Vegetarian Diet Experiment
I spent ~11 days eating a vegetarian diet. What happened?
So, as detailed in this post, I spent ~11 days eating a vegetarian diet. What happened?
Introduction
For starters, I am not a carnivore. I mostly eat beef, fish, full-fat dairy, and fruit, with some vegetables.
I also have some starch, and some sugar. Ice cream is a health food.
I avoid wheat, seed oils, seeds, and seed-fed animals, like chicken or pork. I prefer grass-fed beef to seed-fed beef, but won’t avoid the latter.
So off I went to a meditation retreat, and the only menu available was a vegetarian diet. They offered a gluten-free vegetarian diet to comply with dietary restrictions like mine, so I signed up. While I’ve not been diagnosed officially as celiac, depending on what country I’m in, I could be. So a gluten-free diet for me a an absolute requirement.
I don’t think a vegetarian diet is as healthy as an omnivorous diet containing healthy meats (I’ll include fish in my definition of meat), but it’s not going to kill you in 10+ days! But I was certainly curious, and a little apprehensive, to see what effect it would have on me.
Food on Offer
For breakfast, they typically had oatmeal—not gluten free, more on this later—often some other starch, like quinoa, or something else. They had stewed prunes everyday, definitely more about that later! They also had fresh fruit; oranges, apples, and/or bananas. They offered yogurt everyday.
For beverages they had coffee or decaf, a variety of caffeinated or not teas, and whole milk.
They also had soy and rice “milk”. They offered sugar and hot honey. Hot honey is delicious!
Breakfast was served from 6:30am to 7:15. As we couldn’t talk to each other, this was plenty of time.
For lunch they typically had some other starch. White and/or brown rice, pasta, or some Indian-style starch meal with rice and other things, and Indian spices. Since this was a bilingual Hindi/English course, they focused on Indian spices and dishes. Luckily, I love Indian food. They also had a salad bar, with mixed greens, minced beets and carrots, chick peas, and grated cheese. They had two different salad dressings. They also had either yogurt or sour cream; on one day they had a burritos, and for that day sour cream replaced the yogurt. They usually also had the same selection of fresh fruit as at breakfast.
They offered whole-wheat bread and rice cakes; and a selection of toppings, peanut butter, strawberry jam (yes, you could have lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches each day, once my favorite food!), tahini, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, and some other stuff I never ate and don’t recall. Salt, pepper, and a variety of other spices of an Indian flavor for this course. Gluten-free soy-sauce (tamari), a couple types of hot sauce, balsamic vinegar.
Lunch was served from 11:00am to 11:45.
They didn’t offer dinner (see the related post above), just the same fruits and tea or coffee. On a bunch of different days they had some special beverage on offer. On Vipassana Day they celebrated with hot mulled apple cider, which was delicious. On several days they had a yummy ginger tea made by the kitchen, and they always had a selection of teas available, with whole milk or the other faux “milks”.
Tea-time was 5:00pm to 5:45.
I was usually out of the dining hall in 30 minutes or less, including cleaning my dishes.
Snacks were not available, and you were not allowed to take food or bring food in to keep in your room. So what you got in the dining hall was it for the day.
Calories
I was a little worried about not being able to get enough calories for the first couple of days. This was never an issue in practice. There were no servers, so you could take as much as you liked, or go back for seconds, which was encouraged. I usually only eat two meals a day, so while I ate the fruit at tea time for the first couple of days because of a fear of not getting enough food, after that I usually skipped the afternoon fruit for the rest of the course.
The First Day
They had a light dinner for the first evening before the first full day. They had a soup, and something starchy, as well as the salad bar. I sighed and put the salad dressing (which was delicious) on my salad, along with greens, beets, carrots, chick peas, and cheese. I figured I was going to be pretty unhappy with all the seed oils by the end of the course, and wondered what it would do to my gut.
As their accommodation for people with special dietary requirements they labeled foods that contained wheat, soy, or dairy. This was done manually, and this was a problem immediately at breakfast. The oatmeal was labeled as gluten-free, so I had some oatmeal, which I used to eat regularly.
Oats do not contain gluten, but are typically processed in facilities that also process wheat, so are usually cross-contaminated with wheat. I learned this by buying a fancy oatmeal back when I was fixing my diet starting in 2010, and having a bad reaction to it. I called the manufacturer, and they explained that while they didn’t include wheat in the recipe (not on the label), that I should expect it to be contaminated with wheat. One can get gluten-free oatmeal, but it doesn’t taste as good, darnit. I stopped eating oatmeal years ago.
This oatmeal was delicious, which should have clued me in…
I forget what we had for lunch, so I guess it wasn’t memorable. The kitchen is staffed by volunteers, except for a paid, part-time kitchen director; so I think it took them a couple days to hit their stride. The food improved steadily.
Gluten-Free?
The next morning I couldn’t figure out what to eat, and met Jomi. He knew what was in most of the food, and when I questioned him on one item he went and got the package to let me read the ingredients.
Then he warned me not to eat the oatmeal, that it was not gluten-free. He didn’t introduce himself as such, but I learned afterward that he was the kitchen director.
Drat, the oatmeal was what I had had for breakfast the morning before, and that explained why I was wiped out and falling asleep during the meditation sessions for the rest of the day, and the dietary distress I started experiencing immediately after.
Luckily I didn’t have any neurological effects, other than the sleepiness, but in the past I’ve suffered from blindness, auras (I get a migraine without pain from gluten exposure, and loss of the ability to speak (expressive aphasia), and on one memorable occasion, face blindness (prosopagnosia). Every time this has happened the effect has passed after several hours, but the first time I had aphasia I wound up in a stroke ward for four days. They thought I had had a minor stroke.
Face blindness means you can’t recognize people’s faces. Usually when I have a serious reaction to a gluten exposure I’ll go watch TV or something for a while, until it passes, since I can’t talk to anyone. In this case I was watching the Supergirl TV show that used to be on. It’s pretty obvious which character is Supergirl, due to the suit, but I couldn’t recognize her face at all, or any other other actors.
Now you understand why a gluten-free diet is my number-one concern. The effects have always passed, but I worry about the time when they don’t. It clearly can’t be good to be doing that sort of damage to my brain.
In hindsight I really should have introduced myself to the kitchen staff immediately, and not relied upon the hand-labeling. Jomi took great care of me from that point onwards, in a couple of cases making me gluten-free pasta when the lunch entree was not gluten-free, and making a delicious quinoa, mushroom and spice breakfast that lasted me for days 2 and 3. He went out of his way, and whenever I had a question he was quick to answer. I had no more issues, and the effects of the gluten exposure passed after a couple of days.
Most days there was white rice, however, and this became a staple, as I had anticipated it would.
I don’t like having to eat a gluten-free diet, and it’s a pain because of the inconvenience for me as well as the staff, but as they had advertised that they offered a gluten-free diet, I expected them to deliver. I wouldn’t have been able to attend at all otherwise.
Satiety
So folks claim that the problem with a high-carb diet is ‘hypoglycemia’, where your blood sugar rises and then falls, triggering cravings for more carbs (Berlin, 1994; Wyatt, 2021).
“After glucose intake, seven patients had symptoms (palpitations, headache, tremor, generalized sweating, hunger, dizziness, sweating of the palms, flush, nausea, and fatigue), whereas in the control group, one subject reported flush and another palpitations, tremor, and hunger.” (Berlin, 1994)
As you can see from those studies, it’s not exactly hypoglycemia, but it’s a real effect seemingly related to insulin resistance. I used to get this prior to fixing my diet; I would actually get the shakes and everything.
Not this time. I was full every time I left the dining hall, had no signs of anything like being “hangry”, and woke up ready for breakfast but perfectly fine with waiting the two hours until the dining hall served it.
So satiety, for me, was fine.
Weight
I wasn’t really planning on writing a post about this, so I didn’t measure my weight before going. Judging by my belt and mirror, I lost some weight during the course, but nothing to be alarmed about.
I don’t have any idea about what anyone else ate in their own lives, but I did note that while there were a few overweight individuals, only one was actually obese. He was Indian. On the men’s side, it was a pretty uniformly healthy-weight group of people. A few of the Indians ate special diets, and one had some type of sensor/pump on his triceps, which I presume was for diabetes. I didn’t speak to the gentleman, so never found out what that was for.
Fats
So I anticipated having to eat a lot of seed oils during this course. I never asked about this aspect, as I don’t think eating seed oils for ten days would have any effect on me beyond intestinal distress, which can occur for me after just one meal containing seed oils.
So I shrugged and anticipated an unpleasant experience in that regard, and thought that I wouldn’t be taking the OmegaQuant test that my friend Experimental Fat Loss has been bugging me to take, as I would get loaded up with Ω-6 fats.
But often when I go to a restaurant, I will ask for some sour cream and some vinegar, and make my own salad dressing with salt and pepper. It’s delicious, and perfectly satisfactory from a fatty-acid standpoint.
So I decided to take a look at the yogurt. I was expecting some horrible zero-fat yogurt, but much to my surprise and delight it was not only whole-milk, but grass-fed!
So this became my staple. Happy day!
I suspect I may have gotten a better Omega Balance during this course than I normally do.
What Did I Eat?
So after discovering the yogurt, for breakfast I would have yogurt with fruit including those stewed prunes, typically an apple or maybe an apple and a banana diced into the yogurt, with a dash of strawberry jam. Delicious.
For lunch I would have whatever gluten-free starch dish was on offer, sometimes rice, sometimes some mystery dish with an Indian name, and of course the gluten-free part of the burrito dish the day that was served. A fair bit of beans, I suppose, as this was pretty much the only protein on offer. I would have some of the vegetables, maybe a taste of the Indian spicy pickles (preserved in some seed oil, blech, but very tasty). I would also have a salad, prepared as above with a yogurt or sour-cream based dressing I created myself, and another dash of jam. A couple of days I added a dash of tahini.
I was not suffering at all. I was quite pleased, in fact. It was much better than I had been expecting.
Intermittent fasting
From the beginning of breakfast to 11:30am when I usually left the lunch hall to go for a walk is five hours. That’s a 19-hour fast on most days, except when I decided to have an apple or a banana at tea. That was effortless. Of course it helps that they kept us pretty busy, especially in the evenings, but I never thought about the fact that there were no snacks available.
The Downside
On my normal meat-and-dairy-based diet I typically have a bowel movement once a day.
