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It’s Not Veganism, It’s Your Eating Disorder

If you write clickbait on why veganism was wrong for you, you probably never cared much about the cause.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
4 min readMay 17, 2021
Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

I just read a story here on Medium with the ultimate clickbait title about why a person had quit veganism. It’s not even worth linking this story here, but it got me thinking.

The person started with a strong, eye-grabbing headline about veganism being the wrong choice for them. They then went on to explain why, telling a story about extreme food restriction, labeling foods good and bad, and anxiety about their diet.

When I got to the end, I realized the moral of the story wasn’t how veganism was bad for this person. It was that they had an eating disorder that an extremely restrictive diet had exacerbated. They may have been eating raw foods and pound after pound of fruit every day, but they never fixed an obsessive diet pattern.

Eating disorders are a serious and deadly mental illness that deserves all the attention and support in the world. But I think these types of misleading headlines on stories about veganism (or any good cause, really) aren’t just hacky, lazy writing.

It also shows you never cared about the cause and were only in it for yourself.

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Taru Anniina Liikanen
Taru Anniina Liikanen

Written by Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.

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