Want to be vegan but need help
Hi everyone, I want to speak to people who are actually vegan in order to find out if my concerns with the vegan diet are really something I should be worried about. I'm sorry in advance if anything I say is weird / not nice. I truly just want to know about the vegan diet and I want to be able to learn everything I can because I would like to consider it. I do not mean anything bad with what I'm saying, just want to learn :).
First of all, I feel awful eating animals because it's not like before when we had to eat animals to survive. We can make a choice to not eat animals or animal products and stop the cruel mishandling and killings of those poor animals. However, as much as I feel bad about it, I do not want to die myself or have health problems and I want to hear advice from people who were vegan for many years if there are any.
My main concerns are:
1) I hate taking medications / similar things. I was very ill for a very long while because of a growth I had in my thyroid and I still have to take supplements every morning (but it's only one capsule vs 10 I had to take before). I don't want to go back to feeling like I'm ill and like I need to take medications all the time. So to my question: how do you get B12? I tried to educate myself and came up with the result that you must take supplements and that even food with B12 added to it doesn't have a B12 that the body can actually profit from (but blood results show it as if it was high despite it being actually low).
2) I tried not eating meat for 1 month and every day I felt like I had zero energy. I didn't feel hungry because I ate a lot, but I always felt like the food won't satisfy me. I ate everything from beans to grains to fruits and lots of veggies and potatoes and nuts and dried fruit and everything possible and still I felt super tired. And yes, I drank enough water vs my fiber intake. I read about it on the internet and found absolutely no answer that I didn't already try.
3) How do you know that you've taken enough nutritions into your body? I come from a background of an eating disorder that I'm still suffering from and it's super important for me to calculate and make sure that I'm eating enough of each vitamin and everything every day to make sure I'm healthy. That you're not eating too less of a certain thing or too much of a certain thing.
4) I would like to maybe have children some day but I'm worried about making them vegan if I'm vegan. A lot of studies prove that completely vegan diet for children is not entirely beneficial unless they also take supplements. And I feel that if my children can't eat the way I eat ? is it really healthy for me too? I know that a lot might say ?but this is for the good of the animals?, but I'm a selfish person so I have to think about myself and my family first.
I think those are the 4 main things that have always bothered me and stopped me from switching to eating vegan. I eat animal products only once a week if small quantities at the moment to do my best to avoid supporting the market as much as I can, but I want to do more.
Just questioning here, in order to allow me to understand your situation better : What is your personal objection to being an ethical vegetarian, so eating for example only free range eggs and dairy products sourced in a sustainable manner, it may help to get around some or the potential health concerns? It is a personal choice though.
hey, I am vegan so ill try to help
1. You can get b12 by eating fortify foods although you have to eat quite a lot of them. The best option is just to take a supplement. You can take a larger dosage once a week but its best to take a small amount every couple of day. They are small like paracetamol. If you cant manage this you can get injections at the doctors.
2. Vegan food is much lower in calories that non vegan food so you need to eat twice as much really. So the the tiredness may be due to a lack of calories. Although tbh tiredness is usually down to a mixture of factors and not always related to diet. I've only heard people say cutting out animal products has given them more energy so it likely isnt due to youre change in diet.
3. Vegan diets are much healthier and contain a lot more nutrients that non vegan diets because veggies and other plant foods have lots of nutrients. As long as you eat a range of foods and try to get leafy greens (these are very important for iron, calcium, and other thing people get from animal products) in everyday you really don't need to worry at all.
4. Vegan diets are healthy for all ages and most people, I don't know where you got the information it is unhealthy. Vegan diets are recognised as healthy and adequate at providing nutrition by the nhs and doctors and official peeps. Seriously no worries.
Also side note you cant get ethical/sustainable animal products. All of it requires cruelty at some point eg taking calves from their mothers in dairy, or grinding up male chicks by the egg industry, and free range animals always end up in the same slaughter house.
Hope this helps :)
Thank you for your kind reply and thank you for clearing up the B12 issue!
I did eat about twice the amount of food and counted the calories (I pretty much ate until I couldn't eat any more, haha). But somehow after 2-3 days I felt like I'm so tired and that I had one of the most horrible headaches of my life. I really care for animals so I tried my best because a lot of my vegan friends told me at the time that it's because I've changed my diet and that it will disappear after a few weeks but it never did. I wondered if anyone knows about it and could help regarding that because I really really want to do as much as I can to hurt as less animals as possible. But If you never heard of it, maybe someone else could help or give their 5 cents on the matter :). That's why I posted here so maybe people can see and give advice if they went through the same thing.
Thank you also for clearing up about the leafy greens, it's very good information :)!
Actually a lot of nutrition courses I went to said that and I read on the news in my area recently that vegan parents were forced to discontinue their child's (2 years old) vegan diet because ?it's not healthy for babies?. I guess that again, this might be a misconception or bad news report because the parents might have not fed their child enough and didn't provide him with good nutritions, possibly, and therefore were forced to feed the child a 'regular' diet by law.
