Back in 2006 I was:
- 35 years old
- 285 pounds and growing
- Diagnosed with hypothyroidism, fatty liver disease, high cholesterol, depression
- I was a non-compliant patient and did not take my thyroid medication or my high cholesterol medication.
- Easily winded walking up a set of stairs
- Drinking 2 liters of Diet Mountain Dew a day to keep me caffeinated so I could function.
- Eating from the three food groups: Meat, dairy, highly processed packaged foods.
I rarely at salads but when I did, I buried them in cheese and dressing with a few token vegetables on a bed of lettuce. I’d eat a baked potato filled with butter and sour cream, corn on the cob slathered in salt and butter, french fries and onion rings. That was as minimally processed as the food I ate got and the extent of the vegetables that I would eat.
One night laying on the couch with insomnia watching TV, it happened. A Montel Williams infomercial for some blender was on. They were promoting the blender to make smoothies and all the associated health benefits came on. I watched it rather than flipping the channel. It make me reflect on my health and the health of those around me. It occurred to me that I might be well on my way to a heart attack, with 5 preteen or young teenage kids to still finish raising. Even if I survived through that, my prospects for an active and enjoyable life in retirement were pretty dim in my view. Looking at my parents worsening health issues and lack of activity options due to health issues, I decided that is not what I wanted. I needed to change. That very night, I decided I had to change my eating habits if I wanted to enjoy my golden years and I needed to change immediately. Thus began the research.
That infomercial sold me on the merits of using a blender to blend greens and vegetables with fruit to make them palatable. So I started searching reviews on that blender. From there I spent days reading, watching youtube (which before that I had never really watched), and generally learning. I learned about high power blenders such as the vitamix, green smoothies, and finally the raw vegan diet and living foods diet (basically a raw vegan food diet with an emphasis on including cultured plant foods). Of course there were a number of other diet variations I could have investigated, but these were the ones that caught my eye as being the ultimate/best possible diet and if I was going to make a change and learn to like new foods, I may as well focus on adopting the ultimate/best possible diet. So I chose a mix of raw vegan and living foods diet to follow.
Knowing myself the way I do, I knew I had to go all the way or not bother. I couldn’t make a slow transition and expect to complete the transition. It is just how I operate. I also knew I seriously disliked the taste of nearly every vegetable and green and my exposure to various fruits and berries was fairly limited so this was going to be an uphill battle for me. I would have to start with smoothies as there was no way I was going to eat most veggies and greens in there natural state. I wanted to blend them with fruit that I liked to get them down. Before I made the transition, I would have to take a couple of weeks to buy a vitamix blender off ebay, find a hand full of green smoothie recipes on the internet and give them a try to build up a starting menu of things I could/would eat. After a couple weeks and a few pitchers of smoothies being dumped in the yard for the critters to eat as I wasn’t going to, I was finally ready to make the change. I picked a day, did the shopping to make sure I had everything I needed to make the smoothie recipes I had selected to start with, and so began my journey to regain my health.
Seeking Simplicity 