I turned 60 and started getting sick.
I had chronic reflux all the time and was living on Tums. I took that other pill until they pulled it off the shelves for being deadly. Then I just went with Tums at a dosage of a handful several times a day, as needed. More at night.
I had a peeling, flaking scalp.
I was snoring louder than my bulldog and sometimes would stop breathing in my sleep and wake up gasping.
My cholesterol was very high, but not quite bad enough to require a prescription.
My A1C was high enough to put me in the “pre-diabetes” category.
I had a condition where my heart would race for no reason, diagnosed as “primary supra-ventricular tachycardia” or PSVT. (Similar to A-fib, but less deadly.) I had to take meds for it. When it kicked in and wouldn’t let up, I would have to go to the ER where they would stop my heart for a couple of seconds, then let it reboot. They did this with drugs in an IV. I never lost consciousness, but man is that some kind of pain. I had this procedure 5 times.
My blood pressure was all over the place. High, low, up, down. I was on a daily prescription for that, but changing it often, because we couldn’t get it stabilized.
With each of these conditions, I saw a doctor, and nearly every single time, I asked, “What is causing this? What can I do to reverse it?”
Every time, I was told, “Well, you’re getting older. This is what happens.”
That was a blatant lie.
Fortunately, I knew better. I started my search for the true answers and I found them.
Now, all of the above listed conditions are 100% gone. I simply don’t have them any more. The prescriptions are also gone. I don’t take them anymore. 35 pounds have left my body, as well.
The weight and all the other conditions, were not conditions at all, but rather symptoms of a single core problem; malnutrition. I was putting too many toxic foods into my body, and too few healthy foods. Why would anyone do that? Because I didn’t know the difference. How could a person live 60 years and not know how to eat healthily? Because I’ve been lied to my entire life just like you have, about things like white meat and skim milk and protein and calcium and nutrition in general. Nobody is telling the truth about what a healthy diet really is. And why would they?
Just think if we prevented and cured our high blood pressure and diabetes and heart disease and cancers with food instead of prescriptions and operations. Who would go broke if we did this?
The meat industry
The dairy industry
The egg industry
The entire food industry that produces ultra-processed poisons
Big pharmaceutical companies, which need us to keep buying prescriptions
The industrial medical complex which needs us to keep getting stents, bypasses, and chemo.
The diet industry which needs us to never ever be able to maintain a healthy weight in an easy, natural way.
That’s a large part of the economy. Honestly they need us to stay sick, just to keep the whole thing going. But the good news is, the change will be gradual. Maybe it’ll be in time to save the planet and maybe it won’t. But it definitely won’t happen fast enough to collapse the economy. Climate change will do that.
So I set out to learn everything I could about this, beginning with my initial eye-opener the documentary Forks Over Knives.
As soon as I watched it, my husband and I changed our lives entirely. We stopped putting animal proteins into our bodies and immediately began to improve our health.
Then we discovered “vegan junk food,” and kind of forgot about some of the finer points of healthy eating as taught in the film. We ate Impossible Burgers and Beyond Nuggets and lots and lots of plant-based ice cream and goodies like that. And we started getting sick again. In fact, that was when my blood pressure went wild. So I watched the film again, and the second time, the whole message clicked into place a little better.
The answer, the solution, is not a plant-based diet; it’s a whole food plant-based diet. That is not the same as “going vegan.” You can be vegan and live on potato chips, Impossible burgers, and beer. And you’d be just as sick as an omnivore.
So we don’t eat animal proteins, but we also quit using refined oils and sprays in recipes and for cooking, and we quit ultra-processed garbage. We switched from refined sugar to raw sugar or maple syrup as a sweetener, and from white flour to whole grain flour. (I have found the best whole grain, gluten-free flour blend recipe!)
We cleaned up our diet and returned to eating fruits, veggies, whole grains, all the beans and other legumes, nuts, mushrooms, berries, and minimally processed things like Tamari (soy sauce without the fish) and tofu, and a little bit of plant-based milk.
It’s way easier than it sounds. And it’s DELICIOUS. Here are some of our go-to favorite meals now:
Chili
Marinated portobello mushrooms
Huge savory stir fries
Tacos
Burritos
Fajitas
Goulash
Tofu scrambles
French toast
Cheesy Breaded Asparagus.
Mashed potatoes and gravy
Any dish you can make with animal proteins, you can make without them. You don’t have to give up any of your faves, and it doesn’t take any more time to cook this way. It’s just a matter of deciding that adding extra, healthy years, to your life is worth it.
My health has improved dramatically. I wonder why no one ever told me how easy it was to get and stay healthy at any age? This knowledge has been out there for 25 years.
I wanted to learn more. I wanted to know the science behind how and why eating this way results in such excellent health so I could share it with others. If you don’t have a paper, nobody listens to you. But when you’re over 60, you become invisible. It’s hard to be noticed much less taken seriously. So I started looking for credentialed courses I could take, mainly just to have more credibility.
I found the Plant-Based Nutrition certificate course through eCornell, and saved up enough to pay for it. Not cheap, but it’s Cornell, so I didn’t expect it to be.
I took that course, got the certificate, and learned tons more. There was an entire section on how animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation put together. Yes. More than automobiles, trains, planes, and ships combined.
The revelations from that course set me on fire. I wanted to know more. And so it is that in January, at the age of 61 and 11 months, I’ll be starting college and working toward a degree in Nutrition.
In the meantime, I am developing a program to help other people make this change easily and at their own pace. Right now I’m helping 3 locals.
Eventually I will have an online program to help as many people as possible. Before I get to that point I will take on a few more free clients to help me perfect my approach. So let me know if you are interested and willing to do the work and I’ll see if I can help you. I can only take a few more right now. Once I know how much time the college classes will take, and ensure I can still fit in my writing, I’ll be able to take this project wider.
If you think you’re interested, the first thing I’ll assign you to do is to watch Forks Over Knives on Amazon Prime without a phone in your hand or a computer in your lap, and without distractions. Watch it like an assignment. You might even want to take notes. This will give you a clear idea of what my program is about and you’ll see what it looks like.
So that’s part of what I’ve been up to, along with finishing the novel, The Mermaid Murder, closing The Bliss Blog Shop, and preparing for the holidays. It’s a lot!
I’ll be cross-posting this update to both The Coffee House blog at MaggieShayne.com/blog and the Eat Like You Give a Shit blog at EatLikeYouGiveaShit.com
Happy holiday season! May 2024 be the year you reclaim your health!
Here is the link to watch the documentary I mentioned for 2.89 on Amazon Prime: Forks Over Knives