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“I love eating this way because I am not hungry ever!”

By Jane Birch · Comments (9)
Saturday, August 22nd, 2020

By: Tish Lambert

I have been overweight if not obese my whole life. I have been on a lot of different diets, including straight calorie restriction, Body For Life, and Atkins. I’ve also just tried eating a healthy diet (aka eating less junk food and less processed foods). I exercised regularly, biking 6-8 miles to and from schools I attended, played soccer, and was on Church sports teams.

By high school I was tired of the fad diets and just exercising wasn’t working. I remember researching the Word of Wisdom in high school. I wanted to stop doing everything man’s way and start doing it God’s way. I read it over and over. It was hard to understand all the components, like what does herb mean and what exactly is sparingly? How do I know what seasons everything grows in? So, I went back to calorie restriction/counting and trying to eat less processed food. I had success on a diet that balanced carbs and protein or meat, but I was hungry a lot, and my cheat days frequently extended to cheat weekends. I felt like that diet taught me to starve and binge.

In 2014, I stumbled upon Forks Over Knives on Netflix. It felt like the spirit was screaming, “THIS IS THE WORD OF WISDOM!” It felt like the Word of Wisdom explained with medical proof. I wanted to change right then, but my life was too crazy. In the next two years I ended up moving three times across the country, finishing one pregnancy, and starting another. I continued researching how to get nutrients like calcium, omega 3s & 6s, vitamin B12, and probiotics on a plant-based diet.

About 5 years ago, post-partum, I was obese. I needed to lose 50-60 lbs. I knew that being in the obese category meant my risk for every disease went up. I believed in the Word of Wisdom and Forks Over Knives, but I tried the ketogenic diet next as a vegetarian. I lost weight, but I was so hungry all the time, and I got sick of tofu, eggs, and cheese.

After reading The Forks Over Knives Plan, a 4-week transition program, I jumped into a whole food, plant-based or WOW way of eating sometime between July-October of 2016. I discovered I love eating this way because I am not hungry ever. I can eat as much as I want and as often as I want. My first indication that anything was happening was when my skirt fell off while I was walking around my house. I threw it out. I thought it was the elastic until I measured myself.

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“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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“This whole experience has been guided by an angel”

By Jane Birch · Comments (6)
Saturday, April 18th, 2020

By: Ellen Bench

I was born on the island of Mauritius, surrounded by the Indian Ocean (1,200 miles east of Africa). Our diet there was mainly grains, fruits, and vegetables. We ate meat or fish on the weekends only.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not in Mauritius when I lived there, so none of my family were members. I went to England when I was 18 years old to study nursing. I met the missionaries there and joined the Church. Three and a half years later I was called on a mission to Tahiti. After serving in Tahiti, I moved to America. I married at age 28 and had my first child at age 29.

I started having serious health challenges in my late thirties, some of which included hay fever, insomnia, pre-diabetes and a tumor in my uterus! Those health challenges were not fun. I just did not feel good most of the time.

I prayed to know how to get healed, and it was given to me slowly and surely. I first felt impressed to give up carbonated drinks. Then God guided me to be vegetarian. My diet changed even more when I met Tom Rodgers. He was a vegan who gave lectures weekly at the Bountiful, Utah library. I prayed to know if it was true and right for me. I decided to be totally vegan too. Fortunately, it was not hard for me to eat this way. Slowly and gradually, my health challenges dissipated.

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Categories : Married-1 WFPB, Stories
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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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“I asked Heavenly Father to help me find a cookbook that fit the Word of Wisdom”

By Jane Birch · Comments (9)
Saturday, February 29th, 2020

By: Tamara Curtis

I have always wanted to be the parent that was able to run and play with their kids. I wanted to have the energy to get out and play tag or kick a ball around. Problem was, even in my youth, running just didn’t happen. I felt miserable anytime I made an attempt to exercise. It wasn’t just that I didn’t enjoy it, every time I tried, I couldn’t breathe, I felt pressure in my chest and neck, and I felt as though my heart would either explode out of my chest or the vein in my neck would burst and I would die right there on the spot. Ok, maybe I am exaggerating a little, but not as much as you might think.

My mom was always good about making us home-cooked meals. It was rare that we ever went out to eat growing up. I think the most fast food we got was the occasional day when mom needed a break during the winter, and she would buy a large French fry for all 5 of us kids to share so that she could let us play on the play place while she visited with a friend. It was rare that we got to have a soda, and we obviously weren’t eating a lot of French fries.

When I got out on my own, I most definitely started eating out a lot more. My mom always cooked for a large family so that’s how I cooked, and I could make something for just me, but I often ended up with large amounts of leftovers that would go to waste. It was so much easier for me to just pick something up on my way home. My eating habits obviously declined at this point in my life, and between poor eating habits and not knowing how to plan ahead, I had created a recipe for disaster.

The Word of Wisdom has always been something that stood out to me as a recipe for health. I have always trusted in the teachings of the scriptures, so it only seemed logical that the Word of Wisdom as written in Doctrine and Covenants 89 would have blessings for me. I always obeyed the don’ts: I never smoked, drank or did drugs, I didn’t drink coffee, and only drank herbal teas when I was sick. I thought I was doing pretty well, but when I came to the verses about what was “ordained for man” I became lost and hung up on various verses about meat and grains. I just stopped trying when I got to those because I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I mean really, if it said not to do something, I listened, so I just kept on my merry way.

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