Eating vegetables is the best way to improve your health. As a dad, you want to make sure that you are keeping your health up so that you can be there for your kids for as long as possible. You want to be able to run along-side your kiddos as they learn to ride a bike, you want to be able to help them move their stuff into their first college dorm. If they have kids of their own you want to be able to take care of the grandchildren and keep up with them as they run across the playground. Think of it as an investment in yourself and your family.
Growing up I was pretty active and healthy. I coasted on this base of health throughout my 20s as I graduated school, started my career, and started my family. As I entered my mid 30s things started to go off the rails, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I remember going into my doctor’s office for my yearly physical and they took some blood for a blood test. In my head I was still my strapping 20 year old self, and I expected my blood to practically have flakes of gold in it. I was surprised when the doctor called me back to tell me that my blood pressure was too high, my BMI was closer to obese than “normal”, my cholesterol was way too high, and my liver enzymes were showing early signs of fatty liver disease. “Look,” he said, “It’s not like your heart is going to pop tomorrow, but if you don’t change your habits, you’re going to start feeling pretty bad in your 40s.”
Thanks to this wake up call, I started researching nutrition, and became convinced that a whole food, plant based diet is the best for health. Homework assignment: Check out How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger for the best compilation of plant based nutrition information and research that I have come across. I dove in and was pretty strict in my diet for a year, and all of my emerging ailments went away. My total cholesterol dropped 50 points, all my bio markers moved in the right direction and into the normal ranges, and I felt better and more healthy than I’ve felt for years.
After about a year I found that my diet was not sustainable, and I slid back into many of my old habits. The next year was a slow reversion to the mean. This was discouraging, but eventually I realized that I needed to make smaller and more incremental steps in the right direction. Instead of overhauling my diet all at once like I did in the previous year, I decided to apply the 80/20 run (80% of the benefits with 20% of the results) and make my diet mostly plant based healthy, but make allowances for the occasional pizza + beer or barbecue plate.
Today I have found a happy sustainable path of plant powered nutrition, but I’d be lying if I told you it was always easy. Maybe you also struggle to keep on the healthful path and recognize some of yourself in the above story. I know we all want to be there for our kids and grandkids. My goal with this site is to develop a community of like-minded dads and form a super team of plant powered hero dads to encourage each other and share our successes.
Want more reasons to go plant based or at least reduce your meat consumption? Check out The Why — Parts II and III.
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