men's fitness 28 day diet

what would you do if you found out that everythingyou know, everything you believe, everything you’ve been told since you were a childwas a lie? and not just any lie, but one carefully crafted,finely tuned, expertly executed, and deliberately designed with the express purpose of assuringyou that wrong was right, that bad was good, and that violence was love. a lie powerful enough to manipulate you intotaking part in horrific and barbaric acts you’d otherwise find appalling. powerfulenough to wash blood from your hands. to alter your perception so severely that murder appears mundane and compassion appears extreme. hello, my name is emily moran barwick. i’man animal liberation activist, an artist,

an educator and a vegan. i created the youtubechannel and accompanying website, bite size vegan, where i educate people about veganismthrough a wide array of video styles—from humorous parodies, to detailed academic reports,to interviews with physicians and athletes, to videos for kids—while covering a diverserange of subjects. in our time together today, i’m very likelygoing to challenge some of your life-long beliefs. i’m going to ask you to set yourpreconceptions aside and try to look at the ordinary with a fresh set of eyes. i am aware that this is a great deal to askof you, especially coming from a total stranger. i’m asking for your trust when i haven’teven earned it. but believe it or not, i am

not here to force my beliefs upon you. orto make you vegan. i won’t pretend to have that power. and no one really makes any lastingchange through force anyway. i’m simply here to show you what is reallygoing on every second of every day all around the world behind closed doors. to presentevidence—for your consideration— that things may not be as they appear. undoing a life-long belief is no easy task.but in order to make informed decisions, to look ourselves in the mirror and ask if weare truly living the values we purport to have, we must know the truth. we must educateourselves about what is really going on, not rely on what we’ve been taught. we mustmake decisions based on facts, not fantasy.

i’ll want to preface this talk by sayingthat i’m going to be transparent with you and i’ll even tell you if i don’t knowsomething. i’ll also be providing you with a link to a resource sheet with citationsfor every fact i state, along with a bibliography so that you can dig deeper as i’ll onlybe able to scratch the surface in this brief window of time we have together. so let’s get started. veganism is viewedas an extreme way of living. vegans do not eat, wear, or use anything that came fromsomeone else’s body. we don’t eat meat, drink milk or eat cheese. we don’t consumeeggs or honey. we don’t wear leather, wool, silk, or down. we don’t use products thatwere tested on animals or contain byproducts

from their slaughter. and we don’t attendcircuses, zoos, aquariums, or any other event that exploits living beings for our entertainmentand pleasure. >from the outside, such rigorous exclusionsand avoidances can easily appear extreme. but remember today is about challenging appearancesand assumptions of extremism and normality. today is a lesson in unlearning. and what better way to unlearn than to startour journey at the end and work our way back to the beginning? and what better way to questionwhat’s accepted as good and normal than with something as wholesome and every dayas a glass of milk? the source of milk is no big secret: it comesfrom cows. but that’s about as far back

as most people trace milk’s journey to ourrefrigerated grocery case. most of us grow up thinking that cows aremade to be milked. we may think they have a constant supply of milk and even that theyneed to be milked to relieve the pressure. well let’s look at this critically for amoment. cows are mammals, just like us. and mammals produce milk for one reason: to feedtheir babies. cows carry their babies for 9 months, just like we do, they lactate tofeed their babies, just like we do, and after weaning, they stop producing milk, just likewe do. so in order to have a constant supply of cow’smilk for human consumption, we need a constant supply of pregnant cows. in the dairy industry,cows are repeatedly inseminated, which is

a nice word for raped. the restraining apparatusused to secure the cows is literally referred to within the dairy industry, at least inamerica, as a “rape rack,” so this isn’t a term dreamed up by vegans activists. once a cow gives birth, we face another roadblockto our milk’s journey. babies, after all, drink their mother’s milk. so to make surethere’s constant supply of milk for us, the babies must be taken away soon after birth.this is precisely what occurs in the dairy industry. if the calf is a male, he is sentto a veal farm where he is tied down, unable to move, or locked in a cage where he cannoteven turn around until he’s slaughtered while still only a few weeks old. veal, anindustry that even many meat-eaters oppose,

wouldn’t exist without dairy. every cupof yogurt, every scoop of ice cream and every glass of milk is directly connected to thedeaths of those baby calves. but we’re not quite done tracing milk’spath to our cereal bowls. while the slaughter of babies is certainly horrific enough, wecannot forget the mothers left behind. cows bond intensely with their calves and willcry out for days when they are taken. when residents of newbury, ma called the policeto report disturbing noises emanating from the sunshine dairy farm at all hours of theday and night, the police explained that the mother cows were “lamenting the separationfrom their calves”—but not to worry as “the cows are not in distress and that thenoises are a normal part of farming practices.”

this is not anthropomorphizing. it is a mother’sgrief and it’s utterly heartbreaking to watch. the bodies of dairy cows generally give outat age 4 or 5 and they are regarded as “spent,” despite their natural lifespan of 20 yearsor more. they’re sent to slaughter for cheap meat and pet food, deemed unfit for humanconsumption. at the slaughterhouse, many of these mothers face their final and most brutalseparation from yet another child. while formal statistics are difficult to obtain as moststudies focus on the economic cost of “fetal wastage,” accounts range from approximately10% to 70% of cows arriving at the slaughterhouse pregnant.

in fact there are entire industries that relyupon the slaughter of pregnant animals. a wide array of scientific experiments use what’scalled fetal serum from a range of animals, with bovine fetal serum being the most widelyutilized. bovine fetal serum is obtained by cutting a living fetus out of the mother’swomb, piercing the heart and draining the blood. the process can take up to 35 minuteswhile the fetal calf remains alive. but this most horrific and final separationof mother and child was just the last in a cycle of pregnancy after pregnancy and lossafter loss. in addition to this extreme psychological and emotional trauma, the physical demandsof repeated milkings and the crowded and unsanitary living conditions lead to frequent infectionsand sores.

dairy cows are pumped full of antibioticsand growth hormones, all of which seep into their milk. in fact, there’s an officialnumber of pus cells allowed in milk, euphemistically referred to as the “somatic cell count.”in the united states, around 22 million [22,177,500] pus cells are allowed per single fluid ounceof milk [750,000 cells/ml], with global allowable limits ranging from just under 12 million[11,828,000 cells/fl. oz. in canada & the eu (400,000 cells/ml)] to 29.5 million cells/fl.oz.in brazil [1,000,000 cells/ml]. when we push onwards through to our dairycow’s beginning, back past the first pregnancy, before she became the broken, hollowed-outshell eventually collapsing under the insane demands of her short life, we come to herbirth. the moment she emerges into the world,

wide-eyed and brand new. the moment she’staken from her own mother. you see we talked about what happened to themale calves who are sent off for veal. well the daughters of the dairy industry are stillseparated from their mothers. but they’re kept around to take their mother’s placeand keep the money machine going. keep the milk flowing. so that in every grocery story,every corner shop, every gas station, will be sure to stock this wholesome, normalized,entirely ordinary product. the animal products we perceive as mundane,when reverse engineered, reveal a perversely complex and, to put it lightly, ethicallychallenging, journey from genesis through processing and production to the end product.that is to say, from the animals’ birth,

through confinement, abuse, slaughter anddenigration of corpses to the shiny, happy, store-ready products we literally eat up withouteven a single thought as to what the animals went through. we are being sold the pus-filled ultimateoutcome of rape, enslavement, kidnapping, abuse, disease, torture, infanticide, andmurder—whitewashed into an image of wholesome nutrition. as vegan activist gary yourofskyhas said, it’s the greatest magic trick ever performed. and people say veganism isextreme. unfortunately—or perhaps you may feel fortunately—wedon’t have time to take this reverse journey in such depth with all of the products wecreate from living beings. but let’s at

least take an abridged look at another seeminglyharmless item. one consumed all over the world and with which most americans start theirday. one lovingly mixed into baked goods for birthdays and other special occasions. onedecorated in celebration of peace and new life. the incredible, edible egg. like milk, the source of eggs is clear: theycome from chickens. unlike milk, chickens do not have to be impregnated to supply them.but anytime we make a living being into a machine, a supplier of inventory, the bottomline will always be profit. and increasing profit means increasing output and increasingefficiency. just like the mothers of dairy, the bodiesof layer hens give out prematurely from the

extreme demands of production. hens lose vitalnutrients every time their body forms an egg. every aspect of their lives is regulated ensuremaximum output. from controlling their laying cycles with days and days of persistent lightfollowed by long periods of complete darkness, to starving them for weeks at a time in aneffort to force yet another egg cycle from their worn out bodies, a process benignlyreferred to as “induced molting,” to outright manipulation of their very genetic makeup. we’ve optimized our machines, you see, andbred one kind of chicken for meat and another kind for eggs. because of this, the egg industryproduces millions if not a billion unwanted male baby chicks every year. just like maledairy calves, who are unable to produce milk,

male layer chicks can’t lay eggs. so theyare of no use. to “dispose of”—as they say—thesebaby chicks, they are either painfully gassed, slowly suffocated in plastic bags, or theyare ground up alive. we’re talking about the cute fluffy yellow baby chicks we adorecome easter time. this is standard practice all around the world,with the united states and european union specifying that chicks must be less than 72hours old when the are killed –they are not even granted three days of life. the sisters of the egg industry’s discardedsons get to live out their short lives in cramped battery cages, unable to even extendtheir wings. of course nowadays we hear about

the rise of free-range and cage-free facilities.but in truth, the only comfort these labels bring is to our own conscience. cage-freebirds are crammed into tiny sheds and have twice the mortality rates of battery cagedhens. layer hens are generally good for 1-3 cycles,each lasting roughly a year. in countries where induced molting (again the industryterm for starvation) is illegal, they’re simply killed around their first birthday. i hope you are starting to see the power ofthis lie. of presenting cruel confinement, starvation, abuse, the barbaric murder ofday-old babies and the slaughter of one-year-olds—themselves still children— as something completelynormal and kind—packaged in perfect little

orbs. and we have the audacity to decorate themin celebration of new life. to fawn over the very chicks who were ground up alive for theirproduction. to mix them into treats for our children and loved ones. to start our daywith the products of abject misery and call it “sunny side up.” we might as well startour day by throwing chicks in a blender we could spend all week reverse-engineeringthe paths of the seemingly endless number of animal-derived products we encounter ona regular basis. in fact dutch artist christien meindertsma spent 3 years tracing and cataloguingall of the products made from a single pig: pig 05049.

which brings us to the next layer of our collectiveself-deception: the systematic erasure of individual identity. you see this is wherethe lie is most vulnerable. because beneath the years of indoctrination, we still believeourselves to be animal lovers. we go to the movies and route for babe the pig, cheer forthe chickens of chicken run, and pull for nemo the fish to find his way back to hisfather. then we go home and eat bacon and eggs and make chicken fingers and fish sticksfor the kids. the only way to maintain this most glaringdissonance, this duality of our professed values and our daily actions, is to ensurethat the animals we eat and use have no names, no faces, no identities. so we give them inventorynumbers.

we brand them with hot irons or freeze theirskin off. we tattoo and tag them, inject electronic transponders under their skin, or strap themto their necks or ankles. we even give them barcodes. the important thing is that theyare clearly identified as property. and that they are treated as such. because as soonas we see them as individuals, we threaten the very foundation of the lie upon whichwe so desperately depend. if their bodies don’t conform to our desires,we alter them at will. baby pigs have their teeth cut out, their ears notched, their tailscut off and their testicles ripped out, all without anesthetic. chickens, turkeys andother birds in the meat and egg industries have their sensitive beaks cut or seared off.cows have their horns cut or burned off and

are also castrated without anesthetic. and with some of our most impressive mentalgymnastics, which would be admirable if it weren’t so horrific, we say this barbaricmutilation, this conversion of living beings from someones to somethings is for their owngood. because if we don’t clip their teeth orcut their beaks or slice off their tails, they’ll attack and chew on each other. whatwe fail to mention, is that these behaviors are stress responses to confinement in overly-crowded,insanity-inducing conditions. if we didn’t put them in these abusive conditions, theywouldn’t react the way they do. but we humans love to play the role of saviorin the disasters of our own creation. we swoop

in to milk the cow and relieve the painfulpressure of her swollen udder. pressure that wouldn’t exist had we not taken her childaway. and to top it all off, our fragile charade,we amass mountains of paperwork, conduct thousands of studies, spend untold amounts of money,form governmental, institutional and industry panels, all to decide, define and decree theright way to kill. you can pour through the documents from theusda, or the european union, or any country for that matter, to learn the legal speakthat makes taking the life of a living being acceptable. and you don’t have to look toofar to start finding caveats and loopholes. religious slaughter without any form of stunninggets a pass. birds and fish are excluded from

humane slaughter regulations, the very nameof which is a perfect embodiment of our desperate attempt to simultaneously be animal loversand killers. to be their protectors and tormentors. i mean it really is absurd when we step backand think about it. do we have manuals on how to humanely rape? or how to compassionatelykidnap? or ethically rob? of course not because those are oxymorons. they cannot coexist.but when it comes to killing animals, we will bend over backwards and create massive papertrails of regulations to feel good about what we are doing. again, i must ask, is veganism really theextreme choice here? look at what we have to go through to makeeating animals acceptable.

before we move into issues of the environmentand health impacts of diet, i’m going to play a brief video. the portions of the footagewhere the location is known will be labeled as such. but it doesn’t mean that the samething isn’t happening in other parts of the world. i trimmed down hours of footageinto a 3-minute clip. it will not be pleasant, but i’d imploreyou to watch anyway. you can’t make an informed decision without having all the facts. ifyou feel you must turn away, i’d just ask you to think on the question: “if i can’twatch process, do i have a right to eat the product?” [video]

in my years of being vegan and speaking withmany, many non-vegans, i have yet to ever hear one reason that even comes close to justifyingputting a sentient being through what we just saw. not one. you cannot watch that and say that the animalswe kill for our food don’t know any better. that they die peacefully and humanely. theycan sense the fear. they can smell the blood. and they fight. they fight to the end. and you can’t say that it’s happeningin some far away place because it’s happening all over the world. the co2 chambers you saw- those were the medieval devices lowering pigs to an extraordinarily painful death ofburning from the inside out – that is seen

as the most humane method of slaughteringpigs. it’s employed worldwide, including herein the united states. i know i’ve focused rather exclusively thusfar on the ethical truths behind the mask of normality. but the wake of our destructionis littered with farm more than the trillions of beings we kill every year. the environmental, health and social impactof what we put in our mouth is astounding. there is no way i’ll be able to cover theseareas today in the depth they deserve, so i encourage you to refer to the resource pagei’ll be leaving with you. but let’s try to take a bird’s eye viewof our impact on this planet. when it comes

to the environment, we hear about conservingwater, cutting down on emissions, halting deforestation. environmental protection agenciesencourage us to take shorter showers, carpool or ride our bikes, go paperless and recyclemore. our governments hold international conferences to address climate change and seek solutions. all the while the single most devastatingforce behind our planet’s environmental collapse remains not only unspoken, but actuallyactively denied by the very organizations charged with saving our planet. animal agriculture is the leading cause ofclimate change. it’s responsible for up to 51 percent of ghg emissions compared tothe 13 percent of all global transportation.

it uses a third of the earth’s fresh water,up to 45 percent of the earth’s land, is responsible for 91 percent of amazon rainforestdestruction with 1-2 acres cleared every second. it is also a leading cause of species extinction,ocean dead zones, and habitat destruction. the efforts we make to recycle and take shortershowers are rather insignificant in comparison. accounting for variation in production system,the global average water footprint for a single pound of beef is 1,847 gallons/lb, with numbersranging all the way to 8,000 gallons/lb. we can see here that without fail those foodproducts with the smallest water footprints by weight are plant-based. of course weight doesn’t necessarily meansustenance. still, global averages show that

“when viewed from a caloric standpoint,the water footprint of animal products is larger than for crop products” with “theaverage water footprint per calorie for beef [being] twenty times larger than for cerealsand starchy roots.” and with protein being one of the greatestnutrition concerns for people considering veganism, it’s worth noting that “thewater footprint per gram of protein for milk, eggs and chicken meat is about 1.5 times largerthan for pulses” with beef’s being 6 times larger. leading to the conclusion that “itis more efficient to obtain calories, protein and fat through crop products than animalproducts.” but we don’t really need studies to tellus that eating animals requires more energy

input and creates more waste than eating plants.how can it not? eating animals is incredibly inefficient.we are filtering our nutrients, our water, our resources, through someone else’s body.globally, we’re feeding close to 40% of our grain to our food animals. how can thatnot be worse for the environment than simply eating the plants ourselves? the united statesalone could feed 800 million people with the grain we feed to our livestock. that’s morethan the estimated 795 million people going hungry in the world today. 98% of the massivewater footprint for animal agriculture we just covered goes to growing feed crops forthe animals we eat. i’m not suggesting that a global shift toveganism will automatically result in the

proper redistribution of our crops to thosein need, nor address the issue of unnecessary food wastage, but it’s the only way we canhave enough food to feed everyone. this is where many people point to small,local farms, and sustainable practices. like grass fed beef. or free-range eggs. the thing is, we don’t have the land. there’ssimply not enough land for the number of animals we eat every year. the amount of land thatit takes to produce 37,000 pounds of plant-based foods will only yield 375 pounds of meat. the land required to feed 1 vegan for 1 yearis 1/6th acre. it takes 3 times as much for a vegetarian, meaning someone who consumesdairy and eggs but no meat, and 18 times as

much for a meat-eater. you can grow 15 times more protein on anygiven area of land with plants versus animals. on top of all of that, studies show that pasture-raisedcows emit 40-60% more greenhouse gases than grain-fed. i could talk about the environmental costof animal agriculture all day and we would only just be scratching the surface. i do want to speak briefly to fishing andocean health before moving on. i produced a 17-minute video report encompassing themost recent research on the state of our oceans, which will also be on your resource page,so i’ll try to summarize some main takeaways.

whether you eat fish and marine life or not,this matter impacts all of us. the ocean, or rather the phytoplankton within the ocean,provides somewhere between 50 and 80% of our oxygen and the oceans ecosystems store carbonin massive quantities. since we tend to go for the biggest fish first,only 10% of predatory fish species remain, which could leave the unchecked species tofeed on the ocean’s vegetation releasing the stored carbon. losing just 1% of theseblue carbon ecosystems would be equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions ofaustralia. we pull 90-100 million tonnes of fish fromour oceans each year with some sources even estimating 150 million tonnes. there is noway for the marine populations to replenish

themselves. our industrial fishing methods are incrediblyinefficient, with some operations throwing 98% of their catches overboard, dead, becausethey aren’t the targeted species. as i said earlier, land-based animal agricultureis the leading cause of ocean dead zones, which are areas in the ocean starved of oxygensuch that marine life suffocates and dies. so the animals we are raising for food onland are killing the animals we are ripping from the ocean. and to add a further layerof perversity, we are feeding the fish we catch to the cows, pigs, chickens, and otherland animals and to the fish we farm. and people think veganism is extreme? whenhumanity is decimating habitats, consuming

land and resources, polluting the oceans,destroying the rainforest, driving species after species into extinction, feeding plantsthat we could eat to animals and feeding other animals to animals that aren’t supposedto eat animals, all so that we can eventually eat the animals ourselves. but of course as a consumer, we don’t seethe trail. we see the pretty packages and sleek advertising. we see these ordinary,innocent, every day products. and we find comfort in the fact that most people eat theway we do; that most people don’t seem to be concerned. and we continue to believe thelie that this is the way it’s supposed to be.

ethics aside, we have environmentally reachedthe point beyond personal choice--beyond “you eat how you want to eat and i’ll eat howi want to eat.” this is a global crisis and it’s not about you and it’s not aboutme anymore. we say that children are our future but whatfuture can they have when we are eating the planet to death? the world cannot sustainmeat, dairy and egg production. it simply can’t. we have to start aligning our actionswith our values. i’m going to speak very briefly to the impactthat animal consumption has on our health. we take drugs by the truckload, undergo dangeroussurgeries, spend trillions of dollars on health care every year, in our stubborn refusal toacknowledge the simple fact that diet is the

number one cause of disability and prematuredeath. that the vast majority of deaths in the united states are entirely preventableif we would simply change the way we eat. the denial of this truth is so pervasive,our desire to maintain the system we’ve constructed so strong, that only one quarterof medical schools in the united states teach even a single course in nutrition. the doctorsin whose hands we place our very lives aren’t even educated in the number one cause of diseaseand death in our country. heart disease, the number one killer in theunited states, is a dietary disease that can be and has been reversed with a vegan, plant-baseddiet. but instead we take handfuls of medications and have doctors crack open our chests toroto-rooter our arteries rather than stop

eating animals. after all, a vegan diet istoo extreme, right? once we look at it objectively, from the outside,our behavior is baffling. we serve meat, dairy and eggs at climate changeconferences, supporting and consuming the very source of the problem that the conferencewas created to address. we train doctors to save lives with yearsof expensive education covering every drug on the market while never addressing the truecause of disease. we run our resources and nutrition throughsomeone else’s body, squandering astronomical amounts of food and water and creating anastounding amount of waste. we genetically manipulate, breed, confine,abuse, rape, torture, denigrate, mechanize,

and murder sentient individuals under ourself-created codes of conduct that bring comfort to consumers. all to avoid facing the fact that we are livingthe greatest lie ever told. but here’s the good news. we have the powerto open our eyes. we have the choice to break the cycle and refuse to sell this lie to thenext generation. to realize that veganism, far from being anextreme lifestyle, is the most sane and rational way to live. it’s the most powerful toolwe have for saving our planet, for improving our health when we eat health-consciously,and for regaining our compassion- for becoming the people we believe ourselves to be: goodpeople.

and good people don’t destroy the planet,leaving our children without a future. good people don’t throw newborn babies into grinders.good people don’t rip day old babies away from their mothers. good people don’t rape,torture and murder. yet “good people” everywhere are doing all of these things withevery bite of every meal. but that’s the beauty here. you no longerhave to buy into the lie. you decide what goes into your body. you decide whether youwant to continue to have others kill for you. you decide whether you want to continue consumingdeath, terror, and heartbreak. you have the information at you feet. the responsibilitynow lies in your hands. you decide. and my hope is, you’ll decide to go vegan.

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