My Journey Back to Meat: How I Stepped Away from Veganism

Usha Anandi. 16 | JUNE | 2026

For years, a HUGE part of my identity was built on the idea that not eating meat made me one of the good ones.

As a vegetarian, then a vegan, my diet represented a lot more to me than just the food I put in my mouth. As a member of the wellness community, it tied in closely to my morality. It felt like proof that I was spiritual, ethical, and worthy. That I could keep up, make the sacrifices, and fit in.

So when my body started sending me unmistakable signals that something needed to change, I did what every good spiritual girlie would.

I full-on ignored them.

For YEARS, I had a recurring dream right before my period: running through a dark forest on all fours, hunting, and tearing woodland creatures to shreds.

It freaked me out, and confused the hell out of me, but it was easy enough to dismiss… Until it wasn’t.

By the time I finally listened, I had gained over 30 pounds despite biking everywhere, avoiding sugar and gluten, and pulling coffee enemas and water fasts every month. I was constantly starving, snacking every hour, and in my early twenties feeling absolutely exhausted while everyone around me seemed to have boundless energy.

And my period went away. That I felt.

As it would happen, my body was deeply depleted. I just wasn’t given the framework yet to understand why.

What changed everything was a book on blood type diets, something with genuinely mixed reviews in the wellness world, but one that cracked open a question I’d never let myself ask: what if my body actually needed something different than what I’d built my identity around?

I dive deep into this in my podcast episode. Go tune in and subscribe for more.

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I needed answers, so I tuned back into Ayurveda, the ancient tradition I’ve studied for over a decade. In my search, I learned something that surprised a lot of people in my community: Ayurveda doesn’t actually enforce vegetarianism.

The ancient texts it’s based on mention meat in multiple places. Instead of asking “is this food good or bad,” Ayurveda asks whether something is right for your constitution, at this particular point in your life cycle.

For women especially, that matters.

Our nutritional needs shift dramatically through menstruation, pregnancy, postpartum, breastfeeding, and menopause. What serves your body at twenty may not serve it during a pregnancy, or during the lead up to your period, or in your wisdom years.

Reincorporating meat felt like killing a part of myself.

When I shared the change publicly, after years of teaching plant-based nutrition to other women, the response was intense. But there was also something unexpected underneath all that noise: other women admitting that they’d been wanting to make the same shift… But were afraid to go back on their promises.

In my podcast, I also dig into the ethics.

Factory farming is genuinely harmful to animals, to the environment, to all of it. But that’s not the only way to source meat, and there’s a version of this conversation that doesn’t require choosing between caring about the planet and caring about your own body.

If any of this resonates, the full episode goes much deeper into the practical side too: specific digestive practices from Ayurveda, what traditional Chinese medicine says about nourishment and pregnancy, and the three things that helped my body actually transition.

Listen to the full episode on the Womben Wellness Podcast.

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