I want to start by explaining what made me want to change my diet. That’s pretty difficult, because of how easy it is. Since I was a kid I knew being vegan was the right thing to do, like really obviously right, the ethics equivalent of 2+2=4. Factory farms suck, and almost all animal products come from factory farms, and that’s the entire argument. Like, there are a couple things you could add to that, but it’s not like we need the details, or like they’re fun to think about!
Instead, I’ll start by explaining why I left it so long. How, even though I knew it was the right thing to do, I made it to my early twenties and this millennium’s early teens as just a vegetarian, without even having tried. I had some pretty good excuses!
Allergies. There are some common vegetables I can’t eat, which was fine as an omnivore and ok as a vegetarian, but would make life way harder as a vegan. And it just seemed unfair to ask myself to take this leap when most people who can safely eat carrots still choose to eat corpses.
I was scared of it making me ill. I’m kinda generally sickly, not in any specific or diagnosable way, just -1SD physically and immunologically flimsier than average. So this was a big deal, partly because stamina was the main thing limiting me and I didn’t want to make that limit any more limiting, but mostly because when you’re sorta bleh all the time it gets hard to notice something making you bleher. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve only noticed I have a cold once I’m mostly over it, and unlike contagious illnesses, nutrition problems aren’t something you recover from without noticing the problem.
I was terrified of it going too well. If I didn’t end up living off potatoes and rice, and it didn’t make me sick, and it wasn’t painful or expensive, then I didn’t want to meet the person that might make me into. Like, if it turned out veganism had no real downside, and basically everyone I knew and loved and respected was avoiding it for no good reason, I might start seeing them differently!
For a long time these held a stalemate against the obvious. Then two things happened.
The first was that I noticed I had a mild intolerance to egg yolks, and decided to stop eating them. Then I asked “if I’m cutting this out because it slightly messes with my throat, why am I still eating things that severely mess with my conscience?”, and couldn’t answer myself.
The other was that a cute British chick I vaguely knew mentioned she was considering doing Veganuary, and I wanted something to talk to her about. She didn’t end up doing it, and we never ended up talking about it, but by the time I found that out I’d already decided.
Small reasons, I know! But big reasons can be too big to see clearly up close, and little weights can tip an equilibrium pretty far.
The first couple months were pretty great! I was on watch for changes to my physical health, and didn’t see any. I was still steadily increasing my lifts at the gym, still holding down my job and my hobbies. I’d skip meals when snafus meant alternatives were eating cheese, getting takeout, or having pasta for the fifth time that week. But I never went hungry, and I always knew I could just call the local Chinese place if all else failed.
The biggest change was how much better I felt about myself. I didn’t expect that! When I went vegetarian, it just made me feel worse, because I couldn’t hide behind conformity any more! And even as a vegan, I was still the person who had paid all those people to torture all those animals, who wasn’t doing anything inventive or scalable to make up for it, and who didn’t argue when the old guy I sometimes went shopping for put salmon and yogurt and catfood on his list. But apparently, “I’m not currently actively directly personally complicit in something completely inarguably abominable any more” was enough to get my conscience to chill!
This was a big deal. Like, I never thought my brain was very convincing when it told me “just so you know, if you stepped in front of that truck right now, it would arguably increase global utility”. But there’s a difference between being able to shrug those thoughts off and not having them in the first place. And it turns out that difference matters!
Then I got a bad cold. And after I recovered from that, I got another bad cold. Friends and family told me they were worried about me, and what my diet was doing to me. I told them that I got bad colds all the time, and it was kind of funny that they were only worried now I was vegan. Sure, it was weird I got two in a row, and weirder that I got them in summer. But it was still within normal variation. And it wasn’t like I was lifting less, or noticing weight changes. From the inside, it sure didn’t feel like a diet problem!
But things kept getting worse. I got more bad colds. My skin got grayer, my temper got shorter. I went out to parties, then curled up in the coatroom and slept. That’s not normal for me, I don’t usually go to parties!
If I’d been studying, I’d have dropped out. If I’d been in a relationship, we’d have broken up. If I’d had a demanding job, they’d have fired me. But I didn’t have any of those lines to cross, so I just kept going out of stubbornness.
Eventually a day came when I noticed I couldn’t even hold down my dumb corporate job. That my lifts had been steadily getting lighter for a while. That I actually was losing weight, now, like scarily quickly. That I was starving myself.
And I decided, then, that no amount of moral clarity was worth the way I was feeling. That if it came down to animals or me, I was sorry, but I had to choose me.
But I figured I should try one last thing first. What if I kept eating vegan food, but forced myself to eat more of it? I knew even at the time that was a dumb idea, since I’d been messed up for a while, and it only really addressed my newest symptom. But I wasn’t thinking clearly, and if there was any way I might not have to make that choice, I felt like I had to try. So I tried.
This completely and immediately solved the entire problem!
In about a month, I was back to my usual level of bleh, with no side effects. I’m still vegan today.
That’s the end of my story. Thanks for reading!
You’re probably wondering why I said that stuff I said. Like, it’s true, and that’s a pretty good reason by itself! But maybe I owe you a moral with this story?
Let me start by trying to explain what happened. With guesswork and hindsight, I think my root problem was that I was the opposite of those guys in food deserts or literal deserts who need to eat crazy amounts of their restricted diet to get all the nutrients they need. Vegan food has more vitamins per unit calorie and fewer calories per unit volume, so a check that goes “is he getting all his nutrients, and is his belly full?” can get a positive result even for someone who’s in caloric deficit. And I just kept trusting my gut, not noticing what was happening until it got too severe to ignore.
And I don’t think I’m dumb, yanno? I took multivitamin pills, and even remembered to chew them. I ate clams and cashews to compensate for the missing protein. I did the research, and did the stuff the research said to do. No-one mentioned the satiety thing!
This isn’t even the only time something like this happened. My cousin tried to be vegan for like a year, started feeling really nauseous most days, almost dropped out of college over it, then went back to being an omnivore and got better. Much later, by coincidence, we figured out this was almost certainly almost entirely some kind of weird time-delayed intolerance to a specific kind of fake meat. Like, he’d eat some for dinner, be fine the rest of the day, and then spend the day after feeling like he was about to puke. Sure, anecdata, but also: two nickels!
So yeah, when you guys talk about “people can easily be vegan without health costs” vs “veganism can hurt you”, consider that both of these statements could be true, because even sorta smart people can fail to do easy things if they don’t know what they are. That’s the main thing I want you to take away.
Well, that and “If you somehow speedrun from basically anorexic to basically not anorexic overnight, you noclip into this magical state where you get to say ‘hmm, I think I’ll have a second helping of this supernaturally delicious restaurant food, for health reasons’ over and over for like two weeks straight.” It’s nowhere near worth what it took for me to get there, but it was a pretty neat consolation prize!
tw: diet, exercise, illness, ethics, suicide mention
I want to start by explaining what made me want to change my diet. That’s pretty difficult, because of how easy it is. Since I was a kid I knew being vegan was the right thing to do, like really obviously right, the ethics equivalent of 2+2=4. Factory farms suck, and almost all animal products come from factory farms, and that’s the entire argument. Like, there are a couple things you could add to that, but it’s not like we need the details, or like they’re fun to think about!
Instead, I’ll start by explaining why I left it so long. How, even though I knew it was the right thing to do, I made it to my early twenties and this millennium’s early teens as just a vegetarian, without even having tried. I had some pretty good excuses!
For a long time these held a stalemate against the obvious. Then two things happened.
The first was that I noticed I had a mild intolerance to egg yolks, and decided to stop eating them. Then I asked “if I’m cutting this out because it slightly messes with my throat, why am I still eating things that severely mess with my conscience?”, and couldn’t answer myself.
The other was that a cute British chick I vaguely knew mentioned she was considering doing Veganuary, and I wanted something to talk to her about. She didn’t end up doing it, and we never ended up talking about it, but by the time I found that out I’d already decided.
Small reasons, I know! But big reasons can be too big to see clearly up close, and little weights can tip an equilibrium pretty far.
The first couple months were pretty great! I was on watch for changes to my physical health, and didn’t see any. I was still steadily increasing my lifts at the gym, still holding down my job and my hobbies. I’d skip meals when snafus meant alternatives were eating cheese, getting takeout, or having pasta for the fifth time that week. But I never went hungry, and I always knew I could just call the local Chinese place if all else failed.
The biggest change was how much better I felt about myself. I didn’t expect that! When I went vegetarian, it just made me feel worse, because I couldn’t hide behind conformity any more! And even as a vegan, I was still the person who had paid all those people to torture all those animals, who wasn’t doing anything inventive or scalable to make up for it, and who didn’t argue when the old guy I sometimes went shopping for put salmon and yogurt and catfood on his list. But apparently, “I’m not currently actively directly personally complicit in something completely inarguably abominable any more” was enough to get my conscience to chill!
This was a big deal. Like, I never thought my brain was very convincing when it told me “just so you know, if you stepped in front of that truck right now, it would arguably increase global utility”. But there’s a difference between being able to shrug those thoughts off and not having them in the first place. And it turns out that difference matters!
Then I got a bad cold. And after I recovered from that, I got another bad cold. Friends and family told me they were worried about me, and what my diet was doing to me. I told them that I got bad colds all the time, and it was kind of funny that they were only worried now I was vegan. Sure, it was weird I got two in a row, and weirder that I got them in summer. But it was still within normal variation. And it wasn’t like I was lifting less, or noticing weight changes. From the inside, it sure didn’t feel like a diet problem!
But things kept getting worse. I got more bad colds. My skin got grayer, my temper got shorter. I went out to parties, then curled up in the coatroom and slept. That’s not normal for me, I don’t usually go to parties!
If I’d been studying, I’d have dropped out. If I’d been in a relationship, we’d have broken up. If I’d had a demanding job, they’d have fired me. But I didn’t have any of those lines to cross, so I just kept going out of stubbornness.
Eventually a day came when I noticed I couldn’t even hold down my dumb corporate job. That my lifts had been steadily getting lighter for a while. That I actually was losing weight, now, like scarily quickly. That I was starving myself.
And I decided, then, that no amount of moral clarity was worth the way I was feeling. That if it came down to animals or me, I was sorry, but I had to choose me.
But I figured I should try one last thing first. What if I kept eating vegan food, but forced myself to eat more of it? I knew even at the time that was a dumb idea, since I’d been messed up for a while, and it only really addressed my newest symptom. But I wasn’t thinking clearly, and if there was any way I might not have to make that choice, I felt like I had to try. So I tried.
This completely and immediately solved the entire problem!
In about a month, I was back to my usual level of bleh, with no side effects. I’m still vegan today.
That’s the end of my story. Thanks for reading!
You’re probably wondering why I said that stuff I said. Like, it’s true, and that’s a pretty good reason by itself! But maybe I owe you a moral with this story?
Let me start by trying to explain what happened. With guesswork and hindsight, I think my root problem was that I was the opposite of those guys in food deserts or literal deserts who need to eat crazy amounts of their restricted diet to get all the nutrients they need. Vegan food has more vitamins per unit calorie and fewer calories per unit volume, so a check that goes “is he getting all his nutrients, and is his belly full?” can get a positive result even for someone who’s in caloric deficit. And I just kept trusting my gut, not noticing what was happening until it got too severe to ignore.
And I don’t think I’m dumb, yanno? I took multivitamin pills, and even remembered to chew them. I ate clams and cashews to compensate for the missing protein. I did the research, and did the stuff the research said to do. No-one mentioned the satiety thing!
This isn’t even the only time something like this happened. My cousin tried to be vegan for like a year, started feeling really nauseous most days, almost dropped out of college over it, then went back to being an omnivore and got better. Much later, by coincidence, we figured out this was almost certainly almost entirely some kind of weird time-delayed intolerance to a specific kind of fake meat. Like, he’d eat some for dinner, be fine the rest of the day, and then spend the day after feeling like he was about to puke. Sure, anecdata, but also: two nickels!
So yeah, when you guys talk about “people can easily be vegan without health costs” vs “veganism can hurt you”, consider that both of these statements could be true, because even sorta smart people can fail to do easy things if they don’t know what they are. That’s the main thing I want you to take away.
Well, that and “If you somehow speedrun from basically anorexic to basically not anorexic overnight, you noclip into this magical state where you get to say ‘hmm, I think I’ll have a second helping of this supernaturally delicious restaurant food, for health reasons’ over and over for like two weeks straight.” It’s nowhere near worth what it took for me to get there, but it was a pretty neat consolation prize!