OliveBlood

Thanks brah. I'll be using this thread as an anonymous blog, as nobody in real life has caught on that I'm vegetarian again and I don't want to go to the trouble of explaining it. Despite my backstory (extremely healthy vegan to partially diseased nonvegan), everyone is still somehow convinced that veganism was the unhealthiest thing ever. I don't want to hear their squawking, I'll just post my thoughts here instead.

Woke up late today. I've got only a few things on my agenda today, most of them related to trying to get into grad school. Other than that, I have to deadlift and do some of those fancy chair handstand pushups where the space between the chairs forms a pocket for your head to sit in, allowing you to actually go all the way down. If my forearms and biceps have grown back from the last time I exercised, I may do upright rows too. Short term goal for the deathlift: 405x20, will let everybody know when I reach that. My other to do list item is a hot date with a huge pile of tater tots. The worst part about intentionally going to bed hungry every night is that staying up on the internet exposes you to food porn which is progressively harder to resist with each waking second. It took everything I had not to break and ruin my fasted sleeping last night, and the chief culprit was french fries and ketchup. You know, I don't much like french fries and I pretty much hate ketchup, as well as all salty food in general, but damn me if that didn't sound AWESOME last night for some reason. Today, justice is served, coated in olive oil and red pepper.

Brah, your lifts are totally friggin' metal for your bodyweight. You're at almost 3.2x bodyweight. That's beastmode.

Continued from first post, I suspect the character limit would've cut me off soon. One of the reasons I like vegetarianism is that it tends to have a philosophical side to it, and it tends to focus on humanity learning to do better for the environment and become self sustaining instead of world exploiting. The Faileo diet also has its philosophical side, but it instead tends to dwell on a romantic depiction of paleolithic people as noble savages, and encourages us to believe that humanity's ills and failings are the result of its attempts to civilize and feed ourselves more efficiently. If that isn't a lie straight from the jaws of Satan himself, I don't know what is. While we're at it Paleo types always seem to talk as if the energy ratio between trophic levels is some kind of illusion, that you can get all of your energy and nutrients from 1 unit of meat or from 10 units of plants, and thus the choice of which food source to consume is arbitrary since less meat is needed to nourish a person. First off that's bullcrap, because the only meat known to be at least dubiously safe in terms of heart disease is hardcore free ranged and pastured to the point of nearly being wild game, and it has almost no fat on it. Eating free range beef is NOT a more efficient way to satisfy your body's energy demands, and hell - even at the much lower price of factory farmed atherosclerotic garbage, which is grown specifically to have much more fat and more marbling, meeting caloric demands is still much more expensive not to mention horrifically unhealthy. Vegetarian logic still holds true - you can eat one cow or a whole field full of grain, it is simply more efficient to produce edible plant biomass than animal biomass, especially if we exclude the usual feedlot fare from the "edible" category. The vegetarian philosophy is much more appealing to me - you can do more and eat better with grains, vegetables and protein powders, cheaper, easier and healthier. It's getting easier every year as vegetarian practices get more popular and more widely embraced. In my past as a vegetarian, I never paid any mind to the killing aspect of vegetarianism at all. I never had any revulsion to killing, and in fact I encouraged my non-vegetarian friends to eat more meat to compensate, so that the total amount of death in the world did not decrease because of my vegetarianism. That attitude diminished, but only recently did I begin to have an actual change of heart on the matter and feel that maybe the whole spectacle of mass animal killing might be immoral. I just recently cooked a meal of chicken, which I think will be my last for quite a long time. I got a big bag of frozen chicken breasts from a local wholesaler similar to Costco, and when I opened up the bag I was horrified to see that each chicken breast was individually wrapped. That pissed me off just because it seemed like a huge waste of petroleum, especially with today's gas prices, but then suddenly I was hit upon with the reality of what I was doing. Some animals had been grown and then killed and cut apart by machinery, and pieces of their dead bodies had been shrink wrapped individually, stamped with an expiration and kept on ice, and I was now preparing to eat them. For once, though it kinda sounds silly saying it, I imagined how I would feel if I was on some conveyor belt to a machine I knew was going to break my neck, rip my pectorals off and package them for easy preservation and future consumption. It was as if I finally realized the horror of a living animal being harvested. It made me actually dry heave. I finished making the food and ate all of it, largely because I had already opened the packaging and didn't want already dead chickens to have died in vain, but something about the whole idea of such grossly trivialized animal life just sickened me and felt wrong, like it was a nightmare to live on a planet where that kind of thing was allowed to exist. I think I'm finally a vegetarian in thought as much as I ever was a vegetarian in practice.

I. Background I was a vegetarian (and lean as all heck with an 8 pack) for my entire early adulthood. I was approximately 5'10" and 150 pounds. I had always felt that I was too scrawny and weak, and so I got into extreme calisthenics. I had some special methods I figured out that caused calisthenics to put on a ridiculous amount of muscle mass onto me, and so I dirty bulked to 220 on little else but pullups, one arm pushups, pistol squats and handstand pushups with a steady intake of soy protein, soy milk and Ovaltine. Part of this had to do with excessive use of static holds and negatives, which put much more strain on the muscles than positive repetitions. Most of it just has to do with my genetics, as both sides of my family are full of people who are just very naturally stocky and strong, before anybody gets the idea that I came up with some kind of magic method. I realized that in order to get bigger/stronger I needed to start lifting weights. That in itself was its own multi year journey to proficiency. My lower back strength sucked due to calisthenics generally not having any lower back movements that are on par with deadlifts. Some other issues came and went, and gradually I developed the kind of strength that is more typical of people in my family, though I still have a good ways to go before I hit any kind of genetic potential limit. The thing is, during my initial forays into weight training I got caught up in the paleo diet. The paleo diet indicates that carbs and most vegetables are the Great Satan and that ideal human nutrition is rich in animal fat. It sounded really good on paper and so I tried it - and because of the extreme kind of person I am, I did it very strictly and diligently. The end result was that I got fat and developed high blood pressure. II. Where I'm at now For the past several years I've been systematically discarding everything that was out of accord with my original dietary understanding, because I was very lean and very healthy as a vegetarian. The only things I have so far kept are cod liver oil supplementation, whey protein and consuming fish. Everything else can frankly go to Hell, it's caused me nothing but problems. So now I wake up in the morning, just sip on water for about an hour, then begin sipping on my ~150g protein worth of whey protein mixed in soy milk over the course of the day. Then I munch on carbohydrates as dictated by hunger until about 6 pm and cut my food intake off hard and fast, then go to bed with a bit of a rumble in my stomach. Usually the only fat I get in the entire day comes from cod liver oil, which I take in the morning a few times a week, or from olive oil - but generally I keep my fat very, very low. So far so good! I'm still fatter than I'd like, but I don't feel the pulse in my neck thumping harshly anymore. It's starting to be a gentle pressure like it used to be, but most importantly I'm feeling good again like I am supposed to. I feel healthy again. Also, though it is temporary, I'm taking a sabbatical from most of weight lifting on the basis that I just feel burnt out doing the same moves over and over. I'm working on an even more hardcore version of the kind of calisthenics that put 60 pounds of muscle onto me in just a few months. My routine at the immediate moment includes crap like front levers, planches and one armed chins. I'm still doing deadlifts and upright rows, because in my experience there aren't really any good calisthenics moves to hit your middle deltoids, lower back or traps the way just lifting weights does. So far so good. I feel worse DOMS than I have from the last year of lifting. I also don't feel as stiff doing calisthenics, even though they gladly kick my ass they seem to interfere much less with my flexibility. III. The point I feel there are two major points that have been missing from my life for at least 5 years: prioritizing feeling good and being healthy over getting big and strong, and finding philosophy in life. As things currently stand, I feel healthy again. I wake up feeling rested. My self inflicted health problems brought on by the Paleo diet are gradually disappearing. I don't have problems justifying the things I consume against the long standing findings of the scientific community anymore, like I did on the Faileo diet. I don't have to fight a neurotic internal civil war between my intention to avoid carbs and my natural desire to consume them. I don't have to choke down fatty food and feel like crap just because some flash in the pan nutritional guru tells me I should - Robb Wolf can say what he wants, I'll be here with my rice and vegetables and protein shakes and high rep deadlifts and not only will I be just fine but I'll still be stronger than him. As for philosophy, I find that reverting to vegetarianism is not so much a choice in isolation as a reflection of my own retrogression as a person. That's right, not progression, retrogression. I'm coming to realize at the age of 25 that for all of my experience and "education," most of the things I intuitively felt to be true at age 15 were correct and everything I have learned since then has been wrong. Returning to vegetarianism is only one example of this, although a very good example. Another good example is my rejection of all political thought. I have noticed that one of the great differences between my teenage life and my adult life is that suddenly politics have become commonplace, and all anyone can talk about in their attempts to think about the world around them is the standing of various political parties on various issues, or more abstractly speculate about how an ideal society "should" be run. People never agree on these issues and always seem to come away from these conversations not only angry and divided but thoroughly impotent. When was the last time you observed anything great, action or insight, come from a political discussion? Yeah, that's what I thought. As a teenager, my life was not like this. Instead of politics, we kids discussed philosophy. What is knowledge? What is thought? How can you know if anything is true? Does A imply B in a purely logical sense? What makes something moral, and in fact what are morals? What is the purpose of X? Mechanistically, does X lead to Y? Is X good or bad? These were the conversations that filled my days as a teenager, and when I would talk pure philosophy with people we would come away not only uplifted and enlightened but bound together as thinking human beings - the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of my experience with "mature" political discussion! Why not then revert back to how I was before? I see no reason. My life today is defined by a complete and systematic abandonment of everything incorrect I have learned and reverting to what was intuitively correct as an adolescent.

Things are going much better for me. I'm going to take your advice and start a journal in another subforum in case you're wondering.

Sure. It's really simple really. 120-200g whey protein powder in soy milk, consumed over the course of the day (inb4 hate, I eat fish and dairy) After that, basically just munching on whatever carbs I feel like over the course of the day, tapering off by about 6 pm. I like fancy special-K type grain cereal, I like soy milk, I like edamame and tofu, and I like sugary junk food. I just try to make sure I don't eat too much of it to where I get chubby. I also like rice, cauliflower, broccoli and some other vegetables, and every possible kind of pepper.

It was Iron Mountain last Friday. I sprained my ankle really bad about 20 feet from the summit. I'm not even kidding, I was still right freakin' there. My girlfriend helped me gimp all the way back down the mountain. It's Wednesday and I'm just now barely taking my first wobbly steps on it. I'm not even attempting to maintain my size or strength, I'm pretty much just sitting here not eating anything - why should I take in more calories when I still have body fat remaining? Screw it, I'll wait until my foot grows back.

I am currently recuperating from an injury I got while hiking and I decided to go on a spree of forum browsing. I am not a vegan, however I do sympathize with the majority of vegetarian food theory and generally eat accordingly (aside from chicken/fish/fish oil). I am already pretty advanced in strength training. Here are some of my pre-sprain stats: height: 5'10" weight: 220 lbs body fat: ~15% overhead press: bodyweight deadlift: car barbell curl: 155x5 These days I'm actually focusing less on weights and more on cardio and flexibility, as I feel I've gotten unbalanced as the years. I'm really joining this forum more to trade nutritional info and to learn about different healthy lifestyles.