The Healthy Vegan Lifestyle

Growing up, I was never a big fan of eating meat. And if I did eat meat, it had to be something very bland like a piece of chicken or hamburger.  It was a combination of two reasons. First of all, I found meat simply gross. I probably think a little too much about where it comes from. Secondly, I could never quite get past the fact that an animal took a bullet to the head or was chopped up with a blade just so I could have a sandwich. Most people seem to think a piece of meat comes from a grocery store. They don’t consider what happened in the days before the meat showed up.

Sometime in or around the year 2002, I was having dinner with a friend in San Diego. I ordered a hamburger. I took a bite and bit into a piece of bone. At that exact moment, I decided I’d never wanted to eat meat again. But I didn’t exactly become a vegetarian in a strict sense of the word. I think the actual term would have been a non-meat eater. In other words, I ate the standard American diet, just without any meat. I pretty much avoided any and all fruits and vegetables. It complicated things, but I could still go through any fast food drive-through and get a veggie burger with fries and a Diet Coke. I had to make sure I got the Diet Coke because I certainly didn’t want the extra calories.

I had always been a very skinny child and teenager. When I graduated high school, I weighed about 120 pounds. When I graduated college, I weighed about 130 pounds. I was probably about 5’10″ at the time. For about two years after college, my weight was around 130. I had moved out of home and started to eat whatever I wanted. It wasn’t uncommon for me to eat pizza for every meal. And I don’t mean just one slice, I mean an entire large pizza. At first I could get away with it, as I was so thin. But then it caught up to me. In about one year, I probably went from about 130 to 180.

I joined a health club around age 24. I worked out several times a week but never seemed to be able to get rid of the extra weight. My weight continued upwards. Every week I was on a new diet. Lean cuisine. The Atkins diet. Weight Watchers online. Calorie counting. Starvation diets. Book after book.

The only way to clear my emotional stress was to eat. I knew that if I ate an entire frozen pizza, I would get a high that would snap me out of it for a few hours. And quite frankly, a few hours of relief was worth it. So I was depressed because I was fat. And the cure was to eat more. You can see how this traps a person into a cycle they can never hope to escape.

Shortly after I moved to Arizona in 2008, I accidentally stumbled across a website about raw veganism. I can’t even remember whose website it was. I tried it for a few days, but I was so used to eating pizza and junk food that I couldn’t get past the taste and texture. So I stopped.

I continued on my trek as a non-meat eater. One day, I was sitting in the living room watching CNN on TV. It was a short clip but one that really stood out in my mind. A 93-year-old Asian woman was climbing a tree. She was completely healthy and still worked a job. They were interviewing and translating a conversation with this woman. She made this statement “I have never been sick a day in my life.” This is quite a statement to make. To be 93 years old and never having been sick before. Out of curiosity, I wanted to know how that was possible. Most 60-year-old Americans seemed to have trouble barely walking, let alone climbing trees. And in most cases, the average 60-year-old American is a laundry list of health problems.

I started researching the Asian diet. I thought it might have something to do with the fact they eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables from their own gardens. By complete accident, a book popped up as a recommendation from Amazon.com. This book was called The China Study. I rarely see a book with so many positive glowing recommendations. So I decided to order it.

The book arrived and it sat on a shelf for a week or two. I started skimming through the book and became completely enthralled. I literally read the book page by page devouring every sentence. It wasn’t a fast read either. I usually read no more than 3-4 pages in one day. There was so much powerful information, that I had to read and memorize at the same time. It was information I simply did not want to forget. Everything in the book absolutely convinced me that eating any animal products including meat or dairy is the primary cause for most American health issues. Within a week, I was so disturbed by the studies and data that I threw out anything containing dairy. At that moment, I never consumed dairy again.

Around the same time I decided to head over to my local used bookstore. I had seen the movie clip called Raw in 30 Days last year, and wanted more information about becoming a raw vegan. I found a used book about Raw veganism by David Wolfe. I also read this book  very slowly and deliberately, page by page. The combination of The China Study and this book firmed up my raw vegan lifestyle.

This blog is about all of my observations on being a vegan. Going raw did not happen overnight for me. However, at this point I am almost exclusively on a raw vegan diet. This change in lifestyle has changed everything about me. I invite you to link back to my blog and check back regularly for updates. Most of my reasons for becoming a raw vegan are due to scientific data on health and disease. There is far, far too much to say about this lifestyle change in one story.

Everything you know about food is wrong. Society is wrong. Humanity is diseased and dying because of it.