In her junior year in high school, an overly serious and overly sensitive 15-year-old girl read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. And that’s when she stopped eating meat.

At first, it was all meat. During Thanksgiving dinner, she ate some of her mother’s stuffing not realizing it had sausage in it and was sick for the rest of the weekend. Not just “Oh, I’m so grossed out!” sick. Sick like you spend most of your time in the bathroom.

The young girl came to see that she didn’t miss meat. Eventually, she started eating chicken again, and this made things even easier. It’s pretty easy to avoid eating McDonald’s hamburgers if you can eat McNuggets. And though she now knows that McNuggets are quite possibly even more disgusting than hamburgers, the chicken didn’t make her gag.

Sure, there were times she missed bacon. And she regretted how difficult she sometimes was as a dinner guest, particularly if friends were barbequing. But then she’d see a hunk of raw steak or ground hamburger or a piece of ham and remember why she chose the eating habits she had.

And so she went along in life, a non-red-meat eater. Subsisting on chicken and turkey and fish, she refuted her previous carnivorous lifestyle and vowed to never again eat cows or pigs or, God help her, deer.

One day, at 30, the girl found herself engaged to a boy who had a sensitive tummy. He’d tried everything, been to every doctor to figure out what was causing it. During a conversation with a co-worker, the girl learned that said co-worker was attempting to quell her own indigestion issues with something called the Blood Type Diet. Not only did the co-worker find that the diet was easing her indigestion, but she was losing weight and feeling good all around. Yes, she had to read labels more carefully, and following the diet was tricky at times, but her improved health made it all worth it.

The girl wondered if such a thing could help her beloved. She wondered if this diet might help her lose weight as well. So she bought the book and an at-home blood typing-test and set about creating new eating habits.

After taking the blood-typing test, the girl was shocked to learn that she was type O, just like her boyfriend. This was convenient, she thought, since they could follow the same diet.

Then she started reading the book. Type Os were supposed to be meat eaters. The foods that are most beneficial to the girl and her boy were beef and mutton and, God help her, heart and liver. The girl and the boy, who was himself a ten-year vegetarian, decried the book and doubted aloud if they’d be able to actually follow such a plan.

Ultimately, they agreed that giving it a try wouldn’t hurt. And if it improved the boy’s gastrointestinal functions and made the girl lose weight, it couldn’t be that bad. They’d try it for a week and see.

So they set out for the grocery store buying things that were on the plan and avoiding like the plague the things that weren’t. Things like wheat and cinnamon and, God help her, vinegar were now outlawed. $150 and two groceries stores later, they were ready to embark on their carnivorous lifestyle.

Their first meal consisted of turkey and roast beef sandwiches (on spelt bread, mind you). Yes, you read it correctly. Roast BEEF. After fifteen years, the girl ate red meat. And she didn’t even puke it up.

Maybe she could do this, she thought. Maybe if she eased her way into it, she’d be eating brisket and veal by her wedding. And maybe, she’d be all healthy and skinny again.

God help me.

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