Nearly twenty years ago, I had become seriously overweight and was constantly sick with one ailment or another. Working in a public K–12 school system, I caught every virus or “crud” that was going around. My lifestyle was a mess—poor diet, long work hours, and very little sleep. Eventually, I was so unwell that I had to sleep sitting upright in a chair.
One day, I was home sick from work. My wife had already left for her job, and the TV was still on the Democracy Now channel, which she had been watching. I couldn’t find the remote and didn’t have the energy to look for it. I felt awful, so I just left the TV on. A documentary called Eating – 3rd Edition came on. It laid out a compelling case that most chronic medical problems are directly related to diet. I learned how the way I had been eating was weakening my immune system and making me vulnerable to illness. The film focused heavily on the harms of consuming meat and dairy, particularly from factory-farmed animals.
Up until then, I had never really thought about what I was eating. During my forties and fifties, food was just fuel to keep me going through busy workdays. But after watching Eating – 3rd Edition, I made a snap decision: no more meat or dairy. Then came the big question—what was I going to eat?
When my wife came home and asked, “What do you want to eat?” the adventure began. That same evening, the documentary replayed, and I excitedly asked her to watch it with me. I started eating anything that wasn’t meat—beans, potatoes, corn, bread. I had no idea how to cook vegan food, but I could manage pasta with marinara sauce. My wife was patient with what she saw as another one of my obsessions. At work, I ate Subway veggie subs—no cheese. At home, I threw together hot vegetables. I had no real cooking skills, especially not for plant-based meals.
We had always cooked together—she planned the meals, I prepped ingredients and grilled the meat. Now I just ate the plants. Amazingly, I lost 25 pounds in the first month. I went from being ghastly overweight to merely grossly obese. More importantly, I stopped needing my asthma inhaler after just a month of cutting out animal products.
Two months later, my wife joined me in “my hippie weirdo vegan diet”—”largely” because I now weighed less than she did. She brought home one of Dr. McDougall’s books, which opened the door to a world of YouTube vegan cooking videos. From there, our story toward better health truly took off.
My only regret is that we didn’t —just eat our vegetables—much earlier in life.