Today marks my 7th anniversary as a vegan. Yes, I was plant based since 2012, but I ate minimal animal products like turkey or yogurt up until September of 2016.
I credit my vegan brother Robert Cheeke for helping me transition. The 13 week workout journal did the trick. After the 13 weeks, I never wanted to go back to animal products.
My dad and step mom have been visiting the past week. I went with them as they visited a number of family and friends. One thing I observed is I do not ever want to end up like so many in my family. This is why my healthy whole food plant based lifestyle is a priority.
First of all, my dad has giant cell arteritis. He is on steroids and a monthly injection. He gets tired easily and has to deal with chronic aches and pains.This is an inflammatory condition. My gut instinct is that he could feel a lot better if he were to adapt a plant based lifestyle, but he has no intention of changing.
As many of you might remember, I had a knee injury during the last couple years. I can say that it’s finally healed! It may never be perfect, but that doesn’t mean I can’t resume my normal activity, which I’ve already been doing for months.
I had chronic swelling on and off for a year. I had to wear a wrap on my knee to control the swelling. No matter what I did, if I took the wrap off my knee, it would swell. I wasn’t in pain... the only pain I really had was the day that started it all, when I had to go by ambulance to the ER a few years ago because of excruciating pain in the knee. It was the same day that I had completed a 5K race.
If you have high cholesterol, you really have no other options than to go whole food plant based. It’s really the only way to healthfully bring your cholesterol under control.
Recently, I had routine lab work done for a physical. As expected, my cholesterol was awesome! My doctor said it was optimal. According to Dr. Greger, you want a total cholesterol under 150. Most conventional doctors think anything under 200 is OK but I trust Dr. Greger, Dr. Ornish, Dr. Esselstyn and others who advise people to achieve the optimal level.
142/90. For some reason, that blood pressure reading stood out. There were others that were high around that time, over nine years ago, but this is the one that confirmed to my doctor that I was pre-hypertensive. I was a walking time bomb, also being most likely pre-diabetic. It was only a matter of time that I would have full blown hypertension and diabetes if I didn’t make some changes.
As many of you know, my doctor initially wanted me on blood pressure pills. I was fortunate to have a doctor that worked with me as I did not want to go on medication. He agreed to let me lose the weight and hope that the blood pressure would go down as the weight went down. It worked, as 6 months later, my blood pressure was normal and I never took a single pill.
