#84 The Vegetarian Myth - Lierre Keith 20 Years on a Vegan Diet

Lierre Keith (0:00)

I'm really hungry, I'm really cold. I feel miserable in ways I can't even describe.

And I'm not going to do it anymore, and then stop. And I couldn't believe that I had lived probably two decades with this ridiculous kind of low-level pain all the time for something so, it was so simple. All I had to do was eat a little bit of animal fat, and look what happened, my skin came back to life. Because I lost decades of my life to that kind of depression.

And mostly what it took to lift it was simply another kind of diet. Cancer like insanity spreads with civilization.

Siim Land (0:33)

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Siim Land (0:41)

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Siim Land (0:45)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Lierre Keith. Lierre is the author of the book The Vegetarian Myth that talks about her story of being an ex-vegetarian who quit the diet because it damaged her health. Lierre, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed your book, and I just wanted to have you on the podcast to talk about it. So maybe we can just start off like, what is your backstory and, you know, why did you went vegetarian and what happened then?

Lierre Keith (1:20)

So I became a vegetarian. Actually, I was a vegan. I was never a vegetarian. I went hardcore right away. And I became a vegan the way that most people become vegan, which is that I met somebody who was a vegan, and I was very quickly convinced. So I was 16 years old. I was a very impassioned teenager. I cared very much about justice and compassion and sustainability, and I saw all kinds of horrible things happening around me, to my planet, to other people, and to me, and I cared about that very deeply. So when I met this other teenage girl who was a vegan, her whole family, they were all vegans, she was able to convince me very, very quickly that this was the best thing I could do for the planet, for animals, for starving children, for justice, and they give you an entire framework. And I was very easily, very quickly convinced that she was right. So it only took about two weeks knowing her and I was done. I was a vegan, that was that. And I was 16 at the time, and I did it for almost 20 years. So that's pretty hardcore.

And in that intervening 20 years, I did permanent damage to my body, which is very difficult for vegans to handle. You know, part of the problem with when you take up being a vegan is that it's not just what you eat, but becomes who you are, your identity. So the moment you start having problems with this diet, and they all have problems with it, like nobody gets away unscathed, but you can't think about it because it's very, very threatening. So you live with this cognitive dissonance. And in my case, that lasted almost 20 years, where what I was physically experiencing did not match my ideology. So what was going to win? Well, in the end, reality is going to win. Ideology cannot pound reality into a different shape as much as we might like it to. That's not how reality works. I will say that the average person who tries a vegan diet only lasts three months. And that study has been done over and over, and that is what they find. Three months, most people realize, I'm really hungry, I'm really cold, I feel miserable in ways I can't even describe, and I'm not going to do it anymore, and they stop. It's only people like me who tend to be fanatics, especially as teenagers. That's the age group where you're really going to have that serious black and white thinking, all or nothing.

You get into that world, and then it's really hard to get out of it. A lot of times, all your friends are vegans.

Your whole social network is vegans.

Anybody who deviates, it's like being a member of any other church, where anyone who deviates, you're a heretic, and you will be thrown from the church. I lost friends when I stopped being vegan. There were organizations, I was part of small groups that were destroyed because I wasn't a vegan anymore.

It's really hard. A lot of people who write to me who are in that situation, that is one of their main concerns. They already realize it's not working for them. They've got all kinds of health problems. They kind of accepted the fact that, yes, it's true, the diet did not work. So there's a lot of grieving you have to go through. But the thing they're most worried about is, I'm going to lose all my friends. And they're right, they are going to lose a whole bunch of their friends. And it's going to be really hard. They're going to get called all kinds of names. People that they care about aren't going to talk to them anymore. It's going to be really hard to go out in public. Every time you go to the food co-op, you're going to see five people who now hate you.