Tori Sterling: Chasing a Feeling. :-/

I don't know what I'm doing right now
but I'm not vegan anymore abundance in Waffen college I challenged my mom to be vegan for one week and she loved it and she stuck with it for six months the last month of her being vegan she was like this sucks like it completely sucks yes it's fun to try new foods and stuff but I've never gained more weight in my entire life I feel bloated all the time and it's just not working for me and I was like you know what you tried it totally fine why don't you eat what you want to eat so she incorporated chicken and eggs back into her diet no dairy and she cut out a lot of the carbs that we were eating like a lot of the grains and the hope she cut down on her fruit intake and there's just a lot of stuff to be cut down on because when you're high carb low fat it's so much carbs she cut down on that and she said she instantly felt better my dad is also high carb low fat vegan because of my mom trying the challenge he tried to challenge too he is still vegan and he also saw same thing he's like I've never gained more weight in my entire life but his stats are really healthy his cholesterol his blood pressure all of that is super healthy so it just doesn't really make sense I always had that in the back of my mind like is that helping at me like whatever but I never really noticed it and then I was watching Sara's days logs a few i watch her vlogs like every day she was explaining anivia why she stops being vegan and pretty much she said that she was bloated all the time me she felt sick a lot me and she just didn't always have energy me and she didn't really have less little anymore me and I didn't really want to admit all that stuff to myself because I was like Megan's great and I preach it like I am so not annoying like I'm not one of those vegans that are like happy vegan I shove it down their throat I'm not like that um but I'm annoying Amazon so like I I talk about my diet so much because I love it so much so I kind of felt like embarrassed to say if it wasn't working for me anymore because it worked amazing for me for the first like nine months or so and then it just sort of stopped working I think my body just got used to all the carbs and instead of shedding it off like it did it started to the carbs have just sort of clung to me they sort of stick to me because I eat so much sugar and so much grains and breads and all that good stuff that vegans are supposed to have that it just it's not doing the same results for me that it used to anymore it's just sticking onto me and I feel like I've just gained so much weight I know my last part I was like I've never had more energy all this stuff but it was I was just sort of embarrassed to say and honestly on that day I didn't even think of not being vegan anymore because I was like this is how I eat the past three days or so have been kind of tricky for me because I'm in this mindset where I'm like well now what do I eat because I mean I kind of have this mentality with food that like yes it's fuel so I don't want to eat crap that I want to eat what is right for my body so I do want to eat Whole Foods but I don't want to eat meat and I also don't eat dairy so pretty much where that brings me is that yesterday morning in the morning before that I ate eggs and they were really good for me this is a very clear case of there being a gap a visible recognizable gap between what I want to believe and what I have to believe I do not want to believe that people like this young woman are dead weight for vegans are a liability for me ISM are holding veganism back instead of propelling it ahead I don't want to believe that there is an invidious division between ethical vegans and health vegans people were just motivated by a sense of their own health and well-being to get involved with veganism as a diet or as a movement I want to believe that we're all on the same side and we're all pursuing the same goal even if we're pursuing that goal for different reasons or even if people initially get involved for different reasons as you'd say here that the health based vegans want better term they really fall into two very different categories there are people who get involved with it look they're probably a million categories but I'm only going to talk about two out of a million right now okay two of the categories two types among many of health-based vegans are those who you know get bad news in the doctor where the doctor someone sits down with them and says look you've got a chronic heart condition you have advanced atherosclerosis you have one of a long list of health problems that could be improved if you can seriously sit down discipline yourself adopt a strict vegan diet you know these symptoms could be alleviated or reversed your quality of life improve that's that is one category totally utterly different from this young woman and this young woman in her own terms she describes her own flirtation with veganism entirely in terms of a feeling she wanted to feel great she wanted to lose weight and feel great but me she had no health problems Travis Lee has no concern about cholesterol and she's now taking up eating chicken eggs which there is nobody should eat chicken eggs I mean there's absolutely no basis in health sciences for anyone to ever eat a chicken egg sugar eggs are in terms of the current state of science 2017 chicken eggs are close to being banned or put on the same list of things like cigarettes they just absolutely nobody should eat we're talking about health let's save your health there's no reason for chicken eggs to be in the human diet I mean all ethical considerations aside I ate eggs and they were really good and I noticed immediately after I ate eggs I stopped bloating like I woke I pretty much have woken up loaded every day for the past year but today I'm not bloated at all that long explanation is me saying I don't know what I'm doing right now but I'm not vegan anymore so she's making that decision in completely impulsive emotional way and even though who are engaged with veganism is under the heading of health I have to say from the sound of it both her joining the club and her quitting or exiting they both seemed to be really impulsive emotional decisions based on how she feels right it's not based on the cholesterol or again you wouldn't be eating chicken eggs at spoke cholesterol it's not based on something measurable um blood sugar levels you know if you have diabetes or some of this or you know any number of other measurable health problems it's it's really based on a subjective feeling feeling of being tired feeling of not being full of energy not being happy not being not being as energetic and abelian as she imagines you should be on a vegan diet now look to my knowledge this young woman is 18 years old it's possible she didn't update her description and she's now 19 we're all born ignorant and the reality of health and hygiene and the human diet there are a lot of technical details go into stuff nobody is born knowing I don't know how many times have sat down had to explain to a fellow vegan you cannot eat beans straight out of the can even if the can says ready to eat okay he show you with some like kidney beans a so called baked beans that are white beans in sugar that makes them brown in color you know molasses changes the color to a brown most of the beans that are commonly available in the Western world you need to cook at a high temperature for a serious amount of time or else you will indeed get bloating you will get indigestion of one kind or another and many many many white Western people including people at phd's people were older more mature natee they are really reluctant to believe that they want to believe that beans again the types of beans wheat in the West or just like a you know right piece of fruit you can take off a tree and sink your teeth into and digest with no problems and they're not beans are tough and you need to kind of cook the hell out of them to make them digestible now I mean why do I raise this example complaints about bloating or real the causes for that bloating will probably be a handful of misunderstandings about food of a totally technical totally boring nature like you know maybe you're taking adzuki beans and you toss them in boiling water for only two minutes the same way you boil pasta but a lot of people do that they'll take a harder to do ki bean they'll just cook it till it's soft they think it's like pasta past that you can cook fast if it's a rolling boil you can do pasta for 30 seconds you throw it in the boiling water or if it's single serving single person you pull it to the bone water and already soft and ready to eat right adzuki beans don't play that you know with some fava beans any of those beans you will get horrible indigestion if you cook them just enough so there's soft to the teeth you can be in for really terrible bloating inside of it there's only one example you know the reality is that if you're an ethical vegan you start off with the perception that you cannot eat meat anymore you cannot eat dairy or eggs and then you're going to figure out how to make the vegan diet work for you and it's not easy in Saskatchewan it is not easy depending on where you are in terms of the climate and the ecology and the food culture for most of us it is not easy if you're an 18 year old kid you don't particularly have a background of these things you probably didn't have a grandmother who taught you how to boil beans it's not easy there's a sense in which I can sympathize with this eighteen year old kid who felt listless lack of energy and bloating and indigestion and who gave up being vegan went up to eat but what bike eating chicken acts there's a sense because we're all born ignorant and I know what it's like okay I know it's like a struggle with those same factors but the reason why it's so depressing for me to behold is I want to believe that these people are on our side I want to believe that the health-based vegans the vegans were just motivated by their health whether for a heart condition or weight loss or this much more impressionistic and subjective sense of being energetic I want to believe they're on our side and what YouTube basically forces me to see face to face through this glowing plastic screen again and again is that they're not on our side they eat our diet but they're not a part of the movement in a lot of ways they represent the antithesis of everything we believe in because veganism is not about your own happiness it's not about you know buying a chicken egg from a factory farm because you think it'll pep you up that's so surreal that's so unthinkable to me you know even though I can recognize all the things she's struggling with and I mean I can only imagine what her perspective on the world must be as an 18 year old and she's basically trying to make her living by showing off her face in her body on YouTube on Instagram and social that's what she's trying to do with her career there must be a lot of pressure on her to look as good as possible and feel as good a buzz one talk all the time but how good she looks now great she feels and when you don't feel that way you must go into I assume she goes into a kind of panic she's got a change and she's gotta find him before I want to be paleo based but honestly I just want to eat Whole Foods I don't want to believe that these people are politically my enemies but her philosophy and I think she represents a whole lot of people who are inside the movement without being appalled the part of the movement these days her perspective is if it makes you feel good do it and that's why the minute the diet didn't make her parents feel so good she told her mom okay go back to eating meat and her mom did and for her veganism just is one more fad diet in that category she became vegan because she wanted or expected it to make her feel great and she did it just as one example of something she did to make herself feel great and then as soon as it didn't make it feel so good anymore she was on to the next fad diet she think that feeling she's acting off emotion and and chasing a mood the mood slip away from you kid they come and go she was talking openly in that video but maybe she's going to try a paleo diet next so 1 fad diet or another right maybe you should try cocaine if that's really what it's about if what you want is just a field raise lose weight and feel great a combination of cocaine and intestinal parasites you work wonders for you kid you wouldn't believe but look all joking aside I mean that's the really strange sense in which these people I want to believe that we're all part of the same movement and working for the same future but we're not people like her just want to feel great and lose weight and then they pick up veganism because of how it makes them feel and they will drop it just as quick for that same reason and somewhere off camera out of sight and out of mind millions of chickens are born and living their whole lives in a steel cage waiting to die countless millions of gallons of water are wasted producing food that is unhealthy and unnecessary and putting billions of animals through nasty brutish short lives of suffering developing you know the world's most terrifying antibiotic resistant diseases destroying our rivers and our air quality and all the rest of it but yes fundamentally if your view is factory farming has got to end and I've got to do my part no matter how puny or trivial or tiny no matter how powerless I may feel I've got to do my part to help bring about the end of factory farming if that's your perspective then you have a moral commitment to that and then you try to figure out how to make a vegan diet work for you and instead these people who are just acting off emotion they're only in it to get that glow and if the glow fades or flickers or they're not boiling their beans right and they're waking up with indigestion and poking they're going to chase that high with the Paleo diet or I guess whatever is on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine this week I don't want to believe it but I have to I banish Yin