578: Why I Stopped Being Vegan - The Nutritional Perspective

Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod

Hal Elrod

Goals, Lifesuccess, Success, Goalsetting, Halelrod, Business, Achievement, Lifestyle, Motivation, Productivity, Miraclemorning, Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For over a decade, I ate a "mostly" organic vegan diet and believed that I was fueling my body with the most nutritious food available. I say mostly because I didn't believe in inconveniencing people to accommodate my dietary preferences, so I was pretty flexible when other people were involved.

However, I experienced some health challenges including low energy and brain fog, and I realized that there were some vital nutrients that I was deficient in, which were missing from my vegan diet. Although I could supplement them, I wondered why they weren't prevalent in what I thought was the diet nature intended. That’s when I started questioning everything I thought I knew about nutrition.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing my journey of transitioning from vegan to a more balanced diet loaded with organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and fats, as well as local pasture-raised, ethically sourced meats and eggs.

To be clear, this is NOT to convince you to change your diet but rather to encourage you to consider what our bodies truly need to thrive. This episode isn’t meant to be preachy. There’s no one-size-fits-all diet. It’s about listening to your body, questioning nutritional norms, and making informed decisions so that your diet contributes to optimizing your energy and lifespan.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The role of vitamin B12 and why its absence in plant foods made me rethink my diet
The challenges of getting key nutrients like iron, protein, and vitamins from a vegan diet
How human history and evolution explain why meat has been a dietary staple
Nutrition isn’t one-size-fits-all. Listen to your body and get your blood tested regularly

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To get full access to today's show notes, including audio, transcript, and links to all the resources mentioned, visit MiracleMorning.com/578

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast, the show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams.
0:09.6	I am your host, Hal Elrod, and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level,
0:16.5	as well as interview world-class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals
0:21.9	themselves, and we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what
0:26.3	you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the
0:34.1	podcast. Today, I want to share something deeply personal and perhaps a little
0:38.3	controversial with you, depending on where you stand on this topic. And it's why I stopped
0:42.2	being vegan after roughly 16 years of identifying as vegan and eating accordingly. And if you're
0:49.3	vegan, by the way, if you are a vegan today, like, keep listening. This is not going to be me trying to change your mind or anything like that.
0:57.2	I just want to share with you my journey, my story, and most importantly, what I learned about the limitations of a vegan diet.
1:04.5	Now, I became vegan originally in 1999.
1:08.3	At the end of 99 in December, I went to UPW and Leash the Power Within with
1:13.3	Tony Robbins. And he sold me, I mean, he didn't sell me, but he sold me on the concept of, hey,
1:19.0	fruits and vegetables, like you should eat a vegan diet. And I was all in. And in the beginning,
1:23.7	at first I felt amazing. I had more energy. I felt lighter. And I had a real sense of purpose knowing I was aligning my diet with my values. But after I was diagnosed with cancer, I started questioning everything I thought I knew about nutrition. And I started digging in deeper. Not to mention, I was running tests. I had never run blood tests the way, I don't think ever I had, had all of my markers
1:44.4	tested until I had cancer. And one thing that coming up is, was vitamin B12 and the deficiency.
1:51.0	So when I dug in, I realized, wait a minute, this vital nutrient is missing from a vegan
1:55.9	diet. Vitamin B12 is missing from a vegan diet. It only comes naturally from animal sources. And it
2:04.7	occurred to me if a vegan diet is what nature or God, depending on your perspective, intended for
2:11.7	human beings, why would it be missing a vital nutrient like B12? That one little tiny nutrient and that fact completely shifted my paradigm and got me questioning everything.
2:24.9	Now, what I'm going to share today, this isn't just my story.
2:27.0	I want to use this episode to share what I learned about the limitations of a vegan diet, like I said earlier, the role of essential nutrients like P12 and other nutrients,
	...

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