A bet. It all started with a bet. On Dec. 24, 2019 my brother and I sat in my grandfather’s house in Chicago, Illinois. We sat at my grandfather’s counter grazing over the large display of meat, cheese, crackers and hors d’oeuvres. We always spend Christmas Eve with my mom’s side of the family. My mom’s parents are divorced, so we spend part of the day with my grandma and part of the day with my grandpa.
“I think I want to go vegetarian,” I said to my brother.
“There is no way that you could go more than 2 months without eating meat,” Finn said to me.
“I bet that I can go for a year,” I said.
“I will give you $100 if you go vegetarian for a year,” Finn said.
We shook hands. I would receive $100 from my brother if I didn’t consume meat for an entire year.
I had no idea where this would lead me. I wasn’t sure how my lifestyle and my eating habits were going to drastically change. I never quite understood why people say that you are what you eat, because it became prevalent just how much a regular intake of natural protein does for one’s body.
The first few weeks I didn’t notice it. I wasn’t craving meat, and my mom had started to make our family dinners with a vegetarian option, making everything even easier. I missed the occasional bacon with breakfast or chicken on top of salads but I had never eaten all that much red meat, so my diet didn’t seem to have holes in it.
I started to feel more energized. Little did I know that the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic would slowly be hitting the United States in a few short months.
With this new found energy and as I sat home with nothing to do, I decided during the early days of March that I wanted to start working out. I would start by going for short runs: 1-2 miles. The sun started to make an entrance and all I wanted to do was be outside in the sun and to feel like I was doing something. Those 1-2 miles started to turn into 3 miles. For Mother’s Day in May, my dad got my mom a Peloton: an exercise bike with a screen on it.
I started classes on the bike a few days after it was installed and fell in love with the bike. I loved the sense of accomplishment that I felt after I finished a workout that had been lacking in every other sense of my life.
The runs started to turn into 4-5 miles and the peloton went from 20 minute to 30 minute rides.
This new diet that I was trying left me with so much energy. Energy that I wanted to use to feel a sense of accomplishment.
A couple months into the pandemic, I started to notice how easily I was bruising. I would bump into the side of a chair and find a huge purple and green spot upon the sight of impact a day later. At first, I thought this was normal and had nothing to do with my new change in diet. Little did I know, I was starting to become iron deficient. My mom started to notice the bruising and we came to the conclusion with the help of medical professionals, that I would either need to start taking iron supplements or I would need to start eating meat again. I decided that I was just going to start incorporating more iron into my diet and then I would be okay.
So I did, I kept up my same patterns of exercise and started to work iron into my diet.
It had been a year since I started on my no meat journey, and the bruising wasn’t getting any better. I started to exhibit other symptoms of an iron deficiency.
A year and some months in, I decided that I needed to start incorporating meat back into my diet.
Two years went by of meat back in my diet, and I felt fine. I definitely missed the energy boost that I had felt by being a vegetarian, but I wasn’t bruised and wasn’t exhibiting iron deficient symptoms anymore.
Towards the end of my sophomore year, I decided that I wanted to start the diet again. I would make sure that I was getting enough iron and I would make sure that I was replenishing my body with a normal protein intake from other non-meat foods.
I started off strong, I was feeling the energy boost that I had felt two years prior and I wasn’t bruising.
I started to notice that although I was feeling energy boosts before my workouts, I was having a hard time getting through the workouts at the caliber that I was while I was eating meat. I was starting to feel a fatigue that I hadn’t felt before. I began to feel discouraged when I wasn’t reaching the goals of each workout and I was getting tired at 7 pm.
I was starting to struggle.
Although, I kept going. I kept working out and moving about my busy day with little energy which could also be seen as fuel.
This pattern went on for a couple of months.
My parents started to notice that I was starting to lose some of my skin coloring, they suggested that it was time for me to start eating meat.
I decided that it was time that I started eating meat again, and started to eat regularly again.
It wasn’t until after I stopped being a vegetarian for the second time that I realized just how much it had damaged my body. My hair had become substantially thinner and I had lost weight.
Being vegetarian had taken a toll on not only my physical health, but my mental health as well. Due to the nature of the timing of my second round of vegetarianism, I was trying to balance this new diet while trying to balance just simply being a young teenage female which was no easy feat.
As my body and mind change with age, I remember all of the things that not eating meat and the diet itself did to my mind and my body.