The Bet: Vegan for a Month

after nearly forty years of being an obligate carnivore

Meat may not produce better spellers

All my life I have hated vegetables. My earliest memories are peppered with adults trying to force-feed me greens. I have vomited cabbage onto a babysitter, fed peas under a table to a friend’s mum’s dog, squashed bubble and squeak into my pocket to earn dessert. Like some kind of bizarre nightmare, I felt I spent most of my youth fleeing from angry vegetables.

I never made a conscious decision to be a carnivore, it was just always there. My early years would have certainly been easier if I were an omnivore, but I could not change it. Although I did dedicate several years to forcing myself to like beer, and that eventually took. So maybe I gave up too easily.

As an adult, I reconcile this as a biological matter: I believe that my body tells me what it wants, and it wants meat. No matter what the greater public believe, meat is always going to be my optimum fuel. Once I came to that conclusion, I stopped trying to force plants into my body, and am now pretty much an obligate carnivore. Every meal has meat as the main ingredient. Almost forty years on meat alone, with virtually zero health problems. I have been told a million times that I am a heart attack waiting to happen, yet always have better than average figures for all the key indicators (cholesterol, blood pressure etc) whenever I'm tested, and rarely get sick. My only hospital visit ever was about a year ago to tear out my appendix in the middle of the night before it exploded.

Recently a few high school mates (class of 90) wanted to wager a February Challenge. Tone is going beefcake - a month dedicated to muscle gain, Chuck is going to crash diet to try and hit his 1990 body weight of 72kg, and Duges' wife Jen intercepted the email chain and got in before him to nominate his goal - Duges is getting a six pack.


This is what is commonly known as a Kestell bet- $10,000 but the loser does not have to pay.

So no meat and no dairy, no eggs and no fish. And no supplements no pills no capsules – if I can’t get it from plants then I can’t get it. My predictions are that I will drop weight, be permanently hungry, my health will deteriorate, I will generally function physically and emotionally at less than 100%. Listless, cranky, unhappy and unhealthy.

This blog will be mainly concerned with my whingeing and complaining, but I will drag the others into it whenever I can.

There are rumours that the finale will be celebrated with a boozy Gaulish feast that would put Obelisk into a food coma. My friends are dubious, my wife is annoyed, my plants are terrified. Bring on March.