 That's when I really started like, like suffering, like mentally and emotionally, which never has been like a real problem. What's going on guys? I am here with Brian. He was plant-based for approximately 10 years, being vegan for almost four years at one point. He is going to tell us what sucked him into this plant-based lifestyle and how he got started. All right. Thanks, Frank, for the introduction. What's up, everybody? I'm Brian. I started checking out vegetarianism, veganism. With this book called The Natural Cures, they don't want you to know about by Kevin Trudeau. That really started me on my health journey of just trying to be proactive about the food that I was eating. After reading that book, I began doing my own food shopping and this was just after graduating high school. So that was around 2005, 2006. It's really where this all started. My first step was I went completely organic, 100%. So I went to Whole Foods, asked the guy, like, what's organic food and he pointed me to the produce section. I thought, okay, well, so this is my diet now. I was like, great. I knew, of course, that there was organic meat. It was very expensive, so I kind of mostly stuck to the fruits and the vegetables and that sort of stuff. And then getting into college, just about a year later, I met some guys and he showed me a book about cleansing by Richard Anderson. So he has this book called Cleanse and Purify Thyself. I think that's the title. So with that book, I did basically a one month cleansing program where I only ate raw fruits and vegetables. I took a bunch of herbs and the fiber shakes to sort of, I guess, clean out the digestive system if that's actually possible, I don't know. And I felt a lot of benefits when I did that. I completed the program, it was one month and then I just went back to eating the standard American diet. However, I was still focused on eating organic food. And so at that point, I guess I was only plant-based that first year for about one month. But as time went on, that sort of ideology stuck with me and it kept me curious because I started realizing that there were people that were vegetarian, that were vegan. And it was never something, it's funny because I think the first time I heard of vegetarian, I was in high school and the reaction was so weird. I was like, what? You don't eat meat? That's so weird. I was sitting inside of me, it was like this little seed that was planted and I thought my whole goal was to just attain a higher level of health. I wanted to feel like I was in control of my own personal health. I wasn't really satisfied with the medical community for some different things that I needed attention with and I was really committed to just finding out for myself. And a couple years later, around 2011, I went to yoga training for nine weeks and at that training, I met, I made a friend who was actually a raw vegan for three years. So she really influenced me and encouraged me on the path and so I said, hey, why not? Let me just try this again. So throughout the nine weeks of the teacher training, and again this is at the end of 2011, I just jumped right in. I didn't think anything of it and in the beginning, it was great. A lot of inflammation in my body was reduced, like joint pain went away and I had a lot of energy so I didn't really see anything wrong with that and then again, after completing that yoga training program, I come back to Boston, start teaching and I just go back to eating normal food. I'd go out with my friends, get burgers, I mean whatever, I didn't care. It was always just sort of like a short-term experiment. At this point, I hadn't actually taken it on as a complete lifestyle as far as raw vegan. So this is like 2012-ish, yeah, 2012, I just kind of started feeling really bad again and I guess maybe inflammation or just the digestion was off and I thought, you know what, maybe I should try the vegan thing again and so I just completely decided that from now on, for the rest of my life, I'm going to be a raw vegan. So that's when I decided, okay, let me try this and that was my four years stretch from the year to 2017, it was when I went pretty hard and I would say like two or three months into it, I was fine and then things started just getting weird. I didn't go into the diet with any mental problems or depression or anything like that but those things started showing up and I really didn't know why. So I came across the mucusless diet healing system, Professor Arnold Arrett and I like that you give that shout out within your Steve Jobs video, I think that's a really accurate analysis and stuff like that. I follow that diet to a T and even though in the community, they really do talk about a long-term transition, they do not recommend jumping into fruit fasting or radical cleansing but that is the end goal, that is the destination. Whether it takes you two years, five years, ten years, the idea is that you're constantly working to transition away from animal foods towards a fruitarian diet and so to someone that's going into that with the mindset of wanting to achieve the highest, highest state of health, there's a very trendy progression where first you go vegetarian, then you go vegan, then you go raw vegan, then you become liquidarian and then you go breatharian. It's just crazy because there's like real people having real retreats and I went to one of them. I actually met up with some of these guys from the Facebook group. This was probably 2015 now, maybe 2014. I went to Amsterdam for a weekend thing and I was high as hell man. I was on two and a half weeks of fruit juice and I'm in Amsterdam and we go to this boot camp with this, I won't mention his name but one of these breatharian guys and it was a trip. I had a good time but ultimately the vegan diet, it just totally drains you of all of your reserves. I never got totally, totally emaciated. I did lose about maybe 30 pounds, I average around 150, 155. I think I got down to 120. It didn't look horrible. You went from 155 to 120. Yeah. Somewhere around 120, 125, something like that. It was like a crock. What's your height? 6 foot. 6 foot, 120. Okay. Not too bad. All right. Whatever you say, buddy. Yeah. Well, because I'm a yoga instructor, it's like it's kind of normal for yoga people to be slender, slim or whatever like that. I did have a couple of comments from students here and there but I always had energy. I could always teach my classes because I was so freaking high on the fruit juice, man. It took me a long time to sort of realize what a negative impact it is being on high sugar especially in the fruit because it just, man, it just blasts your bloodstream, your brain. There's a lot of ups and downs. Roller coaster. Oh, yeah. It's a complete roller coaster. Truth be told, I was drinking coffee throughout the whole time and putting the sugar in the coffee and it is what it is. But see, where am I really going with this? You met those people in Amsterdam 2015. Right. You feel like the vegan diet drained you over those four years. Yeah. The only benefit that I'm still perplexed about is that while I was doing that fasting, the juice and the raw part, I could lay in the sun for hours. I mean, I would go to the to the arboretum here and lay out for like one or two hours and never get a sunburn, which I always got sunburned and I don't know if that's just attributed to the maybe like a lack of grains in the diet. Like I definitely wasn't consuming grains. So I'm really, I'm really curious about that. Yeah. High Omega-6. So the answer to that is high Omega-6 in the diet, plant-based fats cause the skin to burn and lack of vitamins cause the skin to burn. And if you're consuming a lot of fruits, fruits have the most available form of carotene out of any natural food. So you might have been one of those people who had a genetic predisposition to converting carotene to retinol. So it's the twofold thing. It's the removal of inflammation and possibly depending on your genes, your ability to convert carotene in some capacity. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. But that benefit did not outweigh the cons that I began to experience as I continued with the diet. And I'm human, man. There were definitely times where I was maybe feeling low and I would cheat on the diet. I had a whole month where during the one winter where I'm drinking fruit juice all day long, teaching my yoga classes, coming home and just having pizza every single night. And I'm just like, what the hell am I doing? And it wasn't really that much of an impact on me per se. But it was just kind of like, I don't think that's really like a healthy. How was the one with the pizza exactly? Oh, that pizza was like 2015. This was like vegan pizza? No, no, it wasn't here. Oh, okay. So it was a vegan pizza. So I think what happens there is that a lot of vegans cheat on their diet and there's like a psychological aspect to it because you're trying to really convince yourself that what 99% of the human population eats is wrong. And so then you're trying to hold yourself out in a public image as being this certain way. And you just get, I mean, I can't speak for everybody. For me, it's just you get really obsessed with staying true to what your diet is. So you don't want to feel like you're being like totally authentic with people. Like, yeah, I'm a vegan. This is what I'm doing. Like, what the hell am I doing? You know, grub it down on this pizza, you know, every freaking night. So would you say you you crave the pizza and how often did you do that? I probably did that for like a month and then just I just stopped doing it. And then I just started eating. After that, I just started eating pretty much normal vegan food. I would bake my own food like every type of vegan option, like vegan mac and cheese. Like myself, but, you know, it's just processed food. So you were vegan for like two years, then you had this month of breaking it with pretty much pizza. And then, well, but that two years of vegan before, was that like a lot of juice fasting, mostly raw vegan? Yeah, a lot of not extended juice fasting, but, you know, it's sometimes like a day here and there, a couple of weeks, one time. And then yeah, that that two years. What did your meals typically, what did you like they typically look like during that two year period? I would basically start, I'd have basically lemon water in the morning, probably like a liter. I would mostly have fruit juice during the day, maybe some fruit and then salads. So I was pretty like organized with it, I would say. I basically have like fruit in the morning and salads in the evening. And I did a lot of experimenting. Like I love to cook. I love to like be in the kitchen and, you know, put together a different recipe. So I kind of went all out there. I mean, I bought, I mean, every single kind of green leafy vegetable that you could juice. And I made all kinds of different juices and it was fun. Like I loved it. Like, but it's kind of like you're living with this sort of like frantic feeling because you're never just kind of calm and like satiated. Like even though I would eat all this food, like I feel like I lost the what it what it means to like actually be nourished. And like it was as if like I'm eating all this food and it's like almost, how do I say it? Just convincing myself that, oh yeah, I got everything I need from this. But it's so much calories, so much time goes by. You don't really know what normal feels like anymore. And so when you start having problems, by the time of problems develop and it's like in your face where you're going like, okay, something's really wrong. It took a long time for that to develop. It wasn't overnight. And at that point, you've been so committed to your diet and your lifestyle and proving it to the rest of the world that it's very hard to objectively look at the other opinions of and luckily, I finally did do that. What do you think when you had that pizza for a month, were the main driving factors? Like was it just you like changing my style? Taste, taste, boredom, like I was craving it, you were hungry. I was hungry. Craving calories. Probably. Maybe I just want to cheese. I don't specifically know. It's just not like you were thinking about it at the time. Hey, here's the funniest part of that, too. Are you familiar with Dr. Robert Morse? Yeah, I've heard of it. I've heard his name quite a few times. So like I would, I would just, I would throw his YouTube on and hear this guy's talking all about fruit cleansing and healing people. Apparently has a lot of success doing. I don't know. I've never, you know, tried any of his methods, but I'd be sitting here, like having a couple of IPA's and eating like a full pizza to myself. But I'm trying to watch this dude's video talk about like fruit heritism and stuff. It was like, it was so backwards, man. So then you jump back to veganism because the pizza isn't working? Yeah, it's not that it didn't work. I mean, maybe because I was technically like only eating one meal a day. It, and I was practicing a lot of yoga at the time. And so like honestly, like doing the yoga practice and teaching kind of took precedence over my diet. Like the diet I always thought was just a way to support myself in the yoga practice. And it seemed to work for a long time. But at a certain point, you know, I ran into the problems with my teeth. Like the front, the fronts of my teeth started getting like almost see-through. And dude, I was freaking out. Did you ever go to a dentist? I didn't know. Oh, no, no, actually, no, I did go to a dentist a couple of times. And I did get a couple cavities filled. And now that I know about, like, you know, Western Price and Dr. Romeo Nagel, have you know his book? No, I haven't. It's how to cure tooth decay naturally, like with diet. I don't know the exact title, but he references a lot from Western Price. And I'm sorry, but for those of you that don't know, Western Price was the dentist who went around in the early 1900s and explore. He was that explored native people. He was curious why they didn't get cavities. I actually spoke to a young girl a couple of weeks ago that had 17 cavities from going raw vegan over the course of a year. Yeah. Yeah, when my teeth started getting really bad, there was when I was I was consuming a lot of canned split pea soup. So it's kind of like I was having fruit juice in the morning. I go teach a couple of yoga classes, come home, and I would cook like a whole frickin' can of the split pea soup. And like now I know, or now we know, like there's a lot of anti-nutrients in these types of products and especially just canned food in general is like not that great. Are you eating any nuts or any seeds or anything? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was definitely eating, you know, packets of mixed nuts from Trader Joe, stuff like that, cashews, almonds, you know, stuff like that. And that that's when it was really starting to like people were noticing, like when I went home to California to visit my family, it's like my mom was like, what, like, you got to stop drinking lemon water, Brian. Like what's what's wrong with your teeth? Yeah, there's something to be said about the phytase, the phytic acid in legumes and nuts and seeds of binds to minerals takes them out of your body. I'm not really getting any nutrition from those foods, unfortunately. And the big thing is like no one told you this stuff, you know, no one told you that you're going to need to soak your food and ferment your food to reduce the anti-nutrients. No one told you you need to supplement this, you need to supplement that. They just speak so glamourously about this vegan lifestyle. They don't say, oh, you need to take these supplements or else your brain's going to rot away. Yeah, that's totally true, man. Yeah, I be trying to eat all these different types of fruit. Like, I mean, normal stuff like pineapples, oranges and whatever. And my teeth were very sensitive. And it's like, I couldn't even eat the food and I would make these giant salads and when I would go to eat them, I would just be just stabbing this bowl, trying to eat as fast as I could, like as if I was never going to eat again. And many times I would bite the inside of my lip and I'd be bleeding. It's almost like my body was trying to send me a message like, dude, I need to eat some meat. If you're not going to feed it, I'm just going to eat your own body. And I guess that was kind of just like a funny sign that, you know, maybe I'm not getting like what I need in this diet. And yeah, we're about to say something. No. Oh, OK. And yeah, like the worst, the truly the worst that it got was the last like two years. I've not been vegan for probably a year and a half now. So around 2016, 2017, that's when I really started like suffering, like mentally and emotionally, which never has been like a real problem in my life. Like there was a feeling just like of like constant anxiety and very, very emotional, like stupid, stupid things would like get me upset if like someone said something to me that was hurtful or like I took things very, very personally, which which normally I don't do. Like, I mean, I'm judging now that I'm eating, you know, like an animal based diet, high nutrients. I follow your channel. I pretty much try everything that you promote. And like, I feel pretty chill, man. Like things are things are good. Like I have positive mindset, positive outlook. But during that time, it was I mean, there were days and days and days of just like feeling like I wanted to die. Like literally just like just absolutely hating life, hating myself and like honestly, like hating people because it's like you're watching all these other people eating the diet that you're so vehemently opposing and like saying that it's bad, but then you're looking at them thriving and having energy, having them or them having like good relationships with people and it's, you know, vegans will go so far off the deep end about like, oh, like this is the most ethical, you know, empathetic way of living, but like a lot of them included myself just turned out to just be like really resentful of like other human beings. They came more about the animals than they do about like human beings life and treating other people and being like loving and accepting of other people. And those are facets of my like personal life and personality that just totally got out of whack. And do you remember any food cravings? Food cravings, I see pizza. I crave like, I would crave like potato chips, like salty food, maybe I definitely crave pastries and since a lot of times I would eat the vegan versions of chocolate chip cookies or go to the coffee shop and they started carrying vegan items. So I just went to town on these vegan items and I don't think I specifically craved meat when I was vegan. It's hard to have a food craving when it's not present in the diet in large amounts before you go vegan. If the body doesn't really have any sort of recollection of it, it's hard to crave it in a lot of cases. Depends on how often you're eating them. Well, I did grow up eating meat. I mean, I ate steak, chicken, pork, all that stuff and rice, potatoes and a very like standard American diet. Like I'm thankful that I was breastfed. Both my parents were not vegetarian. My parents have pretty good genes and my mom always cooked at home. We did go out there. I did get into some fast food. We'd have fast food once in like here and there but it was mostly home cooked meals. So like I think I was raised, I think I had a pretty nutritionally complete upbringing which very thankful for and yeah, that's about it with that. Yeah, fortunately humans are designed to get like 80% of their calories from energy sources. So for vegans, even though you're not eating that much protein, that much fat, you can still utilize carbohydrates. And I think it's safe to say anyone whose genes aren't prone to metabolizing carbohydrates effectively died already thousands of years ago. Just a couple of interesting notes to touch on. You thought the organic fruits and veggies were expensive but per calorie, they probably weren't really more expensive than the meat because you weren't really getting calories. Yeah. The, those raw vegans and like those festivals you went to, did you notice anything about those people? Yeah, I mean, I only went to one. Did they smell? No, they didn't smell. I don't think I smelled too much of it. I can't be true. I smelled safe. I smelled even on like this carnivore diet. Well, I shouldn't say I'm on the carnivore diet, but it's the bulk of my diet. And no, what I noticed is that it was just, it was a lot of people that had trauma in their life. A lot of people that were like searching for answers that were trying to heal and trying to, you know, heal from depression, heal from anxiety or heal from some trauma. And, you know, things of that nature, I think a lot of people get attracted to the flashy lifestyle aspect and thinking that veganism cleansing is going to, you know, help those issues. That's not why I got into it. I wanted just, you know, higher, higher. I just wanted to like have like the best diet. And I was like, oh, if this is better, you know, why not do this? But interestingly enough, long-term, I end up getting those same problems that other people were coming to the diet for. And that's kind of what I saw. That's interesting, yeah. Yeah. So how did your bowel movement change outside of, you know, when I'm sure you were shitting your pants, doing those fiber cleanses? The bowel movements, they, they were better and they were worse. A lot more volume? Well, I guess, yeah, more volume, more frequently. Maybe like one or two times a day. The thing about when I was following the mucusless diet healing system, they really promoted the use of enemas. So, I mean, you know what those are, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah, so like that was just part of the program, part of the cleansing program. You know, you would just kind of incorporate that into your lifestyle. I was like, whatever. And, and honestly, I think they helped me but probably because like I wasn't able to like push through all that fiber. I don't, I don't really know. The funny thing to me about that mucusless diet system is like your intestines and your stomach and a lot of your body is literally lined with mucus as a membrane. You know, it seems like a pretty silly concept if someone has an understanding of anatomy. When you were with these like these breatharian people, I mean, why couldn't they just call it fasting? I, I don't really know. Did that not click in anyone's head? I guess it's not as good of a marketing term. But you kind of, you know, you kind of understate it. You went from 155 to 120 pounds at six foot. Yeah. You lost quite a bit of weight. And then I'm assuming you gained it back when you went to the more cooked vegan diet and the pizza stuff? Yeah, I did, I did gain it back. And now I'm like at 160. And I feel good eating a lot of meats. The one thing that I'm doing now that I just love and I sucks, man, that you're allergic to the raw milk because the raw milk, man, it's just delicious. It's very good. It's delicious and it changed my life, man. Since going back to meat, I didn't go right into like a clean carnivore, you know, regimented, man. I'd go into the bar, man, having a couple of beers, getting some burgers and, you know, eating pizza and stuff like that, that's fine, like whatever. But it definitely impacted my body a lot. I got a lot of inflammation. And the interesting thing is that in October, my knee completely flared up to the point that I was on crutches for two weeks. So I go to the doctor, he gives me ibuprofen. That reduced the inflammation just enough to where I could get off of the crutches, but I still had the knee pain for months. And it slowly got better. And then again, it flared up just about three or four weeks ago. I went to a rheumatologist, they did blood work. The only significant thing they found was my vitamin D was low, it was 25. And I was like, you know what, screw this, I'm gonna go to the farm, I'm gonna get some raw milk. And literally the day that I started, I drank like a whole half gallon. Literally that day, all the inflammation of my body just started going away. And it had a bigger impact than even taking the ibuprofen did. And like, I know a lot of people are gonna say, oh, this is just like anecdotal evidence or whatever. But like, I'm pretty in tune and I know how I feel. I spent months with this goddamn knee and not being able to walk properly and have to go up the stairs. And the milk just blasted it out of the water. And so now I'm really into making like homemade kefir, different stuff, cream. I saw your YouTube video about making the raw butter, I'm gonna try that. And I'm just having a lot of fun, man. It's really cool. Yeah, there's something to be said about the importance of nutrient density in the diet. And I can't even get carnivore dieters to eat nutrient-dense food. So to convince the average person that these vitamins are so important is difficult. If people understood that, these vitamins are literally precursors to every cell being made in the body, they might start thinking a little bit differently. One interesting thing about the raw milk is that it's nutritionally complete. Essentially, if you had any sort of vitamin nutritional deficiency, whether it's iodine, omega-3, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K, your body is getting it from that raw milk. Yeah. 100% for sure. Yeah, and I definitely felt an energy boost. Like over this winter, I was extreme, I was getting sick a lot. And it was notably after eating chicken. And now I know from watching your channel, the high omega-6. It's very inflammatory, yeah. Yeah, there was a time in the summer where I just went to Trader Joe's and I bought a whole chicken, baked it, and ate it, it was delicious. I almost ate the whole freaking thing. But I got very, very sick. Like I had a fever. And I didn't really think anything of it, but the second time it happened, which was a few months later, I just like made some chicken wings at home, organic, whatever. And the same thing happened. Like I got a wicked fever and it just sucked, man. It was horrible. And now it's, ever since those two events, which were this past year, like once in the summer and once like during the fall, I had extremely low fatigue, or no, high fatigue. I mean, how do you ever say it? I was extremely tired all the time. And after drinking the milk, it just, that all went away. So I'm assuming it's because of the vitamin D. Could be it for sure. There's so many factors there that could be changing it for sure. Yeah. Brian, did you wanna leave anyone with a message overall about your experience, any words of warning? Any words of warning? Yeah, don't go vegan, guys. Don't do it. You essentially got tricked into it for the health reason. Usually people do have strong moral implications going into it. You're different in a way that you adapted the moral implications along the way and then tried to justify it. Thankfully, you kind of realized on your own, this is not really a good look. Were there any specific people or things that kind of convinced you that what you should be doing after, I guess outside of my channel? Yeah, the first person before your channel was Spiridge. That was at the height of me just kind of going mental. I was just like, what the fuck is wrong with me? So I saw his channel, I saw him eating the raw meat and I was like, this guy's crazy. But the one thing is, I'll definitely look at other people's perspective and try to empty the cup is so to say. I was like, okay, let me listen to this guy and really see what he has to say. And when he started showing all the vegans and how they have like mental problems and this, that, the other thing and started talking about the fats, all the vitamins and eating meat, I just slowly just realized like, holy shit, like I'm one of these people that he's talking about. And I was like, I have to stop this immediately because this is just out of control. And so that's the only really the other person, him. And that book by Rami Nagle, I think that's how you say his name. I'm probably getting that wrong, but unfortunately he passed away, but the book is amazing. So I got a lot of information from that book. And now your channel, man, I dig your channel. I watch it like every day. I'm glad to hear it. That book is Cure Tooth Decay, Heal and Prevent Cavities with Nutrition by Rami Nagle. Yeah, that's a great book. It's worth the read and that's the book that got me started drinking the raw milk again because when I transitioned back into the meat world I went like vegan to let me just have some raw milk. Okay, let me have some eggs. After like five months I was like, give me some raw steak and that's all it is. Glad to hear it. Did you want to share any social media with anyone? I'm not really very active on social media, man, but thanks for the opportunity for that. All right, sounds good. We don't need any Neanderthals bothering you. That's for sure. Yeah, exactly. Cool, man. Well, it was good to connect with you, Frankie, man. I really appreciate all the work you're doing and helping to create some content for your channel and just say what's up, man. It's really cool. Thank you. No, this was fun, Brian. Thanks for coming out. You guys enjoy the rest of your week, right? Let's say bye to everyone. All right, peace guys.