Hi.

[Vegan of Power]

Hello. My name is Matthew Wetherbee, I have two channels on youtube, Matthew Wetherbee and Vegan of Power. I have not been a vegan very long. I have been an atheist for over 2 decades.

I came here because I was so impressed by the stupid vegan comments videos going over the behavior of Vegan Gains. It had been driving me nuts how horrible he was and how all the vegans were embracing him like a Messiah instead of seeing him for what he really is.

Anyway, the promise that people intelligently discuss complicated topics appealed to me, so I wanted to check this place out.

[brimstoneSalad]

Welcome Matthew, I'm glad you've joined. I hope you enjoy it here.

What led you to become atheist? How about vegan? Any interesting stories?

[TheVeganAtheist]

Hello Vegan of Power, welcome to the forum. Happy to hear that you liked my critique of Vegan Gains. Please share with us some of your background and experiences.

[Vegan of Power]

Ok. I was raised Christian. I went to a Bible College to become a missionary, and while I was there I would always go to the library because I thought it was awesome we had all that knowledge in one building.

One day as I was reading something it just clicked in my head, that if I had been born in a Muslim family, I would be Muslim, had I been born into a Buddist family, I would be Buddist, and so on and so forth.

I always read the bible a ton, so I would always help people with scriptures they needed help with, so imagine how annoying it was after I stopped believing to have all these people trying to convert me. Some people would be sharing scriptures with me and I would be like, I know what it says, don't you remember, I am the one who showed you where that was a few months back.

Over time people get used to things, so they stopped giving me as much flack for my lack of belief most of the time. That was when I was 19, I am 40 now, so it has been over 21 years.

The vegan thing is very recent, though it was a long time, and far too slow, coming. I first got exposed to it in Maui. I mean, not the very first I was exposed to it, but exposed in a way where it made an impact. Before I just thought stereotypical things, these little pencil neck anemic wimps need to eat some meat. Sorry, just being honest about where I was at the time.

But when I moved to Maui in 2003, I had this very beautiful, very good friend who missed me and moved out in early 2004 so we could do stuff together again, she didn't like being so far away from me. While she was here she met this really cool, really smart guy a couple years older than me who was a vegan. I liked him a lot, he had a good mind and it was refreshing to talk to someone who made so much sense.

He told me that Carl Louis was a vegan and I thought that was cool because I always admired him.

I still had no intention of being a vegan myself at the time, but I had a completely different view of it after that.

Then one of my friends, a fellow martial artist who I had taught how to strength train, who just loved meat, went vegan. I found that very surprising.

His wife also went vegan and later one of his number one students, who was a good friend of both of ours, also became vegan. These are all people I liked and respected. But they were also all smaller and weaker than me and didn't consume nearly the calories that I did. So I wasn't fully convinced but it definitely got me so that I was thinking about it quite often.

My friends were awesome. They never preached to me. They never condemned me. They were just good friends. And they paid attention. They knew I was a big fan of Michael Clarke Duncan. So they sent me a video of him explaining why he went vegetarian. That was the first really eye opening video.

A little later he sent me a video of Patrik Baboumian. That one hit me hard. I was still ignorant though. I was thinking, my goodness, Patrik must have put so much work into his diet to make it work. He must have put so much effort into matching all his essential amino acids. I don't want to put that kind of time and money into managing my diet. But it kept eating at me.

I wasn't even aware of all the green house emissions and rain forest destruction that was a result of the meat industry at this point, I only was aware that animals were being treated very poorly and I didn't want to support that. So for the last 10 years, I had been mostly having fresh caught local fish and free range chicken eggs.

I had already gone way lower on dairy for health reasons but there is so much good food that has cheese that I was still having a lot of cheese.

One day I was house sitting for some friends, taking care of all their animals, when I read a book that really brought home the point of how bad meat is for you and how healthy a clean vegan diet is. I went vegetarian at that point, because I thought vegan was too extreme of a jump. Plus we get free food at work every night and they use a lot of butter and I didn't want to reject all that free food just because it had butter in it.

That didn't work at all. I lost so much strength so fast and got super tired and drained and felt like I was aging in fast motion. I hated it. I toughed it out about 5 months and then I gave up. My squats went from 475 to 315. So I started eating meat again.

It very much changed how I viewed the world though. I had no idea how meat focused the world was, but after that I was like, wow, there is so much meat everywhere. I ate way, way less meat than before this second time around.

Then I few months ago I was reading Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins, and when I got to chapter 10, energy, the fuel of excellence, it reinspired me to change my diet. This time I went full vegan. I looked into it more, made sure I had all my nutrients like Vitamin B-12 and what not, and it was a much more smooth transition.

I am a little embarassed at how long it took me, but I am happy that I FINALLY made the change.