Genetics is a large factor in our diet. There are many people who have had great health while eating a vegan diet. I tried to eat healthy as a vegan, made sure to get 4-5 servings of grains, 3 servings of beans, 5-6 servings of fruit and lots of vegetables. I could not function very well as I do on a diet with meat in it. Feel free to disagree but I don’t think a vegan diet’s for everybody. I think both sides could benefit from each other instead of pulling wild assumptions about the other. “Vegans are just stupid, clueless skinny hippies.” “Meat eaters kill intentionally by eating meat and funding the slaughter houses.”

A while back, I cut out eggs & dairy and noticed my symptoms got increasingly better, so I kept doing it and kept seeing improvements.

I slowly started to cut out meat, and I noticed that my symptoms got increasingly worse. I thought “Oh, it’s just the B12″ and started taking a B12 supplement. That didn’t help. Apparently, my body does not use B12 efficiently. I still take B12 supplements once a month (sub-lingual) but I do eat meat infrequently because my body simply needs the B12 at this point. And using fortified products just does not give it an adequate source for some reason.

Fuck happy meat!

The Good:
Lost weight (down to a 4/6), improved digestion (for a few months)

The Bad:
BAD mood all of the time, no matter what I ate. Very heavy and extremely painful periods within a month of starting that diet, long cycles.

The Ugly:
Gray teeth (and they are still gray ), hair falling out, increased hypothyroidism, more estrogen dominance, increased ovarian cysts, horribly depressed in the last two months. The teeth part is frustrating because I was blessed with naturally white, straight (w/o braces) teeth and now I can hardly smile because I cant get used to gray, dingy teeth. Now I’m worried about the health of my teeth overall.

That doesn’t make the “good” part sound so good. I broke that cycle when I had salmon and brown rice for Thanksgiving.

Now I eat a diet of humanly raised, grass fed beef, chicken, limited fruits, lots of vegetables and plenty of fats (raw butter, coconut oil) and fermented foods and beverages. I have not gone back to eating grains because of my compromised digestion and gluten intolerance.

I have never been better health wise in my entire life. I’m not longer horribly depressed and suicidal, my weight is still down, I have normal cycles, my thyroid levels are normal, no more ovarian cysts, etc and have tons of energy.

My brother on the other hand, has been vegan for the past 15 years and have done very well. Different strokes for different folks and we should accept that no particular diet works for everyone.

Just like to add my own story here…after years of reading about what might be the perfect diet for humans, and short experiments with such things as macrobiotics, and just plain old vegetarianism, I was very healthy, but constantly reading about health and diet and finally fell into veganism. A few months after that, began eating according to Dr. McDougall’s plan. Right away, my daughter’s ibs improved dramatically, and we were all encouraged. But also right away, I began having similar symptoms to ibs, for the first time in my life. Other McDougallers said this was normal after switching from SAD to McDougalling, just temporary, etc., so I ignored it. Even though the thought never occurred to me that I’d never experienced this with other experiments in diet that I’d tried out previously. Time went along, life was busy, and I got used to ignoring my symptoms, which became worse and worse over the years. By the 10th year of McDougalling (my only McDougall slip-ups were that I never quit coffee for more than a few months at a time, and we would eat out, about once every two or three months, in either Japanese or Indian restaurants, and have vegan dishes with oil added…we ordered a vegan pizza now and then too, but the place where we got that was not into using much oil, so it was much lower fat if it was vegan)– I was 100% vegan for over 10 years, and 99% oil free during that time. My health got so terrible, and I had gotten so used to just ignoring, even denying my problems, and finally it came to the point where I HAD to figure out what was wrong…I was sick each and every day…BAD sick, and looked terrible too. I was starving and eating tons and tons of food each day, thinking this is what McDougall said to do.

After lots of digging and trial and error, and reading over discussion boards of celiac organizations, I discovered, through a lot of difficulty and a lot of TIME, that apparently for me, all of the bread, pasta, grainy foods I was eating abundantly in place of the stuff I’d dropped from my diet had instigated either a gluten intolerance or full-blown celiac disease. It took me 18 months to get back to anywhere near normal, and along the way, during the healing of my chewed up intestines, I became intolerant to some other foods.

This idea, of gluten intolerance or other carbohydrate intolerance, lectin intolerance, etc., doesn’t seem to go over well in discussion with most other cooked vegans. The raw folks are quite open to the idea; however, my attempts at being raw have all been failures. Now I eat fish, lots of fish, becuase I can’t eat soy anymore. Corn is questionable in small amounts. I took up eggs to have somethign to eat, and now seem to have on and off intolerance of them too.

I feel the McDougall diet screwed up my body. I’ve seen others on his message board with things like ulcerative colitis, different autoimmune diseases, diabetes, etc., who didn’t seem to be doing well with either the gluten or other starches or lectins in the legumes, etc. They are usually treated as just not following the rules…there is big denial going on there, and they either get worse by sticking ever more strictly to ridiculously limited forms of the diet, or they disappear from the board.

This is my story of veganism…not only didn’t work for me, but turned me from a healthy person to a sicko. I don’t wanna be militant or angry, but it’s hard to be happy about it. I would have liked hearing a litte bit of warning that so much grain could possibly harm some people…maybe I would have listened to it. I remember my old SAD days of eating, when I was healthy,
happy, and even skinny, and could eat and enjoy whatever I wanted…they’re gone forever now, because I can never eat
anything with gluten in it ever again, and have to be extremely careful about what I eat, have to watch out for other intolerances that tend to pop up out of nowhere, etc. Starch-based veganism is obviously not for everyone…too bad most people find that out after the fact. Now, in addition to having to be careful about my food selection, I also have to wrangle with my own ethical issues over eating fish, but havne’t found out another way to just have enough to eat.