Please learn from Tim Shieff's mistakes

[andyswarbs]

Tim Shieff has been a vegan advocate for some years. He has found his dietary lifestyle going badly wrong and has now resorted to eating some meat to find some kind of health. In his latest video youtube.com/watch?v=jt9Gcni...(Not working as expected?) he asks is he still vegan, and indeed pours his heart out explaining where he is at.

At the beginning of his video he blames his health problems on his omninvore diet before he became vegan. During his vegan journey he has tried many avenues to solve those issues, and clearly has not succeeded. Much of this this is the story I want to talk about and hopefully others can learn from this.

I fervently believe that although Tim has tried many ways to solve his health issues where he has gone wrong is not going at this structurally based in modern nutritional knowledge. So what has he tried? He has drunk his own urine, he has tried herbal remedies, fasted, faithfully believed that his concept of god would save him, raw food, whole food plant based and probably many more.

So what hasn't he tried? Simply put a structured approach based in the concept that healing takes time. The whole microbiome will entirely replace itself in 3 months. So in serious cases a 3 month window might be a useful time length to think of. However I know of people on journeys of healing from dark places who have gone on for several years.

Let's look at my own journey from my darkest moments. Fortunately for me I chose the Paddison Program, which structures itself in modern nutrition and has what it calls BLAME as a basis for recovery (paddisonprogram.com/the-und.... This is not just a collection of issues (Bacteria, Leaky Gut, Acidosis, Musocal Lining and Enzymes) but a roadmap for recovery.

My own recovery started with a brief water fast followed by juicing celery and cucumber. Then there is a structured approach to adding foods back into the diet. With arthritis we are lucky, in the sense that we get a clear signal (if we are listening) to foods that cause arthritic reactions. So the roadmap involves finding foods that cause big issues and not eating those. It involves finding foods that are tolerable and support a nutritional recovery.

The roadmap has details such as knowing that, for example, adding prebiotics too early can fan the flames. Yes at some stage prebiotics can be a very useful tool to aid recovery, but take them too early and you are only going to cause more problems. Similarly I stopped eating gluten during my recovery, and only reintroduced wholewheat back into my diet after a gap of 15 months.

Healing takes time. Even now my body is healing. Now much of that healing is aided by Yoga which is helping my mind as much as my body. But I could not have started my yoga journey until nearly 9 months had passed by.

Elsewhere I have recommended people like Gojiman who recommends looking at things like SIBO, oxylate issues and so forth. If you understand anything from his approach, like the one I followed there is structure to healing.

So let's assume that Tim Shieff has an oxylate issue stemming back from his omnivore days. By raw juicing he may have added a lot of spinach etc into his diet. This will have only fanned the flames and made his situation worse because spinach is high in oxylates.

I can go on but let me finish by talking about fasting. I'm not talking here about a 2 day fast, but rather the extended one that Tim Shieff did. Again this has fanned the flames of his gut issues rather than resolving them. Let me contrast this with fasting that the True North Health Centre (healthpromoting.com/) do. They heal the gut by extremely careful medically supervised water fasting as an acceleration tool for healing. For some people those fasts may last for 5 days, for others 40 days. This structured fasts are focused on gut healing. The key is they are monitored by doctors who know what they are doing.

Underpinning everything recovery for some people means you have to dig deep. There are routes to health and for many just going vegan can work. However I know that had I just gone whole food plant based without oils that I would still be in the same mess, if not worse.

If you have health issues that means, like Tim, you feel healthier with meat, you feel you cannot eat a lot of fibre, cannot eat legumes etc then please consider a structured approach using modern medicine to solving your underlying problems.

We are all different, and sadly some gut issues are irreversible, but if there is a reliable and safe route to healing then knowledgeable help is at hand. Please use it.

[Zest]

Hi Andy,

I shall hope to watch this video later, but in the meantime I would like to wish you a lovely weekend.

Zest

[Hidden]

I read before that he drinks he's own urine and stoped reading, i read now and its not there.

[JerMan22]

This is a good post; I'm familiar with most of what you're talking about. I was pretty lucky in a way. I ate what could be called a flexitarian diet until about 18 months ago, then switched overnight to WFPB with no problems. I think it's because I had been eating so little meat, rarely ate cheese, never drank milk, and almost always ate vegetables. My digestive tract already "knew" what to do with WFPB food. I'm also fairly active physically and have never been more than a few pounds overweight. One major advantage that I've noticed since switching has been a reduction in joint pain which had started to be a problem, and reduced recovery time from exercising.

But my wife, who had been vegetarian for 35 years, and who switched to be vegan at the same time that I switched to WFPB, is still having problems. Her fondness for junk food has given her a much harder time of it. Having been a junk-food-loving vegetarian, she's now somewhat less of a junk-food-loving vegan. So we've been looking at these gut problems she's been having and trying to figure out what she should do. I've been sharing videos from Gojiman and True North. She wants to cut out the junk food, and she has given up cheese, but just can't give up bread or oils. She has gut pain when she eats vegetables; some much worse than others and she is quite overweight. We live a few hours from True North and I'm looking into how expensive it would be and if it's covered by our insurance.

So, thanks for the post. It's good to share all of our experiences because you never know who you might be helping.

[Hidden]

If the guy is drinking his own urine, I would think he has serious problems with mental health issues.

[andyswarbs in reply to Hidden]

There is definitely a thread of depression for some people who come to veganism to sort out their health issues, and they go down odd dietary ways that make matters worse.

[benwl in reply to andyswarbs]

I agree and probably not just veganism. I expect any strict (or capable of strict interpretation) diet, like macrobiotic or raw juice or fructarian or paleo can have strong appeal to those with certain types of mental disorder.

It doesn't mean of course that the majority of people following those diets have such issues

[Cooper27 Administrator in reply to benwl]

There's a new term - orthorexia- for people who use "clean" eating (be that raw, paleo, vegan) to mask an eating disorder.

[JerMan22 in reply to Hidden]

It also seems like a lot of people with gut issues also have mental issues. Scientists are finding that one leads to the other sometimes. Something about the "gut/brain axis" and the vagus nerve or whatnot. Also, many of them seem compelled to start channels on YouTube and spill their guts to (sometimes) millions of viewers, then other people on YouTube tell them to try some crazy diet. One guy named Vegetable Police once drank turpentine because somebody told him that he had parasites and that would kill them. For example.