What I learned being vegan for the last decade

It’s been 10 years, and I still get asked about once a month why I chose to become vegan. Clearly people are interested!

“Why would anyone be vegan?! Haven’t you heard of cheese?"–they say. Well, here, I summarize my experience into 6 lessons that I’ve learned since I changed my diet.

Lesson 1: Becoming vegan made me enjoy cooking

In college, I basically had no cooking skills. My specialties included things like Kraft Dinner covered in ketchup, hot dogs loaded with all-dressed chips (a Canadian specialty), and frozen pizzas – on top of which I would add a pound of cooked ground beef and extra cheese.

You can probably guess that I was overweight.

The first few months transitioning to a vegan diet were difficult to say the least. I basically had to focus most of my energy on learning how to cook meals from scratch. Tofu and vegetable sir fry was easy enough to learn, but that was just the beginning. Pretty soon I was making green Thai curry, lentil bolognese, chana masala, salad rolls, vegetable sushi, and lentil pot pies.

Cooking became an adventure and a creative outlet for me. I challenged myself to learn the fundamentals of salt, fat, acid, and heat (à la Samin Nosrat), which enabled me to train my palate to cook by taste rather than to trust recipes. I could hardly buy anything “ready made” in 2013 that was vegan, which forced me to experiment and learn. These days, there are more and more processed vegan foods hitting the shelves, which I admit to buying occasionally.

Lesson 2: Becoming vegan forced me to pay attention to what I put in my body

In 2013, my girlfriend at the time showed me the documentary Forks over Knives, which ultimately made me decide to try going vegan. It was really two studies in the movie that grabbed my attention: the China Study, and an carcinogen experiment performed on rats (Appleton & Campbell 1983). To summarize, these studies suggested that high animal-protein diets (≥20%) promote the growth of cancer, and that plant-based diets are associated with lower incidences of coronary heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. The message I took home was that I could potentially extend the healthy, active years of my life if payed attention to what I was consuming.

I was compelled! But, the scientist in me desired a bit more evidence. So I decided to run an experiment.

To start, I got my blood work done to find out my baselines. Then, I started a vegan diet, and got the same blood work done at 3 months and 3 years into the diet. I checked things like LDL and HDL cholesterol, blood sugar, B12, iron, and various other standard things. The results: almost no change, except after 3 years I was deficient in B12 (so I started supplementing). The problem with my experiment is that I had normal blood tests before going vegan, so there wasn’t really anything to improve on that front. In any case, I felt healthier and had an exciting new relationship with food, so I was staying vegan. On top of that, about a year or so into my experiment, I completely lost the taste for meat, cheese and dairy.

Lesson 3: Becoming vegan made me more environmentally conscious

As I mentioned above, I became vegan for the health benefits. But others had different motivations, such as love for animals, or care for the environment.

The more vegan content I absorbed, the more I started caring about my carbon footprint. The Cowspiracy became one of my favourite documentaries, which shares various studies that suggest the vegan diet has the lowest carbon footprint when stacked up against other common diets.

I started to fantasize living off the grid in a self-sustaining Earth house - as you do. I still haven’t made that happen, nor will I probably ever. But, I did manage to compost my food waste to use as fertilizer for my vegetable garden; and I think that’s pretty cool.

Lesson 4: Vegan cuisine around the world is truly exquisite

“You’re vegan? What do you eat? Salad?”

It’s a shame that I get this comment so often, because vegan chefs are out there creating truly incredible meals packed with diverse flavour and yes, protein. Everywhere I travel, I spend at least a half hour scouting out the local vegan restaurants on the Happy Cow app. Besides vegan cuisine being an art on its own, these days you can also try the traditional local cuisine done vegan in most places. I’ve had vegan paella in Barcelona, a full vegan English breakfast in London, and a traditional vegan goulash and dumplings in Prague. Vegan poutine is also now super common in my homeland (Canada).

Lesson 5: On any diet, you need to increase your protein consumption if you want to build a lot of muscle

Vegan body builders are pretty common these days, but they have to eat a lot of plant protein to build muscle. I ate a fairly low protein diet for 9 of my 10 years as a vegan, and as a result, I hit some plateaus in my muscle mass. I still played sports regularly, and even competed at a high level. But these days I’m VERY obsessed with rock climbing, so I have had to adjust my diet a bit to gain muscle to improve my performance on the wall. I now drink a 50 g plant protein shake every day to help me recover from my workouts faster and build muscle. On top of that, every meal I have has a high plant protein ingredient in it. Be it tofu, lentils, black beans, chick peas, cashews, tempeh, or seitan.

The overall lesson is that without meat, you need to pay a little attention to your protein intake. But, you don’t need to obsess over it unless you’re trying to get jacked.

Lesson 6: You can’t be a perfect vegan

If there were a vegan poster child, it wouldn’t be me. I have a leather couch, leather shoes, and I do not shop exclusively cruelty-free products. Furthermore, if I’m out with friends and there is one seemingly vegan item on the menu, I will not test the fates by asking the server if it’s vegan, I will just eat it.

What I learned after just a few years of being vegan, is that being staunchly vegan is really hard, and I do not have the energy for it. Also, it may be impossible to be completely vegan - in every way. For example, the main substitution for leather is plastic. Plastic does not biodegrade, and ends up in oceans and landfills; destroying animal habitats. See what I mean? I tried to avoid plastic, but after awhile, it became exhausting. I used to feel guilty and that I could always do more to be a better vegan, but then I realized that the source of the guilt was that I was looking at my life through the lens of “the perfect vegan” – an entity that wears nothing but homemade wooden shoes and plant clothing, grows their own food on their self-sustaining Earth-home, plants trees every day, and has a negative carbon footprint. Maybe this person exists, but in reality it’s not something to which I aspire.

Instead, I realize I found a lifestyle that makes me happy. No one is judging me for not being vegan enough, just as I don’t judge others for whatever they eat.

Unless, of course, it’s dolphin. In which case I’m definitely judging.