[gberardi]

So I have been eating a vegan diet for at least over two months now.

I don't feel hungry. I don't feel deprived of "real food". I haven't felt like I was weak or anything due to lack of nourishment.

On the other hand, I don't feel more focused. I don't feel that I have more energy. I don't know why my hands and feet are unusually cold these days (other than the fact that Chicago is unusually cold, too...but then again, I lost over 30 lbs since last winter...). I feel like I am more forgetful sometimes, although other times I think that my brain is working just fine.

Now, I don't exercise as much as I should, and I imagine that a lack of exercise is why I don't feel as much energy as I might otherwise. Getting more oxygen in my body would also probably help with my focus and memory.

I also don't think I get nearly enough variety in my diet. For a long while, carrots were the only vegetable I would eat, and these days I have pretty much added broccoli and celery to my normal meals. I started juicing last week, so now I can get romaine lettuce and kale to my diet, but only if I can find it at the store (which I couldn't when I went on Saturday).

All that said, however, I am still concerned that I don't get enough of what I am supposed to eat. At one point, I was convinced that eating a strict plant-based diet is not only healthiest but also natural, but then I have been reading more and more evidence that suggests otherwise.

I still believe that eating plant-based food is important, but I never liked the idea of taking B12 supplements or fortified foods (since that pretty much suggests that they are unnatural, processed (and therefore unhealthy) foods. It seems to me that the most natural way for me to get B12 is to eat some animal-based foods.

One of the arguments I found against the claims of The China Study is that it may not be animal-based foods that are the problem so much as processed foods. It still didn't make me feel comfortable about eating meat ("it may still be not bad for you!" is a great tag line, I'm sure), there seems to be more and more coming up that suggests that we don't know what happens to a person who lives an entire life as a vegan.

I'm thinking about starting to eat fish and eggs again. Of course, finding such food that hasn't been poisoned may be a challenge, but the main reason why I avoided such food in the first place was not so much that I was convinced that all animal-based foods are bad for me so much as I believed it was safest to eat exclusively plant-based foods. Eating more and more plants hasn't been shown to kill people, but eating more and more animal-based foods has.

In the end, I have doubts about the long-term (lifetime, not just 5 or 10 years from now) effect of remaining on a vegan diet. As I continue to search for an answer, I was wondering if anyone here might point me to evidence that might help.

For example, I remember someone posted a link to a chart that showed that humans were herbivores, but I have since found other charts and explanations that suggest the original charts were using the wrong data, such as intestinal track length. Since I am no expert, I can only conclude that I don't know which one to believe.

In the coming months, I plan to exercise much more often. Perhaps I may need to eat more often then, or maybe I will find that I get too weak. Either way, I can only get more evidence for myself by doing since reading research reports appears to be an unreliable means of discovering the truth.