N.B. This post was inspired by a very kind reader’s comment on my previous post. It’s my way of thanking an anonymous reader for the inspiration to create this article 🙂
I often add deprecating words of imagined critics to challenge my writing — they appear as italicized green-text segments. This time I turn those naysayers away and add complimentary words to complement the genuine words of a non-naysayer. 🙂
Thanks for this Bill! But my curiosity is not yet fully quenched! How did your family and friends take your change?
Though the green sheep in the family, I was blessed, or kindly ignored, by family and friends. They have allowed me the space and penchant to follow the way of the iconoclast. Tilt damned windmill! I try to reciprocate in kind, but when you stand up for eliminating THE entree from the plate 24/7, you must expect onslaught and outrage:
Whaaat?
You’re kidding.
You’re not serious.
Whaaat?
A reflexive response to homo sapiens’ rejection of all things never questionable.
You dare countenance baser instincts, to sin against the natural law? Beasts naturally sacrifice their corpus by dint of birth. It’s frail folly to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge.
I also imagine that back then veganism was much harder and much less accepted than it is today.
Graduating from university in the year of Woodstock 1969 and Earth Day occurred the following year. Insanity by political edict in Vietnam would never occur again. Nixon flew away in a disgrace that many of my peers vowed to avenge. Whiplash by pendulum swing was inconceivable — but it was only five years away.
A certain nihilism set in with what I call “Mourning in America” 1980.
Whiplash happens.
Did you join an animals rights group?
Peter Singer (Animal Liberation) rocked the planet with his unspeakable recommendations in 1975. E.F. Schumacher suggested that small was beautiful. It seemed the conventional wisdom would follow in steady due course — but not politically and not personally. My wife died in 1983. I became a single parent until Lisa showed up to rescue us. She got the chance to shop for groceries with a vegan in 1993. TVP and canned vegan fare were tucked away in an a nondescript top shelf. Those cans got lonely up there.
And about the detoxifying, I agree. When I first went vegan, I had detox symptoms too, but then I also gave up coffee, sugar and alcohol completely.
I successfully detoxed from alcohol after a single rehab week in Falmouth, KY. Heroin peers began to outnumber the alcohol-devotees. Break time at the picnic tables there led me back to cigarettes for some months. I was the only person to show up at a smoking-cessation series — my last puff was taken in the parking lot of the hospital sponsoring the series. I’ve saved the certificate of completion.
Let’s say that coffee ‘never hurt me none’, so I’m still with that Kodachrome. Sugar that doesn’t come with real and true fruit, sugar in empty-calorie form remains a crutch that I haven’t discarded. It’s bad news without a single redeeming social value, but I stock up on figs, dates and the such to counter the sugar molecules.
Thanks again for this post!
Thanks so much for the prodding. It’s been enormously helpful to answer your thoroughly wonderful questions.
Thanks for reading.
billziegler1947 
Thank *you* for sharing, Bill.
Personally, I never went through detox. Or, maybe I did and didn’t realize it. Perhaps I was the more outraged both by the atrocities I witness and a blind denial to take notice earlier in life.
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Not experiencing detox is a sign of instant enlightenment IMO. The strength of your resolve must have overwhelmed any biochemical crave processes. Have you ever heard of a meat detox facility? I could imagine it being shut down immediately for threatening jobs and for creating a public nuisance.
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Brilliant! In the process of writing a similar piece, I must discard and start over. Yours is way better…great inspiration. I’ll find my feet yet. 😀
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Dang me all to heck for my outrageous behavior. Actually, your writing style is marvelous and is far more ebullient than mine — DirtNKids is a very welcoming place to visit and enjoy: the sound clips provide birdly sounds nice to hear (I have cheap ears that struggle to hear cheeps), but the volume control carries those cheeps all the way from Houston 🙂 I tend to wax cerebral too often, then have to shred millions of electrons the following morning. None the hecking else, your words are kind and dear, and your feet are right theer!
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Interesting post. I don’t remember feeling the detox effect, but then my health was not great at the time either, so maybe I just didn’t notice!! An ‘alternative’ practioner I saw at the time, rolled his eyes and sighed greatly when reading my diet choice on his form. ‘Why oh why do people insist on being vegetarian/vegan?’ he bemoaned passionately, as if I was making his task all that much more difficult, as if ‘these people’ were their own worst enemies. Needless to say my hope and faith in him ebbed away from that moment…….
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Crohns runs in my family — myself, my son, my brother and his son so far. When I finally realized that cheese, dairy and eggs meant both bad karma and bad health, my symptoms began to disappear. Very interesting that you recount that reaction by the bemoaning physician. Dang it all to heck. Diet is only considered if there is a handy prescription to alleviate it. — particularly if they get a little special remuneration into their back pockets from the nattily dressed and manicured, not to mention Happy. HAPPY. H A P P Y pharm reps.
The enormous denial required to completely ignore the obvious really confounds me. So let’s keep writing about it 🙂
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It’s astounding and frustrating isn’t it?? I know two people, one has Crohns, the other colitits, and neither believe diet has anything to do with it, they eat meat, dairy, eggs, and just swallow the doctor’s rules and take their pills, as you say keeping those big pharma reps, happy, happy, happy!! But I’m a ‘conspiracy theorist’; don’t you love that? If you disagree with anything or question, they throw that at you, even about something so, to me, obvious as diet affecting your health, duh!!!!???? Guess I’m just gullible……….
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I really need to write a post (real soon now) on my experiences with Crohn’s and diet. I had a colostomy for 18 years, and it’s been more than 18 years since it was reversed. Crohn’s struck when I was 27, misdiagnosed with appendicitis in an emergency room — it was very rare those days, frankenfoods were comparatively rare too. But how could diet possibly influence your health?
Well, there you go inspiring me to write about it now rather than “one of these days.” 🙂
And, somehow, *we* are the conspiracy theorists.
Thanks for the very kind encouragement. Now I can’t wait to write that post on Crohn’s and diet. And it’s your fault!
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You are very welcome, I really do enjoy your writing very much and you inspire me too.
You have been through a lot, that must have been a difficult time!! Fascinating what can be achieved, there sounds much for you to discuss??!!
I’m looking forward to you post about diet, I can’t believe some people just can’t see the connection, but most people don’t get a lot of stuff do they?? But there we go again, forcing our opinion on people, our ‘mad theories’. Hummm…..
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