Top 5 Reasons to Try a Vegan Month

The world’s best diet has been under our noses this whole time. You can see the benefits in just one month, but only if you want to be a stronger version of yourself.

At a certain point in your life, you’ll have to put down the carnitas and try the Vegan Month Challenge (VMC). Here’s why:

1. Feel Peak Strength

We all know the stereotype of vegans as weaklings. But nothing could be further from the truth. The strongest mammals on Earth — elephants, giraffes, rhinos — are all vegans. Nobody asks them how they get their protein.

It turns out that a fully vegan diet makes you much stronger. There’s a ton of science to back it up, and a lot of documentaries that explain what goes on in basic cellular terms.

Two weeks into my Vegan June, I realized it was the strongest I had felt since puberty.

After voluntarily returning to a mostly vegan diet, I feel like superman. A few weeks ago, without any training, I ran a 5K with my 40 pound daughter on my shoulders.

There was no stretching. No running shoes. No jogging stroller. We weren’t planning to run. Our plan was to just show support to friends. I was drinking a coffee and eating a donut.

Then, like Forrest Gump, my wife just started running. I threw my oldest daughter on my shoulders and we ran after my wife for a block as a show of support. Then, like Forrest Gump, we just kept running.

45 minutes later, we crossed the finish line. We stopped two times for water & for me to check circulation in my daughter’s legs, but other than that, she was on my shoulders the whole time. We hugged and embraced the whole family at the finish line. All together, it was one of the greatest father-daughter bonding moments we’ve had yet.

At the end of the 5K, I felt tired, of course. But if needed, I felt like I could run another 5K. The gazelle feeling was super-natural.

The following day, muscle recovery was much faster than recovery for any similar caliber exercise that I had ever done before.

2. Way More Energy

Brute physical strength and stamina are closely linked. But at the same time, they are different forms of strength. Not everyone who can bench-press 300 pounds can run a marathon; and not everyone who can run a marathon can bench-press 300 pounds.

The weight-lifter and the marathoner are both indisputably strong in their own way. Every experienced weight lifter would say that about a marathoner; and every marathoner will say that about a weight lifter.

And, yet, here’s the thing their vegan weight-lifter buddies and vegan marathon friends should be pointing out to them (but probably aren’t, because of vegan shyness, or something like that) — vegans have far more energy than non-vegans.

It’s well known. It’s well-studied. The vegan energy rush that must be felt to be appreciated.

You see those crazy mountain goats down below? You know, the ones that can go anywhere, who have incredible coordination, stamina, endurance, explosive strength, thermodynamics, and so on.

Yup — vegans.

3. Peak Empathy

Ever notice how the same people who stereotype vegans as weaklings and hippies somehow also typecast vegans as spoiled ego-brats with too many “first world problems.” It’s not just contradiction; it’s lazy stereotyping.

In reality, the learning process that goes on during the VMC is one of the most humbling and grounding experiences that I’ve ever experienced.

The vegan-month challenge is the first time since becoming a father that I’ve had occasion to reflect on the nature of Life in deeper, philosophical terms. I didn’t get any answers; but VMC made me less hypocritical.

Let me give an example. Ever since the stork dropped off the first, then second, then third kiddo on our laps, my wife and I committed to buying organic produce. I’m skeptical by nature, so even after switching to organic milk for the kiddos, I never automatically assumed that this or that organic label or certification necessarily made something healthier or safer.

When we saw the positive effects of cutting out dairy, we began to see food as a commercial battlefield, with actual market wars playing out for the hearts and minds of vulnerable populations — specifically, our children.

VMC is hands-down the best thought experiment for seeing the grossly inefficient & unsafe nature of today’s mass-scale food production techniques.

At some point in the VMC, you will return to a grocery store as a “try-out vegan.” You’ll walk past the meat aisles; you’ll walk past the dairy aisles; you’ll walk past the ice-cream and frozen meals aisles — and then it will dawn on you, “holy smokes, 80% of what this store is selling is what’s making 80% of the population sick!”

You’ll see the obese mother in her motorized wheelchair; you’ll notice the college-aged kids standing in the frozen dinner aisle trying to choose between this robot-made stir fry, or that machine-assembled pasta with meatballs. But most of all, you’ll start to notice the kids and young people who trust what they’ve been told about different versions of a so-called “balanced diet.”

The empathy is real and far-ranging. You don’t look at these people in a judgmental way; you don’t get righteous all of a sudden.

If anything, what happened for me was a deep desire to suspend judgment, to suspend moralizing, and instead, to reflect on deeper patterns of inequality, dishonesty, and abuse.

4. Peak Transparency

We all know the adage, “You are what you eat.” Well, here’s the 2018 corollary: if you don’t know what’s in your food, then you have no idea who you are.

Today, the overwhelming majority of people around the world don’t know what’s in their food. That’s a major problem.

It really sucks to have to second-guess everything we used to eat and drink, but my wife and I realize that the more careful we are with food, the more careful our children and their friends will be.

I don’t trust organic labels more or less today. I don’t mistrust the “food industry” more or less today than before my VMC. The only thing that’s different today is a realization that I can greatly minimize the need for trust when it comes to food that I put in the mouths of my growing family.

I want my family to eat food that is as close to being made by the Sun as possible. We don’t need our complex proteins or amino acids to be cooked up in the belly of some beast — using processes that we neither know nor trust. But we also realize that some degree of trust is unavoidable. We don’t have the means to start an organic farm just to feed our hungry little crocodiles.

So what VMC does is give you a sense of perspective. You start to see through centuries of marketing. You realize that cheese isn’t some wonder-food. Yes, it’s delicious. But you begin to see that it’s delicious because it’s a solid block of triple-filtered cow fat that’s been purposely contaminated with special bacteria and salt. It can take hundreds of forms and taste profiles, but at the end of the day, it’s cow fat. And it’s cow fat that was intended for a little baby cow somewhere.

Just because I lost faith in dairy, poulty and meat production doesn’t mean I automatically trust “cashew milk” or “almond milk,” or “organic tofu.” I have no idea how these things are made. I’ve never been to a tofu factory. I have no idea what goes on in soy milk production.

But I realize that lack of information is relative. If my decisions to forego meat, eggs and dairy nudge others to do the same, then we can restore a sense of transparency in our modes of food production that has been totally lost.

5. Peak Relativity

A common misconception about vegetarians and vegans is that they are extremists, absolutists — nasty food radicals who want to kill everyone’s nice turkey dinner with their propaganda about turkey feelings and deplorable conditions at industrial turkey farms.

Yes, I’m sure there are vegans like that; but I’ve never met vegans like that.

The stereotype of vegans is that they’re stuck up; they know better; they are always telling other people how to live.

In reality, what I’ve observed is that vegans can’t be and shouldn’t be lumped together. There are some hardcore aggro bodybuilders who are vegan. There are some hippie-vegans who want to return to traditional farming techniques. There are techno-vegans and crypto-vegans. And everything in between.

I don’t think vegan people are intrinsically more virtuous than non-vegans. But I do see that vegans are pushing for far more transparency about food safety, packaging safety, and environmental safety. I really appreciate this, because the list of individuals and groups who are doing this work is way smaller than it needs to be.

I’ve also started to appreciate vegans’ and vegetarians’ honesty about their own diets. One of the most profound moments of getting to know my wife actually took place in the middle of our VMC. We were grocery shopping, and she was looking for cheese without rennet (an enzyme produced from cow intestine). After doing weeks of research and learning that practically all cheese had this enzyme, she turned to me and said,

“I only thought I was vegetarian for 28 years; but I’ve been eating meat products this whole time.”

Another vegetarian I admire is one of the world’s most famous natural bodybuilders — Scooby Werkstatt. At points of my life when I was training, I remember scouring Scooby’s sites, trying to get nutrition tips for bulking, cutting, and so on.

It’s been years since I last visited a gym, but I had a strong epiphany after seeing the effects of my VMC. My mind clicked back to Scooby’s nutrition guides, and I did a search. Sure enough, the intuition was correct. Scooby’s a vegetarian, and a cool one at that. He calls himself a pseudo-vegetarian, which means he’s 95% plant-based, and 5% not.

The vegans and vegetarians I’ve met have taught me that it’s not about black or white, 100% this or 100% that. I can be a vegan and still dip into some honey every now and then.

Veganism is not a religious cult. There’s no secret handshake; you don’t get “expelled” for learning that your favorite Thai restaurant was actually spiking your “vegan” Pad Thai with fish sauce all these years — deliberately lying to you just to keep your business (true story that happened to one of our friends).

You realize that a vegan diet is a commitment to a higher ideal, as unattainable as that ideal may be.

Veganism is an ideal that says (1) we can know what goes in our bodies, (2) we should know what we put in our bodies, and (3) we must know what goes into our bodies.

VMC showed me that I’m not powerless. I’m not just a customer who has to buy exactly what is being offered, like a lamb being led to slaughter.

I have choices. In my time since the VMC, I’ve been much better informed about what I put into my body than at any previous time in my life.

In the context of diet, more information is always better than less information.

Here’s the final score: the pluses of trying the vegan-month challenge clearly outweigh the minuses, because there are no minuses.

If you want to realize the strongest, hardest, smartest, cleanest version of yourself, you know what to do. Do yourself a favor, and please try one month as a full-blown vegan. It will be one of the most powerful and enriching experiences of your life.

We’ll be by your side, always there to support.