My Escape From Vegetarianism

I've been meaning to write about my transition from vegan/vegetarian to omnivore to Paleo for awhile, it's such an important step that I took for my own health. Yet at the same time, it's a very personal decision and one that for many people approaches a religious or spiritual level. To other vegetarians, I know that any time a former vegetarian speaks about their negative experiences with vegetarianism, it can feel almost like an insult to their own beliefs. Which is why people like Lierre Keith who have spoken out publicly (and in her excellent book, The Vegetarian Myth) have been violently attacked for doing so. So it's not easy finding the right words to describe my own personal experience.

In a way, it was watching the graphic elk hunt scene in the documentary I, Caveman on the Discovery Channel's Curiousity program that sparked me to finally sit down and write about my own experience. Watching that scene would've been impossible for me as a vegetarian. The idea that something beautiful and sentient like that majestic elk would have to die in order for a human to eat was a reality that was too painful for my animal-loving sensitive brain to handle. I was the kid who turned off Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom when the lions started hunting the zebras on the African plains. I didn't know then that any time we eat, we are creating the death of something, whether we know or acknowledge it or not.

Like so many soft-hearted, tree-hugging, animal-loving idealistic young women, my journey into vegetarianism started as a teenager, that age when our emotions and our logical brains are so intertwined as to be inseparable. And herein lies the rub: all of us who have been vegan and vegetarian are doing it for all the right reasons. At least we think we are. We love the planet, we adore animals. We save stray cats, we rescue spiders from our homes and move them carefully outside in glass jars, we pick up snails off the sidewalk for heaven's sake. My running partners in Seattle used to threaten to stop running with me if I didn't stop rescuing worms after a rainstorm.

I was a vegetarian for twenty years. So how, and why, did I stop?

It's not everyone who hears their doctor begging them to eat meat. In this day of cholesterol-fearing frenzy, that's a rare enough thing in itself. But my blood iron levels were "lower than a cancer patient's". My thyroid had gone haywire and my health was in the toilet. You'd think it would be an easy decision, given all of that. Yet leaving vegetarianism behind is anything but simple.

To stop being a vegetarian is very straightforward: all you have to do is start eating meat again. But vegetarianism is as much a part of your soul as it is of your body. It's as much religion as it is nutrition. It's been several years now since I made the difficult decision to reclaim my health and to start eating animals after 20+ years of vegetarianism, but it's something I find that I rarely talk about. In some sense, when you're part of the vegetarian and vegan culture, you're made to feel like you've personally failed some great moral test if you can't make it work for your body. You just haven't tried hard enough. Perhaps you need to eat more raw foods, or juice more, or eat more tofu for protein, take more B12 and supplements. As I struggled with my health, I tried and I tried and I tried, so many different things. And I got sicker and sicker and sicker.

I could not complete my first Ironman because I was so anemic my doctor was considering a blood transfusion. So years later when I decided to try again to become an Ironman for real, I knew what I needed to do. I just didn't know how I could bring myself to do it.

The answer for me, at first, was all-natural humanely raised lunch meat. Thinly sliced stuff that tastes bland, doesn't bleed, doesn't have to be cut or prepared, and looks nothing like an animal. This worked fine at first. I could start healing my body without really facing what I was doing, what I was eating. Very slowly over time, I started branching out: a pound of hamburger, some pre-roasted chicken from the supermarket. And then eventually, a steak on the barbeque.

That was it then, at that point I had to face up to it for real: I was eating an animal. Don't call it pork, Robin. Call it what it is: a pig. It's not beef, it's a cow. Let's really look at what we're doing here. My mind was drawn back to a trip that hubby and I took to Africa to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. We spent over a week on a camping safari afterwards, one morning watching hyenas stalking the wildebeest at the watering hole, another day spotting a battle between vultures and wild dogs for the remains of a lion-shredded zebra. This is real life. This is what happens every day. Death happens in order for life to happen. That got me thinking about my previous pristine diet: what had died in order that my "textured vegetable protein" shaped like a hot dog arrived on my plate? Insects, mice, voles, or other creatures that once called those mono-crop soybean fields their homes?

There is no living without death, and therefore there is no eating without death. That truth is a big one. It took me a long time to look it in the eye, and to make my peace with it. I saw that I had never truly been a vegetarian and most especially not a vegan. Even as I saved a spider from my home, I ran over another one when I backed my car out of the driveway. Even as I avoided eating the cow, I ate a mouse's home burrow in my soyburger.

Reading Lierre Keith's book The Vegetarian Myth was like looking in a mirror. Like hearing a beautiful sermon that explained everything. Like being delivered from a heavy mental weight that I didn't know I was still carrying. Like getting a big hug from someone who understands exactly what you've gone through. I could finally stop beating myself for "failing" at vegetarianism, and start celebrating the newer, stronger, healthier body that I now had.


I no longer had a cupboard full of supplements that I had to make sure I took. I no longer had to take so many iron pills every day that my stomach burned and hurt. My thyroid was irreparably damaged (I personally believe it was because of all the soy I ate, soy being a known thyroid and endocrine disruptor) but I would just have to make the best of that. My constant sugar cravings and subsequent battles with candida and yeast infections were gone. I got up in the morning with energy, and could complete even the longest hardest workout without breaking down. My restless leg syndrome and pica were disappearing (both are tied to severe anemia) and my insomnia was on its way out, for good.

Continuing my journey from vegetarian to omnivore, to locavore, to Paleo locavore, I have felt my health, mental health, and energy increase exponentially. It seems funny to me, but I probably eat more vegetables on a paleo diet than I did as a vegetarian (especially in my fat-phobic, Snackwell-munching days). For sure I eat far less sugar. Somewhat counter-intuitively, my cholesterol is down from 220 as a vegetarian to 175 as an omnivore. Probably a side effect of the decreased sugar consumption. Also interestingly, my weight has stayed exactly the same - from vegetarian to vegan to pescavore to omnivore to paleo. From low fat to high fat from high carb to low carb, my scale doesn't budge an inch. But then again, I feel like I'm at a healthy weight, so it doesn't really need to. I just think that's interesting given the hype that the proponents of each diet dish out.

I also eat more locally, and more sustainably, contrary to what most vegetarians believe. My meat, eggs, milk, and vegetables all come from the valley that I live in. Only my luxury items like bananas and coconuts are shipped in from far away. I'd hate to give them up, but I don't depend on them to thrive.

So the other night on the Discovery channel when I saw that beautiful elk heave its last dying breaths while the modern-day caveman hunters who had slain it with an atlatl gathered around for an emotional and teary moment to thank it for giving up its life for them, I was not repulsed. I did not have to avert my eyes, my heart was not sad. There is no living without death, it's something I can fully face now. And therefore I myself can fully live.

Old MacDonald Ate Some Grass-Pastured Free-Range Beef

My mom sent me this cartoon last week. I love it! How many people these days connect their food with where it comes from? How many see the conditions that their dairy cows live in, or view the confines of their omelette's crowded chickens?

Whenever I hear that the only answer to the horrible horrible ills of factory farming is vegetarianism, I want to scream. It's not an either-or equation: it's not eat meat and support CAFO-raised, GMO-infested unhealthy inhumane meat production or never eat meat again. I've looked my hamburger in the eye, and it looked like a happy grass-munching cow.

On the flip-side, when I see people starting to eat Paleo that are not concerned with where their meat comes from or what their meat was eating when it was alive, I feel like they're only getting half the picture. If your cow ate grain, your hamburger is not the same as mine. Period.

I feel a big post coming on about why I'm no longer a vegetarian, but that will have to wait for another day.

Made of Iron, But Not the Kind You're Thinking Of

Looking back on my 10k TT debacle this week, I'm also looking at another possibility: my old friend Anemia might be back in town. Just realized that I ran out of iron tablets a few weeks ago and it's been on my to-do list to pick up some more. The way anemia works is it sneaks up on you. One day you're running 10 miles and before you know it a week or two later you're gasping for breath when you walk up the stairs. Luckily, there's a pretty easy fix, and since I started taking iron tabs again last night, hopefully I'll know whether or not that's a contributing factor soon enough.

I know some people get anemia in pretty mild forms, in fact it's common in women and very common in athletic women. For some reason, I seem to have a real problem making red blood cells, and have since I was a kid. Various tests have been run over the years with no conclusions about my faulty blood cell factory (no I don't have leukemia, no I don't have nutritional deficiencies, etc. etc.) In fact, it was serious, life-threatening anemia that derailed my first Ironman attempt and had my doctor threatening me with a blood transfusion (not to mention threatening to take a baseball bat to my bicycle if I even got on the thing again until my hematocrit came back up).

From as early as eight years old, I had pica, a condition in which you crave eating strange things (dirt, chalk, ice, paper) and which is frequently caused by anemia. While I was a vegetarian later in life, my family definitely wasn't that way when I was growing up. I remember once when my dad was the grand marshall of the rodeo, one of the bucking bulls threw his back out and they had to shoot him. So we had 400 pounds of "Black Magic" or "Hell's Fury" or whatever the bull's name was in our freezer that year. Needless to say, I wasn't anemic for lack of eating red meat. But I got in trouble frequently at school for eating chalk and paper, and at home I ate so much ice that my dad dismantled the ice maker in our refridgerator. Of course, no one knew that my strange eating habits were really the result of a medical condition, which was very curable.

Once in college, I unknowingly compounded my problems by becoming an athlete, and then a vegetarian. What followed was 20 years of serious battles with anemia in which my blood count would get so low that my doctors couldn't believe I was still standing in front of them (not to mention training for triathlons, climbing mountains, etc.). I'm just stubborn that way I guess. The red blood cell count of a dying cancer victim and I can't be dissuaded from my plans. Eventually after my docs endless pleading and the fact that I could no longer tolerate the massive amounts of iron I needed to take just to stay on the low end of normal, I gave up my vegetarianism. That was just a few years ago and though it took awhile to adjust to eating meat again, I think that's what allowed me to train and complete the Ironman finally (and no, the pun of that name wasn't lost on me at the time!)

So now, I really only have to take one small iron tab a day to stay in the boundaries of low-normal. It's not too much to stay on top of, except that for some reason my brain thinks I can slack off on this and still be okay. Until I'm not. Right now I'd place money on the fact that I'm not. Maybe that's not the only reason I had such a crappo run this week, but I'd bet that it's a big contributing factor. So if you've made it this far in this blog post, keep your fingers crossed for me. And if you know anyone who ever confesses to feeling urges to eat strange things like freezer ice or paper straw wrappers, maybe you'll know why!