In a recent video entitled “Am I still vegan?”, celebrated parkour athlete and former UK Ninja Warrior competitor Tim Shieff delivered the latest plot twist in the quiet meltdown currently rippling through the online plant-based community: after six years of loud and proud veganism, he has made the decision to reintroduce animal products back into his diet. Citing a whole bucketload of symptoms, including “digestion issues… fatigue, brain fog, depression, lack of recovery, lack of energy, yawning all the time”, and “waking up stiff”, the somewhat solemn Shieff we see in the video delivers his difficult news with a calm, measured clarity worlds away from the trite bitterness that characterises the majority of the video’s comments.
“You know there’s no such thing as animal nutrient deficiency, right?”, asks one fellow YouTuber, “You’ve just fallen for the carnivore lies.” Another agrees, arguing that “veganism can’t fix what’s going on in your head”, whilst one more tells him: “it’s not the diet — it’s you.” Perhaps it’s Simply Plant Food’s pontification that best sums up the cult-like narrow-mindedness that comes to inform the worldview of many vegans: “you have forgotten who you are.”
Forgotten? Or rediscovered? As a relatively long-term follower of his work, and now as a fellow ex-vegan, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see this coming. In 2016 I attended a talk given by Shieff at the vegan festival London VegFest. Whilst a part of me genuinely hoped to learn a thing or two from an accomplished vegan athlete, Shieff was at the time the veritable prince of Vegan YouTube, at least in the UK, and I was mostly just keen to see him in person. Videos of his athletic exploits were widely publicised by the vegan ‘community’ (a word that, in this context, I resent — but that’s for another time) in an attempt to normalise the notion that vegans, despite what the stereotypes suggest, were capable of acts of incredible strength, speed, and stamina, not in spite of their dietary choices, but actually because they didn’t consume animal products.
I’ve always thought of myself as someone with a decent bullshit detector, so quite why I bought into the notion that, because Shieff and a few other undeniably exceptional athletes appeared to be thriving on nothing but plants, such a diet was demonstrably the optimum one for all human beings, I’m not sure. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of the world’s elite athletes, coaches, and nutrition experts advocate, directly or indirectly, the consumption of animal products in some way, and despite the fact that videos of Tim’s urban gymnastics made prior to his going vegan are just as mind-bogglingly impressive as those filmed during his post-meat years.
But buy into it I did. In all likelihood it had something to do with a sense of youthful contrarianism, mixed with a conspiratorial desire to have found ‘the way’, as well as a hazy post-humanities-degree inclination to support anything resembling social justice. In other words, I was young, arrogant, and inexperienced (I still am, of course, all these things — but hopefully less so.) Regardless, I was a freshly indoctrinated believer in the Holy Trinity of Tim Shieff, Scott Jurek, and Rich Roll, and as a newbie runner (and newbie vegan at the time), I was keen to learn all I could from others more experienced in this Way Of Life. So I attended Shieff’s talk.
Somehow, though, despite the failure of my bullshit detector when it came to the logic of asserting that veganism is, athletically at least, The Solution, that same detector was seemingly functioning just fine when Shieff, then 3 years into his vegan journey, began delivering a fragmented, seemingly unrehearsed talk not on nutrition, exercise, or spirituality, but on the profoundly disturbing dangers of — you guessed it — tap water. As in, the water that comes out of your tap.
I left after 15 minutes.
Really, in retrospect, the writing was on the wall. Unknown to me at the time, in early 2016 Shieff’s health was at a turning point, and he was beginning to see the improvements veganism had ostensibly brought him starting to turn sour. Athletically, he was deprived of what he called the “balance of explosivity and the slow controlled gentle stuff, the yin and the yang”, and “very much only able to do really gentle yin.”
Though he did not publicise this decline, in the subsequent three years it became apparent that the clarity and poignancy were beginning to seep out of his voice. His online content began to fill up with vague, pseudoscientific proselytising and an increasingly haphazard rhetoric that characterises so many of the long-term vegan YouTubers, and I lost interest. It’s a broad church, but amongst those who have been playing the YouTube vegan game for years there exist some — mostly members of the ‘high-carb, low-fat’ brigade — who are now visibly emaciated, but are forced to double down on their hardline views or else risk their entire identity crumbling to the ground. Their channels, initially filled with fairly banal ‘What I Eat in a Day’ videos as well as occasional attempts at something approximating original content, now consist almost entirely of tri-weekly thirty-minute semi-coherent rambling tirades with clickbait titles. I did not want to witness Shieff descend into such a mould, so I stopped watching.
One such former fruit-bat is Australian YouTuber Bonny Rebecca, whose video “Why I Am No Longer Vegan” preceded Tim’s by a few weeks, and arguably sparked the recent cascade of ex-vegan outreach. Formerly a shining star in the high-carb, low-fat movement, her ‘coming out’ video has attracted over 1.1 million views in less than two months. It’s a 40 minute long dissection of years of failing health, one which I don’t want to misrepresent in a two-sentence summation but, when you strip out the particulars, Rebecca’s story is not too dissimilar from Tim’s: after years of failing health, and after trying numerous variations of a vegan diet, with the advice of a doctor she reintroduced eggs and fish into her meals. Her boyfriend, another (ex-)vegan Tim, also returned to omnivority (a word I think we can all agree should exist.) And, within days, their life-altering symptoms miraculously began to clear.
Bonny Rebecca’s story, like Tim Shieff’s, triggered an inflammatory response of outrage from her former community, and yet it’s nothing new; it’s a story you can see repeated time and time again in the interviews with ex-vegans conducted by the controversial YouTuber ‘Sv3rige’, himself a former vegan turned carnivore and raw meat advocate (it takes all sorts, I guess.) And Tim, Bonny, and Sv3rige are not alone (though perhaps Sv3rige should be.) A recent study concluded that 84% of vegans and vegetarians return to eating meat, and whilst the study does not hypothesise about the reasons for this, I’m sceptical of the assertion that it’s all down to people not believing, or trying, hard enough.
Before I go any further I should probably clarify a few things about what this article isn’t. It is not an attack on vegans, individually or as a collective, nor is it denying anybody the right to choose whatever they want to put into their body. It is not a defence, ethically or environmentally, of animal products. And it is not an article about nutrition — I don’t know my B-vitamins from my riboflavins. I do, of course, have opinions about all these topics, but I want to be clear that this article is not about nor founded on those opinions. This article is about what it is like to dive full-throttle into the a lifestyle and a movement, only to find that, for you, it comes up short.
There can be no denying that, for some people, veganism really, truly works. Rich Roll, who I mentioned earlier, is an astounding physical specimen of a man who at 52 looks as good as I might hope to look at 32. Successfully combining the demanding pursuits of being an accomplished ultra-endurance athlete, podcaster, YouTuber, writer, and family man is a sure sign that his diet is serving him, and to suggest otherwise would be plain foolish.
But, regrettably, that is where most vegans, my former self included, stop thinking. Person A is thriving on a vegan diet, therefore I/everybody else should also thrive. When I first adopted the diet, this line of reasoning was just one brick in a fortress of apparently irrefutable rationality that I built around myself to justify my own placard-waving mode of being. Slowly, though, this fortress turned into a prison.
The problem I began to encounter, which I now see reflected (and completely misunderstood by most of those leaving comments) in Rebecca and Shieff’s post-veganism videos, is that it’s impossible to argue your way out of an embodied experience, one which is happening to you and through you. Anyone who has experienced the kind of physical (and spiritual) malaise that a diet misaligned with the mysteries of their own body’s deep biology brings with it will understand one thing is undeniable: it’s not in your head.
Desperate times call for desperate measures; like Shieff, I cycled through the variations of a vegan diet: “high-carb low-fat, I’ve done high-fat, I’ve done whole food plant-based for years, I’ve done junk food vegan, I’ve tried it all.” Shieff, though, as is perhaps his wont, took things further, drinking his own urine every day for two years (free animal protein!), and engaging in a 35-day water fast that he has subsequently claimed “saved my life”. But, whilst he saw occasional benefits, nothing could reverse or even stall the downward spiral. That is, until he finally realised he was trying to get all the answers “within this vegan box, and I thought for a second…what if it’s the veganism that is the limitation on my health?”
At last, a crack in the clouds.
For me, this ‘aha!’ moment was more of a gradual realisation that, despite the nutritional advice folks like Scott Jurek and Rich Roll peddle, plenty of athletes were out there achieving the things I dreamed of one day achieving, on diets very different from the one I had come to believe was optimal.
Jeff Browning, who at 47 is still winning 100-mile mountain races, follows Mark Sisson’s meat-heavy Primal Blueprint diet, for instance. Zach Bitter is the world-record holder for the trail 100 mile distance, and the American record holder for running 100 miles on a 400 metre track. He follows a low-carb, periodically ketogenic diet high in animal fats. And Kilian Jornet, arguably the greatest mountain runner of all time, consumes plenty of animal products.
It’s not just the ultra-runners, either; the whippet-like Mo Farah has said that one of his favourite meals is spaghetti bolognese, heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill seems to eat meat and dairy every day, legendary sprinter Usain Bolt, who has made no secret of his fondness for chicken nuggets, also consumers a fair few servings of meat daily… The list goes on and on, but you get the idea.
Of course, these athletes and their successes don’t prove anything about what the optimum human diet might be. Obviously. But they do make it pretty hard to argue that veganism is the only way to health, or at least athletic performance. And yet, what is one to make of all this if one has confined oneself to the “vegan box”? The only conclusion one can draw is that all these athletes and many more are simply wrong. Nutritionally, they have missed the mark, and would all see their quality of life and their athletic performances improve were they to drop the meat and eggs and pick up a block of tofu instead. And yet, I would argue even the most radical raw fruitarian would be hard-pressed to believe, in their heart of hearts, that this would actually be the case.
But it goes deeper than this. The vegan movement, for many, is not a health-food fad, but a radical and revolutionary restructuring of the way human beings consider animals, and themselves in relationship to animals. If one is to believe the ethical vegan message right down to its fundamental principles — that eating animals is morally evil — then one has to believe that the majority of the people on the planet — from New York socialites to Burmese agrarians — are engaged in an ancient and unending atrocity, a profound evil so ubiquitous that it has melted invisibly into the background of our being.
This is indeed the conclusion that Gary Yourofsky, responsible for converting many an omnivore to veganism with his 2010 video “The Best Speech You Will Ever Hear” (his own title), is forced by his own ideology to come to. “All humans are a psychotic scourge to this planet”, he says. “Whites, blacks, men, women, heterosexuals, homosexuals, Republicans, Democrats. Shit, I even hate vegans.” The consistency of his mantra is admirable: hate everyone. And it’s not really one you can argue against rationally — it’s the ultimate impenetrable fortress, the hyper-rational endpoint one is forced to slide towards if one applies the vegan message consistently.
But hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one place; in 2006 Yourofsky also said that, “Every woman ensconced in fur should endure a rape so vicious that it scars them forever. While every man entrenched in fur should suffer an anal raping so horrific that they become disemboweled.” And he’s not alone: vegan activist Joey ‘Carbstrong’ Armstrong has proclaimed, quite rationally if one accepts his fundamental principles, that killing a chicken and killing a human baby are acts of equal moral evil.
This is not a game I want to play.
There is another way. Some Aboriginal Australians have described the concept of the three brains — your head, your heart, and your gut. It is the role of your gut, which is maybe analogous to instinct, to determine your path through life; these inclinations are then filtered through the heart, something like your emotions; and finally your mind, or rational intellect, chips in to help make the best decision. Living out of sync with this system — following your head when your heart tells you differently, for instance; or following your heart despite knowing in your gut that you shouldn’t — is what cumulatively degenerates a person.
This model has recently garnered a certain degree of scientific backing, and it’s an illuminating concept to mull over when considering one’s own way of engaging with the world (and when considering the role that gut bacteria, and thus diet, might play in cognition.) In the modern West, we are often gut-deaf, following instead an untethered mix of the head and heart’s whims. We engage heavily with social media despite knowing full well that it on some level it isn’t serving us; we watch copious amounts of porn; we prioritise work over family. And we do all these things again and again, despite suffering the consequences. We wrench our heads and our guts as far apart as we dare, and then cry foul play when our hearts are torn in two in the struggle.
In the post-Enlightenment era, where rationality is granted primacy (with the ‘follow your heart’ mantra a close second), this mode of being, the gut-mode, has been all but abandoned. And yet, it’s the mode of being that transcends across your entire ancestry, one that got you here despite millions of years of natural forces trying very hard to make sure you were never born. So perhaps it is worth listening to.
When you are crossing the street and a car almost cuts you down, you don’t respond at the level of rational thought, nor emotion. Your reflexes kick in long before you have time to process what is happening. When you walk into your messy bedroom and feel your heart sink without really knowing why, you aren’t robotically assessing the contents of your bedroom, piece by piece, and determining that a mess exists. Even if this was the case, why would a mess rationally affect your mood, assuming your room was still habitable?
The answer is that you are not responding to it rationally. You are embodying your experience. You feel miserable in a messy bedroom because, in some sense, the mess is an extension of yourself, silently screaming at you a reminder of your own inability to create even a basic level of habitable order, in one tiny corner of the world, in which you can spend your free time.
I believe that the vegan moment is a patchy and half-realised reanimation of a phenomena as old as humanity itself, or perhaps older. It’s religious thought at the level of the head, all ritual and dogma with no tether to the past or the realm of experience. At some level the heart gets involved — who could fail to be moved by the genuinely horrific practices of factory farming? — but it’s only half-hearted (pun intended.) Along with the head it goes into a blind panic when anybody expresses dissent from their gut, as Tim Shieff did, as Bonny Rebecca did, and as I did. Because, if the dissenters are right, then veganism is, in some sense, wrong.
It’s hardly surprising; we live physically and spiritually sanitised lives now. Each of us can dive into an online netherworld seemingly unconstrained by the harsh realities of being. We can live totally deprived of dialogue with the Other, with those who disagree with us, a phenomena increasingly visible in our entrenched political camps and campus outrage culture. With regards to veganism, man-made products designed to imitate meat, dairy, and eggs allow those who choose to to extend this derealisation to the very food (or food-like products) they consume. But as is being realised by more and more ex-vegans, who for whatever reason find themselves unable to square their rationalist ethics with their own biology, you can’t cheat nature for long. Food is not reducible to a set of macro- and micro-nutrients, nor is it distinguishable from its own means of production.
The truth is harsh, but it will set you free. The first time I ate fish, I could almost have wept at the clarity and calmness that came over me after years of battling brain fog and constant anxiety. After meditating, exercising, dropping bread, dropping grains, upping my starch, upping my fat, and trying every other possible solution I could think of within the vegan box, I had long since abandoned the notion that such a state of mind was attainable for me. Now, it has become my new normal. My body, which has always been lean, has begun to fill out; the injuries that plagued me for the first few years of my running have faded. I feel stronger, calmer, balanced, more productive. I feel integrated. There is zero doubt in my mind that animal products have saved my life, not because I was at death’s door, but because I dread to think what kind of zombified half-life I would be leading if I had continued the diet, stubbornly, for years or even decades to come.
Gary Yourofsky’s particular brand of rhetoric — and the principles at its core — pushes the kind of radical equality doctrine that saw millions carted off to the Gulag archipelago in the name of social justice, and I don’t think that’s an extreme analogy. Joseph Stalin once said, “Death is the solution to all problems. No man — no problem.” When you consider Yourofsky’s pro-violence stance — “All throughout history, you’ve had to kill oppressors to stop the oppression” — the ideological principles that guide the two men’s vengeful utterances seem disturbingly similar.
Thankfully, just like the communist dream, I believe it’s a philosophy that is condemned, as it were, to eat itself, and much more rapidly than the Soviet Union did. That’s because, built into hardcore veganism’s core is its fatal flaw — not content with the reducing or reformulating the population’s consumption of animal products, it’s a ‘one size fits all’ solution in a world richer in nuance and depth than we can understand, even with our increasingly sophisticated scientific knowledge. The more we look into things, the more complicated they seem to become, and a reductivist summation like “just eat plants” is proving, for many people, insufficient.
The reality seems to be that one size fits some. The growing body of ex-vegans is not symptomatic of laziness, lack of belief, or selfishness, but a sign that the diet is, for many people, inherently incompatible, unsustainable, and simply unhealthy. It will therefore never be adopted by society at large as the new normal, unless this is mandated through tyranny and dogma. And we all know how that ends up.
