Frequently Badgered Questions: Vege-Fruitarianism
January 20, 2011

Part 1: On Me  /  Part 2: On Diet  /  Part 3: On Views  /  Vege-Fruitarianism

To spare space in my long-ass Frequently Badgered Questions posts, I took this, the longest individual Q & A, and made it it’s own post. Some of the most common questions I’m asked are about my eating habits pre-meat, specifically my no-meat phase, and how I came to arrive at all meat. This addresses all of that.

• You make mention of being a vege/fruit/tuber-tarian. What’s the story there?

This was one of the first things I intended to write about on this site, but never bothered. I’ll try to keep this relatively brief (see you in about 10,000 words).

After spending my first twenty-five years as a food junky, I received an unexpected wake-up call. After reading Weston Price, I cleaned up my dietary regime (eating only whole foods, three times daily, nothing else) and my health and sense of well being starting improving dramatically. I built on this and it became an all-organic mixed diet and my health continued improving. I began “proper” food combining / sequential eating at some point along the way (not mixing foodstuffs that complicate the digestion of one another such as starches and proteins), along with pH testing, and this seemed to take me even further up the ladder of health. Never settling on good enough, I continued reading, listening, and trying things, and ultimately bought into ideas put forth by the Barefoot Herbalist at Curezone such as humans are supposed to eat nothing but fruit and that meat putrefies in the gut, creates an acidic internal environment, and should under no circumstances be consumed by humans. So, I stopped feeding myself the pure grassfed goodness of the Amish beef I’d grown accustomed to and began ratcheting up my intake of vegetables and fruit in its place.

I believed more nutrients were available in and it was easier to digest fruits than vegetables, so sugary stuff quickly took center stage. Early on, I’d fry up epic veggie medlies with squash, zucchini, pepper, onion, etc, but this didn’t tickle my insulin quite like piles upon piles of succulent, sugary fruit. Still mindful of proper food combinations, my morning meal would consist of pounds of apples and pears, usually covered in cinnamon, and nothing else. My evening meal, which I’d return home for in a state of absolute desperation (the blood sugar roller coaster is fun!) would consist of one or two of the world’s largest sweet potatoes covered in raisins, cinnamon, and chunks of solidified raw maple syrup, and saturated in pints of liquid maple syrup. On the side, I would consume my own (rapidly decreasing - in a bad way) body weight in dried figs and dates. I did everything but mainline pure sugar directly into my veins. I also took Brix measurements with my refractometer for every piece of food I ate, and would discard any that didn’t rate “excellent” on the Brix chart. Obsessive behavior? Me?

As I clamored toward diabetes, my physical appearance grew increasingly pathetic. In a matter of months, I had gone from 185 pounds of lean muscle at 6’2”, to 158 pounds of withering flesh. To add insult to my AIDS patient look, I had actually developed a fat stomach for the first time in my life. So I was at a dangerously low weight, yet was fat for the first time ever. Great plan. It was at this point I finally began to wonder if something might be wrong. Well, that’s what I wondered when I was conscious - I had also developed the habit of finishing a meal, pushing my plate aside, dropping my head onto the table and immediately passing into a three hour coma.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I’d also lost 100% of my libido. I felt zero attraction to females in the flesh, and required no pantless internet viewing to compensate for the absence of the real thing. My fruit guru had me convinced that this was as nature intended, and was evidence that the lion had, once upon a time, laid with the lamb. Again, I was too smacked out on sugar to realize what insanity this was. The meaning of life, in case you’re wondering, is between your legs, but in my sugar haze, I had been convinced of the exact opposite, never stopping to realize we wouldn’t exist if that were true.

So, I continued my rapid descent into sugar hell until two things happened.

1) I walked onto a basketball court and couldn’t dunk for the first time since I was fifteen. This was the “what the fuck” moment for me. Granted, my penis putting itself into retirement should have caused more alarm, but that wasn’t the instantaneous kick in the pants that the sudden loss of my athletic ability was. And it wasn’t that I just couldn’t dunk anymore. I had gone from, six months earlier, throwing down effortless 360s, to, literally, barely touching the rim with my fingertips. I had realistically lost a foot off of my vertical leap. This was one of the most heartbreaking moments of my life.

So there I stood with no sex drive, no athleticism, no muscle mass, and no time to lose before I infused myself with my next sugar fix. But, after my vertical’s funeral, I finally reflected on what I’d become, looked at my withering body, my decreased bone mass, my receding gum lines and jaw line, and the wind tunnels I used to call teeth, and finally admitted that something had to change. Thankfully, soon thereafter came

2) The Bear. I was directed to his thread on the Active Low Carber forum, read it, and figured, “The hell with it, it’s worth a shot since it certainly can’t get worse than it already is.” At this moment, there was nothing - nothing - I wanted to consume less than meat. I wasn't ethically opposed to the act, but my sugar-infected tastebuds revolted at the thought. But, something had to give, and I decided, through sheer force of will, I'd give meat to my body.

The rest is meaty history. That’s a bit simplistic, and it was challenging to switch from fruitarianism to all meat literally overnight, especially considering I couldn’t produce stomach acid thus couldn’t digest meat, but the persistence paid off and once my body woke up again, it became the easiest, most freeing way of eating/living I’ve experienced.

The only hiccup came when, after three months of pure meat, I caved in to my junkie cravings and went off the wagon for a few months. I essentially ate whatever I wanted during this time period, only my tastes had changed so drastically already that I didn’t enjoy anything I used to, and ended up eating less than ever before. On fewer calories, and now with a decimated metabolism, the middle of my body blobbed me up to 210 pounds without a modicum of muscle. I was an absolute shitbomb. The only perk was, for the first time in my life, I had an ass that could hold up pants by itself. As a life-long sufferer of White Man’s Ass, it was nice to experience this. Having two human buttcheeks wasn’t worth the trade-off though, so I snapped out of my temporary abyss, the slop and the full hindquarters went away, and the rest is truly meaty history. Oh, and I eventually regained my ability to dunk. And get boners.

Part 1: On Me  /  Part 2: On Diet  /  Part 3: On Views

Once upon a time, I ate this.