Thu, Apr-04-19, 02:23
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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Tim Shieff, the vegan pin-up with a guilty secret. He was eating eggs and salmon
Quote:
From The Times
London, UK
3 April, 2019
Tim Shieff, the vegan pin-up with a guilty secret. He was eating eggs and salmon
Tim Shieff was called the ‘vegan prince’ by his YouTube fans. Now they tell him to kill himself
Tim Shieff can make his body do things that you rarely see outside superhero films. A world champion free runner — an athlete who sprints through cities while scaling walls and climbing buildings — he has twice been the last man standing in the ITV series Ninja Warrior UK.
In last year’s series he came closer than anyone else to completing the show’s obstacle course, swinging like Tarzan, spidering along walls and performing acrobatic, gravity-defying lunges and mid-air twists.
Shieff was a high-profile and outspoken champion of veganism, and his success was trumpeted by fans. “Making a name for vegans!” commented one viewer beneath the footage on YouTube of his winning run in the most recent series. “Plant-based power,” said another. He was dubbed the “vegan prince”.
However, according to Shieff, his display of extraordinary physical strength and agility was not the full story. In reality he had been in declining health for three years and came to the conclusion that veganism was making him sick.
The prolific YouTuber, who had posted uncompromising videos about the evils of eating animals and built a vegan clothing brand, told followers of his channel that he had started eating animal products again. The fury that followed from many vegans was startling in its ferocity, with some wishing upon him a fate that they would not consider for any beast.
“Kill yourself,” was the simple instruction in one message he recalls receiving. Another said: “If I saw you in the street I’d spit on you.”
“They’ve called me a fraud and said I never cared,” Shieff, 31, says when we meet in an east London café to discuss the fallout from his dramatic repudiation of veganism. In some of his videos he seems anguished about his decision to eat meat again, but today he is combative about the abuse he received from vegan critics. “It identified for me a massive mental instability in that community,” he says. “The community is supposed to be about compassion. A human found his health again, but they have to be in denial. They have to blame me and not the diet.”
Vegans claim that he is absolutely to blame in a story that involves naked urban climbing, urine drinking, a 35-day fast, the rights and wrongs of killing slugs and a salmon-induced wet dream.
Shieff grew up in Derby and as a teenager got into free running, giving up a place at university so he could scale buildings and dangle from rooftops for a living. He ran naked across the London skyline for a set of photographs that were sold to raise money for Jamie Oliver’s food charity.
He has appeared in films, including as a Death Eater in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and competed in free-running competitions, winning the World Freerun Championships in 2009. He has participated in the American and British versions of the Ninja Warrior series.
He went vegan six years ago, and in videos on his YouTube channel, which has nearly 178,000 subscribers, he railed against the “animal-slavery industry”. He founded an ethical clothing company called Ethcs — without an “i” because of its premise: “ethics without the ego”.
Shieff is not devoid of ego, as his YouTube videos show. As well as his homilies on veganism there are many videos of him in action. There’s Tim the human, as he refers to himself, balancing on one hand; here’s Tim hanging by his toes from a bar while meditating on a California beach; there goes Tim, his pale-blue eyes flinty with determination, running barefoot through the Peak District.
He was not, however, quite as healthy as all this activity suggested. “I sensed a slow decline in my body over three years,” he says. He had digestion issues, fatigue, “brain fog”, a lack of energy, poor recovery and muscle fragility. “I’d get injured doing a fast pull-up.”
One thing that puzzles me is how he managed to be the last man standing on Ninja Warrior with all these health problems. “I scraped through. There was nothing explosive [involved]. I used flow rather than explosivity. I think that speaks to the potential of my spirit.”
He began a quest for “healing” that would involve a “natural solution” rather than taking supplements. Why not see a doctor? “I believed in my own ability to solve it. I trusted myself. All the answers are within. And I proved that.”
He tried a high-carb, low-fat diet and a high-fat, low-carb diet. For four months he became a raw vegan, subsisting mostly on fruit. He drank his urine almost every day for two years and, most controversially, undertook a 35-day water fast. A lot of his critics have suggested that these extreme diets were the reason that he was feeling under the weather.
“This is one of the big misunderstandings. People have twisted everything backwards,” he says. “I wouldn’t do these things if I wasn’t suffering. I didn’t do them for fun. Why would I do those things when I can just enjoy normal vegan food? No one wants to get into urine therapy and be a weirdo to society. No one wants to not eat.”
He insists that many of the things he tried produced some, but limited improvement. Those two years of urine drinking slowed his decline, he insists. “I’d never been complimented so much on my aura. But there was still something lacking in my diet.”
Initially he planned to do the water fast for seven days, but kept going for five weeks, losing 13kg and looking, as he said, “like a skeleton”. That’s not being vegan, that’s not eating. “I think it was more ethical in a way. I wasn’t consuming any products,” he says. But he was starving himself! “In the long term. In the short term it’s cleansing. It’s very healing. It was completely safe for me. I’m very tuned in with my body.” This is where I begin to feel uneasy about the extreme lengths Shieff goes to in his search for what he regards as good health.
After his fast he tried raw vegan food again, then cooked meals, but he didn’t feel right and started studying the accounts of former vegans who had started eating animal products. “They found the healing that I was looking for,” he says.
One day he bought some eggs from a farm where he could see the chickens running around. He ate two raw eggs and felt a little better. Later he bought some wild-caught salmon, cooked it and ate it. “I had a wet dream that night,” Shieff says. I wonder how much of our conversation can be heard by the people sitting near us in this quiet café. “I hadn’t ejaculated in two months. I think if I went to a doctor that would be interesting to them. Something re-engaged within my system. My body woke up.” A woman at the next table is putting her headphones on.
Now Shieff eats locally sourced meat and is “like a teenager again”, and would like to meet a woman who is also an ex-vegan and can relate to his journey. The “brain fog” also lifted. “Everything was more vivid and my whole lust for life came back.”
Shieff, who has a somewhat idiosyncratic way of speaking, says that the universe was guiding him to do what “myself, my inner self, higher self” needed to do. Animal products, he realised, were a necessity. “We all spout this propaganda that you’ll thrive on a vegan diet — that wasn’t true for me.”
Of his exploration of veganism, he says: “I really went to the depths to understand, overstand, inner-stand what veganism is for my human.”
His confession about the egg and salmon eating came in an agonised video in November in which he described it as a temporary lapse. A month and a half ago he shared another video in which he said that he was no longer vegan and that he did not feel “unethical” for changing his mind.
Some of his followers were sympathetic and applauded his honesty, but others suggested, with varying levels of pithiness, that he needed help. The responses of many vegans ranged from disappointment to rage. He was accused of betrayal, self-absorption and losing his mind.
“It’s amazing how much more powerful a negative comment is than a positive, but it has made me feel more sovereign and liberated to be so misunderstood and yet I’m still OK,” Shieff says. “I’ve had some dirty looks around Shoreditch, but no one’s done anything in person.”
He had hoped that Ethcs could broaden its focus from veganism to more general ethical consumerism, but his colleagues, who were all vegan, put him right on this, and he severed his association with the company this year.
Some of his vegan friends have been more understanding than others. “I sense a lot of them believe that it’s my fault. They have to believe that. One friend thinks that I got bought out by the meat industry. It’s not about money, it’s about my own truth,” he says. “These people just don’t know themselves. Maybe they didn’t have a purpose before they found veganism. It has given them a community and then they’re just projecting on to me their own fears and limitations.”
Could it have been that veganism didn’t suit him because he required a huge amount of fuel running 100km races and somersaulting over city landmarks? “I think I burnt through my supplies quicker because I was an athlete, but I just think it accelerated the true nature,” he says. “If you took 1,000 vegans in the UK from the moment they went vegan and fast-forward ten years, I’d be amazed if ten of them would be at equal health.”
Shieff also takes issue with claims that a vegan diet is definitely better for animals and the planet. “I acknowledged that all my food choices are causing destruction and death,” he says. “That’s one of the things we can’t face.”
There is a debate to be had about the effects that producing vegan food on an industrial scale has on the environment and animal habitats. I’m with him when he talks about the damage caused by deforestation to grow soya consumed by, among others, vegans. And he’s quite possibly right that many vegans don’t think about that as long as they are not eating an animal product. Yet the conversation takes a slightly bewildering turn when he starts talking about the rodents killed when crop fields are ploughed. “I was a vegan buying lettuce leaves and washing flies and bugs off. You’re not consuming it, but there’s a denial of an animal’s life there.”
Shieff is now an omnivore who will eat an occasional steak if it comes from a local cow. “I think a cow, grass-fed, could be the most vegan product in terms of food because one animal could sustain someone for three months.” That’s a bold claim, but he is considering taking ultimate responsibility for any flesh he consumes. “I do feel like the next stage for me is to kill an animal myself. I’ve got to really face this.”
In one of his videos explaining why he had started eating meat again, after years of fiercely promoting veganism, Shieff said that maybe he should not “talk about things so certainly in the future”. Nevertheless, he’s being pretty outspoken now. “Good point,” he says, looking a little uncertain of himself for the first time. He quickly rallies, though. “Me speaking my truth helps the greater good I feel,” he says. “It’s going to stir things up, but a lot of people feel guilt from their friends for not being vegan. A lot of humans are being made outcasts.”
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...almon-6hrf792qn
I think we're going to see more and more articles like this |
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