Why I stopped eating plant-based after 10 years

A decade of doing everything “right”, what it cost, and what changed.

For ten years I did everything I was told was healthy. And it very nearly cost me the thing I wanted most.

I don't tell this story to start an argument about diets. I tell it because I meet so many women who are exactly where I was — exhausted, doing all the "right" things, and quietly blaming themselves for still feeling terrible. I was one of them for a decade. So this is my story, not a prescription. But I'd be dishonest if I pretended it hadn't changed everything I now believe.

Doing everything right

I went vegetarian, then largely plant-based, and I did it properly. I wasn't living on chips. I ate the lentils and the beans and the leafy greens, I took it seriously, I felt virtuous. Everything around me told me this was the clean, healthy, conscious way to eat — the way that would make me well.

And for a while, on the surface, it seemed fine. But looking back, the fade was already happening. It was just slow enough that I kept explaining it away.

What it actually cost me

The tiredness came first, and I put it down to work. I was in banking, it was demanding, of course I was tired. Then the tiredness stopped lifting on weekends. Then came the brain fog, the low mood that arrived without a reason, the sense of running on empty no matter how carefully I ate. I was told I might have endometriosis. I burned out. I was depleted in a way I didn't have a word for yet — I just knew I didn't feel like myself, and I'd stopped being able to remember the woman who did.

Here's the part that's hard to sit with, even now. I thought I was nourishing my body. I was actually slowly starving it of the very things it most needed — the iron that's absorbed far more readily from animal food, the fats, the fat-soluble vitamins, the dense, whole nourishment a woman's body runs on. I'd been sold restriction dressed up as health, and my body was quietly paying the bill.

The turn

The change didn't come from a new supplement or a stricter plan. It came from the opposite direction — from tradition, and from eating more, not less.

I found the world of ancestral nutrition — Weston Price, the way our grandmothers actually cooked, the foods every traditional culture treated as sacred and gave to their mothers and children first. Slow-cooked meat on the bone. Bone broth. Organ meats. Real animal fat, unapologetically. Food with time and care in it.

I started eating that way, and for the first time in years, I stopped being depleted. Not overnight, and not dramatically. Just steadily — the woman I'd been missing began to come back. Clearer. Steadier. Able to keep up with her own life.

The proof I couldn't argue with

And then came the deepest proof of all. At 42, after changing how I ate and rebuilding my body, I fell pregnant naturally — and had my son.

I think about that a great deal. The wellness world had told me to restrict, to detox, to strip things out. The thing that actually worked was the exact opposite: nourishment. Real, dense, unashamed nourishment. My body didn't need me to take more away. It needed me to finally give it enough.

What I'd say to you

If you're plant-based and thriving, genuinely — you feel well, your energy is steady, your bloods and your body agree — then this isn't a lecture aimed at you. I'm not interested in shaming anyone's plate.

But if you're doing everything "right" and still feel like a shadow of yourself, I want to gently offer the possibility that the problem was never your discipline. It might be that you've been quietly under-nourished by a way of eating that looked virtuous from the outside. That was true for me for ten years, and I couldn't see it from the inside either.

You are not lazy, and you are not broken. You may simply be a woman whose body has been asking, for a long time, to be properly fed.

If any of this lands, Why am I so tired all the time — even though I sleep? goes into the iron side of my own story in more depth. And if you'd like to know where your own reserves sit, take the quiz — Are you depleted? — or begin with a consultation.

I'm a nutritional health practitioner, not a doctor, and this is my own experience — not medical advice. If you're making significant changes to how you eat, especially with a diagnosed condition or in pregnancy, please do it alongside your GP.