eat the starch with the meat and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so there was sort of up and down relief and, um,

[video] 18:00 I think I just got so cold and at that point I moved out of Aspen. I went to Santa Fe to start acupuncture school and I was able at that time to get some great like lamb shank bones and different things and I would cook it all day in a crock pot and I just started to warm myself up by just eating all this warm, really slow cooked food. And I, uh, I found that if I just, I went like for a long time, I didn't like beef. I didn't think I could digest it. I thought it made me constipated. It's the same stuff we have our own clients telling us all the time. And I felt that way too. And, uh, yet my sugar cravings were really out of hand and I ate a lot of refined flour products like bagels. I would get whole grain bagels, but I would eat bagels and scones and all this, but then I would eat vegetables and whatever. So anyway,

[video] 18:53 I just realized that I needed to eat the meat and it helped me warm up and it started to bring some life back into my system. But all along from that point, which was in the 90s to the early 2000s that I was living in Aspen and then I left to go to school, I just constantly had health issues and symptoms and things that I was trying to deal with. So by the time I moved here in Arizona and Don and I met and he was doing the paleo diet. I had already kind of read through Lauren Cordain's The Paleo Diet book at a library one day just sitting there and so when he was teaching nutrition and I ended up in his nutrition class and he was talking about doing the paleo diet I thought okay well I'll be on board with that. Prior to that I had started to eat a lot more beans and vegan food again. But it wasn't hard to switch me back to protein at that point.

[video] 19:53 But while we were eating paleo, because we're still eating, so hindsight is a whole nother story. Like we've kind of figured out things now, but in the process, you do go into a kind of a weird mental space. You go into denial or you just don't catch things. But Ended up gaining the most weight I had ever weighed which I mean, I'm only five feet tall I was weighing 127 pounds or something and that's way more than I need to weigh and I was having chubby fat that I couldn't get rid of and We were about to get married and I didn't want to look that bad so I just started to kind of scale down and how we were eating but we figured I Maybe we were eating too much fat and protein, but it wasn't really so much that we were eating too much fat. It was just that if you're eating a lot of carbs still, which fruits and vegetables and then some winter squash or sweet potatoes, plus the fat, plus the meat, that's a recipe for disaster.

[video] 20:53 And that's what most people eat, some kind of combination of all these foods. Most people are eating a plant-based diet, and they don't see it that way. But anyway, so...

[video] 21:05 Then coming up to this point, his first wife, they had been separated. We were together. His first wife had the diagnosis of breast cancer. My breasts started to get incredibly excruciatingly tender, fibrocystic. They got fatty and really uneven in size. And because I now was facing someone very close to him having breast cancer, it really freaked me out. And so

[video] 21:35 because she wanted Don to help be part of her health team consulting and blah, blah. While she was going through her early stages, you know, we were starting to watch all these videos on the Garrison therapies and, um, you know, all kinds of vegan based videos. And we started to read all these plant based books and we just started to be convinced that it was the red meat and the saturated fat that leads to progressed breast cancer development, tumor growth, T. colin Campbell with the whole, you know, the rat study that he did where, you know, the more that the rats ate the isolated casein protein, the more the above five or 10%, the more their tumors would grow. And he would get that out of the diet and the tumors would shrink and he repeated it over and over. So it was foolproof studies or so we believed. And we went vegan and within three months, my breast condition healed.

[video] 22:33 But you also lost quite a bit of weight. At first. So when you lose weight, you get better. So, yeah, we thought we were on the right track at that time. So should I keep going? Basically, we eliminated the deadly combination, which is high fat and high carbohydrate. That's the deadly combination. It really raises your insulin level, and that's what causes most of these degenerative diseases that people are dealing with. So yeah, vegan or plant-based works to an extent if you severely reduce the, if you're eating a high carbohydrate vegan diet and you severely reduce the fats, it has some, it can seem like it has some benefits because you eliminated this deadly combination of fat and carbohydrate and you're just on the carbohydrate now, even though that's not good for you, it's better than having the two together. So as Tracy mentioned, she mentioned,

[video] 23:31 T. Cullen Campbell, she also ended up actually taking the T. Cullen Campbell Nutrition Center certification. I was sold into this movement. I mean, I really was like thinking I was going to be vegan for life. And then I ended up writing a big book. I don't have a copy of it here, but it's called Powered by Plants. You can find it on Amazon. Still for sale. I think people are trying to sell it for $75 a copy. But if you want one, you can go to my website and get it completely free because that's what it's worth.

[video] 24:04 All of my vegan books are downloadable for free too. In that book I tried, I was so convinced at the time that plants were what we were supposed to eat that that's what I tried in that book. I tried to marshal all the scientific evidence I could to quote unquote prove that humans are herbivores like chimpanzees. And now looking back at it now, I know I made multiple mistakes which I discovered later. I used science that was outdated. We understand the role of insulin now a whole lot better. I didn't have the complete picture basically when I wrote the book.

24:46 Did you really look into it or were you kind of in denial?

[video] 24:50 No, he did immense research, a long time. When he goes to write something, he had like over 300 references. He was looking at it from an anthropological standpoint, an evolutionary, scientific, I mean, every which way. Yeah. Well, there's an anthropologist called, his name is Richard Rangham, and his belief is that we evolve by eating starch. And so... he was kind of the guy I followed for that line of evidence. He cites a lot of evidence, and I followed up his lines of research and tried to expand upon that.

[video] 25:34 But anyways, that's all. In my new book, I completely refuted that, the hypercarnivore diet. So there were some just...

[video] 25:48 So small mistakes that you make that end up turning into big mistakes in the end. But anyways, the point that I'm trying to make is that I was very convinced that plants were the ideal base for a diet for more than 30 years. And I kept trying to make it work. people sometimes I deal with vegans now commenting on my Instagram posts or my YouTube channel or whatever and they talk to me like I don't know anything about the research on plant-based diets or anything like I did write a book about this I have I'm very familiar with all the so-called experts all the doctors you probably were eating processed foods blah blah blah like I hardly ever hardly ever ate sugar or anything it was all whole foods plant-based so

[video] 26:39 during the last five years for the previous times I had tried vegan I avoided taking supplements I didn't take supplements because I thought it should be that you can eat a vegan diet without taking supplements if that's the way we're designed to eat but then I came to the rationalization I guess that all the food supply has been modified and therefore if we were in the ideal circumstances we wouldn't need to use supplements, but since we live in a modern society, we have to use supplements in order to make this diet that is our natural diet work, believing that the vegan diet was our natural diet. So during the last five years, I took supplements. I took supplements of B12. I took vitamin D supplements. I took all the things. I took even vitamin K sometimes, and everything that they say might be short in a vegan diet, I took a supplement for.

[video] 27:34 it didn't work any better than it did before because we're not designed to live on supplements we're designed to live on nutrient-dense animal foods so what happened over those five years is same thing that happened before when i initially adopted the vegan diet i lost a bunch of weight i you know lost about 20 pounds of muscle and i got weaker and And that, as I said earlier, it has an anti-inflammatory effect because you're basically in ketosis. It's like a ketogenic diet because you're living off your own body fat, even though you're eating some carbohydrates, just because the calorie intake is so low, you end up in a ketogenic state. So there was initially some anti-inflammatory effect that seemed to help my skin. But then as I stabilized and got used to eating all these plants again and The portions got larger as my stomach adapted.

[video] 28:29 So I was eating like the bowls of cereal that are this big, you know, like for breakfast and very large amounts of rice and whatever to try to meet my caloric needs. Two things happened. First, I put on a layer of fat and my waist got larger than it ever was. It went from my normal of around between 30 and 50 pounds 31 and 31 and a half, which is where it's at right now, went up to 34. And I couldn't tolerate the same level of physical exertion as I did before. And I started to have injuries. I injured my back repeatedly and I injured my knee and then these injuries wouldn't heal. They would not heal. The last injury that I got

[video] 29:21 that really kind of was like one of the straws that broke the camel's back that made me finally decide this vegan diet is not working was I injured my knee and it took even after 18 months on a vegan diet, it didn't heal. And then during the last, say, year and a half of that five years, my skin got progressively worse. I started to get this like rosacea thing and peeling around my nose. here the skin around my eyes started peeling and it would go away and I put a lotion on it and it would come and go and it just kept getting more and more persistent and then that just kept progressing and then there was one, I started to get the psoriasis lesions on the top of my feet and then on my sacrum and it was like the skin was really starting to degenerate and of course at that point I was, since I'm... Except you did have that

[video] 30:21 red mark that after about a year of being plant-based. That was in the beginning when I lost a lot of weight. I had this kind of inflamed part on my nose. When I lost a lot of weight, that kind of healed up. And then again, that kind of hit. That's part of the hook I see of the plant-based diet is that you go into this catabolic state and you become you're going to ketosis and when you're in this catabolic state, a lot of things that are inflammatory conditions seem to heal up. But then when you stabilize and stop losing weight, then these other things start to creep back in because you're no longer in that weight loss state.

31:12 All along they have been eating animal food, technically.

[video] 31:15 Yeah, yeah, exactly, right. Just as you said, all along you're just living on your own body tissues, and you don't think of it at that point. You think, I'm living on what I'm eating out here, but in fact, as you're losing weight, you're living on this, your own meat and fat.

[video] 31:33 So the skin kept getting worse and worse, and the injuries were not healing, and I could not lose that Spare tire around my waist even if I restricted my calories And all those things and ended up especially also I had gas and bloating You know farts that would wake the neighbors up Why are you always pointing towards me when you do that?

[video] 32:10 That would be funny. I mean, it's funny in retrospect, but especially towards the end of the day, like in the morning, if the belly would be flat after you have a bowel movement, I'd have an explosive bowel movement very often, like a whole bunch of stuff comes out. and with the gas propelling it, right?

[video] 32:34 And then the belly would be flat. You're like, okay, fine. Everything's going to be good today. We'll go. And then you eat a couple of meals and you're like, uh-oh, starting to get that balloon in my belly again. And at the end of the day, I mean, the noise. And I'm not even joking. I mean, I would think, God, are the neighbors hearing this? And that... That was, you know, I think some people would get it diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome because you have this, after you eat, then you feel this discomfort and it just gets progressively worse. So that was, by the end of the five and a half years, I had just had it with that. It's just uncomfortable every day to have the gas pain at the end of the day and

[video] 33:25 be just holding your gut, trying to make it feel better, and nothing can make it better because it's the gas in there that's expanding the intestines, and that's the intestines telling you, don't eat that stuff. That's the pain. That pain is the time. But Dr. McDougall at all, they try to make it sound like, oh, that's just a natural part of the actual fermentation of the beans in your colon or whatever. And that's what all the good bacteria are at work. That's a sign that your intestines are in good health. They're all teaching you how to go against your true nature. Exactly. They're trying to teach you to not follow your own body signals. So let me go into a little more of the history of the five years together. So we started, we married May of 2011 and we were still eating meat. We weren't eating gluten. And so I catered our own wedding and we had a gluten-free wedding.

[video] 34:24 I was so proud, no bread, no nothing. Anyway, so later that year, I think was when we finally turned vegan. So we started in late 2011. And that was after he spoke at the first Ancestral Health Institute and he was invited while he was still paleo. And Don was pretty well known in the paleo circles. He had a blog, Primal Wisdom. he was in there with Mark Sisson and all those people that are in the Paleo movement and everyone, like he was one of the first, that was one of the first Paleo books that even came out. And so while vegan, he wrote a now infamous blog post going away from... It's called Farewell to Paleo. Farewell to Paleo. And so he fell from grace in that circle. And then he and I both became quite the,

[video] 35:17 mockery you know he only went vegan because he wanted because he wanted because they just thought i was vegan to begin with and and he wanted to to be able to sleep with me and that's why he would be you know just nasty stuff so but anyway when we went vegan by uh so don and i both studied chinese medicine this before we met each other and so we both had a kind of parallel past we both he was way more involved in macrobiotic movement but i found out about macrobiotics for the first time in like end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s. I was living in Grass Valley, California, and I came across this book written by Christina Turner, who lives there. And it was how to heal your moods based on the energies of food. So you can eat different, you know, types of grains and beans to balance your moods and blah, blah. And I thought, well, that's pretty cool. And, you know, she had all these drawings of pots of beans cooking. And so this stuff still really enticed me.

[video] 36:14 And I found it to be just very fascinating, you know, the way that they approached. And they don't claim to be vegan per se, so you can eat fish or whatever if you want. But anyway, so when we started vegan, we were kind of automatically kind of doing more of a macrobiotic style. So it would be more starch-based and vegetables, lots of vegetables, seaweeds, and vegetables. But I was still having, you know, symptoms and issues and low blood sugar issues and constipation, constipation. I was eating all this fiber, but I had constipation. I had probably irritable bowel relief because I would just, I'd be constipated. Then I would maybe eat a bunch of fiber and drink, you know, liters full of water. And so I'd reach this point where it would all finally just push out and I'd start the whole cycle all over again. Constipated for a while, then there'd be nothing, nothing. Oh, here's a little, here's a little more. And now, boom, all of it. And it would kind of cycle like that.

[video] 37:15 And she would complain about the kangaroo pouch. Yes, my kangaroo pouch. I could not lose the lower belly fat at all.

[video] 37:25 But it wasn't just belly fat. It was the, you know, all that undigested plant material in the intestines. So I was still trying to improve my health and vitality. And I, we just started, while he was paleo, he was talking about how there are these people that have this group called 30 Bananas a Day, and they eat all these bananas. And at the time I first heard about it, I'm like, really? That's crazy. I just thought that was nuts. Well, we ended up doing that. I ended up joining Freely's 30-day banana, you know, groupie group in 30 days. And we continued high raw for that year. And, you know, we would have all our fruit smoothies. I mean, we'd pack in the bananas. You know, we got the Vitamix. And we would have our 10-8 banana. I was having 1,000-calorie breakfast, you know, and then a whole other whatever. And then we would try to make something more savory. It would be raw vegetables with savory spices or whatever.

[video] 38:24 And I was becoming more and more dizzy. I would have very serious hypotensive dizzy spells, but I don't even know if it was always like just from sitting up. I would suddenly- She would come up to me and go. You have to catch me. I literally, I would drop. I would just drop. And then I would have these mini seizures. And then it would finally all pass and then I would get up again and I would keep going. And so I was becoming more and more sensitive to insulin, but I didn't understand that back then. I was eating plenty of calories. And like one of your other interviewers said, I was pissing like crazy. I mean, I was just pissing all the time. All the time. All the time. And it was like... I didn't even know I had to use the restroom, but then suddenly I had to go and I had to go now. I mean, it was urgency pissing all day, all day. That happened to me when we ate the high fruit diet. So I tried the high fruit.

[video] 39:19 I didn't do 30 bananas a day, but I got as many as like 10 or 12 bananas a day. But I knew that I would never be satisfied enough just fruit diet because there's practically no protein and no fat, and I knew that wouldn't work for me. But I thought maybe one of the things I did wrong in the past was I didn't eat enough fruit, so I'll try eating a lot of fruit. So I tried that. Tried the hot, very high fruit diet, and that didn't... The only thing that gave me was a couple of cavities that I didn't want. It was enjoyable to the extent that it kind of just simplified things in a way. Grating or using a mandolin to do the

[video] 39:58 zucchini noodles wasn't exactly simple but just put a bunch of stuff in a blender and hit hit you know blend good to go you know we didn't have to make pots full of brown rice and beans and and all that so in that way it was a little simple so it was kind of a novelty and at first i mean in the very beginning i just had this surge of energy well yeah i mean it was a surge of fructose so of course i would just like i gotta go run i've got all this energy and i would just go out and jog But, you know, that's the thing, again, it's like a hook. You have these initial symptoms that feel like you're on the right track. You have relief of some problems. You have a surge of energy. You think you feel good at first. And so you think it's the right thing, and then you keep going along. Time goes on, and now there's more and more symptoms starting to show up again. Because the more you start catabolizing your own body, especially when you're older, like we're in our 50s, when you're older, you're not as efficient at getting...

[video] 40:58 nutrients from food even if you're eating the best food meat and fat and dairy products if you're eating only plants you're getting so little so much less out of it and you're just breaking down your own body to stay alive so we were trying to do a plant you know based and relying on your stored up nutrients We were trying to do a plant-based YouTube channel and it just was so not very successful but we thought we were being a little more level-headed than a lot of the vegans that we were watching and we were watching Christina Foley Raw and Megan whatever and all these people freely and during all these people for a while and we were watching every new video that came out by Dr. Grieger and so he was convincing us. I read all of the books. I read Dr. McDougall's book. All of them. No, several. I read many of Dr. Neil Barnard's books, met him in person, couldn't wait. I was like the biggest plant-based doctor group. Met Rip Esselstyn, read his books, read his dad's book.

[video] 41:58 We were convinced that we needed to have our total cholesterol under 150 to be heart attack proof.

[video] 42:05 Now that we were out of the cancer scare, we were worried about heart disease, and so my cholesterol was definitely below 150. It's like 125. Yeah, and yet my triglycerides were high, and my LDL was high relative to the low total, and the HDL was below normal low. And so after a while of being on this plant-based diet...

42:29 It's fine, we'll cut it together. Hi. Hey. It's fine, we'll... Yeah, we'll just cut it together.

[video] 42:37 So after being on a plant-based diet for a while, I started to become more and more anemic feeling, very pale. I felt like I was like getting up in the morning and I would look in the mirror and I was seeing more and more gray hair and wrinkles. And I would, I made so many videos for that plant-based channel that I had to just trash because I was so, I'm not even the most vain woman out there. I mean, I was like, To have to wear makeup to look good was always something that kind of pissed me off when I was young. So I just wanted to be natural. And if people didn't like this, that's their problem. That's how I thought of things. I just didn't ever feel like I had very many girly genes in me. But I mean, I was becoming more and more vain because if the lighting was wrong, if I didn't sleep right, bags under the eyes, super like, I mean, every day I felt like I had more wrinkles. I had gray all up top and all around. I still have some gray, but I mean, it's actually less now.

[video] 43:34 Believe it or not, it seems like it's less, but I was really prematurely aging. My skin was just pallor and I, uh, you know, I'm trying to act like I'm really motivated and trying to help people with this plant-based diet. And yet I would wake up with puffy eyes and I felt like crap. And then I'm here in a healing profession, doing energy healing and holistic health. And I was like half the time. I didn't want to, you know, it was very hard to get going in the morning. Very low motivation. I didn't want to be around people. I just wanted to hide. On my videos, I was very beta. I was very insecure. And I just was feeling like crap. I felt like I was living a lie. Like here I am trying to act and sound like everything's great. I wrote the four books. You know, I studied to be a macrobiotic counselor. I studied T. Colin Campbell's. I was full on. I was so full on.

[video] 44:25 I got so into it, I actually took almost half my wardrobe, all my really good leather shoes and boots like this and wool sweaters and belts and everything and I donated it.

[video] 44:38 Like the animal's dead. I mean, you know, what's that serve? But I was so, you know, we filmed me doing it. I was on the floor crying like, oh my God, the animals, the animals, my God. And I would drive around and I would just see the meat, meat restaurants everywhere. And I would smell meat. I'm like, Don, it's just going to be such, this sucks. The whole world is just meat based. And they're not beast based, not really. But I was just panicking, like all these other vegans. So when the vegans come to my channel now and say, I didn't do the diet right, and I never was vegan because I didn't do it for the animals. No, you're wrong. We did the vegan diet every which way. We did higher protein and a little bit moderate high fat. We did very low fat, high fruit, vegetables. We did raw. We did cooked. We did it all. We never did junk food. We never did processed foods. We were never junk food people to begin with. So, I mean, it was just like, wow, I... We gave it our best shot.

[video] 45:33 When we started to add meat back, I mean, instantly, I just was like glowing. I felt like myself. I literally feel like the vegan diet sucked my soul out of me.

45:44 When you had those health issues, why do you think you didn't tell anybody in the video? What do you think made you be quiet about it?

[video] 45:52 Well, so I'm a hypnotherapist. I've studied a thing or two about the mind. I actually am someone that has had plethora of emotional issues and serious stress and challenge in my life. Okay, so I know I look older than I should really for how well I thought I took care of myself. But half the time I was thinking I was doing the right thing I wasn't. And so what happens is the mind likes to be right, for one thing. And for another thing, you know, we try to avoid pain and discomfort. And so I, I was wanting to believe I really wasn't trying to lie or hide. It really was so in my heart, thinking it was wrong to eat animals, that I wanted it to work. But I have to tell you... And also, I think you think, well, it's just something... I just need to tweak something, right? Yeah, you just keep tweaking. There's something I need to tweak. We did farm and diet. We did starch diet, macrobiotic diet, rotted. Every single winter, I got super sick. One winter, I ended up having...

[video] 46:58 like the chicken pox or something. I mean, that was one of her high raw. So I think all that fruit-based stuff, and of course the macrobiotic people, you want to believe, oh, it's a good thing, it's a cleanse. You're just pushing out all the toxins. No, I was sick, because my body was eating itself. I was skinny fat, chubby-ish, and I mean, I actually got fatter on the fruit diet, and

[video] 47:25 My fibrocystic breast tenderness came back on the all raw diet. So then I was like, oh, so it wasn't the animal foods. It wasn't as bad, but I realized it wasn't the animal foods in itself. It came back while eating high raw. And so I was like, hmm. It's like an example when I was, during that last five years that we were vegan, I went through a period where I ate a lot of sunflower seeds and I got this rash on my belly. So I just thought, well, it's just sunflower seeds, you know? So I'm just sensitive to sunflower seeds. You don't think it's the, I didn't think at that time it's the whole diet is wrong. And this is just an adding an insult to already an injury.

[video] 48:13 Um, and, uh, I think the one thing that Tracy said is also, Especially in the so-called holistic plant-based realm, there's an idea of the detoxification reaction. So all your symptoms can be declare detoxing rather than something wrong with the diet. Oh, you're finally detoxing. I'm sick, but this is good. Exactly. Your sickness has turned into something that's positive. I had major sickness every winter, chills, fever, the whole works, and then breaking out all over the torso. Itchy as crazy, like mumps or chicken, whatever the heck it was, one of those kind of things. And Then it would roll into allergy season. So basically from about the holidays until April, we felt like crap because the allergies are horrible around here. And so far, you know, I don't know how this winter will go, this season will go.

[video] 49:12 But I mean, it wasn't as bad last season. Hopefully it's even better this season. But it's, you know, things are in bloom all year here. So it's hard to avoid. It's one of the states of the highest level of allergies now. even though it used to be the opposite. So, yeah, you know, I didn't, it's just you go into a kind of denial. You want to be right. You want to feel like what you're doing is the right thing, and you're putting yourself out there, and you're trying to be the right example, so you feel like you have to hide what's not working. Well, and I want to add one other thing, and I think it is that we've learned to evaluate our health based on what our blood test says rather than what our symptoms are. So if your, if your blood cholesterol is 125, it's under the magic 150, then you're healthy. Even if you've got a bunch of symptoms, your skin's breaking out and all of that.

[video] 50:00 So the same thing, like in my case, it took, uh, from the time I started the vegan diet, the last episode of the vegan diet, um, I started out with a cholesterol, like 235 or something like that. And then I kept testing it every like three to six months or whatever to see what was happening. because I was aiming for that so-called heart attack proof range, thinking that if I tracked my cholesterol and I got my cholesterol under 150, that's when all the magic would happen, because if I'm going to be heart attack proof, I'll be psoriasis proof and everything else proof, right? So until I get to that point, I can't really expect anything. Everything will be like just adjustments, right? So my cholesterol went down a little bit at a time, you know, like every time I tested it, it would go down like 30 or 40 points or whatever, and then it gradually, declined to 154 was the last test that I had while I was vegan. And that's when I felt the worst. That's when my skin was the worst, everything.

[video] 50:57 And that was, again, that was at that point that I realized that this whole thing, the whole ideology behind this has got to be wrong. Because if I'm at the level of cholesterol that these people think is where you should have the pinnacle of health and my symptoms are not showing health, then this whole idea that your cholesterol should be down at this level is just wrong. Because if getting my cholesterol down there is the magic, then I should be suddenly getting better. Every step in that direction should be a reduction in my symptoms instead of an increase in my symptoms. So it's that, again, like Tracy and I, it was around, let me see.

[video] 51:46 How do I put this? At that time, I started thinking very intensely about what was going on in our lives and why this wasn't working out and how I invested myself in all of this, wrote a book, all of that. And kind of to cut the story a little bit short, It was in the spring of 2016, or was it 2016, I think, or I can't remember right now. When we started at Animal Foods? Before we started at Animal Foods, we were sitting in this office, we were having lunch, and lunch was a bowl, you know, a big lunch box full of rice. Grains, grains, and beans. Grains, greens, and beans, right? My little moniker, grains, grains, and beans. And I was sitting there, and I had been, because I try to, Like, this is just who I am.

[video] 52:38 I'm thinking through everything I know, all the experiences that I had, and suddenly this thought came to me, just a question, why are you eating what you're eating right now?

[video] 52:51 And immediately the answer came to me, well, because I believe that it's good for me. And then, well, why do you believe that it's good for you because all these experts, you know, the whole litany list of them say that it's good for you. And then the next question was, what would you be eating right now if you didn't believe any of that? And the first thing that came to my mind was steak.

[video] 53:26 And then it was like it was like for me, it was an epiphany. It was like I felt like I lifted this whole structure of belief system off of me all at once at that moment. And now I was like, right, I should be following me, not them. That's, that's the, that was the real, like for me, it means some people are going to say, well, how can you be so clueless for 40 years? Well, maybe I was clueless for 40 years. It was my journey, but Under the spell of plants. Under the spell of plants, under the spell of indoctrination, etc. But it took, and it took, that was my journey. It took me that long to figure it out, doing it the way that I did. And I don't have anything to be embarrassed about my own journey. But that was, for me, like the enlightenment. Then suddenly, like it was right after that, I was like, I don't want any of this stuff anymore because I don't really... There was a question, do you really enjoy eating this? No, I don't really enjoy it.

[video] 54:25 I don't really like kale. I don't really like chewing all down all of this rice. I really like milk. I really like eggs. I really like meat. So that's what I'm going to eat. And that's when my health... really started turning around when I just decided I was going to eat what I enjoyed eating rather than what everybody told me was healthy. Nothing was satisfying towards the end before we ended being vegan. Nothing felt satisfying. We started to actually buy more of the plant-based meats because we just wanted something more savory. We were just craving protein. Yeah, we were craving protein. So we started to add the protein back in the spring of 2017. And then by May, we started a low-carb, kind of more keto challenge. And we just kind of kept... backing off on all the produce. And the more that we did, the more his psoriasis improved. So we kept at it.

[video] 55:14 The first time in 40 years I'd ever seen any of those lesions improve without losing a lot of weight, without losing a lot of strength, just cutting out plant foods. The more I ate what I really enjoyed eating, the less I wanted plant foods. And it just looks like they gradually fell away. I eat a little bit of plants here and there when I feel like it or just have some fermented, we have some fermented beets or cabbage in our refrigerator that we made, but I hardly ever eat them. I just eat milk, eggs and dairy products because that's what I love to eat and what satisfies me. I mean, our fitness training improved, our strength improved, our moods improved. I mean, I just felt like I

[video] 56:06 the real me finally woke up.

56:09 What do you both think about the future of agonism? Where is it heading?

[video] 56:13 Well, I personally think that there's a big institutional and corporation push for plant-based because there's a lot of money in turning cheap plant material into something that sort of resembles milk or meat. So I think there's going to be a big commercial and on the level of political push for plant-based diets.

[video] 56:45 And there's the whole so-called global warming scare and all of that, and they're going to use that to try to push people into eating more and more plant-based. We talk to a lot of clients and just based on what we know, even the older generation, some of the older, baby booming older, they're all like so now, we've been all indoctrinated for decades now that you gotta eat your fruits and vegetables for so long that to say that those may not be healthy for you, it just is like, they just immediately think you're crazy. So I do think though, because there are people, there's you and there's Sean Baker and others who are...

[video] 57:23 going more carnivore and um those people are having huge success overcoming a lot of issues and so i do think that that's at least a good counterbalance to the vegan movement the the you know the vegan movement's definitely getting pushed there's an agenda to push it and so it's going to keep growing people are going to keep thinking that they shouldn't eat meat and they should eat their vegetables and fruit. And everywhere I go now, that's all I hear people say. And the oddest thing is that when I was growing up, I was the only one that was into eating all these green vegetables. I didn't think restaurants that were served enough. I would eat the parsley garnish off of people's plates just to get something green. My life wasn't complete unless I had green foods in my system. I mean, we're eating a bunch of kale plus a whole plethora of other vegetables every day. I could care less if I never... In fact, the thought of eating kale just is like, ugh. Don't even bring it near me. We sold our Vitamix. We're like, we don't even want this.

[video] 58:22 Get it out of here. We're trying to sell the Soya Joy. We were making our own milk and everything. It's like, ugh. Done. So anyways, you know, it looks like there's going to be... To me, it looks like there's going to be a cultural push in that direction, trying to get people to eat more and more plant-based food. Especially the more successful, this more carnivore movement is, they're going to push even harder. But I think in the long term, it's doomed because people can't thrive on it. You have all these elderly people, the likelihood of their getting dementia or Alzheimer's is super high, one in two, after a certain age. And it's because your brain doesn't really process glucose as efficiently. And so many of these elderly people, they don't eat meat, they don't think they should. And they don't digest it anymore. Well, they don't produce as much hydrochloric acid.

[video] 59:14 And so the more you don't eat animal foods, the more your body kind of self-regulates and then you stop producing the enzymes you need to make it digestible. But also people don't realize that when they say something like, I don't digest meat, blah, blah, blah, they're not, you know, what's the whole context of your diet? Because if you're eating it with all this bread and all this other fat and all this stuff, well, yeah, that might be a pretty bad combination. So The only way you really know, you can say an all meat diet is extreme, but the only way you really know how you're going to feel and or how some of these foods you believe are super healthy for you and are benign, you know, superheroes are to not eat any of them for at least a month, a few months, get it out of your diet. You can add them back, but you aren't really going to know how they're affecting you until you get them out of your diet. And if you think about in nature, A plant wants you to eat its fruit and partake of its flowers because, you know, you eat the fruit, you deposit the seed. A plant doesn't want you to eat the stalks and the leaves, so it's bitter.

[video] 1:00:14 Or the roots. It has bitter compounds for a reason. It's part of its way of fighting off predators.

[video] 1:00:22 These plant-based foods, by and large, are hybridized, and they're really just not these superheroes that everyone thinks.

1:00:31 Uh-huh. The natural plants are way more bitter, so you can't eat them at all. Nobody in nature would do that. Whereas the cultivated ones are not as bitter. So you still get the poison, but it's not that poison, so you still eat some of it.

[video] 1:00:42 So you don't notice it. You're just so acclimated. You don't know that all these allergies... People have all these symptoms, but they're not hooking it up. They refuse to think that their clean diet is the problem. All the vegetables they're eating, they think it's healthy. They can't even imagine not eating them. I mean, people are by and large addicted to carbs. They're not really addicted to the animal foods. Most people aren't. Most people are eating a predominantly plant-based diet.

1:01:10 Do you both regret these years of being as a vegetarian?

[video] 1:01:14 We had a lot of regret. We had a lot of regret. I mean, I'll be 56 soon, and so for that diet to just so age me, and oh man, I was already trying so hard for so many of my, years of my life to prove my health and have a sense of vitality, which I thought was my natural birthright. The thing is when I was younger, I thought I was an odd case, you know, that just wasn't well all the time. And I now see how it's pretty much everyone. There's, there's very few people who aren't on meds or overweight or sick or in pain or something. I mean, I had ongoing joint pain and all these things that completely went away once we went, we got off the plants.

[video] 1:01:55 tendinitis that would never heal we would try to train all the time we were working out hard but i hardly noticed the results and i just always had tendinitis limiting my my progress so um yeah i don't know yeah i would rather have not done it that way right yeah you know i wished except that at the age of 20 someone could have bestowed on me with a piece of enlightenment than I had in the office in 20-whatever it was. Except that when vegans come and make nasty comments on my channel, I know it's like, you can talk all you want about everything that you're saying, and I know from direct experience what that diet did to me. So without that direct experience, maybe I would still end up being convinced at some point that I should eat more this or that. Yeah, I think that that's the... So it gives you a kind of power. That's the lemonade out of the lemons, is that...

[video] 1:02:53 you know like nobody can tell me i didn't try i didn't try it i didn't have the right do it the right way or anything i i did it pretty much every way you can do it that would be reasonable and and so in that way i'm a highly informed mediator anything else you would like to have any experience something special you learned or something you would like to say to any beings who are watching well to any vegans that are watching

[video] 1:03:25 don't go vegan, un-go vegan, what can you say? Because in the long term, your health will suffer for it. You are going to, depending on the individual, depending on your previous diet, how many nutrients you have stored up from your previous diet, you'll last more or less time on the diet. If you had a very nutrient-dense diet before, you might go even 10 or 15 years before you start to crash. But if you have a very nutrient-poor, it might be only a year or even a few months before you crash. But you're going to crash because your body can only recycle and conserve stored nutrients for a certain period of time before they run out. So that's the illusion that comes from that diet is that because you feel good now,

[video] 1:04:18 You think you're going to feel good forever, but because you're relying on stored nutrients, especially like vitamin A and iron and zinc, those things that are recycled and stored in the body to some extent, eventually you gradually lose those and you dip below the threshold. That's when you start to see things happen. So a lot of people think they're fine and then they crash. And another thing that I do want to say is that there are, there may be some people out there that do okay on a vegan diet over a long term. And that's because humans vary in their abilities to adapt to any kind of environmental circumstance on what we call a bell curve. So there are some people who are going to be like, if they cut animal food out of their diet, they're going to feel terrible right away. And then there are some people who when they cut animal food out of their diet, it might take

[video] 1:05:18 20 years before they feel poor. And those are the people, those people that are more efficient at using plant foods, et cetera, they're the ones that are the leaders in the plant based movement. You know, they do good enough for their own purposes that they go, they can go for a long period of time and they tend, they make the error of thinking that because it works for me, it works for everybody. But that's like, That's like somebody who's a star in NBA basketball saying, since I can be a basketball star, everybody can. No, that's not the case because you're a basketball star because you have certain genetic gifts. You have a height and agility and all of that stuff that came from your genetics. And the same thing goes for adapting to a plant-based diet. I want to say that I know this is going to sound crazy, and unless you've been through this process, you're not going to get it, but

[video] 1:06:12 vegans think that they're very compassionate about animals but i don't really know what they're really doing about it i mean what was my having a meltdown crying and donating everything like what good did that do really i've never felt so much more connected with who i really am than since going carnivore because i felt now more connected to the whole process of life nature isn't all unicorns and rainbows death is part of life and it's part of the whole cycle of life and you know cows Actually, if they're raised properly, they produce this gold fertilizer to farmers. It's gold and all the animals interact. The chickens come up behind them and they eat the bugs or whatever out of the poop of the cows. It gives carbon back to the soils. Growing produce in row crops is taking minerals out of the soils. And not only that, but to sustain a plant-based diet, you have to rely on a lot of imported food.

[video] 1:07:10 And it's being imported from all around now, China and South America. And so people think it's more sustainable, but they're really deluded. It's not really the truth. And when you finally reclaim your power and realize that, you know, This is part of life, and I need to just own up to the fact that part of my being alive is going to require the death of these animals. It kind of just, I don't know, it's like a, it's just you start to feel like who you really are and who we were ancestrally in the past. You know, there was no question. There was no question in the past. It was part of survival. And so, I don't know how to explain it, but it's really, you start to feel more connected to life. Hmm. And I have just as much reverence for animals as I ever did. That doesn't change. Just because I eat them, it doesn't mean that I'm not part of that reverence for them.

[video] 1:08:06 I think vegans really think they have the moral high ground on that, but I don't agree with that anymore.

1:08:13 Okay.

1:08:16 Thank you both for sharing. Thank you. You're welcome.

[video] 1:08:19 Glad we finally got to hook up and make this work.