Edyn Jacks is EX-VEGAN: the mockery and the moralizing.

are you receiving backlash from not
being vegan and how are you handling it [Music] I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that Eden Jack's I think the lady doth protest too much although she insists although she protests that she believes in body positivity although she insists that she believes in being healthy in any way I think that Eden Jack's deep down inside I think she really did commit to the vegan diet on a basis of vanity on the the thought the hope the yearning that somehow this ideologies could fix her there's something broken with her there's something wrong there's something missing that makes her eat these ludicrous quantities of food and if only she could get it under control and be a better person and stop being broken deep down inside she could lose weight look great feel great and she could also be a positive story of transformation like so many others that are out there on the Internet and you know it never did work for her and I also want to let you guys know just because I respect you in this community so much that I'm not vegan as of recent and I'm super confident in my decision I worked with a registered dietician I'm not gonna go too much into it because as we've always said to you guys especially in the plus-sized community people always want to have you prove your health to them but your health is really your business and you should always do what's best for you and I really won't be sharing much more on the subject the reason being is the more you share the more well-meaning but unsolicited guidance and opinions you get and the only guidance that I'm seeking is the guidance of my registered dietician that I've been working with over the past ten months we're all doing this life thing for the first time we're not all kind of get it right all of the time we're not always going to be perfect not everything in your life is going to work out and not everything in your life is going to be permanent and the only difference between me and you is I'm sharing it and that's just like magnified times a hundred there was a time when the number one debate tarring vegan youtube apart was about vanity wasn't it a great and wonderful thing to have a vegan movement predicated on vanity feeding on human vanity profiting from you and vanity wasn't it the greatest thing ever that freelee the banana girl was getting 12 million views a month not motivated by veganism not motivated by an interest in animal rights ethics ecology no she was getting millions of views per month by promising people that they could eat unlimited calories and lose weight look great blah blah blah right and all kinds of people who are now morbidly obese were pulled into the orbit of this kind of de based ideology veganism predicated on many including nikka cada avocado current body weight 299 pounds the he was boasting he's just gonna pray 300 pounds morbidly obese the cacao avocados boyfriend Orlin and I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that Eden Jack's I think the lady doth protest too much although she insists although she protests that she believes in body positivity although she insists that she believes in being healthy in any way I think that Eden Jack's deep down inside I think she really did commit to the vegan diet on a basis of vanity on the the thought the hope the yearning that somehow this ideologies vix her there's something broken with her there's something wrong there's something missing that makes her eat these ludicrous quantities of food and if only she could get in under control and be a better person and stop being broken deep down inside she could lose weight look great feel great and she could also be a positive story of transformation like many others that are out there on the internet and you know it never did work for her vanity it's such a morally uplifting force in our lives right guys and I was one of the very few people I mean to Ozzie I felt like I was the only person on YouTube saying to people again and again five years ago this is not going to last this whole cult and culture of vanity and weight loss and miracle diets this is not going to build a political movement that's still gonna be around five years from now five years have come and gone I was talking to an old friend colleague who knew me five six seven years ago he used to have a youtube channel and he was reminiscing about all the other youtubers who hated me and who criticized his channel for being influenced by my channel and they specifically hated the fact that I just dared to raise this kind of question you know like I often raise those people in a positive constructive way I asked them where do you think you're gonna be five years from now what is it you want to be doing in the movement with the movement for the movement five years ago just think ahead five years so we can think positively about where it is we're going then we can build the road to get there or something and none of those people wanted to do it they all respond to that so negatively they hated me they hated my videos they hated my content because what they wanted to do was cheerlead then one of the cheerlead for the lose weight feel great vanity vegan side of the game they also wanted to cheerlead for all kinds of stuff that just happens to make money like you know disruptions and street activism and going to petting zoos and photographing yourself next to a cow that lives its whole life in a cage and you say isn't it wonderful that this cow was liberated and that it's free and it's so happy to be in this petting zoo instead of having its throat slit in a farm and this makes a lot of sense guys yeah yeah yeah I'm you know there's this whole range of kind of hackneyed trite overly familiar vegan memes that are performed here on YouTube again and again by vegans for an audience of vegans where it's vegans preaching to the converted but pretending we're doing education outreach because it earns money right this kind of content those people five years ago they all hated me they hated my YouTube content so intestine and this this colleague of mine was saying he knows at different circle of people than I know but he said you know now when he looks around at those people it says five years later where are they what happened to them a whole lot of them closed down their YouTube channels a whole lot of them lost faith in veganism lost faith in activism and a significant number have gone back to eating meat dairy and eggs coincidentally a lot of them got married got pregnant got somebody else pregnant had kids there were other kind of grow vidiq forces that pull people into the orbit of being a middle-aged conformist and suddenly you know the idea of running away to Thailand and filming yourself in a bikini and showing off how much weight you lost just seems less appealing for those reasons and suddenly the idea of being arrested while cool heroically unquote protesting in the street or making an ass of yourself breaking off that seems less appealing just just because of those middle-aged conformist forces start to come into your life and you become a member of the parent-teacher Association and worry about these kinds of respectable things yeah and you know what veganism built on vanity it didn't last it wasn't durable from the movement it wasn't even durable as like an entertaining genre of YouTube videos and I look at someone like Eden Jax and I see her as like the ultimate victim of this mentality right she bought it she believed in it she preached it I think for seven years she never got the results not even on the smallest scale of her own body her own life she obviously didn't get the results in terms of cultivating any kind of superior ethical character or intellectual character jobs he never developed some kind of sophisticated understanding of the ecological arguments or even the health arguments why you shouldn't be eating chicken eggs you okay she comes out of this seven-year period of being vegan just as ignorant and just as emotionally broken down and she was in the way in right she comes out just as much of a kind of useless basket case she comes out if we're being although I real she must come out just as afraid about her life when you're as morbidly obese as she is you don't just worry about what you look like in the mirror you worry about how many years you've got left on this planet you worry about how long it is until a heart attack diabetes stroke hypertension until these things catch up with you and you wonder maybe even before death becomes an issue you wonder about whether or not you're gonna be able to walk up a staircase with an aren't you gonna be able to walk up the side of a hill those sorts of things start to loom so this is someone who came into veganism yearning for a better life yearning to be a better person but never forget that ethical engagement itself he is a kind of vanity for a lot of people right feeling like a good person feeling like you're Ethel a spirit others that also is connected to vanity and now mysteriously Eden Jack's attributes this to her dietitian I doubt that's the real force for change here mysteriously she gets her tattoo her vegan tattoo covered up or removed she meets a man she's talking about getting pregnant and raising kids we have those forces bringing her into mainstream middle-aged conformist Society won't once again that she seems to be willing to part with the vanity and the sense of ethical superiority that I guess veganism brought in through life and she's going to do that in a context where or the vegan diet for her never got those magical promised results I can relate to eating Jack's not because I'm 200 pounds overweight but because I used to be a member of the Buddhist religion and it wasn't just a religion for me I did research I did humanitarian work I went out and lived in Cambodia I rode my bicycle to ancient archaeological sites you know I studied the ancient language I read stone inscriptions and palm leaf manuscripts I studied the contemporary history and the ancient history and you saw the links between them Buddhism was something much more meaningful in my life than it is for the average superstitious Buddhist who actually believes they can communicate with the ghost of their deceased grandparents I never believed that kind of supernatural horseshit but the stuff I was engaged with be it humanitarian work history books archaeological sites etc that was a tremendously meaningful tremendously motivating part of my life and when it ended when Buddhism ceased to be a part of my life sure you could feel the cold breeze blowing through the room Wow I used to have all this motivation and all this interest and all this stuff going on and now it's gone alright so I I do sympathize the in Jackson I think that for her the loss of veganism is probably much more devastating than the loss of Buddhism was for me all right because I already had a lot going on before I got involved Buddhism I Locke long after I left Buddhism a lot of things that my sense of motivation and moral purpose in life could be based on without relying on Buddhism when I look at eat in Jax I look at somebody who apart from veganism has absolutely nothing positive in her life as absolutely nothing good going for and now that she's taking this step she gets to live her life with that absolute nothingness