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My vegan mentality
Are you vegan Gabe?
Ah! The inquisitive question, regardless of how we express ourselves there will always be the need for a quick answer that satisfies the impatient ones. My short answer is no, but in the long answer I say yes.
The reason I don’t claim to be a full vegan has to do with the checklist some radical proponents of this movement have. For starters, I acknowledge that some supplements I take are made with bovine gelatin, and certain items I consume may have refined sugar. I also own some old leather items that I think would be a waste to throw in the garbage and honestly, I don’t mind using them. That’s it, but I’d rather say I’m not and avoid unnecessary reactions.
I’ll talk about the vegan zealot more as well as my view on veganism in the next part of this series, but for now I feel it’s enough to say that while I believe all the reasonings are valid, not everybody can or has to apply them to finally feel like they are doing something positive.
In the long answer where I consider myself vegan, I explain how this is all a mentality for a purpose, and it starts by quitting major animal product consumption, and down the line implementing other approaches that further the notion of eliminating animal use for our pleasure.
Some people rightly say that there are different shades of veganism, and I agree with that as long as it takes into consideration the central idea of reducing or eliminating animal products from the market. It’s all about the principles.
So that’s why I don’t hold the title at all, but at heart I am a vegan.
Now, I am not the proud vegan, activist, name-caller, pissed off plant-human, and advocate of this lifestyle. While I have my beliefs in why a plant-based diet is superior than diets based on animal products, I don’t push for people to change or switch, or become aware of the factory farm cruelty. I don’t make people feel bad about their food choices, demean them, or whatever guilt-tripping mechanisms a few vegans have.
I am a firm believer that everybody is doing what they consider right and healthy, I don’t believe that anybody see things the way I do and even if they did, I wouldn’t expect my approach from them. Sure, I have to admit the mask effect that’s required to ignore the reality when we talk about animal cruelty alone, but I also wore that mask myself for all my life, so I understand.
I do things because I feel they are right for me, my family, my future, the environment, and of course as a whole: for my beloved Gaia. I write about it because I love writing my thoughts, and I talk about it only with people who have interest and ask me questions. To me talking about diets is like talking about my sexual life, nobody is interested in me telling them about it, but if I am asked, I’ll talk about it to the extent that is required by the conversation, nothing more and nothing less.
Health markers
As I said before, the second reason to consider a plant-based diet, right after my rejection for factory farming, was health. A little background of myself, I have a family history of heart disease from my mother’s side, her father had 4 heart attacks, she had one herself along with over 10 stents in the last 14 years, both her siblings had open heart surgery, and to top it all I look just like my mom, which by default makes me a very attractive fellow.
I started getting more serious about my physicals and blood work past the age of 30, and what I found was that, as expected, my cholesterol was high. This was around the time I decided to get in shape again, clean up my diet, and become more conscious about my food choices that supposedly could influence cholesterol build-up.
I was well aware that dietary cholesterol had no impact in blood serum cholesterol, and I digested Peter Attia’s understanding of LDL particles rather than LDL count. In a nutshell, this meant that while LDL was a strong marker for atherosclerosis, the typical test we take at the doctor was a reference but not the true picture of how LDL can be detrimental.
Without getting into unnecessary minutia of blood cholesterol and arteries, my dead-end was that I still had high cholesterol and I wasn’t sure if it was the normal kind or the bad one. I could have taken the NMR test but I didn’t, in the end what really mattered to me was to lower that LDL through diet alone.
I tried everything that was purportedly good to raise HDL and lower LDL, I lowered my body fat percentage, ate low in saturated fats, I did keto for over a year, low fat after that, intermittent fasting, and so many other dietary approaches and on each stage I checked my cholesterol, and it was always high. Not the kind of high I enjoy.
Another thing that, for some reason, started showing up on the last 2 years preceding my vegan diet were elevated liver enzymes. I still don’t know well why this started being an issue, but I knew it was there. I learned that these markers could be elevated for up to 7 days following weightlifting, which made sense for me and my lifestyle, but it was still a cause of concern anyways.
Results
I wasn’t fully eating a plant-based diet when I did my last bloodwork, I still had traces of dairy here and there, however we are not here defining a specific and strict diet approach, but rather the effects of eliminating as much as possible the consumption of animal products. Most importantly for this topic, at this point I had already stopped eating meat and most animal products that contained cholesterol.
For the first time in my adult history I saw my cholesterol in range along with everything else. Liver enzymes were fine as well, although I’m not sure if this had anything to do with my diet changes but it was a pleasant surprise anyways.
At the moment my intuition told me it had to do with the obvious change in diet, and then I got a synchronistic confirmation by a friend who was doing her PhD work on the key cholesterol enzymes for the development of new drugs, and as she explained the process it made sense how my blood serum cholesterol was lower and within a healthy range.
Having zero dietary cholesterol fixes the excess of it in my blood: since the body produces all the cholesterol it needs, the additional one tends to go floating around and wreaking havoc in my arteries. This is due to the genetic hand I was dealt when born.
It’s worth noting that only animal products contain cholesterol, plants don’t.
In all honesty, I’m still open to the possibility of getting another hit from high cholesterol in one of my blood tests, and to find out that this wasn’t the solution after all, but so far this seems to be the only thing that has worked and it’s a welcomed side effect from my dietary approach.
A view on veganism
I have a concept on the vegan movement which is the purpose of lowering the consumption of animal products, with the goal of eliminating the current production practices. To me, being vegan is more about this idea of contributing in any possible way to this objective, so anything that can help us move forward in this direction is great.
Now, like in any other way of living, there are always radical practices that seem more cult-related than flexible understandings of reality as a whole. What I mean is that thanks to some groups, veganism has become to many this extreme approach and almost fanatic attitude towards food, an all or nothing mentality.
Being a nutrition coach and adviser allows me to see beyond the constricted veil of this drastic view, I see it too much in other communities. As with most things, there’s a spectrum in my concept for approaching a plant-based diet. From the zero-waste raw-vegan to the lacto-ovo pescatarian, there are so many ways one can design and live a vegetarian lifestyle.
Before getting into the different shades of plant-based diets, I want to acknowledge a sub-group who still puts a good effort into reducing animal product consumption: flexitarians. These people normally eat a vegetarian diet but they still include meat now and then. So, while they still include meat in their diets, they do conscious work to lower the frequency and quantity of it, and I am particularly grateful for them.
I’ve talked about why I consider a plant-based diet to be superior over other approaches to vegetarian diets. In essence I feel that the least nutritious and detrimental food is meat, that’s where most people start and I feel it’s perhaps the best option for anybody considering a vegetarian diet.
After ditching meat (pork, veal, beef, basically any mammal), some people might consider consuming poultry still. While not truly a vegetarian diet at this point (although some call this a pesco-pollo vegetarian diet), I think chicken is farther away from us in the animal family to be a little more neutral in terms of the meat itself. However, current chicken production is on the same level as anything else factory farmed, making it a terrible food energetically.
9 billion chickens are slaughtered for food every year in the US (that’s almost 2 billion more than humans in the world right now), and about 50 billion worldwide.
Taking chicken out of the diet leaves seafood, eggs and dairy as the rest of the animal products. There are several combinations here that people might do, depending on what they eat or not, there’s pescatarians (some include dairy and or eggs, others don’t), lacto-ovo vegetarian (dairy and eggs), lacto vegetarian (just dairy), and finally vegan.
The shades of veganism can be very wide and dull to list, it may include not eating honey for some, all the way to avoiding the usage of cosmetics tested on animals, leather, fur, wool, and any other material derived from animals. The bottom line is to stop contributing to the animal industry by and large.
For completion, I want to mention the raw-vegan, who eats nothing but raw vegetables and fruits, basically nothing that requires cooking. Similarly, there are the fruitarians, and there’s a whole subset of approaches to this lifestyle that I won’t get into here. I’m sure we can add in more styles and combinations in this vegetarian continuum, but these groups are the general approaches.
My bottom line
I believe all these are commendable and respectable decisions, it takes a lot of inside courage and change to adopt a diet of any kind that restricts and avoids contributing to the current state of food production and consumption, they all have in mind the need to avoid food groups for health and ethical reasons.
I honestly feel that these changes can be done by anyone who finds it suitable for their life, but only those who have an internal motive to avoid food groups of any kind are the ones who sustain the diet and adopt it as a lifestyle.
If you noticed, in the last two paragraphs I have bolden the inner part of the drive that incites people to make these diet changes. As you already know from the earlier parts of this series, restrictive diets are not easy to get into with all the societal factors at play, it must come from a true and honest intention to avoid foods if you are to never have them again. The same rejection you may have from eating a live grasshopper or anything else you might find unappealing and distasteful.
Most people are not seeing the full picture, and it’s not because they don’t know or admit it, we tend to refuse to see things when they are painful, nobody wants to experience pain and guilt if they can avoid it. I certainly avoided it for decades, I know what it feels to look the other way because of how hard it is to accept that reality.
It’s painful to admit that we have been tricked and fooled to believe we need animal products, and it makes us feel uncomfortable with ourselves for all the wrongness we did in the past. But we can either continue to love the lie, or begin anew with awareness and mindful decisions around our food.
One night I was in deep meditation, communing with Gaia, and for the second time she showed me how unnecessary this suffering across the globe is. The amount of pain, misery, and death coming only from the animals in the planet has increased terribly.
This all goes into the energetic field of the Planet, and while this is not the best place for me to explain how emotions generate frequencies, it’s important to know that every single thought and emotion contributes to the electromagnetic field where we all decode our reality.
This in turn affects directly our state of consciousness and feelings in a negative way by the low frequency nature of the suffering and anguish all these animals are being put through. Note that this is not pseudoscience or a mystical belief at this point of our technology, it’s mainstream science already, but it hasn’t been popularized yet, no wonder why.
Gaia also showed me how absurd all this negative charge is on the Planet, which ends up affecting us at a mental level, all for the sake of money and profit and not really for basic needs or survivability and nourishment.
Another important note, something I see a lot in the fitness circles, is that there are some trendy vegans that don’t have this internal motivation, and they seem to do it by the wrong notion that being vegan is healthy no matter what, it isn’t! We can argue that it can be less detrimental than other diets, but not when this vegan variation is centered on processed foods, it leaves much to be desired.
This is typical of those who don’t want to abandon their dependency of the industry to satisfy their palates, and they focus on buying and consuming foods made with ingredients that pass the “vegan test”, but they are absolutely processed and completely devoid of nutrients, on top of the calorie density that characterizes them. But then again, to each their own.
Now, there’s nothing wrong in my view with sliding up and down the spectrum of dietary choices at any given time, people make their own choices and there are so many hybrid approaches that can allow you to simply reduce the consumption of animal products, without becoming the outcast of your family and friends.
What you do doesn’t matter as much as the intention of why you do it.
Other series posts