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Is fasting and vegetarian diet all good?

A tale from my own experience and experiment

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I always told and also thought that the vegetarian diet is the best for maintaining good health. I have no reason to doubt as I didn’t find anyone who express any other opinion. Being a non-vegetarian for life, I know that it would be pretty hard for me to maintain it for long. Then in late 2019, I decided to give it a try. It was purely an experimental study on my body. At the beginning, as expected, it was hard. But then within a few weeks or so, I got used to with it. I did continue the vegetarian streak for 2 years. I did all the routine check-ups as I usually do. I noticed the following -

  1. I always had stomach issues and had indigestion since school days and had to undertake Omeprazole course once in every few months. With vegetarian diet I rarely took any medications for stomach issues or indigestions.
  2. I had constipation but I didn’t look for a specific reason behind it. While experimenting with my food especially with veg diet, I found that only specific food contributes to my constipation and then subsequent indigestion. I removed those foods for example milk, lentil etc. from the list and I solved that issue.
  3. I lost about 35 pounds in two years even with the similar quantity of food intake.
  4. I was able to do regular exercise as I did before starting the vegetarian diet.
  5. The blood work shows deficiency in some vitamins probably because I didn’t diversify my food enough.
  6. I always had high LDL and that didn’t change at all (neither decreased or increased) during the 2 years of vegetarian diet. This was kind of surprising for me after seeing some of the documentaries on the Netflix claiming vegetarian diet greatly improves LDL level.

Since late 2021, I started non-veg diets gradually even though I do not plan to consume any types of red meat in the immediate future. The idea behind this is to make my food more complete by consuming required nutrition naturally without taking supplements. As of now, I feel great.

Our body is an immensely complex machine that we haven’t yet figured out how it works. On top of that, every human body is a little different and needs some tuning to transform it a perfectly running machine. And that’s why same food doesn’t suit or provide nutrition in the same way to all. Experimenting with food will provide the opportunity to fine tune the optimal food habits. Removing foods that causes issues will certainly help reduce the need for medications. One can only see or feel it by experimenting.

There is a huge impact of doing fasting or intermittent fasting for good health. I will talk about it in the next blog.