Why I Stopped Being Vegan After 7 Years
Why I Stopped Being Vegan
After 7 years.
I was vegan for just shy of 7 years. It’s been on my mind lately because it started as a New Years resolution (it’s almost that time!) and ended up sticking… for a long time. Until it didn’t.
I’ve wanted to share this story for a really long time because it’s a huge part of my story as a person, and I share a lot of personal information on this blog. I do that for a reason - I believe in honesty and transparency. I believe in sharing my honest feedback and experiences with you. This has been a huge part of my wellness journey, and I think it’s important to share so that you can get the full story. Also, sometimes lifestyle changes don’t stick! Sometimes they aren’t forever! I think the reason that it’s taken me two years to write this post is that you don’t often hear people say hey, I tried this for a while and then decided it wasn’t for me. The wellness world is so extreme. It’s all or nothing in so many ways, ways that I think are slowly changing. Success stories don’t always have to be some version of I tried this, it changed my life, and here I am 20 years later! Success stories can also be the story of somebody correcting course a few times.
I also have hesitated to share my story because… vegans can be really extreme. The first time I posted a non-vegan meal on my Instagram feed I got a ton of really aggressive DM’s about eating poached eggs. Eggs! Since then my thought process has been if somebody screamed at me for posting a picture of eggs, what happens if I write out my entire store? Maybe it’s all the CBD coursing through my veins, but I just don’t feel as scared of that anymore.
I went vegan for a multitude of reasons that are all tied up in one another. Like most women of a certain age, I don’t know how to eat without food rules. I was college athlete at the time I went vegan and needed my body to be functioning optimally at all times. I had started learning about the Standard American Diet and really didn’t like what I was learning. But perhaps what influenced my decision to go vegan in January of 2011 is that my mom had died 4 months before. My mom died from a long battle with colon cancer and I was desperate to be as healthy as possible. Going vegan seemed like the most promising option. Off I went.
I started my vegan journey on January 1, 2011. I knew that it would be easier for me to stick with being vegan if I announced it as a resolution and if I made the change at the same time of year when millions of other people are working on themselves. I was right.
I really loved being vegan. I really did. I fell right into the stereotype you hear about vegans and talks about my new lifestyle to anybody who would listen. I lost a ton of weight without trying. I just looked lean. My mind felt clear, my body was energized, and I felt calm. I felt incredibly optimistic about my health. Going vegan during such a difficult and painful time in my life gave me something to pour my energy into. It was my life preserver. This is when I began to realize that I had a greater impact on my own health than I’d previously believed. It was so liberating! It’s so crazy when you start to notice how your body can react to different things and then make it feel better! My time in athletics had trained me to think of my body as a machine. I had been looking at everything externally. Why hadn’t I been thinking about what I was putting inside the machine?
I never found making the switch to being vegan particularly difficult. The food part always felt natural: eat lots of vegetables, look at the nutritional value of foods to make sure you’re getting a balanced diet, don’t eat processed crap, etc. The hardest part, which I don’t think will come as a huge shock, was getting other people used to my veganism. Like any good millennial I turned to the internet. I started a goddamn blog with a huge focus on vegan living. I learned quickly how to change the subject when people questioned my food choices. I figured out how to plan ahead for social gatherings so that my eating wouldn’t be too disruptive. Looking back, though, this is problematic. Look at how much effort I was putting into my diet! This is why (spoiler alert!) I think I hit a wall. I couldn’t just be vegan. I had to be super, super vegan. And honestly? It was so much work to keep up. I was burning myself out.
I kept up all that work for about 7 years. During that time I trained for and ran a few half marathons. I like to point this achievement out to anybody who thinks being vegan makes you some sort of lethargic skeleton. There were a few years when my body responded to veganism incredibly well.
In my 7 years as a vegan I gave up gluten a few times. I dabbled in raw veganism, where you only eat raw fruits and veggies, a few different times. I taught and took dozens of hot yoga classes each month. On the outside I looked like the epitome of health. I was thin, lean, athletic. I would blog about smoothie recipes and ways to talk to your family about being vegan. I met amazing people. In so many different ways this time of life was great. I grew into my adult self. I learned who I was. But in so many ways I was also completely burning myself out. It’s a slippery slope to attach yourself to a healthy identity because inevitably something will happen. For me, it was getting into a gnarly car accident. Following the accident I almost immediately put on a ton of weight because I was used to working out for hours every day. There’s nothing wrong with working out for hours a day - I still do it! I love moving! But my identity was tied up in being athletic. I can see now that I used fitness to avoid painful emotions and my faltering mental health. When I couldn’t move without pain for almost a year, it was a total brain fuck. I had been using exercise to keep my depression at bay. When that was no longer an option, I felt completely lost. I didn’t know who I was. I know that sounds dramatic, but I have the tendency to be incredibly extreme with everything that I do.
I missed movement. I particularly missed the yoga practice that I had put so much time and discipline into. I needed something to do to take my mind off being injured (I was also planning my wedding at the time, ha!) so I got into mindfulness. I realized that I needed balance in my life. I needed sustainability. Vegan blogging switched to thoughts on wellness and balanced living. Oh hi, Donuts + Down Dog!
The straw that broke the (vegan) camels back, as they say, was a quick weekend getaway with my husband and some friends. We would be staying in a cabin on the Kitsap Peninsula in a pretty remote area, so we had to plan out our meals for a few days. My friends were planning fun group breakfasts and snacks while I was trying to plan out a few days of solo vegan meals. At the time I had added some weird rules to my diet (a not-great way that I manage stress), so along with being vegan I was also trying to be gluten-free and oil free. It was exhausting. I wasn’t excited. Dan and I had been married for two months. As I sat planning my food for the weekend I imagined our future. I saw years and years of planning separate meals. I saw myself obsessing over food during special, celebratory moments. I realized how tired I was - mentally and physically. Being vegan no longer made me feel energized, healthy, or vibrant. My food obsession was consuming all of my thoughts. My body felt like lead; I was always crazy fatigued. Did I want to spend the rest of my life like this? What the hell was I doing?
Realizing that I felt stressed about my food for the weekend, I started reflecting. I thought about how terrible I’d felt physically and emotionally the year prior. Part of it was the stress of planning a wedding and recovering from my car accident, sure, but I could tell this was much deeper than that. I had no energy. I was always hungry and always eating, but at the same time realized that it had been months since I felt properly nourished. When I first went vegan my body was lean, energized, and powerful. I had been gaining weight like crazy, could barely drag myself out of bed, and often felt incredibly weak. I resented the rules I had given myself. I realized that I was starting to hate being vegan.
Over that weekend with friends, I ended my (almost!) 7-year vegan streak. The switch wasn’t dramatic or very exciting. I started with a bite of fresh crab that we caught on the beach and then continued by eating what was on the table. I didn’t get sick at all. I get asked that question a lot. During my time as a vegan, I would get sick if I accidentally had something made with eggs or dairy. It sounds kooky, but I really believe that I didn’t get sick because my mind and my body were so ready to change. My mind specifically. I really believe in the mind-body connection. I felt so sure during that weekend, during my first few bites of food-without-rules, that my brain was telling my body that it was OK. That it didn’t need to freak out. My brain was like the sidekick to my body saying chill, bro. Who knows. I’m sure I’ll get a lot of angry messages about this quackery, but I really felt it. Bodies are nuts!
When people, particularly really hardcore vegans, hear that I’m no longer vegan it often is received as if I am now the complete opposite of a vegan. It’s like I went from veganism to chugging gallons of milk breakfast, lunch, and dinner while eating plates of bacon. The outrage and indignation are that intense. In reality, though, I’m still very plant-based. Today, for instance, I’ve eaten fully vegan without trying. I genuinely enjoy fruits and vegetables as food and hate how my body feels when it’s full of shit. That’s the thing about being vegan that was great for me: I found a new baseline for my body and realized how good I could feel. It gave me a new gold standard.
I still really believe in plant-based eating. I have absolutely nothing against vegans.
For me, however, it’s healthier to not have a label on my diet. I do things like intermittent fasting with a lot of caution. I’ve learned (and it only took me 30 years to get here!!!!) that strict rules and intense labels always end in disaster for me. That’s why I am so intensely focused on balance. Balance is a good goal for me. Balance is a good label to assign to my lifestyle. The thing that I continue learning is that it will always be a work in progress. I’m thankful that I have such a strong self-reflection practice. Otherwise, I’m convinced I would be white-knuckling life as a hardcore vegan. And I would be hating every moment of it.
I also really believe that your body needs different things at different times and that it’s important to listen to what those needs are. I have very different physical and nutritional needs now than I did when I was rowing in college. I will have very different physical and nutritional needs when I’m pregnant when I’m 50, and when I’m 100. That’s just life. It’s unrealistic to assume that your body is going to need the exact same things forever. Bodies change. We should constantly be course-correcting to feel our bests. Don’t you think that we deserve that? Shouldn’t that be our right, as human beings, to feel good in our bodies? To feel well?
I think so.
An update from Lizzie: May 2021.
When I first published this blog post in December of 2019 I was terrified.
So terrified, in fact, that I held on to it for over two years. That terror stemmed from the wrath I knew I would get from the vegan community. This wasn’t exactly in my head, either. The first time that I posted a photo to Instagram with a photo of a fried egg, I was immediately ripped into by a follower who wouldn’t let up. They methodically went through years of posts, leaving pointed nasty comments along the way. Then she blocked me. As somebody who has actively chosen to have a social media presence, and to share a bevy of personal information and anecdotes, I expected this. When you willingly show up online you knowingly sign up for a level of trolling. Because of how search engines work, blog posts are much more visible long-term than social media posts. I knew what I was getting myself into. That’s why I waited so goddamn long. Partially, to process my own relationship with food, and partially to prepare myself for the trolls to come.
When I published this post in 2019 I knew that there would be some trolling, but even my anxious millennial mind underestimated how much there would be. Strangers have been really, really invested in my breakup with veganism. Aggressively so. This is my most read blog post to date by a long shot. I’m still not sure how it has gained so much traction around the interweb but, based on the traffic trends and waves of ferocious comments and messages, I have an inkling that it’s getting shared in certain circles with instructions to rip into me. Ironically, the reason that I waited so long to stop being vegan (and to get help for the eating disorder that it sparked), was for fear of backlash or abuse from sections of the vegan community. Each angry comment, rambling email, or nasty DM only confirms that my fears were valid. It makes me incredibly sad. Sad for myself, sure, but mainly sad because I do still very strongly believe that there are so many good things about being vegan. There are so many wonderful people in the vegan community. So many people have had and will have incredible experiences exploring the many layers of what it means to be vegan.
So why the update?
Since so many people are still reading this post and sending me angry messages (I turned commenting off on this post AND deleted them all), I wanted to stand up for myself. When people come to your personal blog/the website for your business and start ALL CAPS TYPING at you, it feels a lot like somebody has shown up on your doorstep screaming. It’s exhausting and invasive. The majority of the people that come here are clearly trolls (and likely won’t be swayed by anything I have to say), but I still feel strongly about articulating myself. For better or for worse, I am not the kind of person that can let this shit go without saying something.
I stand behind my belief that every goddamn human deserves to do what makes their body feel the best. Full stop. I am so ridiculously passionate about this belief that I turned it into a career. I’ve spent a decade taking complex courses, collecting certifications, and putting in thousands of hours with my holistic health and fitness coaching clients. I’m not saying this to imply superiority, but instead to demonstrate my personal experience and knowledge. But really, none of this matters. My decision to stop being vegan was a personal choice. I did what was best for me at the time. It changed my life in beautiful, positive, liberating ways. Removing the label and structure around my diet gave me back my mental health. By removing the constant stress I felt around food and learning how to properly listen to and nourish my body, I was also able to vastly lessen the intensity of my Interstitial Cystitis, a chronic pain condition for which there is currently no cure.
One comment that I found particularly fragmentary was that I wasn’t vegan for the “right reasons” (is this The Bachelor now?) and that my blog post was too “me” focused. I think that it’s important to break this down.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of reasons that somebody might go vegan. Reasons include (but are obviously not limited to): a passion for animal welfare and rights, concern for the sustainability of our food production, a desire to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and many other measurements of health, religious/spiritual beliefs, food sensitivities, social pressure, wanting to optimize athletic performance, wanting to “clean” up personal nutrition, and beyond. It is impossible for any single vegan, no matter how dedicated or educated, to embody all of those reasons all of the time. Each experience is unique, individual, and deeply personal. This particular commenter went on to tell me that my reason for being vegan was selfish, that it wasn’t valid since I wasn’t doing it for the animals, that I was self-centered. I chose to go vegan after my mom died from cancer. I was heartbroken, I was grasping at veganism and other wellness tools to calm my grief and anxiety. On a very high level, there is no right or wrong way to experience grief. On a much deeper level, how dare you tell a child (psychologically, losing a parent at 20 years old is still considered childhood trauma) that her response is not “right”. Being vegan because you want to lower your cholesterol, for example, is just as valid as going vegan because you believe in animal rights. Thousands of people will visit Seattle this year. No matter what brought them here, they all still ended up in the same place. Their presence here is equally valid. They’ve all made it to the same destination.
In regards to the comment that my blog post was too “me” focused… yes? This is my personal blog? I don’t claim to be an investigative journalist. One of the overarching purposes of Donuts + Down Dog is to share my honest and unfiltered experiences within the wellness world to empower my readers to do make the best choices for themselves. To inspire them to also fearlessly claim their own experiences. There is so much bullshit in the wellness world. There is so much dishonesty. There are so many topics that society has deemed inappropriate or taboo that are really just… universal human experiences. The majority of my content has a personal spin to it. All of my work as a holistic health and fitness coach was inspired by my own experiences. You don’t have to like reading my blog posts. But you also can’t come to my personal blog and then yell at me for writing personal anecdotes.
This is the first (and only) blog post that I’ve ever turned off commenting on. I got comments ranging from you made the wrong choice to comments that were straight-up verbally abusive. I felt unsafe in my own corner of the internet for honestly expressing my personal experience. Abuse is not, and will not ever be, tolerated in the Donuts + Down Dog community - online or in-person. This is not up for debate or discussion. If I feel unsafe, if I feel that my clients might be made to feel unsafe and/or triggered, I reserve the right to delete comments, block followers, and remove any content at any time. After all, this is my website. This is my personal blog. This is my space. I work intentionally every day to create a space where women can come without feeling judged, unsafe, pressured, or bad about themselves. I do this work because I fiercely want to advocate for women to have that experience in wellness.
My last thought - you are not allowed to invalidate or gaslight my experience. Or the experience of anybody else. Personal experiences, no matter if you agree or disagree with them, are personal. For me, my seven years as a vegan and active member of the vegan community began to trigger a deeply, deeply painful, and troubling eating disorder. At that moment I chose to prioritize my mental health above the passion of the vegan community, above the identity of vegan I had embodied for almost a decade, and above so many other things. I will never, ever shame somebody for prioritizing their mental health. I hope that you don’t either.
In summary: don’t be a dick.