Hi Faith,

Hope you're well. I thought I'll give some other perspective on the ex vegan subject seeing it's something that keeps coming back over and over and I'm familiar with the story. This is going to be quite long, but if you bear with me you might get another point of view in the mix.

Quickly about me- I'm vegan since I was 4 years old, just after I developed serious dairy allergy. I only tried meat once in my life when I was about 12 but as I wasn't used to it I hated it and never had it again. I'm currently 34, rock climber, runner, very happy, I can't remember when I was sick last time, my blood work is perfect on a consistent basis for many years etc etc

It hasn't been the case in the past though. In 2001 I started getting sick and as the time went by I started to think I'm actually going crazy, because none of mainstream doctors could tell me what was wrong. I ended up in my local hospital from exhaustion several times, but nobody was able to say why I was so exhausted. The next 4 years was like hell on earth, getting weaker and weaker, staying in bed a lot of the time and eventually in search of answers I looked into alternative medicine. I was quickly diagnosed with AF and sold monthly supplement supply, was told to eat certain type of diet and rest. It didn't unfortunately do a thing. So I went to another place and started another program, and then another, and another. I went through 'metabolic typing', 'dosha typing' , high fat raw food, I was told that fruit is poison and under no circumstances I should eat sweet fruit. At the end I got really depressed. I wasn't getting better, my life was revolving around pills and I hated my life so much I wanted to die. I looked like death quite frankly.

And yes, the thoughts that maybe I should start eating meat went through my mind over and over. I was never an animal rights activist (and I'm not to this day actually), and my desperation to get better was so severe I didn't actually care about morals at the time!
But through a very lucky incident I met someone who encouraged me to go back to basics and learn about human body, how it functions, what it needs to thrive, and look properly at what i was eating. I discovered "Natural Hygiene" , connected with Doug Graham and other Natural Hygienists, and within days of addressing my nutritional mistakes it felt like a heavy fog lifted from my brain and i was able to get up and actually do something.

I started learning everything from scratch- reading medical text books, journals, studies, articles- you name it, and as it happens food and nutrition became my life long passion.

What I've learnt is that as much as we would love to think we're certain 'type', on a biological level we are actually the same. Our digestive systems are the same, our natural design is the same, but through lifetime of abusing our bodies (and I'm guilty of it) we lose sense of what our natural design is.
I'm not going to go into discussing history here, because we could discuss it till we're blue in the face- but I would def encourage everyone to study 'hunter gatherer' tribes for themselves and discover that thriving tribes you don't normally hear about actually ate high carb diets with very little meat. There's a fundamental difference between 'thriving' and 'surviving', but that's a topic for another time.

Looking at the human body as it is, we're designed to thrive on a high carb, low fat diet. Yes, human body is incredibly resilient and will survive on anything (for at least a while), but on a cellular level glucose (carbs) is a primary source of fuel for us. We're born with 'sweet tooth' for a reason (although we abuse the idea by reaching for cakes when we feel like something 'sweet'), on a basic level we instinctively seek sweet taste because glucose is so essential to stay alive.

What was I doing during my sick years? Completely the opposite. High fat and very little carbs. Especially when i went raw first time. I was told to avoid fruit, so my calorie source was nuts, seeds, avocados and oils. Plus, the biggest mistake I made was not understanding how much to eat for my body size. Raw food is high in water, so it can be very misleading when consuming large bowls of salads, I automatically thought, yeah, that's a lot of food! Once I've learnt the basics of calories I've realised I literally starved myself in the past for years, no wonder I ended up emaciated and depressed.

Looking at your story, if you don't mind me pointing out couple of things, what immediately stands out is that your approach was high fat and high carb, and that is known to cause diabetes, high blood Sugar and candida you're talking about, so it absolutely makes sense to read about your struggles (pls feel free to ask for some details if you're interested in resources) High fat diminishes insulin sensitivity causing 'sugar rush' you're talking about, and you eventually crashed. People sometimes confuse the Sugar topic so much (assuming it must be bad).

I see you were concerned with your protein intake, but- everything you eat contains protein. Absolutely everything- it's impossible to develop protein deficiency if you eat enough food for your size. In order to develop protein deficiency you would have to stop eating completely- and even than they don't call it protein deficiency, but starvation. In fact, our modern life diseases are caused by protein excess and this is more important to be worried about.

I've been doing 80/10/10 for over 6 years now. And 6 years later I'm not failing, I'm not 'craving' anything, not deficient in anything. Did my 'typing' change over the course of my life? No, I was never a certain 'metabolic type' to begin with.

This is getting super long, but my point here is not to turn anyone vegan, but to encourage people to always look at facts before making a judgment. If you look at Alex's blog thoroughly it quickly becomes apparent she was trying to live mainly on greens- and this is not sustainable in a long run. Plus- none of us really know what she was doing exactly, so its not really a reflection on balanced vegan diet. I don't care that much if she eats meat or not to be honest though.

If people choose to eat meat- that's all fine by me. My point is to make sure people actually have an understanding what 'balanced' diet is, because from my experience it means different things to everyone. Human body doesn't recognise 'food groups', it recognises nutrients, so 'balanced diet' is a diet reflecting body's nutritional needs. It's not a matter of personal opinion. I happen to eat only fruit, veg, nuts and seeds (it's only 1 food group!) and hit all nutrient targets daily, so saying that meat has nutrients not available in plants is not based on science.

As I said, I really don't have a problem with people eating meat (most of my friends are meat eaters and I love them all!) but it's important to be objective and inquisitive enough to always dig deeper.

All the best! x

Faith,
sorry it took me so long to write you back. I hope you are doing well.

It looks like the more I read about ex-vegans and ex-vegetarians, the more similarities I see. I think we should start an ex-vegan-rehab anonymous club with regular mandatory MEATings :)

I really hope that GAPS healing foods helped you stop IBS. Luckily, our gut lining is one the fastest tissues to heal provided that we stop eating all the foods that damage it and introduce anti-inflammatory broths. I too had damaged my digestion pretty badly with all the beans and grains and had to struggle with constant pain, fatigue and indigestion. I never liked soy, but I didn’t ban it either until GAPS, and did eat it occasionally in restaurants as it was part of recipes. All the grains, beans, soy, nuts and even skins of fruit and raw vegetable fibers can be very bad for the gut lining. Gluten, lectins and phytates are very damaging and foods that contain them have to be prepared in a certain way to minimize the damage. Do you know that many vegetarians who do that properly? We were never taught that in childhood. Paleo people honestly believe that grains are evil. Well, they are, if you don’t eat them right. Nobody eats an unpluck raw chicken, right? Grains also have their methods of self-defense, they have all the anti-nutrients. If it hadn't been for GAPS I wouldn't know that grains should be eaten fermented only. If it hadn’t been for GAPS I’s probably still be sick. Broths and healing foods can really heal.

Elevated blood Sugar on vegetarian diet is definitely due to high intake of fruits and grains and they do give a happy high in the beginning. Grains and fruits raise blood Sugar and constantly over-stimulate our pancreas and that’s really like flirting with diabetes, as you mentioned. It is constant stress for our body – to deal with elevated blood sugar, there is always need for more insulin and then there is plummeting of blood Sugar after the insulin was secreted and more need for sugar and so on.

I also think that inflammatory conditions in the gut due to the damaging anti-nutrients in nuts, grains and beans also contribute to blood sugar issues though indirectly. Inflammation is a state of emergency for the body, in all emergency situations our adrenals react by secreting stress hormones and also send a signal for a need for extra boost of sugar. It is a known mechanism that in stress situations our blood sugar has to be elevated in order to provide extra nourishment as metabolic rate increases dramatically. But when inflammation becomes chronic, our adrenals literally get tired from pumping too many secretions and signals and our liver and muscles get depleted of sugar stores (glycogen). That’s how we get adrenal fatigue and blood sugar fluctuations I think.

When I gave up wheat/gluten while being a vegan, my cravings for sweets stopped within about a month and even carrots seemed sweet enough. However, later after gut inflammation persisted for some time, I started having really bad symptoms of low blood sugar and had to snack all the time.

Dr. Campbell-McBride mentioned that unstable blood sugar and exhausted adrenals go hand in hand and can be managed and corrected with frequent high-fat snacks with a little bit of raw honey. True, after a couple months on GAPS anti-inflammatory and high fat foods the low blood sugar symptoms stopped.

I’ve also noticed that fermenting rice and millet, or any non-glutenous grain for a couple of days before cooking (soaking in water and adding 2 Tbsp of home-made kefir in that water and then rinsing before cooking) does not cause any problems with blood sugar fluctuations, or indigestion. I wonder if humans historically ate fermented grains only in order to save themselves from diabetes and inflammatory gut conditions? Does Maker's Diet have any comments on that? I should look into that book since you mentioned it. There have to be some traditional dietary guidelines that worked through centuries but that are less radical than Paleo, right?

I do agree about lobsters and shrimp being cockroaches of the sea. Kosher standards don't allow them, I think for the same reasons that don't allow pork.

However, speaking of seafood, I recently came across the info in an article on Ayurveda mentioning oyster shells being a clean type of bone...whatever it means... Oysters and mussels do not crawl on the bottom of the ocean, they just sit and gulp water and filter out some nutrients dissolved in it, right? Something that makes pearls shouldn't be that bad.. I looked up into their nutrition and it looks like they are the most superior food in nutrition providing tons of B12, copper, zinc, etc.

Fish is really controversial food now, I agree. There are different views on that how much mercury is in it really and whether it maybe exaggerated by meat industry. I honestly don't know what to think of it and since I've learned about GMO-salmon, I am also going to give it a break.

Ah, chelation... Working on it too but taking it slowly now. We should exchange ideas on that.

It is so cute that you have a pet duck. I never thought they could be pets! The only ducks I saw were the ones in a group of other ducks and they were not affectionate or smart. They must behave differently when they communicate with people more than with each other.

What you mentioned about L-arginine promoting replication of the herpes virus is new info for me. I am so glad you found a knowledgeable doc who was able to point this out and get you better as Shingles is a serious and painful condition.
I had a couple of pretty bad cold-sore outbreaks while being a vegan and, of course, thought they were just a healing crisis. The very thought of chocolate, peas, nuts and oats being the foods that support a virus is simply out of our modern pro-vegetarian thinking box. We've been all conditioned to think that plant food heals us and meats make us ill. It took me some time to "re-program" my mind about animal foods.

So if I understand it correctly there has to be a proper ratio of L-lysine to L-arginine in our foods, and eating mostly plants and no animal foods puts us out of balance.

Interesting, that L-lysine has power to help battle the virus and as I read now it also has anxiolytic properties acting as a serotonin antagonist. Which makes the foods high in L-lysine (meat, fish, and cheese) perfect grounding food. So, for Vata types as well as for Vata symptoms in everybody else l-lysine is pretty much critical then.

You are right, as a Vata type you need warm, oily and heavy foods, like soups and meats. You would also respond well to essential oils therapy, soothing music and daily application of warming oils (sesame, olive, safflower or even ghee) as our skins eats too and that's a great way to supplement oils and give some extra nourishment to the whole body.. just a thought, but you probably know that already since you study Ayurveda.

I am Pitta-Kapha type with less than 20% Vata, or simply an angry sloth type :) and according to all logic, I should have been thriving on vegan diet, I should’ve been more energetic and peaceful. But guess what, vegan diet practically put all three doshas out of balance, it made me more aggressive (Pitta) and gave me more brain fog (Kapha) , and raised Vata so badly that I lost my sleep, was cold and tired all the time and became anxious and fearful. I had a chance to learn what it’s like to try calming down Vata. What an experience. It has to be a constant deliberate attempt to be very delicate about everything you eat and do as Vata types are very delicate themselves. By no means should they exhaust themselves or be malnourished.

For Vata types vegetarianism is a way to strive for clean diet as Vatas have a natural tendency to always seek purity in everything. It’s a good thing, but unfortunately, we’ve been conditioned to think that animal foods are something unclean.

For Pittas giving up meat is more like an act of self-discipline and they are the ones who have a lot of ego, aggression and self-righteousness involved… Kaphas are more compassionate and give up meat because they don’t want to hurt animals.

So, for a vegetarian, or vegan with all these moral concepts engraved in their minds about animal products, this diet is pretty much a mental trap. Our society never considers processed food laden with chemicals as dirty, but animal products are somehow unclean, unworthy of eating and guilty foods. Vegetarianism is more a mental thing than dietary, and it makes it much more serious than just an eating disorder.

When I’m done with my Ayurveda certification, I am planning on counseling people, but after my personal experience and reading others people's stories I cannot preach vegetarianism even if it’s part of traditional Ayurveda.

Well, there are different points of view on meat eating even among prominent Ayurvedic practitioners. It theoretically may be applicable in India, where climate is different, or for those who are already super healthy and can go on vegan for some time, or for those who are devoted to spiritual practices only without living a modern hectic demanding life. Theoretically, it sounds good, but realistically, I don’t see how most of us with all our schools, jobs, demanding relationships, environmental toxicities and constant stress can give up animal fats and proteins. Even M. Gandhi called vegans enemies of India. He tried to follow vegan life style for some time and came to pretty much the same conclusions as many of us here and felt that he guided his followers into starvation.

You are right, if humans survived for so long living hunter-gatherers' lifestyle, then they have been doing something right. I agree, modern messing with food and chemicals is the real issue. The more we lean towards traditional ways of living and eating the better are our chances for survival.
And yes, eating should not be based on some ideas. Nature is always wiser than any of our ideas and no matter how logical our ideas may be Nature will always be the one we should listen to.

Faith, you got to stop going down this road. It's not going to help you at all and might cause you to confine yourself in a box by trying to prove who's right or who's wrong rather than getting yourself well. You know what I suffered from before and that I still have AF. Just because your AF might be worse is no reason to minimize mine. My hypoglycemic symptoms were one of the worse here, but I chose to be open to trying new paths to health when everything else I tried failed, I didn't have anything left to lose, and this new advice seemed so 180 degrees from what I was told I needed to do to get well, so I'm not your enemy here. I'm being your friend.

If have no problems with you not being raw or vegan. I'm not raw of vegan or don't know if I ever care to be. I just started researching those diet because I started eating more in that direction and was surprised that the reasons most people failed on those diets was not because those diets were inherently deficient, it was because people were either eating too much fats, too much junk vegan foods, or simply weren't eating enough in general.

You've expressed a moral dilemma of feeling the need to eat meat for health reasons, but not wanting to for ethical reasons. I was partly showing people like you that you might not have to if you go back and look how you ate plant-based before and see if you made any of the most common mistakes and if so, perhaps you can correct them without having to leave that lifestyle you would prefer to stay in. I think I made all the common mistakes when I went vegetarian for a while a long time ago. It wasn't my fault I made those mistakes. I just hadn't come across the right way to live that lifestyle.

My fear is not that people go back to eating meat, it's going way far off into low-carb land where it's bound to cause its own problems like it did with me.