The Hairdresser Who Ruined My Full English Forever
The Long Run Mindset - For a Life Worth Living #22
Catherine went to get her hair done.
That’s it. That’s how it started.
No book. No doctor. No damascene moment on a hillside. Just an ordinary Tuesday in a hairdresser’s chair somewhere in the north of England, where a woman asked my wife if she’d seen a documentary called Forks Over Knives.
Catherine came home intrigued.
We watched it that evening on the sofa.
We haven’t eaten meat since.
What the Documentary Said
Forks Over Knives makes a simple argument.
The majority of the degenerative diseases that kill people in the western world — heart disease, certain cancers, type 2 diabetes — are driven largely by the food we eat. Specifically by animal products and processed food. And largely reversible through a whole food plant based diet.
It’s not a comfortable watch if you’ve spent your whole life eating the way most people eat. It’s not designed to be.
We sat on the sofa and watched it in the way you watch something that is quietly rearranging your assumptions. Not arguing with it. Not fully agreeing with it. Just letting it land.
By the end neither of us said very much.
We didn’t need to.
The Steak I Didn’t Enjoy
About a month later I decided to test myself.
We went out for a meal and I ordered steak and chips. Proper steak. The kind I’d eaten hundreds of times before without thinking twice.
I didn’t enjoy it.
Not in a dramatic way — no sudden revulsion, no moment of clarity. I just sat there eating something I’d always liked and realised I didn’t like it anymore.
Your body craves what you feed it. I’d spent a month feeding it differently and somewhere along the way the craving had quietly moved on without telling me.
I pushed the plate away and didn’t order steak again.
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The Best Meal I’ve Ever Had
Before the documentary we’d booked a seven course tasting menu to celebrate our anniversary.
A proper restaurant. The kind with small portions and long pauses between courses and food that takes itself seriously. We’d been looking forward to it for months.
The problem was we’d booked it as meat eaters. And now we weren’t.
We rang ahead and asked if they could do a vegetarian version instead of the standard menu.
They could.
I want to tell you it was fine. A reasonable substitution, competently executed, slightly inferior to what we’d originally planned.
But that’s not what happened.
It was the best meal I have ever eaten. Seven courses, not one of them containing meat, each one more inventive and more satisfying than the last. Catherine and I sat across the table from each other and ate slowly and talked and looked at each other occasionally with the slightly stunned expression of people whose assumptions are being dismantled in real time.
I had believed — without really thinking about it, the way you believe things you’ve never questioned — that great food needed meat. That a celebration meal without it was a compromise. That you were always settling for second best.
That anniversary dinner ended that belief permanently.
You can make extraordinary food without meat. Not despite the constraint — because of it. The creativity lives in the limitation.
How It Actually Works in Our House
We went whole food plant based first. Cold turkey — if you’ll forgive the expression.
Then after a while we added fish and seafood back in. Not for health reasons. For practical ones. When you’re eating out with friends, or in a pub, or somewhere that hasn’t quite caught up with the plant based revolution, a prawn dish or a piece of fish on the menu is the difference between participating and sitting there nursing a side salad.
Pescatarian is where we landed. It makes life easier without compromising anything we care about.
Catherine does most of the cooking. Apparently I make too much mess — a charge I don’t entirely dispute. Which means she’s the one constantly learning new recipes, new techniques, new ways of making plants taste extraordinary.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you before you make a change like this.
We eat far better now than we ever did before. Not because plant based food is inherently superior. But because we had to learn to cook properly. Fresh ingredients. New techniques. Recipes we’d never have looked at when we were reaching for the same old staples or pulling something out of a packet.
The constraint forced the creativity. And the creativity turned out to be the best part.
We’ve also noticed something else. Most of the time when we eat out now it doesn’t match what we eat at home. Not because restaurants are bad — some are excellent. But because Catherine has become a genuinely brilliant cook, and the bar in our kitchen is higher than it used to be.
That’s not something either of us expected when we sat down to watch a documentary on a Tuesday evening.
She’s possibly more committed to it than I am now. Certainly more creative with it.
It started with a conversation at a hairdresser she can’t remember the name of, about a documentary she hadn’t heard of, on an ordinary Tuesday that turned out to matter enormously.
What Changed and What Didn’t
I still run every day. I still train for things that seem slightly unreasonable to most people. I still believe that the long game is the only game worth playing.
But the way I fuel that life looks nothing like it did ten years ago.
No meat. Mostly plants. Fish when it makes sense. Food that I actually think about rather than just consume.
And here’s the thing I couldn’t have told you before that anniversary dinner — before I sat across a table from my wife and ate seven courses that contained nothing I’d have previously considered celebration food:
Eating well is not a sacrifice.
It’s not the price you pay for being healthy. It’s not the joyless half-life of someone who’s given up the good stuff.
It’s just food. Thought about properly. Cooked with care.
The hairdresser whose name we never knew asked my wife a question about a documentary.
We’ve eaten differently every day since.
I don’t know if she has any idea.
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