Tanya: Resolved her concerns about raising her son vegan... and improved her and her husband's health into the bargain

My husband Paul and I had been fairly happy, healthy vegans for four years when I fell pregnant. I wasn’t concerned about being vegan while pregnant or breastfeeding because I felt that my diet was varied and good, but when it came time for my son to get more nutrients from solids and less from breastmilk at one year of age I suddenly became very anxious about what to feed him.

I had seen a number of doctors for routine check ups through the course of my pregnancy and my son’s infancy and the range of opinions on veganism went from completely laissez-faire to hysterically opposed. I felt the truth had to be somewhere in the middle and that to find that I would need to talk to someone who had studied nutrition and who understood both the strengths and potential weaknesses of the vegan diet.

I initially wanted to find a “mainstream” dietician because I was concerned that going to a vegan practitioner would mean that I was looking for someone who was supporting my mindset and that I wasn’t prepared to be challenged about any potential weak spots in our diet. However, I was also concerned about the typical experience I had heard of vegans seeing non-vegan dietitians, ending up paying a lot of money while that person Googled “sources of B12.”

After interviewing several APDs over the phone and via email I realized that the level of knowledge they had about veganism was less than what I had acquired from 5 years of actually living it.

I had seen the name “Robyn Chuter” repeatedly come up whenever people asked for someone to help with nutrition advice, specifically relating to vegan children. Seeing a highly credentialed, science based nutritionist who has lived a vegan life and raised vegan children turned out to be a much more useful choice for me and my family.

After a year of exclusively breastfeeding my son he returned marginally low results for iron and B12 levels (which is common for exclusively breastfed babies.) With Robyn’s help we were able to quickly bring him into the normal range without using harsh supplements that are known to cause stomach upset.

It is three years since then and my son has stayed in the 90^th percentile for height and weight and is one of the tallest children in his class. He is performing well academically and rarely gets sick.

Robyn’s recommendations to our family contained quite a few big challenges for us (in particular eliminating added sugar, olive oil and dramatically increasing green vegetables) so they are things that we have gotten better and better at year on year. And I can notice that as we adopt a diet that is closer and closer to what she recommends our general health and resilience to illness is increasing. Last year, despite some very virulent flu strains circulating, our whole family completely avoided getting the flu and did not have a cold that lasted more than a few days.

Paul and I have always been slow to get started in the mornings and never considered morning exercise an option for us. But after gradually improving our diet year on year we have both found the energy to pursue early morning circuits and swims. Having a good diet facilitates our ability to exercise, and this has a great flow on to our whole family’s general feeling of happiness and well-being.  It’s hard for me to imagine how we would have gotten to this point without Robyn.

One of the things I most appreciated about seeing Robyn was the amount of information I got and the follow up print-outs and emails I received to help us remember what we are aiming for and what Robyn’s recommendations are.

I often bring a list of questions and concerns when I see health professionals, and some of them seem a bit unimpressed by this. Robyn was full of energy and enthusiastic to answer every question I had.

What we eat and how we nourish ourselves and our family is both a knowledge and information issue, and a deeply emotional one. I haven’t met anyone with the breadth and depth of knowledge on nutrition that Robyn has. Even more unusual is her ability to to also deal with the emotional and psychological side of it. There are so many people in my life who know that they need to eat better and want to be healthier, but struggle to make different food choices. I wish they would all talk to Robyn because she knows how to connect people with the motivation to make difficult and rewarding changes to their lives.

Tanya Sydney