Question from inbox: Greetings Curtis, I've been wanting to ask you what your conversion from being vegan was due to? Were you experiencing health problems. Very curious
Answer: I first started being vegan/vegetarian when I was a sophomore at the age of 19 in college since I read about the mistreatment of animals and some of the harmful effects of eating meat. The information was from PETA. I was a vegan for roughly about four months, lost a lot of weight but due to peer pressure, I decided to go back to eating meat. I then became a hardcore vegan/raw foodist again when I was in graduate school at the age of 22. I did it for four years for health reasons. I did lose a lot of weight and at one point weighed only 125 pounds. People even told me that I looked like I had AIDS. At the time, I dismissed them since I believed I was losing "waste". Towards the end of my fourth year into veganism, I came across a variety of information that veganism was not healthy and that eating meat was not bad for you. Most vegans become very close minded and religious in their approach to be vegan and become totally shut off to new information that may challenge their long held beliefs or lifestyle they may have embraced for a very long time. I am thankful I was open minded enough to receive new information and critique it. For many vegans, being vegan is their identity and they form egos around this identity hence the frequent elitists comments about what "meat eaters" do. Once people assume the vegan identity, they can't be wrong in following that a vegan diet. Their egos won't allow them too. That is why I have said that being a vegan is really an eating disorder because people who really get into are very insecure and seeking something to validate themselves. So if they are "wrong" in following a vegan diet, then triggers their toxic shame that is something is wrong with them and this causes them to delude themselves into believing that being a vegan is good. Nonetheless, I came across factual information which challenged my beliefs plus I started to apply logic about if eating meat was so bad then how come people have not been getting sick the whole time they were eating it which has been hundreds of thousands of years. Along with the information, I found myself craving eggs and salmon. I was craving cholesterol rich foods because your brain does not work without it! Our brains need animal fats and cholesterol to function properly and that is why vegetarian diets cause people's brains to shrink and often used by religious cults to brainwash people because being a vegan lowers brain activity. The cravings and the new information are why I decided to change and I will never look back! I did it for health purposes and once I realized being a vegan was not healthy, then I quit. I highly recommend that any vegan and raw foodist and even non-vegan check out the awesome book the "The Vegetarian Myth" by Lierre Keith. Phenomenal read indeed!
References:
www.beyondveg.com
http://www.sott.net/article/203114-Vegetarians-have-smaller-brains
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201102/does-vegetarianism-make-you-dumber