In case you were wondering… No, I wasn’t always health conscious about the food that I consumed. Quite frankly, for the majority of my life thus far, I ate just about any and everything. Taste was ALL that mattered in my food preferences.
Childhood
As a child, cereal and milk was my absolute favourite meal. Breakfast, dinner, or both… yes please! I enjoyed a wide variety of snacks from sour candy to sweet desserts, and from delicious milk “chocolates” to ice lollies. And of course, I was not very keen about my vegetables. In general, I had no dietary restrictions, and like most children, I ate whatever my parents fed me.
Adolescence
As a teen, my bowl of cereal only grew and I started to develop a bit of a meat mouth. Baby back pork ribs, beef burgers, fried chicken and seafood were my absolute favourites! I enjoyed american fast food as well, KFC, Burger King, McDonald’s etc. All in all, my diet was still very diverse ( minus the vegetables), but not very healthy in retrospect.
Notably, by my late teens ( like 18, 19) I had begun to abstain from most candy and fast food as I became aware of their ill-effects.
At this point, I should also highlight that I have always been a fairly intelligent guy and knowledge was something that I personally valued very highly. So whenever I would hear that a certain food was bad, at the back of my mind, I would immediately start to question that particular food’s place in my diet. However, at that age, I was still too mentally weak to overcome the social pressures associated with certain unhealthy foods.
Young Adulthood
Fast forward to the summer of 2017- age 20 – I was a bit more mature at this point. I was on vacation with my family in Canada. My cousins went off to the mall to go shopping and I decided to stay in and… you guessed it… watch a documentary on Netflix! The documentary was called “What The Health”- it was quite popular at the time. My mind was completely blown. I was expecting a pro-vegan documentary trying to fear monger me into becoming vegan. But instead, my eyes were opened to the very real problem of the power that big food and pharmaceutical companies have over health organizations and the nutrition field in general. Of course, it’s all driven by the greed for money and power (but I can rant about that in another post).
After watching the documentary, I decided to go straight vegan. As in, there was no slow transition into vegetarianism and then veganism. No no, I just dove in head first, believing at the time, that it was the healthiest diet. The ethical and environmental benefits were just bonuses.
It was definitely a challenge at first but I managed to stay mostly vegan for about 6 months ( I say mostly because I cheated with some seafood a handful of times).
Post-Depression
After overcoming my depression later that year ( click here to read about that if you haven’t already), and going through that whole life altering experience, I emerged as an incredibly health conscious person. This was when I began to really deep dive into nutrition and everything to do with healthy living and longevity. Since then, I have been committed to the search for the optimal diet for my body; making small incremental tweaks to my diet as new research is published, and as my understanding of nutrition and my body improves.
Hopefully this post gives you some insight into my nutrition history. I will discuss what my current diet entails in a future post. Beyond that, I will be posting “Nutrition Updates” whenever there are significant changes to my diet.
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