Why You Need to Leave Stupid Fad Diets Out of Your New Year Resolutions

Exhibit A: The growing list of "why I'm no longer vegan" influencers

A New Year is upon us, so I would like to wish all my dear readers a safe, happy, prosperous and scamdemic-free 2024.

Along with countdowns, streamers and tactfully fending off amorous drunks, a long-held New Year's tradition is the making of resolutions.

If there was a top 10 of New Year resolutions, "I'm going to go on a diet and lose weight" and "I promise to get my butt to the gym 2.86 times per week" would almost certainly take the #1 and #2 spots, each and every year.

So I'd like to kick off 2024 by reminding people that faddish and extreme diets are not necessary to achieve your health and body composition goals.

In fact, over the long run, they are more likely to hurt than help you.

A sad case in point is, or was, raw vegan influencer, Zhanna Samsonova (aka Zhanna D’art), who extolled the alleged virtues of a raw vegan diet to her millions of viewers on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.

“I see my body and mind transform every day,” Samsonova gushed while describing her restrictive eating regimen. “I love my new me, and never move on to the habits that I used to use.”

She died on July 21 last year, at only 39 years of age.

Zhanna may have been transfixed when looking at the "new" her, but her pictures evinced a disturbingly thin and emaciated individual who looked anything but healthy.

The food influencer said her raw foods regimen was reportedly inspired by seeing “peers” who looked a lot older than their ages, which she attributed to their “junk food” diets.

Zhanna may have been Russian, but she'd clearly embraced the regrettable Western mentality that shuns moderation and balance for the far more marketable practice of swinging to extremes.

Zhanna reportedly died of starvation and exhaustion. She claimed she ate a “completely raw vegan diet” for the previous four years, consuming just “fruits, sunflower seed sprouts, fruit smoothies and juices.”

A friend claimed her dysfunctional dietary habits extended further back. “She ate only durian and jackfruit for seven years,” they lamented. “You don’t need to be a doctor to understand where this will lead.”

If that wasn’t extreme enough, Zhanna hadn’t drunk water in six years and often practiced “dry fasting,” in which she’d abstain from eating or drinking for days.

Her sequelae were a lucid testament to the power of dietary brainwashing and denial. In the final months leading up to her death, Zhanna’s friends pleaded with her to eat more substantive foods, but she refused to change her lifestyle.

Zhanna's mother said she battled hard to save her daughter but to no avail.

“I fought for many years [but] she did not listen to her mother,” Vera Samsonova, 63, lamented in an interview with 116RU.com. “She chose this path.”

One commenter criticized “This is just pure starvation, not a healthy raw vegan diet” - as if there's such a thing as a "healthy" diet lacking in key foods and the essential nutrients they provide.

Despite the clearly negative aspects of Zhanna's dietary approach, numerous loyal followers remained unconvinced her eating habits played a role in her passing. Instead, they contended that "chemicals" present in the fruit she consumed were responsible for her demise.

'My vegan diet brought on early menopause'

Finnish blogger Virpi Mikkonen was a poster-girl for diet faddism. She authored four best-selling cookbooks and preached the alleged virtues of her gluten-free, grain-free, dairy-free, meat-free and refined sugar-free diet to hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.

Then reality bit. Hard.

At 37 years old, Virpi suffered from early menopause. She also said she felt burned-out, stopped menstruating, and developed a rash on her face.

She visited a Chinese medicine specialist who, unaffected by the West's moronic war on meat, gave the proud vegan some sage advice: Stop eating so much raw food and start consuming animal products again.

Virpi did as instructed. She added in eggs (which she once referred to as "miscarriages of chickens") for breakfast, organic meatballs or chicken for lunch, and broth in her dinner. "It’s amazing," Virpi told The Daily Mail. "I feel energetic, motivated. I’m sleeping better, the hot flushes, and aching in my body have stopped." She also said her periods had returned.

Things go better with meat.

Yovana Mendoza Ayres, who uses the name Rawvana, amassed a cult following online by promoting a raw vegan diet. Over a six-year period, she built up a large social media following to which she raved about her extreme diet.

After being spotted in another blogger’s video with a plate of fish in front of her, many of those same followers spat the dummy and called her a "fraud", "deceitful" and "a liar".

In a subsequent video, she admitted she had been experiencing health problems including being “basically anaemic”, which forced her to add animal proteins back into her diet.

“I was planning on telling you, but on my terms, on my time,” she claimed.

In the 2019 video, she listed her numerous health problems over the years, and admitted she started eating cooked food in 2016.

After not getting her period for years, her hormones were at premenopausal levels, and she developed yeast infections and digestive issues, as well as small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

She said she started eating fish and eggs out of "self-love", after realizing her diet may affect her ability to have children.

Despite that, she said she hoped to be able to return to a raw vegan diet someday.

Good luck with that.

Dana Shultz, who runs a once-vegan recipe blog called Minimalist Baker, was inundated with criticism in 2019 when she announced she was going back to animal products after suffering digestive issues and hair loss.

In 2014, Jordan Younger, aka The Blonde Vegan, broke ranks with veganism after taking stock of her worsening health: She'd withered down to 101 pounds, her hair was falling out and she'd stopped menstruating.

After writing a blog post revealing her eating disorder and the decision to give up veganism, she received virulent attacks on social media, including death threats.

I guess she was supposed to eat plants and die, in order to keep her hopelessly dogmatic followers happy.

Virulent abuse and death threats, it turns out, are common tactics used by the Cult of Vegan against former members who have left the flock for fleshier pastures.

The Six-Year Itch Strikes Again

UK-born Tim Shieff, a YouTuber and former Ninja Warrior competitor once known as the ‘vegan prince’, revealed in 2019 he’d abandoned his plant-based diet because it was making him sick.

"I had some joint issues, chronic fatigue, and mild depression," he said. "My whole body felt like it was shutting down."

After noticing meat avoidance was making him ill, he’d tried to treat himself with 'natural' solutions such as yoga and drinking his own urine.

As you do.

Not surprisingly, Sauvignon Wee Wee failed to exert any beneficial effect. So he began eating meat again, after six years of veganism. "For me I could see the health I gained almost immediately," Tim said.

"I was so shocked . . . My depression lifted, joints feeling better, energy back in my body."

Sadly, Tim's dalliance with reality was short-lived. In a recent video, he "apologized for his denouncement of veganism", explaining that he'd now discovered the teachings of the Divine Truth, a cult in Queensland, Australia led by Alan John Miller and his partner Mary Suzanne Luck. Miller, also known as A.J., claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus, while Luck claims to be the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. They actually refer to themselves as Jesus and Mary on their website.

Before he became 'Jesus', Miller was a Jehova's Witness Pastor but fell out with the Church after an incident with a prostitute.

Miller has been accused of destroying marriages, emotionally abusing his followers, and convincing them to pay for his lifestyle, including international flights, accommodation, his recording equipment, and a $400,000 house where he delivers his ‘seminars’.

This is the 'religion' that Shieff is now claiming has helped him see the light. In his apology video Shieff hinted that, thanks to revelations about his emotionally distant childhood and the guidance provided by the Jesus and Mary imposters, he might have another crack at veganism:

"I can now see a way that veganism is possible for me and others and that if veganism didn't appear to work for me that it may very well have been my issue with an emotional cause and not the diet's issue."

I wish Tim well, but would warn him that falling for the rantings of a shady Queenslander who claims he's Jesus is not going to somehow make his unhealthy vegan diet healthy.

I could go on and on with more examples, but I'd end up with a small book. For those interested, this website keeps a tally of no-longer-vegan influencers and celebrities, and it's clear the failure rate is quite high.

The Unhealthy Reality About Extreme Health Fads

Obviously, not every vegan is going to become dangerously anorexic and die before they hit 40.

Just like not every low-carber is going to become a morbidly obese, yo-yo dieting nutter who ends up in jail for molesting a 13 year old girl.

But a significant number of people will be damaged by these diets, be it physically, psychologically or both.

And it's all unnecessary. Following an extreme diet is not, and never has been, a prerequisite for good health.

There are limited circumstances in which 'extreme' measures are warranted. For example, under medical supervision, morbidly obese people do benefit from extremely low calorie diets.

But picking an extreme diet, and going it alone, based on the ramblings of clueless influencers with often deep-seated psychological issues is never a good idea.

Learn About What You're Getting Yourself Into - Before You Get Into It

Several years back, I worked briefly alongside a stunning Asian girl. I do mean stunning - she had those beautiful, mesmerizing Oriental eyes, thick flowing black hair, a smile that could light up a coal mine, and a body that told you she worked out diligently. Her fashion sense was impeccable (the A-Train loves a woman who knows how to dress attractively and tastefully), and she had that sweet, amiable personality Asian girls are known for, the kind that should be produced in injectible form and distributed throughout the grumpy West.

Now that's an injection mandate I could get behind.

Just as I began wondering if I was looking at the future Mrs C, she dropped those three little words no red-blooded, steak-eating, provolone-loving man ever wants to hear:

"I'm a vegan."

Goddamnit. Life sure can be cruel sometimes.

After my brain momentarily short-circuited from shock, then recovered, I began quizzing her about her diet. Without letting slip that I was a writer hated by militant vegans worldwide, I told her I'd performed quite a bit of research on veganism and vegetarianism, and I started listing the numerous nutritional pitfalls of these diets.

No such discussion is complete without mentioning vitamin B12, so I did. She seemed like an intelligent girl, so you can imagine my surprise when I discovered she didn't even know what vitamin B12 was!

I told her vitamin B12 was essential for proper cognitive and neurological function, and that deficiency could lead to some really nasty effects on the brain and nervous system. Like listening to bogan nutters who name themselves after durians.

I explained that the only sources of truly bioavailable B12 were animal foods, and that even dairy foods were not particularly rich sources. I told her studies had repeatedly shown B12 deficiency was far more common among vegetarians than omnivores, and was highest among vegans.

I told her that symptoms of B12 deficiency can take years to manifest, so she shouldn't assume that because she felt fine now that it would always be that way.

She seemed pretty adamant about her vegan beliefs, so I told her she should strongly consider supplementing with several key nutrients, vitamin B12 foremost among them.

I told her if she wanted to test what I was saying, a quick trip to the doctor and a request for a serum B12 measurement would tell her where her levels were at.

I told her the best and most studied form of supplemental B12 was methylcobalamin. I often carry around a product called Source Naturals Coenzymate B, which contains the various B vitamins in methylated and tasty lozenge form. I told her a B-complex would be a great idea, as vegans were often deficient in other B-vitamins like pyridoxine.

The lozenges contained some methylcobalamin, but being a vegan, I said she'd probably also need a separate and more concentrated standalone methylated B12 supplement.

I told her to hold out her hand, and poured a few into her palm. "Try them ... not all at once," I said.

She did. She liked them. She seemed receptive to what I was saying, but I don't know where this girl is at now and whether she ever did take my advice. I sure hope she did. In fact, I hope she had an epiphany and ditched the whole vegan charade, because it would be a real pity for such a beautiful display of womanhood to experience the health-wrecking, premature aging effects of such dietary extremism.

Unfortunately, it often takes some sort of negative health event before someone staunchly committed to a particular dietary ideology will finally see reason. Some, like Zhanna, will remain in robust denial, right to the very end.

What stands out in my mind about my former co-worker is how such a classy and seemingly switched-on girl fell for such a load of utterly untenable nonsense. When I asked why she'd opted for a vegan diet, she told me "there are plenty of other foods to eat, we don't need animal foods."

A textbook classic vegan propaganda line that she learned from goodness knows where. Probably from some vegan 'guru' or 'influencer' or some bollocks-replete "plant-based" diet website.

She knew nothing about the physiological and biochemical effects of these diets. Not only was she unaware that vitamin B12 deficiency was one of the most common pitfalls of a vegan diet, she didn't even know what vitamin B12 was.

Which means she'd essentially performed no research whatsoever on her new dietary choice (reading BS on agenda-driven websites or the clueless gushings of terribly misguided influencers is not research). She'd made a critical dietary decision, one that could have a profoundly negative impact upon her health, based upon a bunch of simplistic propaganda spouted by a group of people who - let's face it - don't have an encouraging track record when it comes to rational behaviour.

Unhinged vegan propaganda from the unhinged animal killers at PETA.

Simple is as Stupid Does

Most diet fads are underpinned by a simple set of seemingly logical assertions that resonate with people. However, when you look for the science to support such assertions, it doesn't exist. The studies that the diet gurus and activists cite in support of their assertions are usually a jumbled mess of cherry-picked slop, a mess that is easily hosed into the gutter when you pull up the papers in question and cast a critical eye over them.

The alleged health benefits of veganism are based upon the absurd claim that animal foods - especially meat, which humans have quite literally been eating for millions of years - are toxic and unhealthy. Almost all the studies supporting this claim are epidemiological prospective studies - ironically, the research equivalent of highly processed junk food - conducted by the hopelessly biased Seventh-day Adventist researchers at Loma Linda University (whose prophetess Ellen G White parroted the anti-meat bleatings of her era's "Health Reformers") and the staunchly pro-vegetarian "EPIC" researchers at Oxford University. "Plant-based diet" advocates are not so fond of citing epidemiological findings by non-biased researchers that show vegans have a higher death rate than the general population (see here and here for examples).

The low-carb fad was fueled by the writings and rantings of predominantly overweight people (Atkins, Eades, Taubes, and now incarcerated sex predator Moore) who claimed cutting carbs endowed a "metabolic advantage." This magnificent metabolic advantage, they shamelessly claimed, allowed you to achieve more weight and fat loss on a low-carb diet than on an isocaloric high-carb diet. Which begged the question: Why did the physical condition of low-carb's biggest champions range from flabby to downright obese?

Did their metabolic advantage get lost in the mail?

And when I repeatedly pointed out that tightly controlled ward studies since 1935 had consistently shown no fat-derived weight loss advantage from low-carb/ketogenic diets, the 'scientific' rebuttals ranged from name-calling to pathetically desperate ramblings about "insensible water loss."

Next.

The current diet flavours-of-the-month are "intermittent fasting" and time-restricted eating, which not so long ago in history used to be called "skipping breakfast." The hyperbolic proponents of these regimens, like ‘biohacking’ huckster Dave Asprey, rant against calorie restriction, even though the evidence shows that when these diets do cause weight loss or glycemic improvements, it's entirely due to calorie restriction.

Genius.

In fact, intermittent fasting, which schedules entire days each week with no or very little caloric intake, is nothing if not a form of deliberate caloric restriction.

Not to be deterred by reality, IF and TRE proponents claim these diets flick a "metabolic switch," that they boost growth hormone, and even confer longevity benefits by triggering "autophagy." As I explain in my recent book Not So Fast, the number of studies demonstrating this in humans is a big fat zero (this video also does a pretty good job of debunking the IF and TRE hooplah). The reality is that, in healthy young subjects, these dietary formats have been shown to lower testosterone and the key thyroid hormone triiodothyronine (T3). Hardly a selling point, which is why these unfavourable findings are routinely ignored by the fasting fadistas.

As the brilliant scholar and social critic H. L. Mencken wrote, "For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

The solutions pimped by most dietary fads are simple, neat and almost always wrong.

Leave them out when you draft up your New Year resolutions. Instead, try sensible eating and exercise - you'll be amazed at just how effective this combination is when you actually stick to it.

Consistency, not novelty, is the key ingredient most often missing from people's weight loss and fitness regimens.

As Richard Nikoley once wrote on this topic, "stop being f**king idiots about this stuff."

Anyhow, have a cannoli ... and an awesome 2024,

Anthony.

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