In the beginning...
Since this is my very first post to the blog, I want to just introduce myself and tell you how this happened.
I was going along in my ordinary life as a carnivorous novelist. I have been called eccentric. I'm a working witch and my side biz is a magic shop. I run a blog that marries the practice of natural magic with the omnipresent Law of Attraction, and I write thrillers and romance novels and non-fiction categorized as "New Age Mysticism" for a living. I am 59 and owning it, mom to five exceptional young women, grandma to thirteen gifted and blessed wonders of creation and great grandma to two more.
So there I was, living my life, recycling my brains out and trying to do my part for the greater good. I buy the compostable trash bags. All my healthy scraps go into my own compost pile. I use earth friendly products and drive a little Juke when I drive at all.
I'm a big believer in what goes around comes round, or as we put it in the my circles, the Rule of Three, which states that you get back triple what you put out. So you know, I thought I was good.
I knew my health wasn't great, though. I knew my eating habits were shit, to be blunt, and I spend a lot of time sedentary, moving only my fingers across a keyboard. I was beginning the final year of my fifties and feeling every bit of it, and knowing I had to do something about it. My mother only made it to sixty years, two weeks, and four days. That clock has been ticking more loudly in my head with every passing year. And here I am, at fifty-nine. Tick-tock.
My 2021 resolution
I decided this year to follow my bliss in absolute confidence. That means that whatever I feel compelled to do is what I will do, regardless of what my brain tells me I should be doing. I believe that is the quickest path to everything I want to do or be or have. My perfect answer for achieving primo health was going to be found along that path. (I did tell you I've been called eccentric. You'll get used to it.)
So I was following my bliss, and like a leaf dropped from an autumn maple, the answer fluttered down and landed in front of me. I was flipping channels, taking a break from doing one thing I love to decide which fun thing to pursue next. I saw Super Soul Sunday was airing, which my provider hadn’t carried before. It had been my one gripe about the service. I clicked on the episode in progress and heard Heidi Cameron say that she and her husband James had changed their diets and their entire lives after watching one single documentary.
And I was like, changed their lives how? And what documentary? So I rewound a little to find out. Turns out that Heidi and James Cameron had switched to a “plant-based diet" immediately after viewing the documentary Forks Over Knives.
I hung my head and sighed and said, "Dammit, I'm going to have to watch that." And I already knew it was going to change everything. Sometimes you just feel something. When you hear a truth that is your truth, find a missing piece that fits your puzzle, discover a key that fits your lock, you just know it.
So I found the documentary, FORKS OVER KNIVES on Amazon Prime, bitched because it wasn't free with my membership, and paid my 4 bucks to rent it.
An hour in, my jaw on the floor, I went and got my hubs and started the documentary over again from the beginning. Pretty soon his jaw was on the floor too. And the very next day, just like the Camerons, we changed everything.
I can't explain to you how powerful the science in this film is. You just have to see it for yourself. Even if you think giving up meat and dairy is the craziest idea ever and are sure you would never ever change your life so drastically, you should still watch the documentary. It could save your life.
The next logical step
It wasn’t hard for my husband and I to make the change. It felt like the most natural thing ever, even though we soon realized we had been eating animal proteins with every single meal. And for me, every course of every meal. Butter on my veggies. Butter on my bread. Hard boiled eggs and sharp cheese in my big healthy salads, milk in my oatmeal, cream in my coffee.
When I watched the doctors in the film turn cancer on and off like a light switch just by adding or removing animal proteins from the diets of mice, it flipped a different light switch for me. The film also followed people living plant-based lifestyles and repairing their bodies so much that they came off meds for high blood pressure, cholesterol, and even diabetes.
After watching the film, it would have been harder to stick with our old lifestyle than to step into the new one.
As we started looking at what we were eating through the lens of what we had learned from the experiments and studies talked about in the film, we were stunned. And when we traded it all in for a truly healthy diet, it felt like, “Duh! Why haven’t we been doing this all along?” It was easy. There was no will power required, no struggle involved, no drama or trauma or tearful goodbyes. It felt good. And we felt good. Better and better from the very first few days.
My hubs and I are in the beginning of our sixth week eating plant-based. For me that means, no meat, no dairy, no eggs. I have no problem with honey. My honey comes from my daughter and son in law's rescued bees, and they treats them like family. It also means using natural sugars and whole grain flours, and keeping oils to a minimum. For you it might mean something entirely different! No two human bodies are alike.
At this point a lot of you might be asking, "But what do you eat?" Trust me, there is a whole world of wonderful food out there waiting to be enjoyed. Mac and I will be posting a lot about food, and we're adding recipes to the site as we speak. But in this post, I want to focus on how it felt to make the change during the first five weeks.
Physically
There’s a lightness, as if the density of my body has dropped a few points. It feels as if all the things that flow are flowing more freely than before. I feel cleaner, lighter, fresher. I prance up the stairs now. Before the switch to plant-based, I was reminding myself not to put too much weight on the banister.
I have more energy. I bound out of bed in the morning eager to start the day. There's a spring in my step and my strides are longer. My posture is better. My chin is up. I feel ten years younger, and it's only been 5 weeks.
Mentally
There’s a mental change, as well. Today reminded me of it. Today, the sun broke through the clouds that have been blanketing us most of the winter. And even though there are still feet of snow on the ground in every direction around us, that sun felt like spring. It was clear and bright and warm and clearly in charge. The snow will not withstand it for many days. Spring’s coming early this year.
My mind feels like today. There’s a sudden brilliant clarity, a sharpness, as if a bank of thick clouds have cleared; clouds I didn't realize were there. I’m remembering people’s names instead of snapping my fingers repeatedly saying, "You know, the guy with the thing and the stuff from that show with the girl who has the...other thing." Yeah, now I just say the name. And I know which series is on which streaming service and what day of the week it is. (It’s a pandemic and I work at home, so that’s saying something.)
Mood
I feel great. My mood is elevated, and I was already pretty upbeat. I didn’t quite fart rainbows but it was close.
And yet, now… now it’s above and beyond where it was before. I am excited to wake up every morning just because I get to spend another day loving my body, nurturing it inside and out, seeing and feeling it heal and grow stronger in real time. Day by day I feel more vibrant and more balanced in every single function.
Experience is the best teacher
There are some things that cannot be explained, but which must be experienced in order to be understood. Working natural magic with women of like mind, 'round a balefire on a cross-quarter night is one of those things. The feeling of living in a clean, toxin-free physical machine that is performing as it’s designed to perform is another. You have to feel it for yourself to really understand how amazing it is.
The good news is, it starts fast! Improvement begins on Day One. I was feeling these things within the first week, and it gets better and better.
The challenge
You will never know whether this is for you until you try it. Hubs and I were compelled to make the change by what we learned in Forks Over Knives. But we stuck with it because it felt so absolutely amazing. Neither of us could quite believe the difference.
So I'm challenging you to give it a try. Try eliminating animal proteins (meat, dairy, eggs) from your diet for one week. Try it for ten days. Try it for two weeks. If you get to three weeks, I don't think you'll ever go back, because the way you feel will be so drastically different from where you were before that t's like the sun coming out. It's like you didn't even know how dark it was until it did.
If that's too big, try just meat, or try just dairy. Those are the two best things we can do for the planet.
Try it. Dare you. We'll be here to help!