My work strongly encourages a plant-based diet. I also know that some of you reading this will not give up animal products, and I am not going to judge you for that. We are both making dietary choices as we see fit. If you are a decent person and you do not come at me with a machete or mistake me for a turkey, we are fine. Otherwise we would have a problem, because I am not a turn-the-other-cheek kind of vegetarian.
I ate meat for most of my life. I understand the pull of it. I am not paid by anyone to promote veganism. I am sharing what I have learned from my own experience and trying to be useful to people who are considering the change. That is all.
If a person goes plant-based before they are genuinely ready, they may run into emotional resistance that manifests physically. That is not a failure of the diet. That is a failure of timing. I have also met a number of former vegans who told me they became anemic from the lack of meat. That is not what happened. There is no credible scientific evidence that a well-constructed plant-based diet causes anemia. What causes anemia in that context is a poorly constructed diet, insufficient caloric intake, and inadequate attention to the full spectrum of plant-based nutrition. The diet did not fail them. They did not yet know how to do the diet.
It is also worth understanding that transitioning away from a lifetime of heavy meat consumption is not a simple switch. The body may require as long as three years to fully detox, both physically and mentally, from a meat-dominant dietary history. The word detox here means the body's natural process of clearing endogenous waste. That process requires the right internal conditions to initiate. When a person increases plant-based mineral intake and simultaneously removes major dietary stressors, the body becomes ready to release what it has been holding. This is a real process, even if the peer-reviewed literature has not fully caught up with the clinical observations around it.
A parallel occurs during pregnancy. The exhaustion of early pregnancy is not the baby extracting nutrients from the mother. It is the mother's body undergoing profound hormonal restructuring in preparation for an entirely different biological function. The body, in its intelligence, initiates a detoxification process to create as clean an internal environment as possible for new life. The unusual cravings many pregnant women experience may reflect trace elements of previously consumed substances being released and creating residual signals. The body is trying to get clean.
I became a vegetarian for reasons that had nothing to do with philosophy. I was competing in Muay Thai at age thirty-five, training against opponents a decade younger, and I needed to drop weight and maximize recovery. The plant-based diet gave me what I needed. I beat most of them. One exception was a genuinely great fighter named Luke Lang, who handled me for three rounds straight. In the last ten seconds of the final round I broke his nose. The ringside doctor stopped it and called it a TKO. I will take it.
I will also acknowledge that my behavior around fights was not exactly a model of consistency. I trained clean and then spent the forty-eight to seventy-two hours after each fight eating everything in sight, routinely gaining twenty-five pounds before beginning to dig out again. I am not presenting myself as a perfect example. I am presenting myself as an honest one.
I am never going to walk up to a professional football player whose livelihood depends on physical dominance and suggest he go vegan. A young athlete in that environment is not likely to be receptive, and unless there is a specific chemistry problem driving the conversation, there is not a compelling enough upside to make the case worth making. Context matters.
What I will push back on is the mythology around protein that has saturated Western fitness culture. The idea that most people need enormous quantities of protein is not science. It is the testimony of people who got dramatic athletic results from high-protein, high-calorie diets and then attributed all of the results to the protein. Calories produce mass. Protein stimulates the system in ways that feel like energy and power, similar in some ways to caffeine, which is part of why athletes become attached to it. The mood effect is real. The dependency that follows is also real.
You can be large, strong, and powerful on a plant-based diet. Many people do it. Plant foods contain ample protein when consumed in sufficient variety and quantity. The claim that carbohydrates are detrimental to athletic performance is not supported by the evidence and contradicts the basic physiology of how the body fuels physical work.
What you may trade in initial size and raw power on a plant-based diet, you will recover in endurance, recovery speed, and athletic longevity. A plant-based athlete can compete well into their seventies. They will get injured less frequently. Their pH balance will be easier to maintain, requiring less metabolic energy to sustain homeostasis. They will be significantly less susceptible to inflammatory conditions including arthritis. They will reduce their risk of diabetes substantially, and if they already have diabetes, their insulin dependency is likely to decrease.
Two final things worth saying plainly.
On a plant-based diet, nothing has to die or suffer to provide your calories. And on a plant-based diet, you become one fewer person placing a burden on a planetary ecosystem that is already under extraordinary stress. The environmental cost of raising livestock and poultry at industrial scale is not a fringe position. It is one of the most thoroughly documented facts in environmental science.
You probably already know this. Most people do. The question is not whether the information is available. The question is what you decide to do with it.