10 Years Later

Back in 2013 I was making waves. For real. It was truly the most transformational year of my life in all the best ways. With the flip of the calendar to what is now 2023, I secretly am hoping for another “best year ever.”

One of the big things that happened for me in 2013 was that I went vegan. Now, if you knew me prior to this moment then you understand how monumental this shift was. And if you’re new here, let me give you a little rundown.

I grew up eating the most standard Standard American Diet that you can imagine. When I ponder the Standard American Diet now I find hilarity in fact that it is coined the SAD diet because dang, that’s some truth hidden in plain sight.

Anyways, I was a processed food junkie as a kid. Breakfast time. Give me a box of cereal and some basic white cane sugar to dump on top of it. Yes, I was literally dumping SUGAR onto my sugar laden cereal and eating it straight up for breakfast. No milk, please and thanks. Lunch. Yeah, I’ll have some plain white rice. Maybe some chicken nuggets on the side. That’s it. No veggies, no sauce, no seasonings, nothing else. Dinner. Maybe nachos and cheese heated up in the microwave. I’d add that canned Fritos cheese dip to my plate of chips and top it with a mountain of shredded cheese. A few seconds in the microwave and I was in nacho heaven. Or maybe I’d have some boxed mashed potatoes and chicken, or boxed macaroni and cheese. Snacks. Yeah, gimme a Twix or KitKat, maybe some ice cream or some type of sugar filled candy. Remember Baby Bottle Pops and Fun Dip? Loved those!

My parents would cook, but it was never branching outside of the SAD realm. Any vegetables were most likely canned and just heated up without anything added to them. Fruit, forget about it, I wasn’t interested. And I very quickly grew to dislike red meat. I felt like I was chewing on a shoe. I couldn’t handle the texture of it. I found out when I was 28 that I just didn’t like red meat as a child because they cooked it well done. Give me medium rare and we’re good.

So that was a bit of my diet as a child. Sometimes when I think back on it I cringe, but at the same time I know that my parents were just doing the best they could and eating in that way was a very normal thing in the small rural town that I grew up in. Heck, it still is a very normal thing.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was, somewhere in the early 2000s, so 11 or 12 ish. I was pretty young and I started to develop digestive issues. I was constantly constipated and had acid reflux. It was killer. I couldn’t lay down flat without lighting up my esophagus. My mom was a nurse at a doctors office at the time so I had easy access to their “guidance.”

I was very quickly prescribed Prevacid and Benefiber or Miralax. Everything worked, until it didn’t. And it stopped working in a very short amount of time. I saw specialists and did the whole Western Medicine thing for a while, which was also (and still is) the normal thing there. Everyone told me that I needed to eat better but there was no guidance or help in that area. Combine that with the fact that the cafeteria at school would feed us funnel cakes for breakfast and sell Nutty Buddys at lunch, I didn’t stand a chance. So I didn’t change my diet.

I could write a whole book about this health journey, and someday I may, especially after learning all that I have learned and all the ways that I was guided into the wrong and often harmful directions that were not assisting me in healing at all.

After years of popping Tums like they were my lifeline, various prescriptions, misery, laxatives, pain, Imodium, stress, and everything in between there was finally a shift.

Fast forward back to 2013. I was a big Tumblr user at the time. What a website! Without Tumblr, Myspace, and Xanga (the OG blogging platform, who remembers?!) I would have never become a blogger and who knows where my creativity would have been channeled. But alas, I was blogging and connecting with other awesome people, some that I’m still in touch with to this day, on Tumblr. It was there that I saw someone go gluten free for some digestive issues that they were working through. I didn’t even know what gluten was at the time. Thank God for the internet though, because I quickly learned all about it and decided that it was something that I needed to try.

I don’t believe in coincidences, but coincidentally I was diagnosed with Lyme disease around the same time. I took a heavy round of Doxycycline (which is a whole other story for another day) at the time and it was rough, to say the least. I decided that I would try the whole gluten free thing for 2 weeks and if I was noticing improvements in my digestion then I would continue. If not, back to gluten I go. It didn’t even take me a week, only a few days, for my digestion to begin to sort itself out. Years of suffering that was alleviated by A FEW DAYS of removing gluten from my diet!! I was bowing down to the gluten free gods. What a gift!!

I was obsessing over this new shift in my body and I began to wonder how I could feel even better. Back to the internet I went and people were talking about removing dairy from their diets to feel even better. And what do you know, Earthlings popped up on Tumblr. I had literally no idea what Earthlings was. If you’re not familiar, it’s a documentary that reveals the horrors of the factory farming industry. It is not for the faint of heart, but I think it’s important to recognize and realize where your food is coming from.

I clicked that link and my life was changed forever. I was going vegan asap. And I was obsessing over it. I finished up some yogurt that I had in the refrigerator and then I was all in on veganism.

When I tell you that it was probably the best decision that I ever made for myself, I’m not joking in the slightest.

Remember, it was 2013. Veganism was becoming more popular in the blogging world and there were some amazing vegan restaurants in NYC and LA but it was far from mainstream, especially in western Pennsylvania. There was not an abundance of alternative options out there like there is now. Especially for a gluten free vegan. That meant that I was eating primarily fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and the occasional tofu or tempeh.

Talk about a shift from SAD to 99% plant based and 100% gluten free vegan… all in less than a month!

My health skyrocketed. I kept telling people that I didn’t know that your body was designed to feel as good as I felt. I thought that I found “the cure” to my health struggles. No more Lyme symptoms, no more acid reflux, no more constipation, no more feeling bad!

Three years later I started to recognize some symptoms popping up again. I was confused. What was going on? Why was this happening? I wondered if I was being exposed to gluten or if I was eating something that my body didn’t like.

I was experiencing hives and other weird skin rashes, extreme anxiety, heart palpitations, bloating, some constipation, and running or biking was becoming more of a challenge.

I suffered through those symptoms, among a few others, over 2 years. The second year I began to question my diet. I saw a lot of other vegans going back to eating animal products and I questioned it but wrestled with the ethics of it for an entire year before I could bring myself to try an egg.

I know that it sounds crazy to anyone who has never been vegan or in a situation that is similar but it was truly a big struggle for me. I was deciding between my ethical beliefs and my health. Sure, I came across veganism because I was searching for ways to heal my body, but I initially went vegan and stayed vegan because of the animals.

The time came though when my desperation and curiosity got the best of me and I tried a single solitary egg. One from my parents backyard chickens. I had it on a piece of avocado toast.

To this day I still hate saying it, but it. was. amazing.

And so my five year stretch of veganism ended. That’s not to say that my health problems went away with the reintroduction of animal products. They didn’t. And it took my two more years to get comfortable eating animal products more than once a month. Then I began to eat more meat out at restaurants that properly sourced animal products and had some at home, too. Slow and steady.

It was still all very sparing until late summer of 2021. At that point I was in the early stages of my relationship with my now husband, Mitch. He’s a big meat eater and also a great cook. I lost my love of food and cooking when I stopped begin vegan and I was very up front with him about the fact that I was not going to be regularly cooking in the relationship. He was cool with it and took the reins in the kitchen. That meant that whatever he was cooking was what I was eating. I was just grateful to not be having to worry about and dread making meals. So I began to eat a lot of animal products. He was very liberal with the butter and we had hefty doses of meat or eggs on our plates 3 meals a day. At first this was good. No problem. But over time my body began to speak to me.

I was experiencing more constipation, anxiety, acid reflux, excessive burping, pain in my right side, and crazy inflammation. Along with that I was starving. We’d eat a big meal and two hours later I would be in a panicked mode of true stomach growling hunger. Something wasn’t right.

I kept saying that I needed to cut back on the animal products but out of convenience I wasn’t doing it. Once my symptoms were keeping me up throughout the night and causing severe discomfort, I knew that I had to do it.

That was just last fall, only a few months ago. My health has completely transformed. Not from a fancy supplement or an elimination protocol. Nope. It’s completely transformed because I let my intuition and body signals guide me. I am not as inflamed, my digestion is slowly improving, I can sleep at night, I feel calmer, and I feel way more satiated eating less animal products.

Basically, everything that all of the experts and trendy health gurus say about all of this I have thrown out the window and once I did that my body realigned itself and is getting back on track with existing in the world in the best way that it knows how, by being fueled by its favorite types of foods.

Ten years later, I’m not exactly back to veganism, but I am pretty close to it. I never thought that I’d get here after that decision to step away from it 5 years ago. But here I am. Basically, I am coming full circle by just listening to my body and really tuning into it, which often requires tuning everything else out. We often get so influenced (way too influenced usually) by the information that others share and the ways that they portray living their lives. It’s not easy to redirect the antenna back to yourself at first, but once you get there you can see that you’re receiving the proper guidance and along with it comes the greatest gifts, lessons, and reflections of where you were, where you are, and where you’re going.