My Journey to Veganism and Self Respect

'Have you seen What the Health'? Is something I keep on finding myself asking people. To me, it's so exciting that the world is waking up and the truth is being revealed about the food and pharmaceutical industries.
The documentary is currently on Netflix in the UK and is definitely worth a watch wether you are vegan or not.

My journey into veganism, I believe, began from the first day of my life. As a baby I was given formula straight away and I was totally intolerant to it. This lead to me having such painful stomach aches that I ended up being given carrot juice instead of milk. Never in my life have I drunk a glass of milk (or eaten cheese, for that matter).

My father is Scottish but with my mother being German our family would spend every summer, October, Christmas and Easter holidays in Germany where we stayed with my mother's family on their farm. We lived there with horses, kittens and dogs so I developed a love for animals and saw them as a part of the family. However, the family business was in meat production and slaughtering.
When I think back to my summers in Germany, I reminisce about long days horse riding and picking strawberries and raspberries from the garden as well as occasionally visiting another farm that the family owned where there were pigs (who I loved!). What was really going on went over my head as a child until the day I was taken to work with one of my uncles and I could see the cows ready for slaughter. Somewhere that experience got etched into my mind and really began to awaken me from a young age to the reality of the suffering that animals go through to fulfill the desires of humans.

During my childhood I was given meat but I found myself push it to the side of the plate. I loved ice cream though!

Becoming vegetarian happened naturally and as I grew up and was given more freedom over my diet, I found myself eating fully meat free by the age of thirteen.

At age nine I had begun dancing and by almost eighteen, was full time in professional dance training. The years between those saw me battling an eating disorder that had reached it's worst point when I was sixteen years old. I'll go into that in detail in another blog post in future.
Dancing helped me to recover. It helped me to focus the physical part of me into something artful. My body was an instrument, not just an entity to fight with. However, it still took me years to see eye to eye with food. Though I was well on the road to becoming vegan, I was still deeply unhealthy, undernourished and pushed myself too hard.
Eventually, in my early twenties, I struggled with migraines and ultimately chronic fatigue which was very painful for someone as active as I was to cope with. It's difficult for anyone to cope with! We are supposed to be in balance and alignment. My body was forcing me to stop and my thyroid function became very low.
When this happened, I lost a lot of hair, was constantly cold and didn't have a menstrual period for a year. The doctor who put me on Levithyroxine (a thyroid hormone stimulant), told me that my fertility could be impacted, particularly because I had also had no period for a year when I had been diagnosed anorexic at sixteen. This should have scared me but at the time it didn't. I couldn't ever imagine that someone like me, with such a poor self concept could ever be a good mother.
The medication worked, my energy levels steadied and I finally slowed down. Probably most importantly I started talking. I embraced my emotions and stopped punishing myself. I still consumed dairy however, which occasionally gave me very painful stomach cramps and bloating.
It was the summer of 2013 that served as a turning point in my life for many reasons but for the sake of this article on going vegan, I'll discuss that aspect of it.
My friend and I happened upon a raw vegan restaurant that had opened up in Edinburgh and we ended up volunteering there. It was in this place that I really discovered just how beautiful food could be and how eating could be a true joy. Claire, the raw vegan chef who was also the owner, made dishes so vibrant and bursting with life, I was constantly inspired and feeling more vivacious than I had ever experienced being.
Fast forward to January 2016. I had just quit my job, left all my belongings and life as I knew it and begun to travel with my now husband, Hal. Though I had been told that once you go on thyroid medication, you would be on it for life, I listened to my intuition when it told me to get off medication. In a spiritual sense, I had been undergoing something of an awakening and it began to click with me that the body would never be out of balance if we allow for it to thrive. I knew deep down that I had developed an autoimmune condition because I had been poisoning my body with stress and an imbalanced diet.
So I went fully vegan (healthy vegan, educated vegan), eliminated stress, threw away my pills...and my thyroid levels not only normalised but I had never felt better. 10 months later I was pregnant and now have a beautifully healthy baby who is thriving. As am I.
Living a plant based lifestyle, to me, feels like the best way to show myself respect. I gratefully nourish my body with medicine from the earth and never ever worry about what I am eating anymore. It's simply a pleasure.