Archive for osteoporosis

“I want to please Him because I know He wants what is best for me”

By Sherry Seeley:

The brownies were in my locker. As requested by my seminary teacher, Brother Krebs, my mother made a treat to share with the class. When class started there were no treats. Rather than share my family secret, I endured a five-minute lecture on being responsible while I stared at my shoes. The secret was my mother cooked everything from scratch with healthy ingredients! Those brownies were sweetened with honey and contained 100% whole wheat flour. I couldn’t face the imagined ridicule from my peers.

Every Saturday morning my mother ground up wheat that was made into delicious bread for the week. Whole wheat toast with honey was my comfort food. You could measure the kind of day I’d had by how much bread was eaten after school. Breakfast was a large pot of cooked cereal or whole wheat pancakes. Dinner was a large casserole of beans, rice or potatoes loaded with homegrown vegetables with only one serving of meat to feed eight people. There was always a salad and fruit at every meal.

The problem in this wonderful diet was dairy. We drank milk! Lots and lots of milk. As an adult this came back to haunt me. I thought it was healthy for my body and bones. A few years ago I received my first bone density test, and it showed I was losing bone density. I was furious. I felt betrayed. When the nurse tried to put me on a series of drugs, I wouldn’t listen. I started a quest of investigation and learning that was intense because I was fighting for my bones without taking drugs.

My search led me to the video documentary Forks over Knives and all the related books and movies on whole food, plant-based nutrition. I found Jane Birch and Discovering The Word of Wisdom on Facebook. This was an answer to a question I’d had my whole life. When I first read D&C 89 as a child, I noticed the part where it says to eat meat sparingly. The answers I’d received were very unsatisfying. People would say, “Oh well,” and “it says that but, that’s not what it really means.” I knew it was time to change. I started drinking plant-based milk and stopped eating meat, dairy, and oil.

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“The destroying angel has passed by me”

By: Wendy Hardy

Growing up, my family ate mostly whole foods with little junk food. We rarely had soda, cookies, or potato chips. We did have animal foods, but I hated to eat cheese, eggs, or milk. My health was very good overall. I spent a lot of time playing outside, jumping on the trampoline and riding my bike. I was physically active and involved in extracurricular activities such as softball and drill team.

The summer before I started 3rd grade I was bucked off of a horse and fractured my wrist. When I had the x-rays done the doctor said that my bones were brittle. I have a family history of low bone density on my mother’s side, and there are many family members on that side with a history of multiple fractures. However, I did not have any more incidents for many years.

When I received my patriarchal blessing as a young woman there were some things that really stood out to me. There are a few references to me receiving a healthy body. There was also instruction for me to “eat and drink only those things that ensure good health, and to abstain from all others.” I thought it was wonderful news that I had been given a healthy body. I didn’t really take the admonition too seriously though. I always enjoyed eating healthy food (although I didn’t really understand what things were healthy), but I didn’t abstain from any foods. I just didn’t have them very often (in my eyes).

As an adult, I’ve always been interested in health and diet. I love learning new things and if I feel like what I learn is beneficial then I will wholeheartedly adopt it into my life. Several years after starting our family I came across the book Nourishing Traditions. It teaches all about eating whole foods and taking time to prepare them for your family and how important that is. I read the book and a lot of it really resonated with me. There was great information about vegetables, grains, and beans. There was also a lot of information about dairy, meat, and eggs. It seemed to make sense to me.

After finding this information I started making changes in the way we were eating. We started using a lot of dairy products. After all, we are taught that dairy is important for bone health and our family had a history of bone density problems. In fact, some of my children have inherited this mutated gene for low bone density. Some of them have had multiple spinal compression fractures, so I wanted to make sure they were getting the best nutrition they could!

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“Dang it, there go the hamburgers”

Paul & Orva Johnson closeupBy: Paul Johnson

My wife and I have always tried to eat with a mind toward health. But I enjoyed a good hamburger, barbequed tri-tips, chocolate shakes, ice cream, etc. In fact I would have been perfectly happy to have hamburgers for every meal. I still would—but I can’t do it, because I know too much about what that would do to my body, not to mention the cows’ bodies.

So my journey toward a plant-based diet came slowly. As my wife became totally plant-based, I supported her (easy to do since she looks amazing). We had mostly plant-based food at home, except for cheese and a few other things like that. She learned to cook meals that could be done completely plant-based or with a little bit of cheese or even meat thrown in.

At 46 I was in very good health, or so I thought. I was in a kick-boxing class, could do 80 pushups, and could run forever. But my feet started to tingle a lot. The tingling gradually grew into outright pain. Terrible, unbearable pain. I went to several doctors who simply couldn’t figure out what was going on. When they took x-rays of my feet they were astounded. My bones were disappearing. I was osteoporotic as an otherwise healthy 46-year-old male: practically unheard of.

After numerous tests, they discovered my kidneys were throwing out all of my calcium, causing my parathyroid glands to grab the calcium from my bones so that my body would have enough to function. The docs gave me prescriptions to help my condition. Nothing worked and the meds had weird, unacceptable side effects. During this time they also discovered I was pre-diabetic, glucose intolerant. Apparently my feet found out I was about to become diabetic and decided to get peripheral neuropathy early—thus the tingling, numbness and sharp pains in my feet. (I realize that numbness and pain don’t seem too congruent, but just ask anybody with neuropathy about that. They won’t be able to explain why, but they’ll make a pretty convincing case that it happens.)

So now I had two problems: diabetes and the kidney thing. I had also had two very bad kidney stones, requiring three surgeries between them because they would not pass on their own. I was given more medicine for the diabetes issue and was told to cut way down on carbs: go easy on the fruit and bread and eat meat. My wife was very supportive and went out of her way to make sure I could follow the standard American diet for diabetes.

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“I’ve started wearing belts and much snappier outfits!”

Bob and Carolyn AllenBy: Carolyn Allen

I was 12 years old when I saw a picture of myself that would impact my entire life. As an adolescent I had put on some weight, but not any height. I’m so short-waisted and short-legged that there was no place to hide any extra weight. Even five pounds is a big deal for me. In the photo, I was chubby and had an unflattering outfit, but more than that, my face was sad and unhappy. Looking at myself, I felt distressed.

So at age 12, I started to exercise and watch what I ate. I didn’t tell anyone, but when my mom commented that I looked different, I told her I’d lost 5 pounds. My weight went up and down by as much as 30 pounds during the next 8 years. It greatly affected my self-esteem. I also had a strange genetic disorder that resulted in my starting 7th grade as toothless as a first grader. Ages 12-18 were spent trying to lose weight and waiting for teeth to grow in. Needless to say, I was not a cheerleader or prom queen. Add the typical woes of adolescent acne and social challenges, and no one could pay me enough to do those years again!

I was chubby when I went off for my freshman year at BYU where I gained more weight. As I returned home for the summer, in my frustration of gaining the 10 pounds, I gained another five. I reached what was later my top maternity weight. I could see myself ballooning into a very overweight girl, much like my paternal grandmother and aunts and uncles, so in desperation, lonely and scared, I went to the local Weight Watchers. Thankfully, I lost the ten pounds and got a moderate grip on things.

As the years went by, I returned to Weight Watchers many times, and I thank this program from the bottom of my heart. It saved me from becoming obese. My happiness level went up and down through these years, but as I look back, it could have been much, much worse. Eventually I became a Weight Watchers leader. My years of sharing the importance of “A Balanced Diet of Fruits and Veggies! Meat! Dairy! Protein! Be Healthy and You’ll Be Happy!” were a lot of fun and were the foundation of my current writing and business.

During these years, Weight Watchers actually came out with a vegetarian program where you could “eat as much as desired of these foods until you are satisfied.” As I look back on it, it was pretty much a whole-food-plant-based program that I dismissed with “Who would ever do that!” I loved my skim milk, cottage cheese, weekly allotment of cheese, beef meals, etc. And with a sweet tooth that was never really under control, I sure wasn’t going to go that route!

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