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I was strictly vegan for 11 years. The whole food plant based kind. I lost a lot of weight at first and then started gaining. I was running and lifting 3x a week so I was confused about the weight gain. I wasn't beer belly fat but I was pretty sure it didn't seem like typical muscle gains. My doctor wasn't sure, he said I looked like a muscular guy but we still ordered a DEXA scan.
My DEXA said I was 31% body fat!
More alarmingly it said my bone density z-score was -2.0 (!!)
That meant 97.7% of my age and sex adjusted peers had higher bone density than me.
Was that caused by 11 years of strict veganism? I don't know but I was totally convinced to experiment after that. I went omni after that and started drinking whey protein shakes. I noticed right off the bat I put muscle on almost immediately. Like over the next 3-4 months I felt my arms and legs get tighter in my clothes and started racking up PRs in deadlifts and squats and bench press.
But more importantly, repeated DEXA scans every year showed a recovery in z-score. From -2.0 to -1.3 to -1.0 this year. I'm still low, but it at least shows I'm gradually rebuilding bone density and also losing it less quickly than my peer group now. Whew.
This is obviously not rigorous but to be a fairly active vegan dude and have such a terrible z-score, like worse than what the median fucking American has who doesn't do any health related thing at all, it's hard not to finger the drastic dietary delta with the median American as the cause.
Veganism is a product of modernity that I imagine only exists due to industrial petro farming. The Jain are the closest I can think of, but they do dairy. Veganism is an impoverishing luxury diet.
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