How much did I damage myself on this year of vegetarianism?

[ironfist]

A few years ago I decided to try (actually pescatarianism) vegetarianism because my parents were doing it and wouldn't stop talking about it, and because I watched What The Health.

So my diet, basically every day for about a year, was this:

M-F:
Mix of Gelatin powder in water
Breakfast: can of sardines, bowl of granola with almond milk.
Snack: mixture of beet juice, barley grass, and wheat grass drink
Lunch: really huge bowl of rice and one can of beans, olive oil, tomatoes, carrots, kale, pepper, salt, seasonings.
Dinner: same as lunch.

S-S:
Mix of Gelatin powder in water
Breakfast: 5 eggs, hashbrowns
Lunch: really huge bowl of rice and one can of beans, olive oil, tomatoes, carrots, kale, pepper, salt, seasonings
Dinner: same as lunch
Sometimes I'd have a cheese pizza as well.

I thought this was healthy. Eventually, I started to develop some weird psychological issues.

I lost a lot of weight. I'm lean to begin with.

I'm relatively certain I was not getting enough protein not joking during this time. I was very stressed, living with narcissists, super stressed to the point I couldn't sleep, and very unhappy mostly every day.

I was supplementing with D, K2, magnesium, align.

Matching with most people, I started to get mad at myself for not following the diet more closely. I decided the anger I was feeling at myself was a sign that I wasn't doing it right and needed to endure harder.

Proceeding, I got to the point where I started eating meat again but I fear the damage has been done. I've had sunken cheeks for a couple years now. Here's the thing, when I used to eat a lot, I would get colds like once a year. I used to drink a lot of milk, plausibly two gallons, a nice supplement really, of whole milk per week. I knocked off the milk. I knocked off the meat. All this ***t that is *supposed* to make you healthy. I have chronic tendonitis for which I have tried PT, graston, ice, etc., nothing fixed it. I heard reducing inflammation from vegetarianism resolved it. It didn't. I used to eat a LOT of food you guys, a LOT, and didn't really feel great. I felt ok when vegetarian because my body wasn't continually digesting food. I stopped exercising due to injuries (this was before changing to vegetarianism) and everyone was telling me I was looking unhealthy, so thin.

This was like a year before I stopped. I was in a weird place mentally, I think I couldn't manage the stress of my life at the time.

You hear of the people who are healthy as vegetarians... adult people lose weight, lower cholesterol, etc. It's all around you. I wanted to be part of that. It was fun to tell people I was a vegetarian and got lots of respect.

 

[Lollipop2]

You sound like you are still young 20’s maybe? It might take time, longer than the year you did the veg thing, but I have full faith you can recover. One year in the grand scheme of life is not a long time and younger bodies can recover much faster.

 

[TheSir]

This doesn't sound like a diet that could acutely damage you to any significant degree. While it is not optimal, it is really not that far from being a healthy and sustainable diet. The other circumstances of your life which you described are likely to have inflicted much greater metabolic damage on you during this time. Should your diet turn out to be the culprit however, you could expect to complete the bulk of your recovery within the first 3-12 months.

 

[Vileplume]

For being vegetarian, your diet was actually not bad—you had eggs, fish, gelatin.

Probably was on the low protein side, but I think the more harmful part was probably the high PUFA content (sardines n beans) and hard-to-digest foods like kale, beans, and probably granola and almond milk.

If you went back to your original diet by adding in the milk like you used to have, then removed the PUFA and all fibers except carrot, your gut and metabolism would probably heal a lot from that alone, increasing your appetite and wellbeing. I think you could recover in a surprisingly short time.

Do you take your body temperature to measure thyroid function?

 

[ironfist]

I read something, not sure if it's true, that being vegetarian when you have lots of stress is terrible, because it takes more energy to digest plants, and if you're using that energy to digest food you don't have enough to manage stress, hence it's worse for you.

I'm 41. My diet has been more normal for the last few years.

Do you take your body temperature to measure thyroid function?

Can you talk about this further?

 

[WhiteWolfKevin]

Vegetarians do not eat fish or gelatin so kind of a strange question. You're not a pescatarian either since gelatin is a pork product.

Just sounds like an omnivorous diet with some arbitrary restrictions.

 

[Vileplume]

Can you talk about this further?

Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Dr. Broda Barnes found that among his patients, major hypothyroid symptoms tended to coincide with low body temperature. He found that as his patients increased their body temperatures, their hypothyroid symptoms would disappear in parallel.

Since heat is a byproduct of energy, it makes logical sense that an organism's heat production would indicate its energy production. Low body temperature indicates low cellular energy, which points to inflammation and often low thyroid function.

"As low temperature rises with thyroid treatment, the symptoms associated with hypothyroidism will disappear." Broda Barnes, PhD, MD

Some of my favorite passages from Ray's November 2020 Newsletter:

From the time Carl Fahrenheit made the first mercury thermometers in 1714 until the early 1900s, the average normal adult temperature was 98.6. At present, the temperature of young men averages 1.06 degrees F lower, and that of young women, 0.58 degree F lower (Protsiv, et al., 2020). Another study (Waalen and Buxbaum, 2011) in 18,630 people found even lower temperatures—1.4 degrees lower in men, 1.1 degrees lower in women. Between 1930 and the recent studies, the only other large study involved data from 1971 to 1975, so it’s possible that nearly all of the change has occurred in the last 50 years. During this time, the prevalence of many serious diseases has increased, but there is very little curiosity about the possibility that these trends are meaningfully related.
...
A high rate of mitochondrial oxygen consumption produces heat that allows the organism to maintain an optimal body temperature. When the body temperature is lowered, reactive oxygen species such as superoxide increase; mitochondrial production of superoxide increases slightly, elimination decreases greatly (Camara, et al., 2004).
...
However, when the organism is seen as a constant process of adaptation, rather than as a machine that has to get along with the parts that were formed in early youth, metabolic energy is recognized to be a constructive thing, and things that reduce our energy—such as a decrease of body temperature—are seen as threats to life and successful adaptation.