“No baby animals were harmed in the making of this salt.” – Natalie Dee
I really wanted to be a vegetarian. I wanted it like the Beatles want to hold your hand, like The Flying Lizards want money, like Cheap Trick wants you to want me (or maybe they want you to want them or me to want them or something. Aw crap, what they really wanted was a haircut.) Any of you who have seen a PETA video or Alicia Silverstone in a lettuce bikini will need no further explanation of my vegetarian desires. To the rest of you who are smart enough to stay away from that which we will not speak of (Baby chicks in dumpsters! Being crushed to death by the weight of their siblings piling on top of them! Sorry that just popped out.) I will just say that I had many moral, spiritual and health reasons for going veg.
Like many teens, I first experimented with vegetarianism in high school. Vegetarianism quickly became like a religion to me – which in and of itself was a problem as I already belong to a very time-consuming (but awesome) religion – and I was its biggest evangelist. I was annoying and sanctimonious and, heaven help me, a zealot. Pretty soon being vegetarian wasn’t enough for me, I had to go vegan and eschew all animal products. While this upped my street cred in the plant crowd, it also upped the crazy voices in my head. You know those voices – the ones that tell you it’s safer to just not eat anything ever than to risk it being tainted.
Over the next decade and a half I cycled in and out of vegetarian/vegan – ism. If you asked me, I would staunchly tell you that I was absolutely a veg but behind doors I occasionally ate meat. It seemed like there was always some reason. In college I became anemic (thank you crimson wave, tsunami edition) and the doctors told me to eat red meat because I needed heme iron. During my second pregnancy, all I could stomach during the first tri was raw pasta, Cheerios and… McDonald’s Big-n-Tasties. All my subsequent pregnancies saw me return to being omnivorous because of low iron and cravings. You may recall that after Jelly Bean was born, there was some concern about her lack of weight gain and again the doctors ordered me to drop my vegan diet. And while it was never conclusively connected, the fact that my great overtraining-and-suppressing-my-own-thyroid debacle happened during a particularly ardent vegan phase seems suspicious. (I think it had something to do with all the processed-soy imitation meat products I’d been eating.) I also struggled with vitamin B12 deficiency even though I took supplements and ate nutritional yeast and algae, discolored nail beds, hair loss, fatigue, amenorrhea and other small health issues.
Nevertheless, every time after I’d finish whatever the situation was that called for me to eat meat, I’d go right back to my veg ways. In my mind, it was I that was failing vegetarianism. If I could just stop getting pregnant! Or sick! Or working out so hard! Then I could be the perfect vegetarian. Sometimes though, I’d “sneak” meat for no apparent reason at all other than I really wanted it and in those moments the guilt was immense. It didn’t hit me until I began the intuitive eating program that I’d never been able to sustain an extended period of no animal products. (I believe my longest period with no meat at all was 3 years and with no animal products was 9 months.) It wasn’t that my health issues were causing me to fail vegetarianism, is was that vegetarianism was failing my health.
In addition, I also realized that I’d been using veg as a way to further restrict my food, a subversive eating disorder if you will. There’s no easier way to get out of dessert than to say you’re a vegan. I’m not saying that every veg has an eating disorder but it was certainly disordered eating behavior for me. I learned in my therapy that this is quite common in eating disordered patients.
Unlike when I went veg, I did not proclaim my newfound revelation to the world. Honestly I was embarrassed. I still thought that eschewing (hee!) all animals products was the most moral choice. I have very close family members and friends that are strict vegetarians or vegans. Many of you first found me because you were looking for a kindred veggie spirit. And I didn’t want to disappoint all these people that I so love. Heck, I even love Alicia Silverstone! Not only was she a genius in Clueless but I even liked her in that weird movie where she pretends to kidnap herself for attention but it turns into a real kidnapping but then she falls in love with her super-hot kidnapper and I can’t remember what it’s called but it was actually really cute and she was adorable in it! For the love of little green apples, I wanted to please a celebrity who doesn’t even know I exist! See, important reasons.
When I failed the Primal Blueprint Experiment (twice now, holla!), a lot of readers wrote to me saying some iteration of “See, I told you vegan is best!” But the thing is this: while neither way of eating is bad and both work very well for many people, both the Primal Blueprint/Paleo and vegetarianism/veganism don’t work for me. It makes a lot of people in both camps angry when I say this. They say things like, “Well you just didn’t try hard enough!” (I tried as hard as I could with the resources that I had.) or “You didn’t do it the right way!” (You’re right, I couldn’t do it perfectly. But I still can’t so nothing’s changed there.) or “If you’d just try it again, this time it will be successful!” (Perhaps, but how many times do I need to try?) or “If you understood the science better, you’d see why [insert diet/lifestyle] is the only way to eat!” (So much compelling science on both sides. Truly.) and even “If you’d just let me run your life and tell you everything to eat and when to eat it and how to eat it, I could make you into the lean goddess of your dreams!” (Tempting but are you planning to stay with me for the rest of my life?)
Frankly I think that I don’t do well with extremely restrictive/elimination diets (or, depending on your perspective, I do too well – thereby landing myself back in eating disorder therapy). Intuitive eating has shown me that banning nothing and eating what my body needs gives me a level of peace and acceptance and safety that I have never before had around food. The crazy voices in my head have gone from screams to mere whispers. There isn’t a diet on the planet that would make want to give up that trust I’ve earned in my body.
I’m done doing food Experiments. I know that this will upset some of you but I wish that it wouldn’t. Everyone needs to find the pathway to health that works best for them. I think it’s awesome that so many of you have gotten miraculous results from The Primal Blueprint. Mark Sisson is a genius and really knows his stuff. I think his plan is fantastic. I also love those of you who are vegetarian/vegan. You have such great big hearts and you are changing things for the better. Let me be clear: I am not knocking either way of eating. But in the end I’ve found what works for me – and that is eating some meat, lots of fat and vegetables and also some fruits, whole grains and dairy – and I think I can stick with that for the rest of my life.
Thanks for hearing me out. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to finally own up to this on here. (Not that I ever lied – I just never came out and explicitly stated my reason for dropping my vegetarianism.) I love you guys! Please don’t send me death threats! (You think I’m kidding? I once had a man at a party bite me – as in chomped down on my arm with his teeth – because I told him I was downgrading from vegan to vegetarian. Food is a hugely polarizing topic, I’ve learned.)
What is your eating philosophy? Has that changed over the years? Any other failed vegetarians out there? Did anyone else see that Alicia Silverstone movie??
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First: Love you! Just found your blog and gobbling up all the posts as fast as I can.
Second: I have recently switched to vegan and I love it! I was flirting with vegetarian for a while, and after reading Ornish/Furman/McDougalls books I decided to try vegan to see if I could. Well, I can, and I feel great. I get sick less, lost some fat (not muscle, as my brother in law chooses to believe) and get less headaches. But then again, I have never liked fatty foods or a lot of meat, even as a child.
I would just like to say not all vegans are crazy (!!!) as in going to bite your head off, and I find your story (stories? posts? ramblings? the whole shebang…) awesome and encouraging. Rock on for listening to your body and going with that, because really at the end of the day we all have to live with ourselves (and our crazy families) and deal with what we have put into our bodies. No one else does. So we have to be happy with it, individually.
So I’ll take your spare veg and you can have all the meat that I don’t want. Sounds like an awesome deal for us both!
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Have you tried DrGreger diet? http://tinyurl.com/drgregercomplete (watch for 11.5 hrs)
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