I’m ending the vegan diet experiment a week early. The results were disappointing. Not only did I not experience the tremendous energy boost that many vegans rave about, I didn’t lose a single pound!
However, I still believe that healthy vegan diets can be excellent for many people. As I mentioned in my previous post, there is not really any such thing as “The Vegan Diet,” since “vegan” merely describes what is not eaten, rather than what is. And that was the heart of the problem during my experiment. What healthy approach to use?
Brendan Brazier’s “Thrive” plan proved to be extremely intimidating from the first day. Although I had already spent a good week familiarizing myself with its concepts—making everything yourself, sprouting beans, exotic grains and seeds, creating your own flours, etc.—I found that I didn’t have the time or willpower to actually put much of Thrive into practice.
After some weeks, I came across Dr. John McDougall’s “The Starch Solution,” which seemed at first to be the vegan answer for anyone ill-suited to the time demands and exoticism of Thrive. However, The Starch Solution was even worse in the regard that all of these starchy foods involved cooking. While I didn’t completely avoid cooking during the test, asking me to actually cook rice and potatoes often—and without unhealthy fats—is just not going to work.
Another healthy vegan approach which I was familiar with, but wasn’t interested in trying, is the 80/10/10 or raw vegan diet. Although some people do well on it (I love ultrarunner Michael Arnstein’s posts on it at The Fruitarian), others have tried it and had poor results, such as the Raw Brahs. My main reasons for not going there during the trial were:
- I ate so many salads last year that I burned out. Three months of salads, fruit, and smoothies did not appeal to me.
- Both the Raw Brahs and even Arnstein have reported decreased sexual desire on the raw diet, also not appealing to me.
Any healthy diet, vegan or not, should eliminate or minimize sugar and omega 6–heavy vegetable oils, and that is certainly the case with these three. The problem is that many of the most appealing tastes go with the loss of sugar and oils. The additional flavors and textures of animal-based foods, do a lot to bring palatability to a healthy diet. At least, that’s my excuse.
Alas, my trial ended up being “The Standard American Diet, Quasi-Vegan Edition” with all too many junk foods, and predictably unspectacular results. And although I allowed myself two “cheat meals” per week, I sometimes had more like three or four cheats. Many vegans would object that I hadn’t given veganism a genuine try. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t give a healthy vegan diet a try.
Not eating meat was the easiest part of the switch. I ate meat only about four times in the duration. Although I’ve never been a firm vegetarian, I have long believed that eating little meat is far more natural and healthier than eating meat three times a day, which was unknown to most people in history, except for hunter-gathers in regions that are covered by snow periodically. (There’s a reason why hunter-gatherers have been far more numerous and successful in the tropics and subtropics.)
The most difficult thing to give up was actually the cream in my morning coffee. My friends joke that I don’t like coffee-flavored coffee, and they’re right. I like cream-flavored coffee, preferably with heavy whipping cream and spices like cinnamon and ginger. In the absence of heavy cream, a generous amount of half-and-half also works well. But I found soy milk in coffee hideous, almond milk pretty bad, and even coconut milk poor. Soy creamer was a bit better, but full of weird ingredients, and the popular “non-dairy creamers” are so full of chemical junk I avoided them altogether. At first I coped by substituting yerba mate for coffee, which I could drink without cream or sugar (but still not enjoy), but towards the end I was often drinking sweet soy lattes and mochas instead.
I really missed cheese. ‘Nuff said.
Although omelets were my most common breakfast last year, doing without eggs was much easier than I expected.
Towards the end of the experiment, I finally became comfortable with soaking and sprouting legumes. I think treating legumes this way (which removes the toxins and anti-nutrients) makes them near-superfoods. I also found the restriction of the diet much easier when eating sprouted legumes towards the end. Although I have never listed beans as one of my favorite foods, there is a fantastic difference between black beans that have been soaked and rinsed repeatedly for a day and sprouted for three more, slow-cooked with onions, garlic, and other spices, versus any prepared in a fast rinse-and-cook manner. I came to really enjoy eating my own slow-cooked, sprouted black beans and hummus made from sprouted chickpeas.
This also makes me question the Paleo diet’s rejection of legumes. Sure, hunter-gatherers don’t usually eat legumes, and many legumes are somewhat toxic without treatment. But properly treated, they become one of the most nutritious foods around, and most human cultures have successfully incorporated them into their diets for centuries. No, human evolution hasn’t changed in that amount of time, but to gut bacteria, it’s been millions of generations, and they can easily process legumes prepared well. Antiquity should not be the primary criterion of suitability.
I’m also canceling my planned Paleo and lacto-ovo experiments. I’m beginning the P90X workout system, and will be following its nutrition plan, though going fairly lightly on the meat.
My conclusion: vegan or not, a diet that doesn’t minimize sugar and omega-6’s is going to be mediocre at best.
