My 1st year
On Friday, July 28, 2017 I was home alone, with my two sons away at USF and my wife and daughter visiting family up in New York. I had just finished the series finale of Sons of Anarchy on Netflix and I sat back and thought to myself, there has to be something on here where I can learn something! So I started to scroll through the categories and came across documentaries, and stumbled upon the movie, What The Health. When it was over I said, out loud in an empty house, “It’s the food thats killing me.” It was a life changing moment that I will never forget! I immediately started to think to myself if it was possible for me to give up eating any food that came from an animal. I came to the conclusion that yes, I could do it, but it would have to wait til Monday because, well, I had food that I had to eat first before making such a drastic change. I mean, I had those salmon patties in the freezer that if I didn’t eat nobody in my house would, and they would be wasted. After deciding that adopting a vegan diet would definitely be something that I could do for at least 30 days, I decided to start on Monday.
After watching What The Health I watched just about all the food documentaries that Netflix has and when my wife and daughter came home I told them about my idea. They profiled this lady on What The Health that was basically knocking on deaths door and after just two weeks on a vegan diet she was walking without her walker and off all her medications. I thought to myself, if she feels this great then maybe adopting a vegan diet will do the same for me? I was not in a great place with my health and I am sure that if I didn’t make this change that I was gonna have a major medical event within the next 5-10 years. I am 5’ 8” with my shoes on and I was 250 pounds. I was having chest pains, shortness of breath, headaches, and like an idiot I was on no medications for any of it. I hadn’t even seen a doctor in years. My blood pressure was 158/98 and I was not feeling well at all. When I would make a fist with my left hand it felt really tight. I had this thing about taking medications and did not want to be on them. I did not want to go down the road that so many people go down as they age, taking more and more medications and feeling worse not better. I was truly at a crossroad in my life!
I had decided to take a 30 day challenge and eat a vegan diet and test the claims made on What The Health. I didn’t wait til Monday to start, I finished those salmon patties by Saturday night and started being vegan on Sunday, July 30, 2017. In the beginning I was still learning about different foods so even though it was vegan it didn’t mean it was healthy, although it was so much healthier than what I was eating. I was on a high fat vegan diet for probably most of the first year. I was eating chips and salsa, chips and guacamole, Wise unsalted and Lays reduced salt potato chips. I was also eating a lot of raw fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds too. I never had an avocado before and was eating a lot of them now. Except for the raw fruits and vegetables everything else was high in fat, even the avocado. Every time I added a new food to my diet I would look up its nutritional value on the internet. I also stopped drinking soda, and started to drink my coffee black with no sugar. Water, almond milk, tea, and the occasional beer or wine is what I drink. I remember my focus in the beginning was to eat no refined sugar or sugar substitutes, limit my salt intake and to concentrate on getting my protein and fiber. I liked lentils, so lentil soup became a go to meal for me, minus the sausage or the hot dogs or ham that some people add to their lentil soup. After the first two weeks I felt great, it was amazing, the headaches were gone my blood pressure had dropped and I was starting to lose weight. The chest pains were still there but they became less and less over time and are now gone. When the 30 day challenge was up I felt so good that I stayed on the vegan diet.
It was the beginning of September and I had a trip planned in November with my friends to go to Austin, Texas. My new goal was to continue with the vegan diet and when I arrived in Austin I would enjoy some great barbecue with my friends. I continued to discover new foods. Instead of just eating brown rice, and pasta, I added quinoa and barley to the mix. I was eating a lot of celery and hummus. I started to make black bean burgers and even roasted some chick peas for a snack. I was still eating a lot of salad with olive oil and red wine vinegar as my dressing. I also added fruits like watermelon, oranges, apples, avocado, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, grapes, cantaloupe, and honeydew to my diet. I started to make a vegetable stir fry dish with brown rice or quinoa. I would add onions, garlic, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, celery, mushrooms, spinach, and later on I would discover bok choy. In one of the documentaries they mentioned that when you change to a vegan diet your taste buds will change and I have definitely found this to be true. I was never a big vegetable eater and never really liked cantaloupe, but I love it now. I started to buy a lot of spices when the different recipes that I made would call for them, including paprika, smoked paprika, red pepper powder, chili powder, cayenne pepper, ground mustard, ginger, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, garlic powder, onion powder, and I always used a lot of black pepper. I was feeling great and the closer I was getting to my trip to Austin Texas the more I knew eating barbecue was not going happen. The trip to Austin was great, I stayed vegan and my weight was down from 250 pounds to about 215. Feeling healthy and realizing that this vegan thing could last because I was losing weight and not really dieting. I am a big eater, hello, you don’t get to be 250 pounds if your not, so finding a way to be able to eat when I wanted to and still be healthy was great. Thanksgiving came, and I stayed vegan, which I thought was going to be hard but it wasn’t.
On December 1, 2017 my family attended my nieces wedding on Long Island and we had a great time. She was the first of my nieces and nephews to get married and at her wedding reception I had what I call, a violation. I ate a small piece of chilean sea bass for dinner. Seafood is my weakness, out of all the animal meats it has always been my favorite. She just celebrated her 1 year anniversary and that has been the only meat violation. The only other violations are when we eat at Mexican restaurants because they cook their rice in chicken broth and I’m sure other ethnic restaurants do the same. I do not eat out as much as I use to and when I do I try my best to make it vegan. With the vegan diet gaining in popularity more and more restaurants are offering vegan options on their menus and my hope is that this trend will continue.
In March of 2018 I had my first doctors visit in years. I saw the same doctor that had seen me years earlier and she was happy that I finally turned things around. The last time I saw her she put me on blood pressure medication that I took for awhile then stopped because I had this persistent cough that I later found out was a side effect of the medication. The good news is that my numbers were good and even though I was still technically obese at about 205 pounds, she told me there was no need for me to be on any prescription drugs. The only negative from my blood work was my LDL which was at 123. They want that number to be at 100 or less. I attribute the elevated number to FAKE NEWS! There is more fake news in the world of food than there is in politics, and that is a major problem and one of the goals of this blog is to try to expose the lies and help people make better choices so they can live healthier and longer lives. Leading up to my doctors appointment I was using coconut oil and coconut milk and I attribute that to the higher LDL number. Coconut has a higher saturated fat content than butter and I believe that contributed to my slightly elevated LDL number.
The last four months of my first year of being vegan continued with different recipes and spices being added to the mix of foods that I would eat. I will post these recipes and write on the health benefits of the different foods and spices that I continue to discover as I go down this new path in my life. I will also include restaurant reviews, book reviews, and vegan news and events. By July 30, 2018, the one year anniversary of my switch from the SAD diet (standard American diet) to a vegan diet I had lost 57 pounds and was 193 pounds, which is still considered to be obese at my height. The good news is that I felt, and still feel great. I feel lighter and cleaner and I achieved this not by dieting but by just changing my diet. I still eat when ever I want to, I just eat healthy. I use a FitBit watch and walk a lot for exercise and I bought an elliptical that I do not use like I should.
The goal of this blog is to raise awareness and interest in a vegan lifestyle, to help save lives and improve the quality of life as we age. I believe that humans are not suppose to get sicker and sicker as we age and be on prescription drugs that all have side effects and just mask the warning signs but do not cure the diseases. If cholesterol medicine truly helped prevent heart disease then how is heart disease still the number one killer. We should be able to age with a high quality of life and with a life expectancy of over 100 years old. By eliminating the three things that I believe promote disease in humans, animal protein, heme iron, and cholesterol, we could virtually be free of our biggest killers, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. Animal foods also have antibiotics, steroids, and pesticides with many animals eating food that is roundup ready. If you adopt the mindset to never say I can’t and to always say how can I, you can feel better and live longer by just changing what you eat. I am not a dietician or an expert in health and wellness, I am just a blue collar guy who was killing himself with food and just wanted to feel better. We work too hard our whole lives so we can retire and its so sad that many people do not get to enjoy their golden years. There is a health crisis in the world with almost 70 percent of the people that are either obese or overweight. I hope you will join me on my journey into the world of a plant based, whole food, vegan diet, and my quest to be, totally vegan.