My Story Part II
So, when I was responsible for the presentations, I found out a few things. When you consume animal products, first of all, it contains cholesterol. They're highly saturated. It's usually a solid at body temperature. And it creates chemicals in your body called arachidonic acid, and those chemicals bring ride to or they are the precursors to inflammation in the body that comes about through prostaglandin too.
I also found out that when you eat plant-based products, plant oils have no cholesterol. They're poly and mono unsaturated. They're liquid at body temperature. And they create another chemical called linoleic acid, and they help to decrease inflammation throughout the body through prostaglandin 1 and 3. So, that was very revealing, and I looked at the list of health conditions that were associated with inflammation, and most of them I didn't have. I only have one. I had a condition called dysmenorrhea, and it is when you have unbearable cramps, to the point where you wish you weren't list, that you wish you didn't have female organs and you wish each month that you could die and never have to experience the pain again.
I used to consume 600mg to 800mg of Motrin, ibuprofen with breakfast, 600mg to 800mg with lunch, 600mg to 800mg with dinner, and many times, the same right before going to bed so that I could halfway sleep through the night. And this was all while taking birth control, which was supposed to help with making that pain more bearable and diminishing the symptoms, but nothing really worked very well for me. It helped me to get out of bed or not toss and turn like I had the exorcist, but aside from that, I could barely function. It just did enough for me to make it to a classroom, sit, almost comatose, and barely take notes. But what was very disturbing for me was that when I was in school, graduate school, I had a hard time getting to clinic or going to clinic or being able to function at that capacity, going in and out of exam rooms and seeing patients and running throughout the building to find my doctor, who was supervising the case with me.
It was unbearable, so I was missing lots of clinic and I was concerned that people would think that I was making excuses, but I really couldn't function, like that's how debilitating it was. And no matter what I tried to find, it didn't seem to work. And for someone who has never had that problem, it might be hard for you to really fathom or imagine how debilitating it was, but it was that debilitating. It was so debilitating that when I found this information and really had a chance to sit down and think about it, I thought to myself I don't have any of the other concerns that were listed in terms of they talked about there's an inflammatory component to heart disease. There's an inflammatory component to high blood pressure. There's an inflammatory component to diabetes. There's an inflammatory component to asthma. There's an inflammatory component to allergies. There's an inflammatory component to lupus. There's an inflammatory component to arthritis. There's an inflammatory component to acne and acne rosacea.
There's an inflammatory component to almost anything you can think of. They mentioned also PMS symptoms and bloating symptoms, and all of that. There was an inflammatory component to it. And they mentioned a number of other things, but the only one on that list was dysmenorrhea, and that's what affected me. And I thought about it and I said, "Wow, do you mean to tell me that if I just don't consume any animal products," that this curse that I feel has plagued my life; I thought it was hereditary. It was something I inherited from my mother because she used to have really bad cramps before she had children, and she talked about how she, many times, would go to work and she became so sick that they would sent her home because she couldn't function. And one time she had to ask the man to pull the car over and she opened the car door and threw up, and everyone thought she was pregnant, but she wasn't, and it was because of a really, really bad cramps. That's how it affected her and it had affected me as well, and I thought, you know, I've just got some bad genes and this is why I experience this pain and other women don't in general.
But as I went through the information, it was talking about how, when you eliminate this, you know, when you eliminate eating these foods, the chemicals cannot be produced. It's real. It's just straight science. It's straight chemistry, and I had taken chemistry and I had taken biochemistry in undergrad, and so I remember that pathway. I remember the prostaglandins and how they led to pain and inflammation. And I said, "But they never said where the prostaglandins came from. No one ever said where it came from. They were just there. And you're telling me that if I eliminate all animal products, that my body just can't produce the prostaglandins that create pain and inflammation?" And this doctor was like: "Yes. When I helped my patients to change their diet, it took them a few months, but they would come back and say hey doc, my arthritis is better. Hey Doc, you know, my allergies are greatly improved." And he says, "After a while, I would have to wean them off of their medication."
And I thought about it and I said, "Wow, I would give anything to get rid of that one problem." And it was at that time that I said, "You know what. I don't have anything to lose. I'm going to experiment on myself. I am going to try this diet for a few months and see what happens. If nothing changes and it doesn't work, I'll just go back to what I've always done, which is eat meat. And if it does work, wow, that would truly be amazing and liberating." So, I eliminated all animal products. No dairy. No cheese. No milk. Nothing. No flesh foods. And two to three months in, I took myself off of the birth control because it was acting crazy anyway, and so I was coming up on my first experience without birth control and to see how was I going to respond in my cycle.
I must say that it was the first time in my life from when I developed my cycle that I had absolutely no pain. None. None. I have to repeat it again. No pain. And I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. I was amazing. Not only did I not experience any pain. I was fully functional, meaning I had the energy and the stamina that I would have when I was not on my cycle, which had never happened in my entire life up until that point. I was so euphoric that I was like you can't pay me to eat. You can't pay me to eat the way I did previously after that revelation and that personal experience.
I was so excited that I was like hey, you know, this thing worked. Like I was so skeptical, but it actually worked. And I was just grateful that I had come across the information. But not only did I come across the information. I started to share it with my family and friends, my close family and friends. So, my mom was the first person I told, and I was like: "Mom, you know, if you make changes with your diet, it's going to do this and that for you," and I was just so excited to share this stuff with her. Sent her information. Books. I shared it with my brother. I shared it with my husband. And of course, you know, people just were like oh, hurray for you, but you know, not interested.
So, I kept on, but I don't know what I did, but a few months in, I probably got a little slack and maybe a little negligent, and one month out of the blue - it might have been three or four months in - I was at work and because I had been doing so well for a few months, I was totally unprepared for what happened, which was my body totally shut down and the pain came on me like immediate. And it was so intense and so overwhelming that I actually had to leave work. Nobody knows what happened to me other than myself. They thought I had come down with a sudden stomach virus or something, but all I knew is I had to get out of there, because there was no way I could finish the day.
I was kind of embarrassed and I had to try to figure out, well, what did I eat that I wasn't aware of that had food in it that obviously was animal products. So, at that point, I made it a point that I would ask and I wouldn't eat unless I asked whoever made the food and made sure that there was no milk or eggs or cheese or anything in there that would bring this situation back to me. So, that's a little bit of my story, but my story gets even better because I just continued to do what worked for me and, surprisingly, two or three years later, in 2005, my husband made an announcement for New Years.
He said I think that I am going to try being vegan. I was surprised because I never tried to persuade or coax him to make those changes. I was just doing it because it worked for me. And he said, "I really want to try it because I notice you don't get sick anymore." I said, "Wow." He said, "I'm thinking that if I make the change, then maybe I won't have my severe allergies anymore." Wow, I was definitely surprised, and it speaks to the power of just living your life and for others to see the effects of what you've done.
And so, my husband was allergic to pretty much everything as a child. He had to go to an allergist, and I believe it was once a week he got shots in each arm to help him overcome his severe allergies. He had shots from about the age of four, up until about 16 every week, and so he had severe allergies and was basically miserable during the month of May, and this was here in Philadelphia. Well, my husband made those changes and, to his surprise, that summer was the best summer he had ever had in terms of reduction of symptoms and itchy eyes and sneezing, and he actually didn't get a sinus infection, which was pretty much an expected course for him.
Each year that he maintained his diet, he noticed significant reduction in his symptoms, so much so that by the time we moved to Memphis, Tennessee. in 2007, and he experienced his first spring in the south in 2008, he was fully prepared and he really didn't have a problem. He was able to pretty much breeze through the spring, and he made sure that he was very strict at the beginning of each year because he knew spring came early in the south and that he didn't want to have any problems.
So, that is, in a nutshell, some of my story, and I must say that it has been a fabulous journey. It has been eye opening. It's been liberating. It's been tremendous. Another turning point that I want to interject was while I was really deliberating and praying, trying to figure out if I was going to really make this transition when I was sitting on the information, I did have a patient that came to my office when I used to work in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I don't recall her name, but she came in and when I looked on the chart, the chart said that she was 49 years old.
When I looked at her, she didn't look 49 at all. And she was a Caucasian woman and she looked way younger than the chart, so I initially thought there was a mistake on the chart. I verified her age. She confirmed that was her age, and I remember thinking wow, you know, she looks so much younger than women in her age group, but she even looks substantially younger than black women or African American women in her age group, which is not typical. So, I tried to discreetly find out what she was doing differently in terms of her lifestyle or her habits that was making such obvious change. And initially, she didn't know what I was alluding to because she was pretty much clueless.
I was trying to be discreet, but I had to just come out and ask her what are you doing. What are you doing differently from everyone else, because you look so much younger than everybody else in your age group, like even younger than many African American women? She didn't have any crow's feet. She didn't have really any wrinkles, and she really looked vibrant and pretty healthy. She proceeded to tell me that she didn't do anything special She didn't go to an esthetician or get facials every other week or once per month. She didn't go to the gym necessarily or was an exercise freak. Nothing like that. And I kept probing, kept probing. I'm like she has to be doing something different because this is very noticeable and eventually, she said, "Well I am a vegetarian."
And I probed, "Well, what kind," and she said, "Vegan." And at that point, I said, "Why?" And she told me the story of her daughter, who was having ear infections. She said, "I had a baby that was having ear infections and she had so many ear infections as an infant that the doctors were about to put tubes in my baby's ears. My friend gave me a book and, in the book, it talked about what I was feeding my baby, and my friend told me that if you change what you're feeding your baby, your baby will not have ear infections again." She said, "Out of desperation," she said, "I read the book from cover to cover and I changed my baby's diet because nothing seemed to be working."
And she said, "Two to three months later, my baby never had another ear infection," and she said, "I was so impressed with the results," and ultimately her child did not have to get tubes in her ears. And she said, "I was so impressed that I changed my diet and the rest of my family because of what had happened to my baby." And I looked at her and I said, "Well, when did that happen?" And she thought about it and she said, "Well," and she called her daughter's name and she said, "Oh, she is 20 years old." And I said, "Do you mean to tell me that you've been vegan for 20 years?" And she said, "Wow, I guess I have been, yes." She said that she was like 98 percent, which meant that sometimes, if she goes some place and someone offers her something and they tried their best to accommodate her, she said she tries not to be fanatical, but she said 95 to 98 percent she was vegan. And whatever animal product she consumed was very minimal at best.
And so, at that point, I felt as if I had confirmation because I had been thinking and praying and trying to figure out if I should take that leap or that leap of faith, as you would say, and when I saw her, I knew that that was really the only difference, because she was still breathing the same polluted air I was breathing, probably drinking the same water, and was living in the same country world and experiencing the same stresses that we all pretty much go through. So, the one significant factor that was different from her compared to the rest of the population was how she was eating, and I actually was able to see the results, which was a 20-year difference. And so, that really nailed it for me and I said to myself, "Wow, you know, that's better than any expensive L'Oreal or special cream, that it really can make a difference."
So, I hope that by me sharing my story that you will realize that you will not be deprived of great tasting food, that you will experience such mental clarity, extra energy, vitality, and you will grow older gracefully and with energy and enthusiasm. And if you want to live your best life, please take a moment and really consider the recipes and additional information I will be sharing in the following chapters. Take care and hey, let's start on this tremendous journey of health and wealth. Remember your health is truly your greatest wealth.
So, when I was responsible for the presentations, I found out a few things. When you consume animal products, first of all, it contains cholesterol. They're highly saturated. It's usually a solid at body temperature. And it creates chemicals in your body called arachidonic acid, and those chemicals bring ride to or they are the precursors to inflammation in the body that comes about through prostaglandin too.
I also found out that when you eat plant-based products, plant oils have no cholesterol. They're poly and mono unsaturated. They're liquid at body temperature. And they create another chemical called linoleic acid, and they help to decrease inflammation throughout the body through prostaglandin 1 and 3. So, that was very revealing, and I looked at the list of health conditions that were associated with inflammation, and most of them I didn't have. I only have one. I had a condition called dysmenorrhea, and it is when you have unbearable cramps, to the point where you wish you weren't list, that you wish you didn't have female organs and you wish each month that you could die and never have to experience the pain again.
I used to consume 600mg to 800mg of Motrin, ibuprofen with breakfast, 600mg to 800mg with lunch, 600mg to 800mg with dinner, and many times, the same right before going to bed so that I could halfway sleep through the night. And this was all while taking birth control, which was supposed to help with making that pain more bearable and diminishing the symptoms, but nothing really worked very well for me. It helped me to get out of bed or not toss and turn like I had the exorcist, but aside from that, I could barely function. It just did enough for me to make it to a classroom, sit, almost comatose, and barely take notes. But what was very disturbing for me was that when I was in school, graduate school, I had a hard time getting to clinic or going to clinic or being able to function at that capacity, going in and out of exam rooms and seeing patients and running throughout the building to find my doctor, who was supervising the case with me.
It was unbearable, so I was missing lots of clinic and I was concerned that people would think that I was making excuses, but I really couldn't function, like that's how debilitating it was. And no matter what I tried to find, it didn't seem to work. And for someone who has never had that problem, it might be hard for you to really fathom or imagine how debilitating it was, but it was that debilitating. It was so debilitating that when I found this information and really had a chance to sit down and think about it, I thought to myself I don't have any of the other concerns that were listed in terms of they talked about there's an inflammatory component to heart disease. There's an inflammatory component to high blood pressure. There's an inflammatory component to diabetes. There's an inflammatory component to asthma. There's an inflammatory component to allergies. There's an inflammatory component to lupus. There's an inflammatory component to arthritis. There's an inflammatory component to acne and acne rosacea.
There's an inflammatory component to almost anything you can think of. They mentioned also PMS symptoms and bloating symptoms, and all of that. There was an inflammatory component to it. And they mentioned a number of other things, but the only one on that list was dysmenorrhea, and that's what affected me. And I thought about it and I said, "Wow, do you mean to tell me that if I just don't consume any animal products," that this curse that I feel has plagued my life; I thought it was hereditary. It was something I inherited from my mother because she used to have really bad cramps before she had children, and she talked about how she, many times, would go to work and she became so sick that they would sent her home because she couldn't function. And one time she had to ask the man to pull the car over and she opened the car door and threw up, and everyone thought she was pregnant, but she wasn't, and it was because of a really, really bad cramps. That's how it affected her and it had affected me as well, and I thought, you know, I've just got some bad genes and this is why I experience this pain and other women don't in general.
But as I went through the information, it was talking about how, when you eliminate this, you know, when you eliminate eating these foods, the chemicals cannot be produced. It's real. It's just straight science. It's straight chemistry, and I had taken chemistry and I had taken biochemistry in undergrad, and so I remember that pathway. I remember the prostaglandins and how they led to pain and inflammation. And I said, "But they never said where the prostaglandins came from. No one ever said where it came from. They were just there. And you're telling me that if I eliminate all animal products, that my body just can't produce the prostaglandins that create pain and inflammation?" And this doctor was like: "Yes. When I helped my patients to change their diet, it took them a few months, but they would come back and say hey doc, my arthritis is better. Hey Doc, you know, my allergies are greatly improved." And he says, "After a while, I would have to wean them off of their medication."
And I thought about it and I said, "Wow, I would give anything to get rid of that one problem." And it was at that time that I said, "You know what. I don't have anything to lose. I'm going to experiment on myself. I am going to try this diet for a few months and see what happens. If nothing changes and it doesn't work, I'll just go back to what I've always done, which is eat meat. And if it does work, wow, that would truly be amazing and liberating." So, I eliminated all animal products. No dairy. No cheese. No milk. Nothing. No flesh foods. And two to three months in, I took myself off of the birth control because it was acting crazy anyway, and so I was coming up on my first experience without birth control and to see how was I going to respond in my cycle.
I must say that it was the first time in my life from when I developed my cycle that I had absolutely no pain. None. None. I have to repeat it again. No pain. And I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. I was amazing. Not only did I not experience any pain. I was fully functional, meaning I had the energy and the stamina that I would have when I was not on my cycle, which had never happened in my entire life up until that point. I was so euphoric that I was like you can't pay me to eat. You can't pay me to eat the way I did previously after that revelation and that personal experience.
I was so excited that I was like hey, you know, this thing worked. Like I was so skeptical, but it actually worked. And I was just grateful that I had come across the information. But not only did I come across the information. I started to share it with my family and friends, my close family and friends. So, my mom was the first person I told, and I was like: "Mom, you know, if you make changes with your diet, it's going to do this and that for you," and I was just so excited to share this stuff with her. Sent her information. Books. I shared it with my brother. I shared it with my husband. And of course, you know, people just were like oh, hurray for you, but you know, not interested.
So, I kept on, but I don't know what I did, but a few months in, I probably got a little slack and maybe a little negligent, and one month out of the blue - it might have been three or four months in - I was at work and because I had been doing so well for a few months, I was totally unprepared for what happened, which was my body totally shut down and the pain came on me like immediate. And it was so intense and so overwhelming that I actually had to leave work. Nobody knows what happened to me other than myself. They thought I had come down with a sudden stomach virus or something, but all I knew is I had to get out of there, because there was no way I could finish the day.
I was kind of embarrassed and I had to try to figure out, well, what did I eat that I wasn't aware of that had food in it that obviously was animal products. So, at that point, I made it a point that I would ask and I wouldn't eat unless I asked whoever made the food and made sure that there was no milk or eggs or cheese or anything in there that would bring this situation back to me. So, that's a little bit of my story, but my story gets even better because I just continued to do what worked for me and, surprisingly, two or three years later, in 2005, my husband made an announcement for New Years.
He said I think that I am going to try being vegan. I was surprised because I never tried to persuade or coax him to make those changes. I was just doing it because it worked for me. And he said, "I really want to try it because I notice you don't get sick anymore." I said, "Wow." He said, "I'm thinking that if I make the change, then maybe I won't have my severe allergies anymore." Wow, I was definitely surprised, and it speaks to the power of just living your life and for others to see the effects of what you've done.
And so, my husband was allergic to pretty much everything as a child. He had to go to an allergist, and I believe it was once a week he got shots in each arm to help him overcome his severe allergies. He had shots from about the age of four, up until about 16 every week, and so he had severe allergies and was basically miserable during the month of May, and this was here in Philadelphia. Well, my husband made those changes and, to his surprise, that summer was the best summer he had ever had in terms of reduction of symptoms and itchy eyes and sneezing, and he actually didn't get a sinus infection, which was pretty much an expected course for him.
Each year that he maintained his diet, he noticed significant reduction in his symptoms, so much so that by the time we moved to Memphis, Tennessee. in 2007, and he experienced his first spring in the south in 2008, he was fully prepared and he really didn't have a problem. He was able to pretty much breeze through the spring, and he made sure that he was very strict at the beginning of each year because he knew spring came early in the south and that he didn't want to have any problems.
So, that is, in a nutshell, some of my story, and I must say that it has been a fabulous journey. It has been eye opening. It's been liberating. It's been tremendous. Another turning point that I want to interject was while I was really deliberating and praying, trying to figure out if I was going to really make this transition when I was sitting on the information, I did have a patient that came to my office when I used to work in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I don't recall her name, but she came in and when I looked on the chart, the chart said that she was 49 years old.
When I looked at her, she didn't look 49 at all. And she was a Caucasian woman and she looked way younger than the chart, so I initially thought there was a mistake on the chart. I verified her age. She confirmed that was her age, and I remember thinking wow, you know, she looks so much younger than women in her age group, but she even looks substantially younger than black women or African American women in her age group, which is not typical. So, I tried to discreetly find out what she was doing differently in terms of her lifestyle or her habits that was making such obvious change. And initially, she didn't know what I was alluding to because she was pretty much clueless.
I was trying to be discreet, but I had to just come out and ask her what are you doing. What are you doing differently from everyone else, because you look so much younger than everybody else in your age group, like even younger than many African American women? She didn't have any crow's feet. She didn't have really any wrinkles, and she really looked vibrant and pretty healthy. She proceeded to tell me that she didn't do anything special She didn't go to an esthetician or get facials every other week or once per month. She didn't go to the gym necessarily or was an exercise freak. Nothing like that. And I kept probing, kept probing. I'm like she has to be doing something different because this is very noticeable and eventually, she said, "Well I am a vegetarian."
And I probed, "Well, what kind," and she said, "Vegan." And at that point, I said, "Why?" And she told me the story of her daughter, who was having ear infections. She said, "I had a baby that was having ear infections and she had so many ear infections as an infant that the doctors were about to put tubes in my baby's ears. My friend gave me a book and, in the book, it talked about what I was feeding my baby, and my friend told me that if you change what you're feeding your baby, your baby will not have ear infections again." She said, "Out of desperation," she said, "I read the book from cover to cover and I changed my baby's diet because nothing seemed to be working."
And she said, "Two to three months later, my baby never had another ear infection," and she said, "I was so impressed with the results," and ultimately her child did not have to get tubes in her ears. And she said, "I was so impressed that I changed my diet and the rest of my family because of what had happened to my baby." And I looked at her and I said, "Well, when did that happen?" And she thought about it and she said, "Well," and she called her daughter's name and she said, "Oh, she is 20 years old." And I said, "Do you mean to tell me that you've been vegan for 20 years?" And she said, "Wow, I guess I have been, yes." She said that she was like 98 percent, which meant that sometimes, if she goes some place and someone offers her something and they tried their best to accommodate her, she said she tries not to be fanatical, but she said 95 to 98 percent she was vegan. And whatever animal product she consumed was very minimal at best.
And so, at that point, I felt as if I had confirmation because I had been thinking and praying and trying to figure out if I should take that leap or that leap of faith, as you would say, and when I saw her, I knew that that was really the only difference, because she was still breathing the same polluted air I was breathing, probably drinking the same water, and was living in the same country world and experiencing the same stresses that we all pretty much go through. So, the one significant factor that was different from her compared to the rest of the population was how she was eating, and I actually was able to see the results, which was a 20-year difference. And so, that really nailed it for me and I said to myself, "Wow, you know, that's better than any expensive L'Oreal or special cream, that it really can make a difference."
So, I hope that by me sharing my story that you will realize that you will not be deprived of great tasting food, that you will experience such mental clarity, extra energy, vitality, and you will grow older gracefully and with energy and enthusiasm. And if you want to live your best life, please take a moment and really consider the recipes and additional information I will be sharing in the following chapters. Take care and hey, let's start on this tremendous journey of health and wealth. Remember your health is truly your greatest wealth.