One possible criticism of this blog is that I did veganism wrong; veganism didn’t fail me — I failed it. Now that I have no reason to keep this blog anonymous, I can talk about myself a little more. So here’s a history of my diet up until now.

Childhood. One Sunday night at a family meeting, my mom tells my brother and I to choose a meal for every day of the week. Whatever we choose would then be repeated week after week after week. Since the next day was Monday, we decide Mondays would be pizza night. I think we might have made Thursdays pork chop night (pushing it toward the back of the week since neither of us liked pork chops), but I don’t remember any of the others because pizza night was the only one that stuck.

5th Grade. My parents divorce. When my dad gets us on the weekends, he takes us to movies and out to eat, usually for fast food.

6th Grade. I get eczema on my feet and am prescribed a steroid lotion that controls it but also thins my skin.

9th Grade. My Physical Science teacher mentions in passing that you should only get your sugar from fruit. I’ve never cared much about nutrition before, but I immediately quit drinking soda. I don’t give up all desserts until a year later, on a trip to Wales with my dad, who was born there. The first dessert I turn down as an anti-sugar absolutist is a Welsh cake, the only Welsh food anyone in my family seems to care about. I obviously mean business.

10th Grade. I’ve been getting weekly migraines for as long as I can remember. A diabetic friend suggests I might be hypoglycemic. I do some research and learn that I should be eating fewer carbs and more protein. I experiment with this by avoiding the nan bread at Indian restaurants.

A friend of mine who is already skeptical of my anti-sugar thing really doesn’t like my new anti-nan thing. He tells me it’s a sign that my personality had become regimented and “very German.” Worried about being too self-controlling, I still avoid desserts but I go back to eating bread.

11th Grade. I become friends with Cory Kilduff, a vegan. I play defensive omnivore bingo with him and his vegetarian friends, trying to find contradictions and flaws in what I fear is their morally superior lifestyle. Is his hair dye tested on animals? Nope. Where does he get his protein? I forget, but I’m sure he had an answer.

Later as a vegan, I look back at those defensive omnivore cliches that came out almost automatically and find it significant that even future vegans stammer dumb, reactionary things upon encountering vegans.

12th Grade. I take a nutrition class. One day the teacher says that a vegan diet is the healthiest possible diet. “Interesting,” I think. But when I graduate from high school in the Spring of 1997, I still eat everything except for desserts.

Summer of 1997 - Summer of 1998. With my mind freed from the thought-crushing, conformity enforcing prison called high school, I start to question my meat eating. Eating meat makes me feel guilty now, but I don’t quit the moment the guilt hits. I go through a brief period as a guilt-ridden omnivore. “Meat is murder,” I mumble before reluctantly eating a pork chop (pork chops are pretty much the only food I remember my mom making for us).

There’s only so long one can dwell in such morally ambiguous territory and by the end of ‘97, I am officially a lacto-ovo vegetarian.

My mom rebels, cooking my rice in chicken broth and demanding that I eat it, but finally accepts me for who I think I am. She brings me takeout from a new Chinese restaurant called Suma Veggie Cafe. “It’s all vegetarian,” she tells me after I open a Styrofoam container and see what appears to be chicken and broccoli. “Are you sure?” I ask repeatedly before finally trying it. It tastes like meat yet I don’t feel guilty.

In the Summer of ‘98, after about six months of vegetarianism, I get a small part in a play at the local theatre center. I get a reputation for sleeping whenever I’m not on stage. As an inside joke, they change the script so that the first time we see my character, he’s asleep. Why am I suddenly so sleepy all the time?

Toward the end of the Summer, my brother grows concerned about the fat content of cheese. Pizza night is discontinued.

Fall of 1998 - Early Winter of 1998 (V). I move to Austin and go to The University of Texas. I major in film and work at the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, as an opinion columnist and movie reviewer. I’m used to not eating pizza now, and even though the dorm cafeterias offer it, I restrain myself. Since cheese was the main animal product I still ate, and since pizza was my main source of it, I start to think that maybe going vegan wouldn’t be so hard.

I become a quasi vegan who will still eat something that might have animal products in it, as long as the animal products are hidden. For instance, I eat bran muffins that I think have eggs in them. I explain this version of veganism to one of the editors at The Daily Texan and she laughs at me.

Before the year ends, I go vegan for real.

Late Winter of 1998 - Summer of 2000. My first two years of veganism are the worst from a health perspective. I didn’t go vegan for health reasons, and even if I had, the dorm food is terrible for vegans. The cafeterias offer two kinds of veggie burgers, but one of them has cheese, so only one veggie burger is possible for me, a disgusting TVP patty. My meals consist primarily of those, iceberg lettuce from the salad bar with peanut butter on top and cheerios (dry or with orange juice, since there is no soy milk). Sometimes there will be a daily special that I can eat.

I start getting spontaneous nosebleeds that won’t stop and have to make multiple visits to the school clinic. I think this might have something to do with my diet, but I don’t see any solutions (I already believe in veganism too much to quit it, so that’s out). I send emails to the person in charge of meals at the dorms, asking for more vegan options; eventually they promise to add a vegetarian section in one of the cafeterias, but this will only come after I leave the dorms.

I begin to notice that I get a cold almost every month. I attribute this to my new eczema medication, which is an immunosuppressant.

Along with being my unhealthiest period, this is also my most strident. In November of ‘99, I host a Thanksgiving special on the student radio station to talk about the horrors of turkey production. And for the paper, I write a column in favor of the consumption of aborted animal fetuses, proposing it as a compromise for animal eating pro-lifers and pro-choice vegans. Of course my real point is that people should be vegan.

On the other hand, I give a negative review to Ingrid Newkirk’s You Can Save the Animals: 251 Simple Ways to Stop Thoughtless Cruelty. Even then I thought activism like putting stickers that say “Warning: Decomposing Corpse Inside” on chicken packages was in bad taste.

My roommate’s girlfriend gives me a vegan cookbook called Simply Heavenly! The Monastery Vegetarian Cookbook. I can’t use it, though, because we don’t have a kitchen in our dorm.

Fall of 2000 - Spring of 2001. I move into Royal Co-op, a vegetarian cooperative house. Food costs are included in rent, and though the vegetarians easily outnumber the vegans (there’s only me and one other vegan at first), there’s plenty for me to eat. No more nosebleeds.

Plus, it’s a terrific community. I’ll have a connection to that house for the rest of my time in Austin and it’s the main reason that alienation wasn’t a bigger part of my vegan experience. In fact, by making me want to move into a co-op house, veganism forced me to become more social.

Everyone in the house has to do “labor” to keep the house running. I sign up to cook and grocery shop every week, even though I don’t have experience with either.

Now that I need to learn how to cook, I crack open Simply Heavenly! Abbot George Burke and the rest of his vegan monks are not fans of TVP, which they say is chemically produced, but they love wheat gluten, tofu, nutritional yeast cheese and even MSG. Weird that TVP is too chemical for them, but MSG is one of God’s gifts.

Still, that doesn’t deter me from consulting them on my early cooking attempts. At this point in my veganism, partially due to Simply Heavenly!’s influence, I am big on mock meats. Vegetables too, of course. One of the rules of cooking for the house is to make a balanced meal.

The other cookbook I use a lot is The New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook. It was originally published in the 1970s, which explains all the recipes with whole soy beans, none of which turn out well.

The colds decrease. I start to believe that vegans don’t get colds. But every time I consciously think “vegans don’t get colds,” I get a cold. I get superstitious about that phrase and try to never think it. I certainly never say it aloud.

I try to get into animal rights lit. The Case for Animal Rights, Animal Liberation, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes and The Sexual Politics of Meat are all books I attempt to read, though I don’t get far into any of them before losing interest. The vivid descriptions of animal torture do at least help remind me why I’m vegan.

My housemate Joe and I start writing an animal rights book of our own, called No Whey: The Case Against Caseinate. Unfortunately for the animals, we only finish a couple of chapters.

I go to the dentist and am shocked to learn that I have eight cavities. I blame genetics. Also surely genetic is my propensity to fall asleep at the wheel as I’m driving between Austin and my mom’s house in Richardson, even in the middle of the afternoon. Just about every trip between the two cities I have to pull over and take a nap. I just figure I’m a sleepy person.

Summer of 2001. I have an internship in Los Angeles. My boss is a former macrobiotic and recommends Sugar Blues, a semi-macrobiotic manifesto with a vendetta against sugar. I buy a copy.

The author, William Dufty, grew up on a diet of almost pure sugar and suffered health problems as a result (unlike Paul Rudnick). Dufty vengefully blames every conceivable physical and sociological ill on sugar, but strangely ends the book by saying it’s okay to eat ice cream as long as it’s made with honey.

Though I realize the book is ridiculous, I become terrified of refined products. Not eating desserts is no longer enough. I quit white flour and white rice (and white potatoes for good measure).

This summer is the first time since sixth grade that my eczema goes away on its own and I can stop the lotion. I figure there’s something magical about L.A.

At the end of the summer I write a screenplay about someone who is raised vegan but then rebels against his upbringing. It’s called “Animal Liberation,” but unlike in Peter Singer’s opus, the animal being liberated is a human escaping from veganism. Not that I’m thinking I would ever want to do that.

Fall of 2001 - Spring of 2002. I’m back at Royal Co-op. Joe’s mom, once an editor at Vegetarian Times, gives him You Are All Sanpaku, perhaps the most important (and certainly the most ludicrous) book about macrobiotics. Though macrobiotics allows fish, George Ohsawa makes it clear that the ideal is no animal products. This veganism business isn’t just about sparing ol’ Bessie — we’re also saving ourselves.

There’s something compelling about the confidence and consistency of Ohsawa’s outrageous claims and we prepare ourselves for a more macrobiotic diet by eating nothing but brown rice for two weeks. I notice more hair falling out than usual while on the brown rice fast and my eczema comes back, but at least I’m pure and ready for some yin/yang balancing action.

Macrobiotics seems overly strict, even for “German” me. But I follow the basic concepts by eating whole grains instead of refined grains and mostly avoiding nightshades (white potatoes, tomatoes and peppers; I like Baba Ghanoush too much to give up eggplant).

Sorry Popeye, but I eat kale and collards instead of spinach now. And Casa de Luz, Austin’s vegan macrobiotic “community center,” becomes my favorite restaurant. At the same time I grow more lenient when it comes to desserts — sometimes I’ll have one if it seems reasonably healthyish.

Summer of 2002. I have an internship in Manhattan. Paranoid of running out of money, I eat a lot of peanut butter, Ultimate Meal and nutritional yeast. Not that I don’t eat I eat real food too, but my diet definitely degrades for these months. I can’t even call myself semi-macrobiotic this summer. That being said, my roommate for the summer, who is also a vegan, often compliments me on my healthy diet.

I get so sleepy every single day at the internship that instead of taking lunch breaks, I eat lunch at my desk and then take hour-long naps on a piece of cardboard in the basement. I assume the sleepiness is because offices bore me.

I go on the master cleanse for six days with my Brooklyn roommate. Supposedly my tongue turning white has something to do with purifying.

While eating a salad, I bite on my fork and chip a tooth. I blame the fork and try to use only spoons and chopsticks after that.

I go to a sushi restaurant with acquaintances. Looking at their sushi is the first time I see an animal product since going vegan and think, “Well, that doesn’t look too evil.” Of course I don’t have any.

Fall of 2002 - Spring of 2004. I don’t live in Royal Co-op anymore, but I “board” there, which means I eat there once a day.

I volunteer at Casa de Luz; I get free meals out of it and a shot at a job there, which would give me access to all the free macrobiotic food I need.

Some nights I can’t sleep because my legs are so uncomfortable, I have to constantly move them. I’m not aware that this is an actual medical condition. My solution on nights I can’t sleep is to do push-ups and sit-ups until I’m so worn out that my legs don’t bother me anymore. Then I see a magazine article about Restless Legs Syndrome — oh, so that’s what I have. I do some internet research and figure out that I should take B12, calcium and SAM-e. The restless legs go away immediately and never come back.

I become obsessed with “superfoods” and begin almost every day with a bowl of oats mixed with alleged nutraceuticals. Here’s an excerpt from a blog entry I wrote at the time:

Oats by themselves do not a physics-flaunting meal make. So I add a dash of superfoods to make sure I get every single nutrient that the body expects over a lifetime, all in one bowl. These include, but are not limited to:

Wheat germ, spirulina, kelp power, alfalfa powder, wheat grass powder, soy protein powder, raw almonds, raw pumpkin seeds, raw sunflower seeds, MSM, ascorbic acid, stevia, insolitol, bee pollen, nutritional yeast, and freshly ground flax seed… all mixed into one mushy green blob with unsweetened soymilk.

And actually, I stopped putting oats in my bowl of oats, after I learned that oats block calcium absorption.

I’m pretty sure I was joking about removing the oats, but no doubt my breakfast routine was eccentric. It had to be healthier than starting off the day with a bowl of Puffins, though, right?

Summer of 2004 - Winter of 2004. I work at Casa de Luz now, giving me all the macrobiotic food I need. We serve tofu at the restaurant, but my co-workers convince me that unfermented soy is bad. I quit eating tofu, soymilk and soy protein powder and amp up my tempeh and miso consumption.

The meals at Casa de Luz are systematic. This is macrobiotics, after all. Every plate comes with grains (usually brown rice because the customers complain when it deviates), beans, salad, greens, sauce for the greens, and vegetables. There is seaweed twice a week and my co-workers soon learn that the most dangerous place in the world is between me and a tray of hijiki.

I believe that I have just about the perfect diet now, so it’s really confusing to me that my eczema keeps getting worse. Whereas before it was only on my feet, now I have conspicuous breakouts on both my arms. It makes it embarrassing to pass out plates, since our short-sleeved work T-shirts reveal all.

The eczema is so intolerable that I go to a “natural” type doctor that a friend recommends. He suggests I take fish oil. I wrestle with my conscience, but I’m so desperate that I agree. The pills don’t seem to do much, though. If anything, my eczema gets worse, probably to punish me for my sin.

Winter of 2005 - Spring of 2005. I move to Prague.

I always get paranoid about running out of money when I’m in a strange city and for the first couple of weeks, I eat almost nothing but plain oats. I lose my sex drive completely, but that’s actually convenient because I’m now in a long distance relationship.

Then I realize that I’m not totally broke (Prague’s cheap!) and I splurge on food. I try to do most of my shopping at Country Life, a vegetarian grocery store and restaurant. It’s here that I discover quinoa milk, which I never see anywhere else ever again. It’s on sale and I buy so much of it that I am unable to finish it all before I leave. I also discover natto, though I can’t say I fall in love with it.

I eat out a few times, but mostly I just cook for myself. The dish I make most during my time in Prague is tempeh mixed with tahini and beets. My sex drive returns right on time.

Interestingly, Prague is about as good for my eczema as L.A. was. It goes away on my feet and my arms. That makes me think that rubbing my arms against the Casa de Luz apron as I worked caused the arm outbreak.

Summer of 2005. I move to New York. Don’t worry, it’s not back to peanut butter and Ultimate Meal for me, since I get a job at a vegan restaurant, Angelica Kitchen. It’s all about whom you know — the daughter of one of the managers at Casa de Luz is a manager at Angelica Kitchen.

For the next nine months that I’m working there, I hardly eat any food that isn’t leftovers from Angelica Kitchen. I get to eat seaweed pretty much every day now, which has to make me basically the healthiest man in the world.

Winter of 2005 - Spring of 2006. Now that my long distance relationship has fallen apart, I date an Angelica Kitchen customer. Despite her attraction to me, she’s concerned about my appearance. She tells me I “look yellow,” and that I probably have jaundice. I assume she’s just thrown off by the eczema that’s been attacking my eyelids lately. The eczema on my feet has gotten bad too; I ruin all my socks by bleeding in them and I have to wrap bandages around the wounds. Worse, wearing gloves in the kitchen has led to an eczema outbreak on my hands.

A friend of mine gets me a part-time job at pure food & wine, a fancy raw food restaurant. I like the idea of supplementing my macro staples with some upscale raw dishes, but am surprised to find that I don’t like the food very much. As much as I enjoy young coconut, it gets old when just about every menu item has a coconut aftertaste.

There’s way too much pressure in the kitchen anyway — I just can’t layer the zucchini, pesto and macadamia cream lasagna fast enough and the manager is prone to unjustified tirades.

I quit pure food & wine after two weeks and I throw out all my leftovers. [Note: I went to pure food & wine again a couple of years later and liked it a lot more.]

Four months later, in April of 2006, I quit Angelica Kitchen.

Summer of 2006. My girlfriend’s parents fly me and my girlfriend to Israel. Her mom has a friend who works for El Al and we get special treatment on the flight — first class food in coach. Unfortunately for me, that means lox.

I try to figure out how to dispose of the fish without offending anyone, but my girlfriend is adamant that I at least try it. I give in (what happens a mile high stays a mile high, ?האין זה כך), making this the first time since becoming vegan that I will intentionally eat an animal product. I scrape the creamy sauce off and have two small bites. I feel sick to my stomach and get a terrible headache. See what happens when you violate your ethics?

After Israel, we travel Europe. I write a blog entry during the trip about our culinary adventures — mostly cheeseless pizza while in Switzerland, Paris and Italy. But in Poland I ingest a few more animal products, mainly accidentally, though I do purposely eat sheep’s milk cheese. I like it more than I care to admit and claim to be unimpressed in my blog entry. Still, my vegan faith stays strong.

My girlfriend, her Polish friend and I order pizza in Krakow. As I pick off little bits of cheese that slipped onto my supposedly cheeseless pizza, the Polish guy tells me, “Rhys, you’re the most religious person I know.”

Amen, brother.

Fall of 2006 - Summer of 2007. Though I no longer work at Angelica Kitchen, I have a steady supply of high-quality vegan food. My girlfriend takes me out to eat at vegan restaurants, her housekeeper cooks for me and I become a member of the Park Slope Food Co-op, which has good produce and vegan products for cheap. I drink a lot of kombucha now that it’s reasonably priced.

This is when I become aware of having chronic brain fog. I’m always tired and sluggish, my thinking isn’t as sharp as it used to be, and I’m generally depressed. To fight this, I overcome my fear of caffeine and get into coffee, which my roommate assures me is healthy as long as it’s black. It helps. I try not to drink it too much, but whenever I don’t, brain fog.

End of Summer 2007. My girlfriend and I go to Tokyo for a month to shoot videos with my vegan friend. When we go out to eat, it’s usually for Indian food and Ethiopian, since those are the most vegan friendly. We also find a few macrobiotic restaurants, which at least gives us some semblance of Japanese food.

I notice that my vegan friend is tired all of the time; he has to interrupt the shoots in the middle of the afternoon to take naps. I’m tired too, and his experience combined with mine is making me question the health miracle that is an animal-free diet.

On my very last day in Tokyo, I try real sushi. It’s easily the best food of the entire trip. I feel like a fool for not having Japanese food in Japan earlier.

Fall of 2007 - Winter of 2007 (NV). Fall of 2007 is right. My brain is foggy as ever, my eczema is on a rampage and I’ve grown severely depressed. Though I’m not suicidal (that would require having energy), I am indifferent to my life. I become preoccupied with how little it would matter if I died. But there’s an upside to this pessimism. “If my life doesn’t matter,” I think, “an animal’s life definitely doesn’t matter.”

My roommate (Joe from the co-op house), raised vegetarian and now an ex-vegan, has been following the “evolutionary fitness” model (a version of the Paleolithic diet). He looks healthier than I’ve ever seen him, which is hard for me to ignore while I’m feeling worse than ever. He’s been talking up meat and bashing starch for a while now, and his arguments coupled with how awful I feel start to make sense.

One day as I’m cooking brown rice and red lentils, I feel a shudder of dread. I realize that I don’t want to eat brown rice and red lentils anymore. So what do I want? My mind turns fondly to that last day in Tokyo.

The problem is, I still believe in the ethics of veganism. Though my depression has made me mostly indifferent to life, I’m still not sure that it’s okay to take an animal’s life for my own selfish benefit. To appease my uppity conscience and my miserable body, I try to be more “evolutionary” within the bounds of veganism.

I stop eating grains and eat more vegetables, fruits and nuts. Basically the vegan diet that Dr. Joel Fuhrman recommends. I don’t notice much of a difference, though. I fear that I’m either going to have to go against my morals or feel groggy forever.

One night I see The Omnivore’s Dilemma on my roommates’ bookshelf. I know nothing about the book but the title sure resonates. I skip to the chapter where Michael Pollan goes vegetarian, feels unhealthy as a result, goes back to meat and then explains why that’s okay. It’s something to do with humans raising animals being mutually beneficial. I don’t even know if that makes any sense but at this point I’ll accept any logic that allows me to eat animal products again.

I fly to Dallas and have a vegan Thanksgiving with my family. I cook a wheat gluten roast like I always do, but don’t have any myself. Then I fly back to New York for Thanksgiving with my girlfriend’s family. I eat turkey. It tastes exactly as I remember it. My girlfriend’s family welcomes me back to humanity. I’m happy to be back.

Beginning of 2008 - Now. My diet has consisted of meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, eggs (and now some dairy) ever since leaving veganism. In other words, the Paleo/primal/evolutionary/caveman diet.

Is it a sign of a dogmatic personality that when I leave one food-related ideology I have to blanket myself in another? I guess I’m not psychologically cut out for culinary anarchy, but at least I feel healthy while following my new rules. The brain fog is gone, I’m not depressed anymore, I rarely get headaches, my muscles have come back (true, I did slack on working out before the end of my veganism) and my eczema rarely shows its itchy red scales around these parts anymore.

I suppose it’s silly to try to eat like a caveman, but I’d rather be silly than near-suicidally miserable.

Final notes. While I was vegan, no vegan ever told me that I was doing veganism incorrectly. It was enough that I was vegan, and being quasi-macrobiotic made me seem even more health-aware. In fact, I was often complimented as a healthier vegan than most because of how I shunned sugary desserts and refined foods. But when I quit veganism, suddenly vegans felt compelled to pick apart my former diet to pinpoint where I’d gone wrong.

It would be fair to call me a situational junk food vegan for my first two years, but that changed as soon as I got out of the dorms. Were my TVP and peanut butter years so damaging that they undermined the next seven years of my veganism? If so, why did the fallout from my dorm diet end once I became an omnivore again?

For the majority of my veganism, I did what I thought was healthiest. Still, many vegans will say that if only I had done it differently, I might still be vegan today.

Was quasi-macrobiotics to blame? George Ohsawa was a nut and the yin/yang rules of food are baseless, yet few vegans will insist that a diet composed mostly of whole grains, beans, vegetables, nuts and fruits is unhealthy, and that’s what my diet was for at least the last five of my nine vegan years.

An anti-anti-vegan who found this blog assumed that I must have been a raw foodist to have run out of vegan steam. Raw foodists apparently have a growing reputation for vegan failure, which is one reason the site Beyond Vegetarianism has such a big raw foodism focus, even though most vegans aren’t raw. At least I was never afraid of cooked foods.

The main things I did avoid in addition to animal products — sweets and refined foods — don’t really have any defenders. As for nightshades, the only one I strictly avoided consistently was white potatoes. Vegans are fond of saying that there is no magical nutrient in meat that you’re missing by going vegan. What were the magical nutrients in white potatoes, refined flours and unfermented soy that I was missing by going quasi-macro?

Did I not supplement enough? After I got restless legs syndrome, I started taking calcium, B12 and SAM-e with some amount of regularity, as well as B-complex and vegan multivitamins now and again. But I didn’t take any of these supplements every day.

The importance of B12 supplementation for vegans is well known (though raw foodists often claim it’s unnecessary and vegans often try to convince themselves they can get B12 by not washing their vegetables or by eating fermented food), so was I slacking by not being more systematic about my B12 pills?

Nah. Even if I couldn’t tell you how many pills I took a week, I did take B12. I also ate nutritional yeast, which is supplemented with B12, and when I cut out soy milk, I drank B12-supplemented rice milk and almond milk. What’s that you say, Dr. John McDougall? Even with zero supplementation my odds of B12 deficiency were one in a million? Not sure I buy it, but works for me!

What about Omega-3s? Because of my eczema, getting Omega-3s was one of my biggest concerns. I had seaweed, flax oil and ground flaxseed at least a few days every week, and I regularly ate walnuts, pumpkin seeds and hemp seeds too. But as soon as I quit veganism, a vegan pointed out to me that all that stuff doesn’t work and I should have been taking vegan DHA in the form of seaweed extract.

I thought I’d been King Omega III, but I’d never heard of that supplement before. Apparently all vegans are savvy enough to take this now, though I’d be curious to see what polls on vegan message boards would say about that.

My retort upon learning about vegan DHA was that even if it had been the way to save my veganism, I couldn’t believe in a diet that required a pricey industrial seaweed extract in order to work. If I’d known it then, I could also have pointed out that vegan DHA from seaweed extract has only been around since 2006. If vegans are destined for failure without these pills, veganism has only been truly possible for the past four years.

Nevertheless, I didn’t quit veganism until a year and a half after these pills were invented. If I’d heard about them before the Thanksgiving 2007 execution of my beliefs, could I have regained my clear thinking and energy while maintaining my ethics?

I doubt it.

I felt better as soon as I started eating meat again, and that was mostly turkey, not fish — at Thanksgiving, and then with the turkey loaves my girlfriend’s housekeeper would cook. I felt better before my Omega-3 levels would supposedly have balanced out. Not to mention that McDougall has my back. I was eating vegetables as a vegan, which is good enough for him!

Vitamin D. When I was vegan, nobody thought Vitamin D supplementation was all that important. Calcium was what vegans had to worry about and I took a calcium supplement (irregularly) and ate plenty of leafy greens. Apparently now Vitamin D is the thing and if I’d been supplementing with the fourth vitamin of the alphabet, maybe I wouldn’t have turned so pale and sickly.

Vitamin D initiated its comeback in March of 2005, when science proclaimed that we needed to spend time in the sun without sunscreen. But it was only at the end of 2005 that research showed the sun was not enough and supplementation was necessary. No doubt it took longer for these findings to become accepted as standard nutritional wisdom, and still longer for vegan authorities to glom onto Vitamin D supplementation as a vegan must. The Vegan Health page on Vitamin D sites “recent research” as evidence of the need to supplement D, and that research is from 2007, the year I quit veganism.

That same page says that Vitamin D deficiency is no greater problem for vegans and vegetarians than it is for omnivores. I didn’t start supplementing with Vitamin D once I quit veganism, yet I still felt better. If Vitamin D was the issue, why would not supplementing with D make me fail at veganism but not at omnivorism?

What Vitamin D shows is that we don’t know as much about nutrition as we’d like to think we do. As late as last year, American Medical News was discussing Vitamin D as if it was a new trend. For the most part, the necessity of supplementing with Vitamin D (and certainly the need for vegans in particular to supplement with Vitamin D) was unknown while I was a vegan. This slippery hormone dodged our nutritional radar. But now all you vegans gotta D-up. Jack Norris says so.

Good to know, but what don’t we know now that we’ll only find out once the next generation of vegans craps out? Again, I can’t trust a diet that has you skirting so close to disaster if you don’t take all the right supplements, especially since we never know what all those right supplements are. On top of that:

Should Healthy People Take [Vitamin D] Supplements? No, otherwise healthy people who can expose themselves to life-giving sunshine should not bother with supplements.

Sing it, McDougall!

But this reminds me, I do keep meaning to buy some Vitamin D.

Protein, then? I did quit tofu, after all, and that’s a major vegan source of protein. I also didn’t eat wheat gluten regularly, and almost never TVP, though I did eat plenty of nuts, tempeh, beans and seaweed, which I thought had me covered. Plus, there are vegans with soy, nut and gluten allergies. No vegan would tell them to face facts and give up, but I certainly got more protein than those star-crossed vegans do.

Personally I do think I wasn’t getting enough protein as a vegan, but the consensus among vegan nutritionists is that it’s almost impossible to not get enough protein. Unless I was anorexic or eating only junk food or fruit, I should have been fine. Some vegans would even say that just fruit is enough.

Here’s Jack Norris RD of Vegan Health:

Vegans might not meet their protein needs, resulting in a loss of muscle mass and/or reduced immunity, if:

* Food intake does not meet energy needs such as in cases of anorexia nervosa, depression, poverty, lack of appetite due to illness,³ or dieting.

*Higher-protein plant foods are not included in sufficient amounts. This can happen when:

*Most foods eaten are low-protein, junk food such as French fries, potato chips, and soda.

* Protein is believed to be unimportant and/or higher protein foods are avoided (such as in some fruitarian or raw food diets).

* Legumes are avoided. 3 (Other high-protein foods should be used.)

I did lose muscle mass, despite Norris’ assurances that vegans are fine as long as they aren’t restricting calories (even though I was depressed, I didn’t eat any less), but part of the blame lies with my non-existent workout routine during my last two vegan years.

By the way, is there any question that McDougall thinks I got enough protein?

“It is impossible to make up a diet deficient in protein or individual amino acids from any unrefined starches (rice, potatoes) and vegetables. … The only real problems with protein come from eating too much.”

I think I was protein deprived as a vegan, but vegans aren’t allowed to agree. It would undercut too many of their arguments. And if an individual vegan goes against the vegan consensus to say that I can’t have got enough protein as a vegan without tofu, that vegan has become the thing that they most hate — a “Where do you get your protein?” demon.

Sorry veganism, but you failed me.

It would’ve been nice, though, if I’d done blood work as a vegan and figured out for sure what was wrong with me. I never thought to get my nutrient levels tested, partially because I was so convinced of veganism’s healthfulness. When I first started to feel bad consistently, I thought it was something naturally wrong with me, not with my diet.

But if I had gone to doctors the second my brain got cloudy, maybe they could have pinpointed exactly what nutrients my body was struggling to operate without.

Then again, I just read a message board thread started by a vegan who hoped to find something wrong with his nutrient levels to explain why he feels unhealthy. But his results came back fine:

“i actually sort of hope there’s SOMETHING that’s off. so i could have an idea of why i don’t feel 100% and i can have a solid plan of attack.” … “Got my results! This little vegan’s B12 level is higher than the normal range. I guess… I guess human beings CAN sustain on such a foolhardy, unnatural, hippie fad of a diet.”

Or maybe there’s a nutritional je ne sais quois to animal products that our bodies eventually miss. OR… seaweed extract solves everything. Either way, it’s not too big a tragedy that I didn’t get my blood tested as a vegan. I’m not the only vegan to ever experience cloudy thinking, so if it’s a single lacking nutrient that’s the culprit, it shouldn’t be too hard for science to narrow it down.

If I did veganism wrong, it wasn’t for lack of trying. We have more nutritional knowledge today than when I gave up animal products, but can vegans realistically say that they’ve finally got a lock on the right way to be vegan?

The only reliable vegan source of Omega-3s will have its fourth birthday in March. And that’s about as long as vegans have known to take their Vitamin D. Is there some other slippery nutrient that vegans aren’t getting enough of that we don’t know about yet? Or are we finally set now with vegan DHA and Vitamin D?

For the sake of vegans, I hope we never fully crack the mystery of nutrition.

I’m actually glad that I was a vegan when less was known and it was easier to fail. If I’d figured out how to be a healthy vegan indefinitely, I might never have gotten out. That’s why I worry about the vegans of the future. If science ever discovers the most nutritionally optimal animal-product-free diet possible, that’s one less deus ex machina to set vegans free.