How Not to Die
After Proteinaholic peaked my interest in plants, I decided to read Dr. Michael Greger’s How Not to Die – Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease. By this point we were already eating a lot of lentils because it was the only way I knew, at the time, to get our fiber up. I didn’t realize changes were happening until I got about halfway thru the book… when I realized: “Wait a minute! I’m reading!!”
Now, I know that probably sounds weird—an adult being dazzled by her own literacy, especially one who had already demonstrated a written command of the language by previously writing a book herself. So, no, it wasn’t that I finally learned to read; it was that I was reading without Ritalin.
“Holy shit I can read!” I shouted upstairs to Jason.
You see, despite having a minor in philosophy, I had previously never read a book without being medicated. And since I stopped taking Ritalin years prior (decided a resting pulse under 90 was more important than amphetamine fueled eye-contact), this was shocking. Not only had I been reading, uninterrupted, for more than 90 minutes, I remembered I just finished Proteinaholic. If lentils would resolve this annoying component of my ADHD, what else could plants do?
So I kept reading. To be honest How Not to Die gets a little long-in-the-tooth by the 7th or 8th way you can “not die” by eating more plants. Sorry, spoiler alert—eat more plants is pretty much the message. But since it was my first explicit introduction into the whole-food, plant-based (WFPB) lifestyle, the reputation was probably warranted. This was the science-based information we needed to agree to stop eating meat a home for a while and see what happens.
What happened was, I started feeling way better. Like way! Right up until people started giving me more dairy. Apparently when you stop eating meat in the States, the “polite” thing to so is give you cheese instead. Look at airplane food—which I frequently enjoyed on business trips during this time period—if you don’t want the chicken, they give you cheese lasagna. Yea, so I went from feeling much better on my no-meat, low-dairy diet at home to feeling even worse on the high-dairy, high-travel-stress menu on the road.
Might we be better off just going vegan?
That’s the conversation we had following a grilled oyster bender in New Orleans. As we sat at a vegan café, looked at the delicious breakfast served before us, and basically said “fuck it, let’s give it a try!”
Thanks Greger, you gave us plants.
An Aside About My Mom
Upon hearing that I read a book, my Mom (shocked) demanded I tell her the title. She simply had to know what book managed to capture her ADHD daughter’s attention with such vigor as to have her actually finish it. So she picked up How Not to Die from the library and read it. Mom shared my “belaboring the point” sentiment towards the end, but muscled through anyway.
Unfortunately she didn’t share my enthusiasm for dietary experimentation. Instead I believe her exact words were: “Yeah I read it, but I don’t believe it.” Trust me, I asked *all* the follow up questions. “What do you mean? You always said to eat my veggies… ” and “All the studies are cited, what do you mean you don’t believe it?” and the like.
No luck and huge bummer as it marks a significant change in our food relationship. I remind myself that while Jason and I were ready for change, not everyone is—and they might never be. And that’s okay because we don’t have to agree about food to be family. We still love each other and that’s all that matters.
