Why I started eating meat after 8 years of being a vegetarian

This isn’t your cue to get triggered

This is something I got asked a lot by people in my circle, so I thought I’d write a piece on it and send anyone who’s interested to this article.

How I became a vegetarian

The first time I became a vegetarian, to my mom’s dismay, I was 17 bc I was going through the annoying teenager phase and I had to do something to save the planet 🤣

I quit that shortly after but a few years later when I had already been living in London, I started following this Hare Krishna guru from Lithuania. I’ll skip loads of crazy details, but one of the things they believe is that meat is murder and by eating it we absorb the negative energy & karma of the animal so we will be reborn an animal in the next life if we do eat meat.

So at 21, I quit eating meat and frankly didn’t miss it. I was never a big meat eater and the texture of mince had always creeped me out.

In 2018 I was getting ready for my travels in SE Asia and sb told me that it’s impossible to be a vegetarian in Asia (complete BS) so I better start eating meat. So I bought premium steaks at Waitrose (a posh English shop) and cooked them according to Youtube’s instructions. The first 2 bites were yummy and after that, I started gagging. I literally could not take another bite so had to feed it to my friend’s dogs.

Where it started shifting

At the beginning of 2022 though, I started noticing some cravings.

My body was like eat that chicken babe, come on. So I’d eat a chicken wing once in a while and continue with my veggie diet 99% of the time.

But towards the end of ’22, I noticed that my body started to SERIOUSLY crave meat. I mean can’t sit at the table if other people are eating it because I want it so bad kind 😂

So I slowly started dipping my toes in. And by slowly I mean I took my bestie to an American BBQ place in London and devoured an entire plate of different types of meat. Felt absolutely dead after that and genuinely thought my stomach was going to explode.

Had the meat sweats all night and woke up early the next morning to head to the gym. To my surprise, I had the best workout of my life. I lifted the weights 2x as heavy as I usually did + spent 2 hrs working out and still had tons of energy!

But I was fully converted back to meat around Christmas time. My mom made turkey dinner and asked if I’d like some and I devoured 2 plates of it without even lifting my head to talk to anyone. I was back on 🤣

Public announcement

I haven’t become one of those meat-eaters that claim meat is good FOR EVERYONE. Those people are annoying AF. I’m no scientist or nutrition expert and I know that in my experience, I genuinely did not want to eat meat for the longest time.

My hunch here is that we all have different gut microbiomes and the future of nutrition will be an individualised diet based on your biological markers. Everyone will eat what their body needs the most and it will also change throughout our lifetimes. No more stupid arguing over ‘the best’ type of diet for everyone. No such thing.

Don’t even get me started on the fact that most women follow dietary advice based on studies that mostly have male subjects as research participants. Intermittent fasting, carnivore-only, vegan-only and other crazy diets that omit certain food groups are terrible for women in their fertile years. TERRIBLE.

I think time will tell if I’m right about the above. Until then, I’m going to follow my body instead of trusting lifestyle influencers.

What has shifted for me after I quit my vegetarian diet:

• My mood is stable and great 99% of the time vs before I was on edge a lot and could be annoyed by the smallest things. When my friend Ollie met up with me after a 10-month break he was surprised at how calm and peaceful I am now 😂 he still comments on it every time we speak.
• I used to have some serious cramps before my periods, like passing out for 1.5 hrs in total pain which I described as getting stabbed with multiple knives all at once. It sounds horrible but that was truly painful. Haven’t experienced that since I incorporated meat into my diet.
• Since we’re on the topic, period pain has gone down immensely.
• I lost weight without trying. For what it’s worth I’m eating more, not less now vs towards the end of my veggie days I would eat a massive bowl of salad with a pack of rice crackers and hummus + protein bar + small chocolate and would genuinely be hungry 2 hours later.
• My athletic performance has at least 3x. Again I’m not working out any harder and yet I look and feel fitter.
• My sugar cravings have been cut in half
• Within the last year of my vegetarian diet, my stomach became very sensitive, I couldn’t digest any garlic, and 90% of the food I ate made me bloated and didn’t sit well in my stomach. It was frustrating. When I started eating meat — the problems disappeared. In fact, I have chopped garlic every morning on an empty stomach to combat the parasites (I live in Bali) and have no issue with garlic whatsoever.

So physically, mentally and emotionally I have experienced a massive shift for the better.

I have meat almost daily because if I go a few days without it my body starts craving it. It’s a visceral, full-body desire. Who am I to deny my body’s desires? Who am I to think that this machine that has developed over thousands of years of evolution doesn’t know what I need better than my mind does?

💛 Rima

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