How did I gain and lose 30+ kg in 15 years of unhealthy eating and end up becoming vegan and living healthy every day? This is chapter 6 part 2 of my unforgettably honest autobiographical experience named Speaker Meeting 2017!
Here are the previous chapters!
Chapter 1: Welcome at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/schmd2cm
Chapter 2: Sex at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/txgjjuij
Chapter 3: Alcohol at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/60ilq8m2
Chapter 4: Money Part 1 at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/8q8xb602
Chapter 4: Money Part 2 at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/60vj7bec
Chapter 5: Gaming https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/jhlvzw3i
Chapter 6: Food Part 1 at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/odangy6p
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Here is the second half of the transcription from the video plus a couple before and after pictures!
Before
After
By 2014, thankfully, things were so bad that it was getting to the point with my alcoholism that it was going to kill me. Thank God that's when I made my desperate prayer. I said I'll do anything to get sober. I went to Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank God, as of February 8th, 2017, the last drink I had was in April 2014, at which point I was close to 250 pounds in weight.
I was a mess. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally a complete disaster inside. Thankfully, I had enough people who love me to love me through going into all that. Thankfully, that is the most I've weighed. That is the highest and most I've weighed since then as well.
In 2014, just not drinking alone lost me about 20 pounds, but once I realized, around Thanksgiving, that not drinking alone wasn't going to lose me any more than 20 pounds, and I remembered from my previous experience with being sober for much of 2012 and not losing any weight, I realized that I needed to do better with my diet to be a happier person.
That's my physical trainer had also mentioned the diet thing, so then I started counting calories. That was one of the first big improvements I made. I started tracking all the calories I ate.
The beautiful thing about tracking calories is I started paying attention to what I ate. Instead of just unconsciously eating and stuffing my face full, I started actually thinking of what I was eating. If you can get anything out of this, I hope you get it really helps to think about what you're eating.
Consider what you're eating before you put it in your mouth because the vast majority of the eating I've done in my life, I just ate without thinking. I just ate and threw it all down. I'd taste maybe the first piece of food and then all of a sudden I'd be looking at my plate, "Where'd that hamburger go? What happened to that whole piece of cake?" That's unconscious eating. You're not thinking about it, you're just throwing it all down. You're just going through and eating as much as you can, as fast as you can.
In 2014, right before Thanksgiving, I started using the calorie app or the health app, whatever it is, on the iPhone. I started trying to put in the calories I ate every single day. That helped me start losing more weight because, in considering putting in the calories, and something I'd learned to do in Alcoholics Anonymous, I learned to be honest.
When I'm counting my calories, don't leave off that last half pint of ice cream you ate at the end of the night. Don't leave off that extra dessert you had after dinner and you already had a dessert at dinner. Don't leave off that bag of popcorn at night. On Thanksgiving, make sure you put in everything on Thanksgiving.
I ate over 3,000 calories according to my estimate on Thanksgiving in 2014. I would bet that was about, I would say, at least a third, if not half, as much as I'd had on the Thanksgivings before that. Just counting my calories encouraged me to eat a little bit less. Over the next several months, I continue to lose more weight just counting my calories.
Then my friend, [Jerry 01:06:43], introduced me to the MyFitnessPal app, which his brother was using to track his calories. For a year, I put all the foods I ate into MyFitnessPal. For about 350 and 360 days in a row, I put all the foods I ate into MyFitnessPal. That's what prepared me for a miraculous change.
A year of looking at every single food I ate and seeing the sodium I ate some days might be two to five times as much as the daily amount recommended, trying to balance my fat and my protein and my carbs together, and seeing how I would eat some days just so much fat with having eaten all these ice creams and meat and things like that, that helped me ... I lost another 20 more pounds, 20 to 25 more pounds, between just not drinking and then counting my calories. I lost another 20 to 25 pounds over the next year and a half just from counting my calories.
Now keep in mind how much work that is. Everything I ate, I sat there and took the time to put it into MyFitnessPal. My wife was so loving and patient. We'd be out to some fast food restaurant, I'd be trying to make eating decisions and figure out exactly how many calories things worth of what I was eating. My wife, infinite love and patience.
For all of that time, counting calories, but then I continued to get this frustration as, in the middle of 2016, I was starting to plateau. My counting calories and doing personal training was starting to not lose me any more weight, and I still weigh more than I did in college. I was down to about 200 to 195, and I was plateauing. I started to look what can I do to lose even more weight? What can I do to take things to the next level? My mind was open, my mind was looking for new things.
Meanwhile, I got what I think has been called a fungus or yeast infection. I don't know exactly because these are just labels the doctors put on stuff. They don't know exactly what's going on, but they take a guess at it. The dermatologist said it might be a fungus.
In 2013 or 2014, at some point, I got this fungus on my chest, just a little rash that kept coming back in the middle of my chest. Over the next two to three years, it spread out to where it got all over my chest and all over my back and started to go down my arms and up my neck. It started to itch as well. I originally hadn't done anything, but, by this point, it got to itch.
Now you might think, "Ew! Why are you talking about this?" because a lot of the things we're given in life that we think are something bad are actually the exact tools we need to make our positive change. I look at my fungus as a friend today, as a friend who has taught me how to take better care of this entire body. My fungus humbled me because, as I tried to figure out what might be causing it, I was humiliated by my inability to even with counting my calories every day, even with using MyFitnessPal every day, even with seeing all the nutrients in all the foods I ate, I was completely helpless to try and determine what was the cause.
Now I didn't know it was a fungus, or I hadn't went to the doctor. You might think, "You should have just went to the doctor." I tried, don't like going to the doctor. I try and stay away from the doctor. Doctors are there to take care of sick people; therefore, I try and avoid going to the doctor and just be a healthy person.
I struggled, I tried to fix it on my own. I tried to see what is it I'm doing that's impacting when this rash gets all red and itchy. I started to see that certain foods I ate impacted my rash. I noticed one day I had a bunch of dried coconut chips and my rash had a huge flare up right after that. I initially thought, "Oh, maybe I'm allergic to coconut." I thought maybe this might be a food allergy. I realized if it was a food allergy, there's no way for me to tell what I'm allergic to because everything I ate had everything else in it.
For example, in the morning, I had a breakfast burrito, I had a tortilla with gluten in it, I had eggs, I had cheese, and I had hot sauce on it. How would I know if I was allergic? Because that has a bunch of different things you can be allergic to. Then at the time I had these Good2Go bars, and they had a whole bunch of things. They had milk protein, soy protein, chocolate. I looked and I'm like, "There's no way. How do I figure out ... ?" If I do have an allergy, there's no way for me to even figure it out.
My eating is so bad in terms of I eat so many different things. My rash humbled me, and I saw, man, my eating's so bad I don't even know where to start to make it better. I eat all these things; they have everything else in them. How do I even have a chance?
I tried some elimination diets. Some of these, I tried just not eating things. I tried not eating any ... What did I try not eating? I tried a bunch of these different things. Oh, I tried one elimination diet. I tried no dairy. I looked online and I found one of the main things people are allergic to. Okay, dairy, soy, and two other things, main things. Basically, everything I ate had those things in it.
I remember I went out to this breakfast buffet right when I decided to try this. I remember loading up and eating a bunch of salmon and a bunch of fruits and vegetables, because that's the only thing I could think of that met the criteria then of all those things I was cutting out. I tried these different elimination diets to try and see if one of them would impact my rash.
For example, if I could not eat something and then my rash wouldn't flare up. One elimination diet I tried, I tried a turkey and rice with peppers elimination diet. That was all I ate for several days was white rice, ground Turkey, and green peppers.
I got sick. As in I came down with some kind of flu or cold within two or three days of eating that way, even though no one else around me was sick. Eating in that way was so bad for me that I got sick within days of just starting to eat like that. I tried cutting fruits out of my diet because I saw sometimes some of the fruits I ate would seem to flare up the rash.
Put all this in perspective, all of this trial and error, all of this frustration, all of this effort to try and be a healthier person, no results. Nothing. Sure, my weight went down, but, by this time, all these elimination diets, my weight had plateaued. I wasn't losing any more weight, even with counting all my calories. Still was not at a healthy weight yet, still frustrated, and the rash had just completely beaten me.
I just gave up. By the time I visited my family in Michigan for a family barbecue, I'd given up the elimination diets. I said, "I have no idea what this thing is. I need help." That was a breakthrough, that was a miracle because I finally asked a doctor for help. My uncle, I asked him, I showed him the rash. I said, "What do I do?" I told him the things I'd tried, and that's when he recommended I read the book How Not to Die.
When he gave me that book to read, I didn't read it right away. He also told me to go see a specialist, like an allergist and a dermatologist. I did go see the allergist. It turns out I don't have any food allergies. I went and saw the dermatologist. They said it was a fungus and they gave me a cream for it. That hasn't comprehensively fixed it; although it seems to be working a bit better now after having put that cream on it for weeks. I don't know what's going on with it, but that is still in progress even seven months later.
However, I had a magical thing. All of these experiences prepared me to make a new decision in my life, because up until this point, at some point I'd simply decided that I enjoyed eating and would eat for pleasure, that I would use food to change how I felt, and that eating was an important part of who I am.
Even as I remember being at the family barbecue, as I said earlier, criticizing my family members mentally and intimately to my wife, telling her, "I can't believe they eat like this. It's so annoying," watching several of my family members, including my uncle who's a doctor, he eats vegan, he doesn't eat meat or animal products, and one of his daughters is a vegetarian and then another one often will avoid eating meat as well. I am up there criticizing him and his daughters for their eating habits.
Then I had a magical experience. "Thank you, Jerry. An hour and 15 minutes, really excited you're going to share this magical experience with us." I had a magical experience at Detroit Metro Airport. Now I realize you may not have heard that very many times, but all of these things that I went over with you prepared me for what happened at Detroit Metro Airport.
I was feeling very good. I was having a beautiful day. My wife and daughter, I just had a lovely vacation with my family in Michigan. We were on the way to fly home, everything was good to go. I was feeling great. I was in a very good mood. I had a small snack that morning, maybe a granola bar or something, and I was prepared for a lovely breakfast at P.F. Chang's at the airport.
Now they have lots of options on the menu. I chose one that was typical of my eating patterns. I got one that had pretty much everything in it. It had all different kinds of meat, it had entire eggs in it. It was some kind of like noodle bowl or something, and they just dumped everything you could want in it. There was all kinds of meat, eggs that was greasy. it was delicious. I ate up a whole bunch of it. I figured you want to load up before the plane, so I ate and had a big feed and was nice and full and picked my daughter up to go walk down and sit at our terminal, which was fairly close away.
Within 10 minutes of finishing that meal, my thoughts had dropped from gratitude, thankfulness, happiness, love, and joy; my thoughts were dipping close to suicidal depression within 10 minutes of that meal. By the time I was carrying my daughter, there was a bar that we walked by at the airport, and I'm an alcoholic. We walked by the bar.
Now at this point, I'd had about two years of sobriety. I was feeling very good about normally things like walking by the bar, not getting sucked into the void on it, like I've got to have a drink, just walked by just like it was any other part of the airport that wasn't relevant to me. This time I started thinking about a drink, then I started feeling bad about thinking about a drink, then I started feeling bad about being a bad parent because my daughter was not happy with my diaper changing procedures in the bathroom or something, or maybe she just wasn't feeling very good and she was a bit crabby.
By the time I sat back down with my wife, I felt horrible. I felt full of shame like I'm an awful person, I'm not a good enough father, I'm not a good enough AA member, I'm not a good enough husband, here I am bringing this mood over to my wife when we're traveling. I was just filled with shame.
Then the miracle happened. When we got on the plane, I started listening to the book How Not to Die, which is read by the author. I had what you might call a revelation. I had one of those thoughts that comes and it just gives you everything you need to make a decision right that moment to change your life forever. I had a thought just like this: what if what you just ate made you feel the way you did?
That just exploded my whole thing. I'd been having such a good morning and what action did I take? I essentially poisoned my body. I put a bunch of things in it my body didn't like, and my body communicated that to me with a bad mood. It used a depressed mood to communicate with me that it didn't like what I was doing. I had that just smashing thought as the author of How Not to Die starts launching into a healthy way to eat. That thought just smashed everything. I'm like, "Oh, my God. That meal I just ate gave me that bad mood. That meal I ate caused that bad mood. I experienced that bad mood because I just did something wrong. I poisoned my body."
Now with all the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings I went to, I'd been so familiar with all of my struggles, like with my sex issues that I've explained and my emotional issues and my money gambling issues. I started to recognize that when I did something wrong or sinned, not in the sense that I'm a bad person, but I simply did something in a way that's not optimal.
In car terms, I put the wrong kind of gas in the car. By wrong I mean I put the kind of gas in the car that it's not designed to run on. I put gas in the car that it doesn't function optimally with.
That's not wrong per se, in the sense that if you don't know what the right kind of gas to put in the car is, then you just put one kind of gasoline in the car or another and you don't figure it matters, but when you start to look inside your body and see how it feels and see how it responds, like the last time I watched an adult movie, I noticed I felt really bad afterwards. The same thing with having a drink. The last time I had a drink, I felt really bad afterwards.
Then I realized the same thing with food. Oh, my God, this is the same thing. It's just like with alcohol, it's just like watching adult movies. I did something that hurt me, I did something that made me feel bad, and what I did, I ate wrong. I don't even know the right way to do it. I don't even know how to eat so that I don't make that happen. That really humbled me, like, "Wow! I'm 30 at this point. Almost 31 years old, and I have no idea, I have no clue how to eat in a way that does not cause depression, does not cause bad moods."
I realized at the same moment the universe, my uncle, God, however you want to put it, had gave me the exact book that would show me exactly how to eat and how to never experience that same thing again. Just seeing all of that at once, I made a decision, I said I will do whatever it takes to eat healthy. I will do whatever I need to do to eat healthy, to eat in a way that does not cause depression.
Now I experience way less moods like that because I don't eat like that. Changing my eating has wiped out an unbelievable amount of those little bad moods that come along. I am used to being in a great mood all day all the time because I'm not used to suffering a bad mood after I eat, and that's a miracle. What I realized then in listening to the book, I was given exact information to guide what I needed to do.
What you need to do first is stop eating animal products, all animal products. No meat, no cheese, no milk, nothing with meat or milk in it as an ingredient. No more of that. The guy explains in the book, he says, "If you're a person who does moderation," my wife does moderation; she does moderation in almost everything, "sure, there's no reason you couldn't occasionally have a hamburger or occasionally have a glass of milk or a bowl of ice cream. If you're an alcoholic, you might want to stick to doing this system exactly how I explain it and not having any meat or animal products."
With enough honesty, alcoholic, yeah. I'm probably better off not trying to do moderation on this because, honestly, I've eaten enough meat and animal product for the rest of my life. If you ate meat and animal products in moderation your whole life and compare it to how many I've eaten, I've probably eaten the same amount as a person would eat in moderation for their whole life. The book told me what to stop doing. As soon as I listened to that book, I have avoided meat and animal products.
Now I don't do it in the sense that it's for the principle. One day, when I went to T-Rex at Disney, I was hungry, I hadn't properly prepared my food to eat, my friend and I went to order a meal. I wasn't yet familiar with how to ask exactly for what I wanted at the chef. I ordered a Caesar salad. I forgot to ask for no Parmesan cheese, I forgot that it might have anchovies in the dressing.
The salad came loaded with Parmesan cheese and Caesar dressing. You know what? I ate the salad. I didn't sit down, throw a fit, or go hungry. I said, "You know what? I'm going to eat this salad because this is good enough for this meal, but I'm not going to make a habit of doing this."
See, eating is not quite as simple as alcohol in the sense that you can just avoid alcohol completely. Sometimes things are going to have meat or animal products in them by accident. The point is to mostly avoid it, especially at home. I work in everything I buy and eat. If it's got animal products, I don't buy it, I don't eat it.
Then I'm not opposed to, for example, if there's some horrible thing happens and the only way I can survive is to kill one of my dogs and eat it, then I'm going to do that. I think I might do that anyway. I don't know if I'm going to do that, but if there's some starvation or famine, I'm open to eating whatever is available. If there's not fresh plant, fruits, and vegetables everywhere and the only thing I can get my hands on is either face starvation or eat some meat, I might eat some meat then.
I'm not totally opposed to it, but the question is what am I going to eat today that will produce the very healthiest result for this body? That becomes clear. Then the How Not to Die lays that out exactly and it matches up with what I read in Whole also.
Fruits, vegetables. You know what? The US government says that half of what you eat, half, 50% of what you eat should be fruits and vegetables. That's the official recommendation by the US government.
Now if you believe the US government is absolutely honest about things like there's no UFOs or no aliens, then you better be eating half of your plate fruits and vegetables every day because that's what they tell you to do also, and you better be completely honest on your taxes as well. That is the official recommendations of the US government is to eat half fruits and vegetables.
That's what I try and do. Half of my diet is fruits and vegetables today. I have this 32-ounce smoothie twice a day that contains almost only fruits and vegetables, blended up, raw. That's half of what I eat today. I try and just follow the recommendations based on the research.
Then the other half of the plate: beans, nuts, whole grains. Beans, nuts, and whole grains. Between the three of these ... Among the three of these, Jerry ... among the three of these different foods covers all the nutrition, plus some herbs and spices. Then what I have, I have ground up matcha tea to drink.
Let me hit the beans, nuts, and grains first. The nice thing with my smoothie is that all I do is blend up the raw fruits and vegetables like I described, the pineapple, grapes. You can throw about any fruits and vegetables you want into a smoothie and blend it up and have that.
I eat the raw fruits and vegetables in a smoothie. I drink them. Then every day, I make my smoothie. It takes about 30 minutes every single day. I take the time to make my smoothie, and I make it so that it's ready the next morning, the whole thing's ready for the next day. I've got a smoothie made for the next day.
Then for my beans, nuts, and whole grains, I try and buy lazy-friendly foods. For example, Larabars. They have lots of nuts that are ground up in them, along with things like dates. They're very healthy, so I eat Larabars, a very good source of nuts. They also have some fruits in them. They can have some other things depending on what they're made of. Then for the whole grains and beans, I like to do hummus. One of the healthiest whole grain options I've found that's easy is Triscuits with low salt, or a hint of salt as it's called.
Ideally, I try and also avoid added sugar, added oil, and added salt. You have to make some compromises somewhere. In the whole grains and beans is where I try and make the majority of my comprises. Then, in fruits and vegetables and nuts, I try and go no added anything. Then I can make a little compromise in the whole grains and beans, and then I can get those down and enjoy them. Then I don't have that much added anything in my diet.
The hint of salt Triscuits have three grams of fat in terms of added oils out of 28 grams. That's a pretty low percentage compared to, say, potato chips that have anywhere often six to 10 grams of added fat out of every 28 grams. The idea is I'm getting a greater percentage of healthier food.
The Triscuits are made out of whole grain wheat, and then they have a little bit of salt and oil in them. Then I use the Triscuits to dip in hummus that I make at home. I buy a packet of the oil and everything that you need for hummus at the store, I take the no-salt-added beans out of the ... I get these in organic. They have no salt added, they're organic beans.
I put two cans of those in the blender and I put the packet of hummus in that's designed to just be made with the drained beans. The hummus I make is a little watery and thin and doesn't have as much taste, but it's got a lot less added salt and oil and it's got a lot more nutritional value than the hummus you buy at the store.
My wife then makes some of her own hummus for me as well. Then I use the Triscuits or sometimes I'll get bean chips and then I'll dip in the hummus, and then that's my meal. Then I'll use other things, like you can cook beans, you can make beans. There's all kinds of other things you can do.
In fact, one of the most amazing things of changing my diet this way is that this has encouraged more experimentation than I've ever had. I'm eating more kinds of foods, I'm trying more foods, I'm experiencing more kinds of foods than I ever have in my life. It's a lot of fun and the energy. Oh, man.
You see, I've been talking for an hour and 30 minutes straight standing up here. This is first thing in the morning. I just got out of bed 30 minutes before I started making this. I have this level of energy all day every day. It's amazing. After doing things like this all day, I still go out and walk my dogs for an hour.
The nice thing is, when I eat this way, it produces this ridiculous simplicity. Human beings do very well with simplicity because there are so many areas of life that are so complicated, most of us get overwhelmed really easily. You can get overwhelmed very easily just by having too many different decisions.
What I've noticed is a lot of the people I think of as successful, people like Mark Zuckerberg, I don't know how successful he is as a husband or a father, but he's done very good in creating Facebook, what I've noticed, for example, he takes out deciding what clothes to wear. He has all these bland, brownish hoodies and t-shirts he wears, and that's all he wears. That's his whole wardrobe. He's completely removed clothing from things he needs to make decisions about.
For me, I have removed a huge element of decision making and work in my life in food, because all I do I drink my whole smoothie every day and then I try and have some snacks that I keep around the house. Then if I go out to eat with my wife, for example, I ask and order things that are vegan. That way, if I go off to eat and it has some added salt or added oil or added sugar, it'll balance well because what I eat is so good normally that a little bit of added something when I go out to eat then is a treat, or I go across the street to my wife's parents' house and they'll make some food for me and they'll ... For example, last night, they made eggplant Parmesan, but my wife put some eggplant aside for me that had been breaded and baked vegan, and then just had some noodles and marinara sauce on top of it. I had a little plate of that for dinner.
Now the beautiful thing is the simplicity. I don't have to count calories, I don't have to use self-discipline in my eating. The foods I eat have so much dietary fiber, they are so heavy that they fill me up completely. The smoothie this morning that I drank fills me up for two hours. It has very few calories and it provides a burst of energy that's way better than any energy drink, because the energy I get from fruits and vegetables is natural.
What happens with energy drinks, I've had lots of energy drinks throughout my life, you get overclocked. That means you get too energetic. It gets to be uncomfortably energetic. You get to just feel like, "Oh, my God. I'm on edge."
Then, in addition to my diet, the only thing I drink, I drink water and I drink ground up green and black tea. That's all I drink. You see the simplicity that offers?
I don't drink sodas. I gave up drinking sodas. I'm not opposed to having a soda perhaps once a year for a special occasion, but on a daily basis, I don't drink sodas. As a rule, I say no to sodas. "Do you want a soda when we go to the movies?" "No, I'll just have water."
For me, as an alcoholic, that makes it a lot easier as well because everything I drink is all in my cups. For example, if I went to a New Year's Eve party, I take my cup of tea with me and then I have that to drink. No one even asked me if I wanted to drink because I had my own cup of ground up tea with me. No one even offered me a drink at a New Year's Eve party. I don't think everyone there knew I was alcoholic or anything. I think that's just awesome.
I love this way I eat today because it's so simple. It's easy. I don't have to count calories anymore. Everything I eat is designed to run my body at maximum performance.
Now if you haven't been sold, so to speak, on it, I'm simply telling you what I do. You can do whatever you want to, just like I did whatever I wanted to for most of my adult life. I'm doing this today because based on the science, this is the best I've seen in order to get the best results. This is the best I've experienced and the best I've seen based on the research. No other way I've eaten in my life has come close to how good I feel and look today with this.
I've even started not getting sunburned as much. You can't tell from here with the lighting, but this new diet I've been eating has helped me to not get sunburned so easily. Because when you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and all-plant foods, they process the sun, and that's how they get energy. You actually have so much of them in your blood that your blood can actually, on a small scale, perform photosynthesis, that some rays or your sun actually go through and hit the chlorophyll cells in your blood. You can actually photosynthesize inside your body. How cool is that? You eat as many fruits and vegetables I do a day, that happens on a little tiny scale.
Now the beautiful thing when you eat this way, the body fixes all kinds of little problems that it doesn't fix if you're eating all these animal products and all these added sugars and no nutritional value. It's not just about cutting out animal products, it's about filling your diet with things that are loaded with nutrition. That then I don't need to take a vitamin supplement every single day. I don't need to rush to the doctor if I get sick. I know my body has the ability to fix itself. If it temporarily gets out of balance, it'll fix itself.
I had an eye twitch that lasted a couple weeks, and I had faith my body will fix itself. With this fungus, my body will fix itself. This fungus has helped me out a lot. It came along because I needed it. When it's ready to go, it will leave.
I'm not opposed to seeking a doctor's care. If the fungus takes over all my skin, sure, I'm open to going. If it goes crazy, sure, I'm open to going to a doctor, but, by default, I trust my body to take care of itself, because according to the science, when you eat a diet based on whole plant foods, this means, for example, to have almonds instead of almond milk, or almond butter instead of almond milk, where you get the whole food; to have a whole carrot blended up into a smoothie instead of having carrot juice, where most of the nutrition has been removed; to have a whole fruit and vegetable smoothie instead of buying some juice drink that most of the plant's been removed.
According to the science, eating the entire food has much different properties than eating little tiny portions of the food. For example, apparently, you can process added sugar very well if you have a whole strawberry or some kind of whole fruit alongside of it. Your body will process the extra added sugar, say, that was in something sweet like vegan ice cream. If I have a little bit of fruit with the ice cream, my body will process that a lot better and I have a much ... Eating this way ... Oh, my wife says I should continue to mention the benefits more.
Remember all that work I did trying to get in a place where I ended up plateauing at about 195 pounds? I lost 20 more pounds in the seven months I've been on this diet. Meanwhile, I've been walking an hour every single day. I switched to a standing desk because I had so much energy. I wanted to stand up and not sit down all day, so I switched to a standing desk, and after all the other things I did.
Now the way I've lost weight, this means that if I would have started this diet directly from 240 pounds, I could've lost straight down to where I am now at 175. This diet alone, I wouldn't ever had to go through counting calories, I wouldn't ever had to try all those other things.
This is not something unique to me or them, this is just simple knowledge of how the human body works. While the human body technically can process meat, it is designed to eat plants. That's what it's supposed to eat. That's the gas it's supposed to take. It can handle other things.
Here's the analogy that Dr. Greger made in How Not to Die. Eating animal products and food or filling yourself up with foods like white rice, for example, that have been stripped of their nutritional value, eating things that aren't whole plant foods anymore, but drinking something like juice, where most of the plant's actually been removed, or almond milk ... Sure, drinking almond milk is better than drinking cow's milk ... but when you don't eat the very healthiest you can, and especially when you eat things that poison you, like animal products, when you eat these things, it's like bumping your leg on a table.
Picture you're sitting down on the couch, you stand up and you bang your shin hard off the table. Those animal products are kind of ... You're banging your entire inside of your body off the table. You're doing something it doesn't like.
What do most of us do, we just keep going back and sitting on the same spot on the couch, get up and we keep banging our leg today. Then we complain about the table, which the table won't move, the couch won't move, and we want to sit down. We complain about the table and we keep banging our leg against it.
Then what do we do? We find some pills we can take to numb the pain of banging your leg against the table. Then we go to the doctor, we maybe even get surgery to try and protect us and heal the damage that we've suffered banging our leg off the table. The easier solution is to just stop banging your leg off the table, just stop sitting in that same spot, stop standing up in the exact same way, and stop hitting your shin off the table.
From a health standpoint, when you stop essentially hurting the inside of your body with all these animal proteins, there are miracles that happen. According to the data, when you cut out things like animal protein out of your life and you cut out all these added sugars and salts that make you fat, when you eat a whole plant food-based diet, you drastically drop your risk of cancer way more than any of the top cancer drugs.
You also drop your risk of heart disease to nearly nonexistent. Countries that don't eat meat or animal products and that don't have all these added fats and sugars in their diet, their blood pressure never goes up ever. Their blood pressure stays the same their entire life. None of them have heart attacks. If they do, if there's one rare case of a heart attack, it's something extreme or something like a defect that's random or something like that. There's almost no heart disease in countries that eat the way I'm telling you to eat. I'm telling you because that's what I do and because that's what others have suggested to me and because that's what's working.
Not just heart disease, brain disease, depression, diabetes, so many of the diseases you hate and that you might donate and you might fight against, you might post something like, "[F 01:44:52]cancers," your friend dies on Facebook. Eating a whole plant food-based diet will prevent and even reverse many of those. In fact, the diet is so powerful that you can be exposed to all kinds of environmental factors. The diet will almost completely override environmental factors.
Now we get obsessed with all these things, like, "I'm allergic to mold or asbestos or lead," or all these things in the environment. The fact seems to be that your diet is first and what you're exposed to a second. If you eat right, your body will naturally process most of the things in the environment that cause problems.
That means that even if you're around smokers, if you have a good diet, you will minimize the impact other people's smoking has on your body. If you're around things that are toxic, eating this way will minimize their impact on your body. If you could make a pill that produced the results of eating this way, every person on earth would demand to have that pill.
Here's the thing. You might have gotten all the way here, "Okay, Jerry. I've got all this point with you. Why doesn't anyone else tell me this? Why aren't they advertising this everywhere on TV? Why hasn't the government policy shifted to ban meat? Why? Why? Why?"
People, for years, smoked cigarettes. Some people knew they were bad, and yet doctors would prescribe smoking cigarettes to pregnant women to lose weight. A doctor just recently recommended to a friend of the family to eat more red meat to help raise her iron, recommended to a pregnant woman to eat more red meat to raise her levels of iron. That is just about like recommending her to smoke cigarettes. Yet today most of us are aware that smoking cigarettes is toxic to the human body, and yet still a bunch of people smoke.
Now the same transformation is happening with food. A lot of people my age either are starting to eat the way I'm eating or ... And it's not my eating. They're starting to eat the whole plant food-based diet, which is basically human being instruction manual default fuel you put in the body. I hate even saying my way of eating. Eat how I'm sharing here with you. Even if people aren't eating that way, they are aware of the consequences of eating things like meat, of drinking things like sodas.
For me, when I go to the movies and I see advertisements for popcorn slathered in butter, for sodas, for hamburgers, to me, these are all like cigarette commercials the way I see it, and yet I love and understand it's big business. In fact, it's bigger business than you maybe have ever imagined.
Let me explain to you real quick. Would you do this little exercise with me? Would you picture what the world would look like if everyone ate a whole plant food-based diet? I will assist you.
If everyone ate a whole plant food-based diet, nearly all cancer, nearly all heart disease, nearly all diabetes, nearly all overweight, nearly all health problems, so probably about 80% or 90% of persistent health problems, along with probably many acute health problems would disappear. That means 80% to 90% of the beds at hospitals would be unfilled. Are you starting to get ... Just get this picture with me.
All those beef, chicken, all the meat, all the milk, all the companies producing all these animal products would either have to drastically shift to make things you would eat as part of all plant food-based diet or they'd go out of business. Inevitably, tons of huge companies will be put out of business because they simply wouldn't be able to switch in to do something else. The government will lose massive tax revenues from all the health care expenses, from all the food expenses, and a lot of officials would lose their elected positions after having been found to be supporting all these meat and health care industries.
Are you starting to see the devastation this would cause on the whole world economy, not just devastation in a bad way, if even a significant percentage of earth, let's say twice or maybe five times as many people today, started eating a whole plant food-based diet? That would wipe out all starvation across the planet because, according to the data, meat takes so many more resources that you ... For example, water. It takes about 1,000 gallons of water to produce a kilogram or so of carrots. It takes 100,000 gallons of water, that's 100 times as much water, to get that same amount of meat to you.
Now, sure, the water might vary whether it's beef or chicken, but the point is eating animals and even things like cow's milk, keeping animals alive requires an unbelievable amount of resources compared to simply growing foods that can be immediately consumed by a human being. See, cows have to eat and chickens, any kind of meat has to eat a lot throughout its life before you get a hold of it. Then the meat you eat is a small fraction of the whole animal.
For example, if you eat a fish, you're not eating all the eyes and tail and fins, you're eating a small portion of the total fish. That fish has to eat a lot of things throughout its life before you can eat it. All the toxins that that fish eats for its entire life build up, all the ones that aren't purged successfully build up in the meat of the fish, another fish eats it, and then that fish is caught. Then that fish is what you get.
There's this magnification of fact in terms of toxins. Eating something that's an animal product, you are eating all the toxins that animal ate that it could not successfully purge, which is, for some certain types of meat, is an unbelievable amount of toxins.
In fact, I believe these bodies, with proper food and lifestyle changes, can live 150 to 1000 years. Now to live 1000 years, you might need some technological systems, you might need to have had your grandmother or your great grandmother and every single other person eat a whole plant-based diet for their entire life, and then you do the same thing.
Then these bodies are not designed for a specific time period. These bodies can function indefinitely with proper care. The thing is most people don't know the proper care, or even if they do know it, are unable to receive it. There are many places in the world people do know how to eat right and they can't get clean water.
You see, there's an opportunity to do so much better than even is reasonably imagined are possible. I'm aiming at living 150 to 200 years in this body in complete, full health, where I have the similar functionality as I do today. I am hoping to work 50 or 100 years doing what I'm doing today and similar activities both by eating, lifestyle, and then through technological innovations, which are likely to get invented along the way at the rate I'm living.
I'm very grateful that others have courageously shared this information because all the companies and people and systems actively suppress information like this because sick people are profitable. When you're sick, you get afraid, you blindly spend money at the doctor, you blindly throw money away, just like me.
I was a sick alcoholic most of my adult life, I blindly threw my money away at the liquor store, at the bar, on all kinds of food at restaurants to try and make me feel better, at yogurt shops. Then you end up having to go the doctor, take pills, buy supplements. Sick people are fantastically profitable. It's extremely profitable they keep you ignorant and sick.
There's a lot of money that would be lost if even a significant percentage of the planet wakes up in the sense that they're connected, empowered to speak, and they are not sick all the time, because you won't have all these things to sell them. People are healthy, I feel health is my number one value today. I don't need to buy things to change my mood, I don't need to eat things to change my mood.
My eating, from your point of view, might be extremely boring. I buy the same kinds of fruits and vegetables, I eat almost the exact same thing every day. My eating is regimented, it's healthy, it's extremely effective, and it's way cheaper than getting sick and suffering through all the problems with it. It's an absolute one of the biggest miracles I've ever seen in my whole life because of how comprehensive it is. For example, getting sober is a miracle to me, but that's not something that relates to every person; eating does relate to every single person.
I hope I've shared this in the spirit with you of love and service and joy. I hope that I've shared this with the sense that I want you to have the knowledge and motivation to have the very best life possible. I share this with you because I love you. That's why I share this with you and that's why it was shared with me. That's why Dr. Greger wrote the book How Not to Die, that's why the book Whole, The China Study, that's why there's so many of these other people out there who went against the grain, who've, if you think of it in smoking terms, come out years before it's been made official that smoking is bad for you and suggested that people will be better off not smoking.
I'm grateful to have a chance to be among the people serving you that are here to tell you that I love you and this is the best information I found today. I will keep updating it every year because if I can find, for example, if eating only carrots will produce the absolute very best result for my health, I might start eating even more carrots than I already do today.
I am praying today to have an open mind because, as my wife says, your truths have changed a lot in your life. They have. I feel that my truths today produced a much healthier and happier result for me and the people around me.
Would you please think about these things I've shared with you? If you want to have a healthier, happier life today, would you make a decision here with me right now to change the way you eat forever and to change it as the number one value to be truly healthy? Not just healthy for yourself, but I aim to be an example for others that, look, if you want what I have, I'll tell you what I do, and you do it. It's that simple.
If you want to feel good all day every day, you eat how I eat, you exercise how I exercise, you do the kinds of things I do in my life, and you will get the exact same result. You will lose weight, you will get rid of health problems, you will be happy.
My mission is to create happier people. Eating, for me, is one of those things I'm very grateful. I've experienced so much pain and suffering in my life through eating. I'm grateful to have a way of eating today that's simple and effective.
Thank you for being here with me today. I hope you have a wonderful day today. I appreciate you experiencing this with me.
Love,
Jerry Banfield