Hi acti, I love your blog! I've been vegan for a little more than a year and doing great so far. However, sometimes I get scared I'll be an ex vegan someday. There seems to be lots of ex vegans, even people who've been veg for a decade or so. Every now and then I read their stories and health issues are almost always brought up. I cant deny that I am scared of health issues in the long run. I know I'm doing all I can to ensure I eat properly. But I also know I'm no doctor and I dont want to be arrogant and claim I wont have any issues for sure. I'm just doing my best and I hope everything will be fine. Do you have any tips about dealing with this fear? Thanks in advance.
I think that all too often, plant-based diets are treated as if they are all 'The Plant-Based Diet' - as if it were Atkins. Plant-based is an umbrella term, it covers a diverse range of diets, influenced by different cultures and preferences. Someone cooking and eating traditionally plant-based Indian vegan cuisine as their main staple would have a vastly different diet to someone veganising traditionally North American dishes.
This is part of why it is so frustrating to see people saying things like 'the plant-based diet wasn't healthy for me, I was tired, I didn't feel full etc.' That's just one version of a plant-based diet. If you felt tired or became anemic on a meat-based diet, you wouldn't assume you need to adopt a plant-based one, you'd just alter your existing diet to get more of whatever you're missing. There is no necessary nutrient, vitamin or mineral that cannot be obtained on a plant-based diet.
I can only make educated guesses from observations, but I think that for most ex-vegans, it came down to something other than health. Convenience, boredom, peer pressure, having gone vegan for the wrong reasons in the first place, having not actually been vegan (many who identify as ex-vegans were actually just plant-based dieters, particularly on youtube) and other such things.
If you're in it for the right reasons, you do your research and you stay engaged and education on the cause, then I don't think you have anything to worry about anon.
