In the ongoing conversation about the best eating routine for achieving health goals, one of the OG macronutrients is undergoing a major rethink – and with good reason. Is it time to switch up your protein?
As her
STEAK with gorgonzola sauce was set down on the white tablecloth, Carrie Forrest cast a nervous glance around the restaurant. She wasn’t famous, at least not in the conventional sense; she had a vegan blog with an app and was successful enough that she’d been flown to Miami to present at a food-blogging conference before flying up to New York for another work engagement.
With a master’s degree in nutrition, Carrie knew all too well the vital role that protein played, and she ate plenty of beans and soy. And yet, she was exhausted. In fact, she’d been low on energy for months, maybe years. She’d switched to a vegan diet in 2010 – inspired by the actress Alicia Silverstone, a love of animals and a hope of losing that stubborn 5lb. Giving up meat was easy (it was yoghurt that had been hard), but lately she’d found herself looking longingly at eggs in farmers markets. And by the time she arrived in New York, something had shifted.
‘I was just like: this isn’t working,’ Carrie, now 47, recalls, of that trip. ‘I felt ashamed. But I also felt like, this is my health and I have to make a change.’ She remembers two things about the steak: it was delicious and she couldn’t finish it. The next morning, she woke feeling ‘energetic’, so she took the leftovers from her hotel room’s mini fridge and ate them cold.
Almost immediately, she began searching for the words to communicate her feelings to her audience. And after revising it more than half a dozen times, she hit publish on a post called Why I Am No Longer Vegan, which included an apology if the headline caused ‘disappointment, confusion or anger’. Then she held her breath. Within hours, she had hundreds of negative comments (‘No true vegan would ever “listen to their body” and eat animal products,’ wrote one), along with bad reviews of her app on the app store. So many people unsubscribed from her email list that she received an auto email from marketing platform MailChimp saying her account had been suspended. The company was afraid she’d been hacked. Meanwhile, Carrie’s close friends – also vegan – deserted her.
‘I was pretty much alone, except for my husband and my therapist,’ she says. But still, she stood her ground, eating farm-raised beef, adding chicken to her stir-fries and feeling her energy levels stabilise. It was two years before she received the first apology; in an email, a negative commenter confessed that she, too, had given up veganism and admitted she’d been too hard on Carrie. The emails began as a trickle, then turned into a small but steady stream, inspiring Carrie to publis
