Archive for Married-2 WFPB – Page 2

“I asked myself, ‘Why am I unwilling to go all in?’”

By Jane Birch · Comments (12)
Saturday, August 8th, 2020

By: Mallory Barrick

I have wanted to share my whole food, plant-based diet journey for quite a while now, but I didn’t know if I could do it. My journey has been so different than what I hoped it would be when I began eating this way. I have finally decided to share my story and my insights, in hopes that this different type of journey might help someone else.

For a couple of years, I struggled with pretty intense abdominal and pelvic pain. I visited several doctors and specialists trying to get an idea of what was going on, but they told me that everything seemed fine. Still, I tried various prescription medications, probiotics, and even had a procedure to remove a small amount of endometriosis. I was glad to know there was nothing seriously wrong, but what was I supposed to do about this persistent mystery pain?

In the summer of 2017 we drove across the country for a family reunion and I ended up getting the books The China Study, Forks Over Knives, and How Not to Die from the library to take with me. Over the course of the trip, I couldn’t stop thinking about a plant-based diet and all the benefits, even miraculous healings, that seemed to come as a direct result. On the way home I searched the internet for “Mormon vegans” because I wanted to know if this lined up with my beliefs. I found many of Jane Birch’s articles online. After learning about the diet from a scientific perspective and adding in how it worked so well with the Word of Wisdom, I felt a strong prompting: “This is the way you need to eat.” I told my husband, who I had been sharing all of this information with along the way, and we stopped eating all animal products overnight.

I hoped and even expected that my pain would disappear quickly after making the change, but it lingered on. To this day I am not completely pain free, and that has been disappointing for me. I had read all the amazing stories, and I wondered why God didn’t love me as much as he seemed to love everyone else that was healing. On top of that, my husband and I continued to struggle with infertility. Where were the promised blessings?

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“I was consumed with health anxiety”

By Jane Birch · Comments (2)
Saturday, June 27th, 2020

By: Mallory Marshall

Some of my earliest and fondest memories revolve around food. I remember cinnamon rolls and cheesy potatoes and ham at my grandparents’ house. I remember trips to Arctic Circle for family home evening ice cream cones. We would go to Sizzler every once in a while, and I would eat from the buffet until I was so full I would cry all the way home. I would wake up in the morning and ask what was for dinner, always looking forward to the next meal.

Growing up my family ate a mostly Standard American Diet. My mom always made sure we had a vegetable at dinner, and she used whole-wheat over all-purpose flour whenever possible, but we ate a lot of processed food and animal products. In high school I worked at a pizza shop and ate leftover pizza almost daily. Aside from just eating, I have always loved cooking, trying new recipes, and baking desserts, and food has always been an important social connection for me: a way to share, bond with, and give comfort to others.

My grandmother passed away from brain cancer when I was eight years old. I think that started some form of health anxiety in me. I remember getting worried when it was a bad year for the flu or when someone we knew was sick. It wasn’t frequently that I would feel that way, but I worried over my health as well as the health of my parents on occasion. As much as I worried, I was always told, “When it’s your time to go, you’re going to go, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.”

Fast forward several years, when I became pregnant with my first daughter I became more self-conscious and wanted to avoid excess weight gain during pregnancy. I started exercising, which wasn’t something I had ever really enjoyed before. I also started cleaning up my diet. I cut out many added fats (butter, cheese, oily sauces) and removed sugar from my diet as well. After my daughter was born, I started a high protein, low-carb diet. I felt really good and had great energy, but it was more protein than I was used to eating and was difficult to maintain.

A couple years later (2016) my second daughter was born, and I immediately began experiencing extreme postpartum anxiety. I would stand at her bedroom door at night and just cry. I was consumed with health anxiety. I had uncontrolled thoughts that I was going to get cancer or another terminal illness and leave my children without a mother, or worse, that one of my children would. I was also struggling with body dysmorphia issues. I was over exercising, counting calories, and binge eating. I have never been overweight, and I gained healthy amounts of weight during pregnancy, but nevertheless I was obsessed with being in good shape and looking better. At this point I knew I couldn’t go on living with those thoughts or treating myself and my body the way I was.

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“I told God I wasn’t going to do another diet”

By Jane Birch · Comments (3)
Saturday, June 13th, 2020

By: Tricia Braunersrither

I grew up in a large family of four sisters and two brothers. I always felt overweight because I was a bigger build than my sisters. I thought it was something that needed to be fixed. Consequently, I spent my lifetime looking for diets to shrink my body. I tried diet after diet and was never successful. After each diet I would gain more and more weight.

In 2010, I started a diet that seemed to me to be the Holy Grail to Weight Loss: hCG. I would take a hormone and eat 500 calories a day, and I would lose weight. I lost 75 pounds! For the first time in my life, I felt like I had some control over my weight. To keep that weight off, I had to continue taking the hormones and keep my diet at 500 calories. I would do that for three weeks, then I would eat low carb for the next three weeks then go back to 500 calories. I did that for eight years until finally I couldn’t do it any longer. I told God that I no longer was going to do that. I told him I was going to wait on him for an answer of what I should do because I definitely wasn’t going to do another diet.

I gained 25 pounds right away because I finally was giving my body the nutrients it needed. In July 2018, I was visiting my kids in Idaho. A family friend was there who is a doctor. I told her my frustrations with many of my health issues. She did a full bloodwork panel on me. She even did an insulin-fasting test. She came to me and told me that I was “insulin resistant.” I had never heard that term before, but I later learned it is the first stage of type 2 diabetes. She gave me Metformin and told me to exercise and to eat a low-carb diet. I told her that I had done keto for seven months, and I knew how to do that diet. She said, “Oh yes, that would be great. Go ahead and do that.” So I headed home with much hope that this was the answer from God I had been waiting for. I even had my dad give me a priesthood blessing. He blessed me that “I would be able to discern what was the best path to healing my insulin resistance.”

I went home and immediately pulled out my keto cookbooks and started watching keto YouTube videos. I thought it was interesting that keto would be God’s answer. When I ate the keto diet, which is heavy in fat and meat, I often had thoughts that this was not following the Word of Wisdom. Despite these misgivings, I knew I wouldn’t gain weight eating keto, and I would have refuge from my 500-calorie diet, so I assumed it must be healthy.

While watching one of my keto YouTube videos I fell asleep. I woke up to a YouTube video that had continued to loop while I napped. I woke up to a bald guy with no eyebrows giving a talk on how eating Whole Foods can reverse insulin resistance. I had never heard of this. It was the exact opposite of what my doctor told me. I started researching right away. I found Dr. John McDougall who had the same message. He was telling me to eat all the things that are in my Church food storage under all my kids’ beds! Oats, rice, and beans! I found that super interesting! I found one plant-based doctor after another saying the same thing. But why do they not teach this to diabetics? I was terrified to try eating this way. The things they said to eat were what I avoided my whole dieting life because “carbs make you fat.”

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“Trusting God has made all the difference”

By Jane Birch · Comments (6)
Saturday, May 30th, 2020

By: Tiffany Mortensen

My challenges began at the age of 13 when I started to put on weight. Although my mom had studied nutrition in college and was a wonderful resource and support to me, my struggle to achieve and maintain a healthy weight would continue through the remainder of my teenage years. Although I was young, my observations of other family members who struggled with their weight and similar health issues was a great motivating factor in establishing healthy patterns of living and learning to take care of my body.

My devotion to health and my effort to eat in a healthy manor was valiant, but the results did not match, leaving me, and at times my parents, perplexed and confused. As a result, I began to believe that my body was unable to achieve a healthy weight. Although I did notice a positive difference in the way I felt when eating wholesome, healthy foods, eating became a daily ritual largely centered on self-denial and self-deprivation, not to be thin, but to avoid becoming more overweight.

Then I began having children.

Each of my pregnancies began the same: with a commitment to healthy eating for my baby and to stay within the recommended weight gain range.

Each of my pregnancies ended the same: with a confusion as to what I did wrong and how my eating habits could have resulted in so much excessive weight gain.

My second pregnancy with my son was especially difficult as I struggled with wide fluctuations in my post-meal glucose levels, the excessive accumulation of amniotic fluid, excessive weight gain, and a very large baby. I received diabetic counseling with a registered dietitian, but after looking over my food journal and reviewing my eating habits she was just as perplexed as I was and commented that I not only ate healthier than any patient she had ever worked with, but that I ate healthier than she did.

After my son was born, I was advised to lose weight and change my lifestyle habits to avoid becoming diabetic. I was also diagnosed with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome).

I was confused. My only beverage of choice was water. I did eat treats, but not on a daily basis. I avoided sugary cereals, chips, crackers, and most prepackaged foods. I typically ate a large salad for lunch with some type of animal protein, and I was careful to not drench it in salad dressing. I predominately ate whole grains, lots of fruits and vegetables, and thought my dinners (which were typically made from scratch) were a healthy balance of all of the food groups, including meat and dairy.

Not knowing where else to turn, I decided to read the Word of Wisdom, a law of health given to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although cultural practice of the principles found therein centers on abstaining from the don’ts (alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea) there is an incredible list of do’s that is unfortunately largely ignored.

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“The only solution that made sense was to turn to the Creator of our bodies”

By Jane Birch · Comments (0)
Saturday, May 16th, 2020

By: Faith Ralphs

I grew up in Sedona, Arizona in a large family, eating what is now referred to as SAD (Standard American Diet). Although we ate lots of fruits and vegetables, we also drank some Capri Suns, poured corn-syrupy maple syrup on our pancakes, and ate the occasional pepperoni pizza. But everyone was fit and healthy, so why not?

Fast forward to when I was about 15. My grandparents on both sides were suffering from various chronic diseases. It was hard to watch, and I think it made my parents think about preventing such problems from happening to them. We also had some friends who didn’t eat refined sugar (ever!), and that inspired us. My mom joined a Word of Wisdom email group and read a book called Super Immunity by Joel Fuhrman about the power of plant foods. She says she gained a testimony of those principles, and it forever changed the way she cooks. She shared some things she was learning, and I decided to join her in not eating meat. I am very thankful for my mom’s influence and example.

Although not fully whole food, plant-based (WFPB) yet, I didn’t eat any meat from the time I was 16 to when I left for college at 18. While at college I was more of a social meat-eater. On my mission in Paraguay I tried my best to get fruits and vegetables, but I also ate a lot of beef and more white bread than ever before in my life, trying to be polite to those who fed us.

Every marriage and family has their own food culture, philosophy, and health habits. When I got married we had to establish our own. My husband, Carson, had given up cow milk as a teenager to see if it would clear up his acne and prevent his frequent ear infections. He stopped guzzling the stuff and voila! His skin cleared up, and his earaches went away. Although he didn’t drink cow milk when I met him, he ate a typical college boy diet otherwise (think lots of spaghetti and $1 frozen pizzas).

My husband knew, before we got married, that I was prone to only eat meat for special occasions, that I bought almond milk instead of cow milk, and drank green smoothies every day. He loved that about me (and still does, thankfully!). I told him I’d be willing to cook him meat if he really wanted me to, but he said he was fine just eating it at restaurants. Although we didn’t eat meat, we still bought eggs and cheese those first few years, and probably way too many tortilla chips.

Fast forward to when we’d been married three years, had lost two babies due to incompetent cervix, and were now struggling to conceive for months. I had several symptoms of PCOS and rarely ever had a menstrual cycle. Although I thought I knew that a vegetarian diet was the healthiest, I needed reassurance. When you google the best diet for PCOS (or any other insulin-related disorder), you’ll be told to eat low-carb and high-fat. I desperately wanted to get pregnant and really needed to figure out how to eat to improve my fertility.

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

By Jane Birch · Comments (3)
Saturday, May 2nd, 2020

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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“If you know it’s harmful, why are you feeding it to your family?”

By Jane Birch · Comments (4)
Saturday, March 14th, 2020

By: Lesli Dustin

I am grateful I grew up with a mother who cooked from scratch and fed us healthfully for the most part. My school lunches of whole wheat bread, fruit, and homemade cookies looked a lot different from my friends’ Wonder Bread, Twinkies, and fruit roll ups. I decided to try being a vegan as a teenager. Since it was more a statement than a decision, it didn’t last long, but I did remain a vegetarian for about six years. When I got pregnant with our first child and had an intense craving for meat, I took that as my body’s message that it needed meat and that was the end of my vegetarianism for many years.

I continued in my mom’s tradition and tried to cook and eat healthfully, always aware of eating enough fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and making most of our food at home. But we ate animal foods and lots of sugary desserts. I was inspired to eliminate dairy from my diet when I was in my 30’s and was excited to experience a dramatic decrease in nasal congestion that I thought was normal because it’d been there my whole life. All of a sudden, the chronic sinus infections I’d been suffering from my entire life stopped. It felt like a miracle.

Over the years I cut down on the amount of meat I was feeding my family. Shortly thereafter I decided to stop eating it altogether, except for rare occasions, but I still cooked it several times a week for my family. That year I ate turkey on Thanksgiving and discovered that it tasted awful to me. I have always been interested in health and nutrition and reading books on these subjects, and after reading The China Study I knew the lifestyle that I was flirting with had to be right. But I also wanted to be right with Heavenly Father and not get sidetracked from the gospel by following down strange paths. As a vegetarian teenager, I had a bishop who told me that refusing to eat meat was wrong and that always bothered me. I couldn’t deny the revelation I was receiving that was pushing me in this direction, but I wanted to be sure. I went to the temple and asked Heavenly Father if being a plant-based eater was right. I opened the scriptures there in the celestial room and read the Word of Wisdom and knew I had my answer.

Though my husband is an adventurous eater and would eat my vegetarian meals, he has always loved cheese and meat, and wasn’t interested at all in changing. One night at dinner, he sat down and said, “You know, if you want to cook vegetarian all the time, I’d be okay with that.” I almost fell off my chair.

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“After all these miracles, I was convinced that this was the way I needed to eat”

By Jane Birch · Comments (13)
Saturday, December 28th, 2019

By: Janelle Dunn

As a young girl, whenever someone asked me how many children I wanted to have when I grew up, I would answer “eight.” I have always wanted a big family with a house full of children. Well at age 44, life hasn’t exactly turned out as I had hoped. I didn’t get married until I was 33. That was only part of the challenge. The amazing news is that I have been blessed to have been pregnant eight times. Getting pregnant was never the problem. I ended up having six miscarriages and the last three were all in my second trimester.

As my empathetic OB/GYN would disappointedly share the news with me that I had yet again lost another baby, she would follow it up with the same consoling words, “This isn’t because of something you have done. It is probably because of your age.” At this point in my life, my age ranged between 37-42 years old. Her final words were usually, “. . . and this has nothing to do with something you ate.” Each time she said that, the Spirit would say, “This has something to do with the way you eat.” I didn’t know what this meant, but I began praying about it. God quickly told me to break my addictions to chocolate and sugar. So with much prayer and fasting, I covenanted with God to give up chocolate and sugar. It was a painful first year without chocolate. With the Lord’s help though, I can say that I have not had any chocolate now for three years, and I no longer feel the addictive craving for it. This was only my first hurdle, unbeknownst to me at the time.

In the interim, I spent way too much money on specialists, genetic testing, and other options to see if I could find a solution for my miscarriages in hopes of having another child. No specialist seemed to find anything obviously wrong with me. They found some thyroid levels that were slightly off and that I had endometriosis. This was not enough to convince any of them though that it was the cause of my miscarriages, and the blame usually fell back on my age. I just wasn’t satisfied with that response.

Around the same time, my mother read a book called Discovering the Word of Wisdom. My mother has always been a righteous thought leader in our family. She read it and immediately gave up eating meat. She would mention a few things to me here and there, but I still wasn’t awake enough to get what she was trying to tell me.

Several months down the road, my father called me on the phone. He started telling me about an 80-year-old man who walked into his dental office and started sharing his secrets for great health and vitality. This man had run three miles that day, and he told my dad he eats two large salads every day. He attributed his youthful athleticism and his clean diet to a book he read called Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. My dad ate the Standard American Diet at the time, but this man caught his attention enough that he wanted to tell me all about him. I wrote down the name of the book, and I immediately got it on Audible. I did not know what the book was about or what I was getting myself into, but I knew it would be a good idea for me to eat more salad.

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“Nothing need die, that I might live!”

By Jane Birch · Comments (13)
Saturday, December 7th, 2019

By: Tom Rodgers

I grew up on dairy and poultry farms managed or owned by my father in the Bountiful, Utah area. I thought I ate a healthy diet, which included meat, eggs and milk. I obeyed the Word of Wisdom as I understood it, but contrary to the promise, my health was failing.

In February of 1990 I was 49 years old. Here I am with my wife Betty (left) and daughter Cindy (center) just days before serious cancer detection, surgery and treatment work began. Far exceeding 250 pounds (I stopped getting on the scales out of embarrassment and denial) and no longer feeling like I was the invincible, unstoppable, independent entrepreneur and functional man I had labored to be for decades.

As my own boss in my some-times animal husbandry and all-the-time mechanical repair business, I was never short on exercise. My work was always physically demanding and strenuous. I could “throw” a cow, “drop” a cantankerous horse, pull wire or break thread on the largest rusty pipe or bolt without difficulty. I did unfortunately believe, as I had been thoroughly taught, that I needed to sufficiently consume, for the “good” of my health, teeth and bones, the products of my own dairy and animal husbandry industry. I had no shortage of milk, eggs or meat. I should have been as healthy as my old horse Frisky – but it was not so!

One day as I was working on a washing machine, I leaned over it and bumped into a little mass in my chest that gave me a sharp pain. I thought, “Wow what is going on here?”

I went to the hospital. After several tests, I learned that I had tumors in my chest and abdomen. I had one very large tumor in my upper back with tentacles reaching into my chest cavity and brain. Additionally, a black mass was found on my shoulder about the size of a pencil eraser. It turned out to be stage 4 malignant melanoma.

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“I’m healthier at 35 than I have ever been before”

By Jane Birch · Comments (7)
Saturday, October 26th, 2019

By: Brandon Berrett

I’ve been a “larger fellow” all my life. I simply chalked it up to genetics. I watched my father and grandfather be diagnosed with diabetes and saw them struggle through everything that comes along with obesity. After years of seeing this happen, I didn’t want to be that person.

So I took action and 15 years ago I started to do everything that traditional medicine and weight loss advocates say to do. I went on a high protein, low carb diet filled with as much meat as I could handle.

I saw a lot of success. I lost about 50 pounds. I looked great. It was suddenly an option for me to pursue a career in the military, which I did. Even in the military though, I was always at the high end of the weight scale. I had to constantly count my calories. I found that pounding back tons of protein every day was no longer effective.

Despite my high level of physical activity, I was gaining weight. I was distressed and depressed at the same time. And it never sat right with me that I was told to avoid certain fruits and vegetables. How could carrots and fruit be causing my weight gain but unlimited steak and bacon were perfectly fine?

My health was also suffering. I was diagnosed with chronic recurring pleurisy. I had terrible chest pains that would leave me incapacitated for days or weeks at a time. Needless to say, this was not good for my military career, and I was medically discharged.

Over the next 7 years, I watched my weight gradually increase and my health steadily decline. I felt 30 years older than I was. I found myself weighing 320 pounds and was constantly sick from ailments doctors couldn’t diagnose. I was in my early 30’s, and I had to walk with a cane.

Despite my pain, I decided it was time to make a change. For the second time. I decided to skip the high protein route though and after a year of really hard work, I dropped myself to 300 pounds with pure exercise.

During this time, my mind kept returning to my patriarchal blessing. In it I am specifically admonished to remember the Word of Wisdom and the principles of taking care of my body. In my wrecked physical state, I wondered what that could mean. It told me specifically to “only take into [my] body that which is pleasing to the Lord.”

I, of course, thought this only applied to the Word of Wisdom in a traditional sense. I took special care, more than most, to avoid harmful tea, alcohol, tobacco, etc. I thought I was keeping that admonition in my blessing because I was keeping the worthiness aspect of that section of the Doctrine and Covenants. I wanted to run and not be weary and walk and not faint. But somehow that promise was elusive to me.

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