I was vegan for nine years, and vegetarian for a year before that. For the last couple of years of my veganism, I was consciously aware of feeling horrible. My thinking wasn’t as sharp as it had been before, I was weak, I got sick a lot, my muscles atrophied, and I felt groggy just about every day. On the rare day when I didn’t feel like I was wandering in a dense, numbing fog, I was pleasantly surprised.

I believed this had nothing to do with veganism, which was obviously a vital part of any immortality-assuring lifestyle. I also thought, as many vegans do, that health is something that you know you have, not something that you necessarily feel or see. Which was a helpful delusion to have, because I was looking pretty bad by the end.

A photo I took for my long-distance girlfriend at the time (whose identity I have protected with two strategically placed bars). It’s a miracle she didn’t leave my pasty ass earlier, but then, she was a vegan as well. Beyond simply looking hideous here, I seem to have wet myself.

This was my last day at the vegan restaurant I worked at as a to-go food package boy. If you ever wondered whether I’m going to die one day, just look at that odd toothy grin, which betrays the skeleton underneath, and my pale, ghostly skin. I was still alive and I was haunting the place. The red eye is a typical symptom of b12 deficiency.

If it weren’t for that table, and the fellow workers I was desperately grasping for support, I would have collapsed to the floor.

I could have eaten the entire contents of that container. It wouldn’t have done me much good.

When I was vegan, people used to ask me if I felt better once I switched to vegetarianism and then veganism. I would always answer that I didn’t immediately feel noticeably better, but that if you were to compare how I felt now to how I felt before I was a vegan, the improvement would be astonishing. So in other words, I didn’t actually feel better, but I knew that I must.

It was a different experience when I quit veganism. I felt better immediately. I wasn’t tired all the time anymore, I had energy again, and my arms even grew back a little.

This is me in Barcelona, pretending to go to the beach, eight months after I’d stopped being vegan. True, I wear glasses now, which I didn’t usually do as a vegan. But I can’t blame meat for that, so much as a general acceptance of reality on my part. Around the time I gave up veganism, I also gave up the hope of “fixing your eyes naturally.” What ideals will I callously discard next? Last stop: sheer nihilism.

This is me about a week ago. I don’t mean to be one of those meat eaters who holds up steaks and says “Mmm, meat.” I just wanted to get the food in the shot. It was good, though.

So I feel and look better now than when I was vegan. Except that I’m older. And the longer I’m not vegan, the older I’ll get. Eventually I may look back on the photos of me as a vegan and wish I still looked like that, because at least I still had hair. And when that day comes, I’ll be forced to admit: veganism was right.

Until then, I’m going to post photos of vegans who look as sickly as I did.