A month of eating meat

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

It's a month since I gave up being vegetarian, and I feel so much better! From constant pins and needles, to only sometimes but still every day took a couple of days, and then from about a week in, I've had nothing like that. My legs hurting so much I cried myself to sleep went straight I started eating meat; within a day, my legs didn't hurt. My sleep pattern has gone from 2 nights of 5 hour and 1 of 8 to mostly 8 hours sleep a night, and I'm associatedly less exhausted, dizzy etc.

Apparently - and this is something I didn't really internalise at the time - most vegetarians don't have constant pins and needles/numbness. I'tsn ot just that I'm a wuss, it really was unhealthy.

I even managed to have a day or two of no meat without sliding back, so I'm hopeful that I'll be OK to go back to how I was before (although even before I ever went vegetarian, when I ate meat most days, I was starting to choose vegetarian by default when eating out etc, and I have three vegetarian partners, so it's easier to make family meals mostly veggies).

Comments

[aiwendel.livejournal.com]

It does sound like you had a deficiency and it would be interesting to know if that was resolvable. Since getting pregnant I've been craving meat (and marmite!) and succumbing to it as it's easier than finding out whatever it is I've been lacking. I do wonder if I could get back to a properly balanced vegetarian or low meat diet though so if you do find out alternatives that help you I'm interested to know about them. I suspect I tended to do a meat free diet rather than an active vegetarian one with enough meat replacement things in.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Ooh, congratulations! And lots of people find that they crave meat and then are fine again when they're not pumping blood for two. So you might be fine.

I think that's exactly it, I was eating too much meatless rather than embracing the good vegetarian food; I struggled lots to get enough calories, for example, and didn't always manage.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Fwiw, as someone you don't know from Adam, I was veggie for 15 years before getting pregnant, wherupon I found that *for me* I needed to add meat into my diet for the next approx 4-5 years during which I was either pregnant, breastfeeding or both (bf and 2nd pregnancy overlapped.) Baby 2 breastfed til he was 5, but after a couple of years I figured his intake/my output wasn't significant enough to continue to cause me issues, so I cut meat out again, and have been veggie again for the last 5 years. The pregnancy/bf period felt like a discrete period when my body's needs just were different, and then when that wasn't the case any more it was not a problem to return to the previous status quo. I might even have done it sooner, but I have ME which added a complicating factor in terms of energy levels etc. I hope this random anecdata from a stranger is of some help/comfort/interest to you, and I hope everything goes brilliantly for you :-)