Give It Up For Health

Cartoon by Bitstrips It's Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, my favorite American holiday of the year. I have a friend for whom this will be her first Thanksgiving since adopting a whole-food plant-based diet and after talking to her about what was ahead in joining her family at the annual feast it made me think about how food is so tightly wound up in any culture. On Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. it’s all about “the bird”. Without turkey on their Thanksgiving tables, many Americans would not feel that they have “celebrated” Thanksgiving at all. And I know this for a fact. I am a New Zealand-born U.S. citizen. I was 40 before I celebrated my first Thanksgiving eating turkey with some American friends who generously invited me to join them. In 2000 a different friend invited me to join her and some of her friends for Thanksgiving turkey and that became a tradition of taking turns at hosting that lasted 13 years! The others in the group, all American-born, would of course never think

This week marks one year for me on the “whole-food plant-based” diet, or to use Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s name for it, a “nutritarian diet”. I like to think of it as more of a lifestyle than a diet as it’s not just what we eat that has changed, but how we shop, how we cook, what’s in the fridge, and many other things besides. Image via Bistsrips My About page details the big improvement in my health since changing my diet, so rather than go over that, perhaps I’ll share with you what was the easiest thing about changing my diet, and what was the hardest thing. Actually the easiest thing was “just doing it”. I guess I was just so fired up and motivated after reading Joel Fuhrman’s book “Eat to Live” . I’m not sure if the book has the same effect on others as it had on me, but I just couldn't wait to get to the end of it and get on with the show. Reading the book made me just so absolutely convinced that to fix my problem with cholesterol all I had to do was follow his advice on ad