The true effects of meat on the body, mind and spirit

Ok. Strap in, we’re going DEEP on this one.

Let me preface this by saying that for the first 34 years of my life, I was a heavy meat eater. When my Dad and I would go out to eat together in my teens and early 20s, I would delight in getting the ‘meat platter’, filled with as many different types of meat, including organs, as one could imagine. It was unimaginable to me that one would go a day without eating meat (often the idea of going even a meal without was unfathomable). In my 20s, like many young men (and these days even older ones) I became obsessed with putting on muscle, and as I succeeded more and more, I (falsely) credited meat for my ‘gains.’

I say all that to say this. As a meat eater, you are probably going to be extremely triggered by a lot of what I have to say here. The invitation therefore is two-fold. Firstly, to read with an open mind. Just let the ideas be there whilst you read without having to fight them tooth and nail. I cannot remove any belief from you without your consent. Opening yourself up to new ideas won’t mean that you immediately have to give up something that you cherish. And secondly, remember that the one writing these words was just like you. I am not saying I am better. I am merely sharing knowledge that has been given to me along my journey.

I have been extremely blessed in my life to have been on the receiving end of a number of health crises, both within my own body and within the bodies of those closest to me. After 15 years of eating nothing but meat, junk food, and drinking alcoholically, at 24 years old I developed crippling stomach pains that rendered me close to disabled. So began a long and winding journey back to health that continues to evolve with each passing day. Along the way, my Father was diagnosed with advanced stage 4 cancer, and he joined the journey for the last 7 years of his life. He was given 18 months to live at diagnosis, and because of somewhat following a holistic health path he lived a lot longer than that. Had he been willing to go all the way, he would still be alive today. But that’s another story for another day.

In 2016, I became vegetarian. The path to being vegan for me had been coming for a long time, in fact I had been talking about it for a couple years. I was cautious, having had a life full of meat-industry funded propaganda, and so I decided to be vegetarian for a year before making the full conversion. By the time the year was done, all doubt had been erased, and I’ve been vegan ever since, and increasingly more on the fruitarian side (if you don’t know what that word means, see my blog here).

Through the course of my life I have had to, or chosen to, make some radical changes to what I put in my body. From a meat eating, junk food consuming alcoholic, it has been a long and winding journey in stages. A funny thing happens to a person when you go through these kind of evolutions in who you are. In order to sustain these kinds of changes, I was forced to change how I looked at the world, and how I looked at the experience of being in a human body. I was forced to examine and re-examine my values over and over again. If you’ve never had to do this, or never wanted to do this, I cannot overstate how life-changing such a necessity can be. It changes you forever, and for the better.

I have always been a deeply spiritual person. I may not have always acted in alignment with these values, but it has always been there. I have known since I was a small boy that there is much more to the human experience than appears to be the case at first glance. The rabbit hole goes deeper as I get older in this body, and results in a more bounteous and abundant experience of life than I ever could have imagined.

On a base energetic level, the human body is an extremely dense material object. It is infused by vibrating energy that animates it and brings it to life for the duration of it’s existence. This intertwining creates a symbiotic system. The energy, the spirit, affects the matter, and the matter affects the spirit. The more dense the matter is, the harder it is for the spirit to maintain it’s natural