This will, as usual, be a long post. Yes, brevity is the soul of wit, but I am not trying to be witty. I want to share with you the story of Fraser Bayley.
I share these stories not to show you that the only way to get muscle is through vegan diet. Obviously that is not true.
Rather I want to dispel the myth that a vegan die will make you waste muscle. More importantly I want to share how changing to a plant based diet can change so many aspects of your life.
Check out Fraser’s story of transformation:
From Butcher to PlantStrong vegan: How it changed my entire life
Many years ago was diagnosed with ADHD learning disability, bipolar disorder / heavy long term brutal depression as well as crippling social anxiety — borderline suicidal.
I just happened to be a butcher too. For about 6 years of my life.
I smoked. Drank a lot. My diet was a typical western junk food diet too. I was also on a myriad of prescription medications for anxiety, depression & ADHD — none of which I felt worked at all for be besides just numbing me from the world, turning me emotionless and void of feeling.
Over the years I cleaned my diet up in many ways. No smoking or drinking, but went with what you would call a ‘Paleo style diet’ still consuming large amounts of animal products daily in the order of 250g of animal protein per day. I made a lot of progress from where I had been, BUT I still didn’t feel anywhere near like deep down I KNEW I could.. I still felt like I just wasn’t living vibrantly or with full color yet.
Yes I had built muscle and those things, but does it really matter if you feel awful doing it? I know MOST people put themselves through this kind of torture, I was one of them.
My sleeping was horrible, really broken leaving me feeling incredibly unrested each day. I would actually get MORE tired after I ate, than before I had eaten. It was like every time I ate, the lethargy and brain fog just compounded leaving me pretty unproductive and feeling quite crippled at times.
See… for me it wasn’t just enough to look good, I KNEW I had to discover more from this life. That this simply couldn’t be it, right? There HAD to be more.
And so my journey into Veganism began.
Along my transition I even cried one day — tears of happiness and loss. Loss in the sense that I felt like I was saying goodbye to an old friend, someone I had grown apart from and didn’t recognize anymore, my old self — but happy that I had room in my life to expand beyond anything I had ever experienced.
No meds. No drink. No more animals. A real stripping of the old identity — that I was a butcher. Or I was a body builder who needed to eat meat to build muscle. Or my family had traditions around eating animals that went right back to when I was young.. It was a shedding of the old skin.
It was a beautiful feeling and I am proud to say it brought me to tears!
I want to show other guys that you CAN do this, still achieve ALL of your personal goals, live well and really change the world. We just need to unlearn all the things we’ve been conditioned to think as ‘fact’ and realize we have the ability to create our own world – that everything we know has been taught and programmed into us. That the mind-made manacles that keep us trapped are just an illusion and when I finally let go of that, I felt liberated… Free… and so much more conscious about how I had been letting fears control me all my life.
Since going vegan my life has changed in ways I NEVER thought it could.
My sleep for the first time in my life is actually sound. I wake feeling rested and don’t need to blast caffeine all day to function. I have more clarity, more energy when I eat. The food actually makes me feel MORE energized! The food is beyond amazing.
Beyond that I am stronger than I have ever been in my life, I feel like I am in the best shape of my life, yet its so much easier to maintain that now – very counterintuitive to what most people think will happen on a vegan lifestyle and diet. My recovery is so much better – now could it all be a placebo? Maybe, but all I know is that it’s changed me and I am not going back!
I now feel like the message I preach about peace and love, is finally congruent with my actions and the way I treat this planet and what I put on my dinner plate. The more I learned and immersed myself in Veganism the more reasons I found to just support my change. The health benefits. Animal ethicals. Environmentalism. Spiritualism.. Compassion, strength and evolution. I combined them all to have a really solid base to propel me through massive change.. And you know what? It’s been SO much fun along the way.
Why wouldn’t you want to not only feel better, look better, have a higher quality of life, be more congruent with your ideas of peace and love, be kind to other beings on this earth and treat this planet like it was our only place to live. It just makes so much sense to me!
So for me, it was about transcending. Evolving through our own stages from that old ‘me’, on the junk food diet, lost. On meds, feeling void. To someone with clarity. With vision. With health. With compassion. Thats what Veganism has given me — I feel like Veganism is the final step to higher consciousness and health and I am SO glad I stepped outside my fears, identity and conditioning and tried this.
It has truly changed my life and seeing people in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s looking like they are half their age in phenomenal health. The answer for me was simple. Let it change your life too.
Just start! It wont be perfect all the time, but just begin and watch yourself evolve and grow.