I was taking walking toward the gym this morning. My usual route takes me by the local yacht club. As I walk walking by it the smell of grilled meet hit me in the face (well, it is Saturday, so I’m sure a lot of cooking is going on there).
“So, what’s so special about the smell of grilled/charred meet”, you may ask. Well, most interestingly it reminded me of a 4-5-moth period of time – about 2 years ago – when I tried to follow a vegetarian diet (some eggs, very little dairy, but no meat of any kind).
Now, I certainly eat meet these days and I’m definitely not a vegetarian. Moreover, I even advise against vegetarian, even more so against pure vegan diets, as not a part of our genetic development as homo sapiens. Does this meant that there are no people that are doing (even temporarily) okay on vegan diets? No. It doesn’t . In fact, I know that everybody is uniquely different and certain people can handle certain lifestyles (including vegetarian/vegan) much, much better than others. It just goes hand-in-hand with the saying that there are no universal diets that work equally well for everybody – for the chief reason that we are so different from one another.
But, I know vegetarian diet doesn’t sit well with me – not with my wife, either. I need meet, so does she. We both tried it and we both know this to be a fact, not only from science (anthropology, history, biochemistry, biology, etc.) but from personal experience, as well.
If you care to know why, well here are a few facts: I lost close to 20 lbs of lean muscle (I generally maintain 8 – 9 percent body fat, so there wasn’t much to lose, as far as fat goes), I felt a well-pronounced loss of energy, loss of the feeling for well-being (I didn’t feel healthy), and what’s worse than all of the above – I became noticeably short-tempered and snappy.
But, back to where I started – the smell of burning/burnt meet.
Surprisingly (kinda) for a very brief moment it evoked a feeling of disgust and it woke up memories of what I felt during my short stint as a vegetarian. Just the thought of meet made me feel sick to my stomach back then… until I made myself re-introduce meet to my diet and then I was fine again.. It was just that brief moment, during which I felt like a vegan.
This whole deal, in turn, brought about some quite old memories – from around the year 2000 when I was near 220 lbs – or at near my fattest. You can see a mug shot of my fat face here (scroll down a bit).
Any way, back then with my (or should I say “our”) limited knowledge on nutrition, I believed that fat is the macro nutrient that makes us fat and if I didn’t want to be fat I absolutely had to avoid it. Well, you know what happened – I replaced the calories with extra carbs and I ended up fat.
But my point is back then I used to get that same feeling of disgust, mixed up with guilt if anything resembling fat touched my lips and I felt the grease on them. It’s the same feeling that I had toward meat when I tried without it and the same feeling that I had today for a very brief moment, regardless of the fact that I am an omnivore and I’m convinced that this is the best diet for most, if not all humans.
What I’m trying to get at is this: although I personally do not approve of vegan diets for health reasons (moral reasons is different) I think I do understand how vegans and even vegetarians feel some times when they are around meat eating friends, and more so when they are exposed to the smell that makes them sick to the stomach..
Just my thinking from earlier today.. That’s all.