I’ve been in and out of veganism for the last ten years and recently re-committed about a year and a half ago for not only vanity and health motivations, but environmentalism and animal rights motivations. There is no question that eliminating meat and dairy (even grass-fed and “free-range”) from your diet results in a reduction of excess sodium, antibiotics, hormones, GMOs and mucus in your system. Additionally, the meat and dairy industry are the biggest players in land degradation, carbon emissions and animal cruelty in the history of mankind. However, this post is about another pressing issue: boobies.

I’ve always had small training bra-size boobs that I’ve always been comfortable with (I’m almost 36 years old, yet favor a training bra). When I stopped eating meat and dairy in my mid twenties, I stopped getting severe menstrual cramps and my boobs stayed consistently small even around my period. I not only stopped eating meat and dairy, but I had also given up cooked food all together because I became obsessed with the integrity of raw foods. This health obsession ironically became the unhealthiest period of my life. It took me about two years to realize that my diet was making me an anxious person, at which point, I adopted even unhealthier eating patterns in an effort to erase my anxious raw vegan identity. So over the last ten years, I went from being raw vegan to vegan to vegetarian to pescatarian to carnivore, then back to vegetarian and now vegan with a love (not obsession) for raw foods.  And through these phases, I can definitively say my boobs were most tender and grew to adult size during my carnivorous phase.

While this may encourage women to eat meat, sudden breast enlargement can signal estrogen dominance, which may cause breast cancer and man boobies. There are easy ways to reduce exposure to excess estrogen in our system. These include eating processed soy products, meat and dairy in moderation, eating organic, drinking filtered water (not in a plastic bottle), giving your nails a breather from nail polish, using truly natural body products and cosmetics and exploring natural methods of birth control. Most importantly, it is crucial to monitor our elimination because poor elimination increases the load on your liver, which is responsible for metabolizing estrogen out of our bodies. Unplug your rancid hormones with a colonic and consider a future liver cleanse.