Here’s What Happens When a Vegetarian Turns Paleo

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Interesting read over on Refinery 29 today. Former vegetarian Leeann Duggan opens up, confessional style, about how she gave up a 17-year veggie streak for a meat-heavy Paleo diet. Talk about a total 180, right?

“After years of eating in a way that I believed to be both morally right and healthy, I had a revelation—that I didn’t feel healthy,” she writes. “And, I sort of couldn’t remember a time when I had.” With time and a lot of self reflection, she came to realize that her meat-free diet probably had something to do with it.

Listen to this:

Despite the fact that my diet lacked red meat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and all those other enemies of health we’ve been trained to avoid since the Nixon era, despite the fact that I exercised and meditated and did acupuncture and took supplements and generally tried to maintain as chirpy and cheery an outlook as is possible for a natural born cynic, I felt the exact, diametric opposite of healthy. I felt, in a word, like crap. And, I started to suspect that my “healthy” low-fat diet of starchy carbs might have something to do with all of that. I finally admitted to myself that I needed a major change—like, quick, before my latest crash diet veered into ABC Afterschool Special territory.

This summer, she says, she decided to jump aboard the Paleo train, a dietary switch that was particularly challenging for a vegetarian, considering Paleo’s extra emphasis on, well, meat. But she did it, and she’s living to tell the tale.

Read how it turned out for her here.