Hi, I ‘m Paula. I’m a dietitian with a passion for plant based eating and healthy living. I started my career as a Clinical Dietitian in a large hospital. Since that time my focus has shifted to my family. My husband applied for life insurance at 23 years old, and we discovered that he had high cholesterol. As a former college basketball player and active person, that came as quite a surprise. We then discovered that he has a family history of early death from Cardiovascular Disease. The first step that we knew to take was to start a cholesterol lowering drug. The drugs lowered his cholesterol but they were still at an elevated level. We always knew that he was in danger of heart disease, but kind of ignored it for about a decade. He used to joke that if he hit the age of 50 he would have done well. We were resigned to the fact that it was something that we couldn’t change. During that time we ate “healthy.” Our diet was chicken, skim milk, lunchmeat… we thought we were making good choices.

We first heard about plant based eating from The Model Health Show podcast by Shawn Stevenson when he interviewed a gentleman named Rich Roll. Rich Roll is a plant based ultra endurance athlete who completely improved his health and athletic performance by adopting a plant based diet. This seemed so weird to us because, of course, “where do you get your protein.” It didn’t take us long to discover the absolute wealth of knowledge on this subject and eventually we sat down and watched Forks over Knives. That settled it. Within a couple of months my husband and I were completely plant based. My husband lost weight, lowered his cholesterol, and we both felt better than ever! That was in June of 2015. Fast forward almost 5 years and we are more committed now than ever. Join me as I show you foods and recipes that our family eats on a daily basis.

I’m NOT as OLD as I Used to Be
by Jeff Blankenship

Thanks to a very important health screening test and a couple of rounds of lifestyle eating behavior changes, I can honestly say that I don’t feel as old as I once felt. My lovely bride Joyce and I just celebrated our 47th wedding anniversary, and judging by how old I feel now, we must have married about 20 years BEFORE I was born (I feel like I am about 25-30 years old).

The health screening test I’m speaking of is called a coronary calcium cat scan. Your family physician will need to give you a prescription to have it done. My family doctor says “it is the best way to see what is going on inside your arteries without actually going inside them like you would with a heart catheterization.” Very few health care insurance companies cover this procedure unless you live in the state of Texas where insurance companies are required by law to reimburse individuals up to $200 to have the test done. However, the price for this screening is not prohibitive since it only cost me about $100 for the scan and maybe another $40 to have the scan analyzed. Occasionally hospitals like University Hospitals in Cleveland Ohio will have some grant money available to where they will perform the scan for free. On with my story…

The coronary calcium cat scan measures the amount of plaque built up in your coronary arteries. This plaque build up is mostly a result of the fats circulating in our arteries due to our affluent lifestyle diet (much more to follow on that subject). Joyce had her scan done in the summer of 2018 and got a score of about 195. The 195 score indicates that she has a “moderate” amount of plaque built up in her arteries. Most scores range from 0-400, with zero being no plaque build up and 400 being that you can be expected to possibly have some type of cardiac event in the next 5 years or so. I wasn’t too worried about getting my test done right away since we ate the same foods and I am much more active than Joyce. When I did get my test in December of 2018, my score was 695 with a 495 score on the right side of my heart! Right away my family doctor put me on a statin drug even though my cholesterol was 184 without a statin, low dose aspirin, and ordered a stress test which shortly led to a heart catheterization and a diagnosis of a coronary artery ectasia. This particular artery disease I had was causing the artery in the lower right side of my heart to enlarge instead of narrow as is the case 95% of the time. The enlarged artery was causing abnormal blood flow in this portion of my heart. Short of replacing this portion of artery, there was no option of a stent to restore normal blood flow. The good news of it is that a heart attack in the area of the heart affected by my enlarged artery is only about 5% chance of being fatal, as opposed to problems on the left side of the heart where the “widow maker” is located.

At this point I now had incentive to step up the “relaxed vegan” diet that Joyce and I had been on since August of 2015, to a full go strict no added oils and fats vegan diet.
I am deeply indebted to our dietitian daughter Paula Evans for all the guidance and encouragement she has given to Joyce and I in implementing our new healthy lifestyle eating habits. Along with Paula’s help I also invested a lot of time in reading good books to learn about the science behind this lifestyle along with many tasty recipes. There are many good books available but I have found these 4 to be my favorites.

These links are a part of the Amazon Affiliate Program. Paulalovesplants.com will receive a small commission of these books are ordered by clicking these links. There will be no additional charge to you and it will help out the page a lot. Thank you!

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. M.D.

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure

The China Study by T.Colin Campbell, PhD and Thomas M. Campbell II

The China Study: Revised and Expanded Edition: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health

Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program For Reversing Heart Disease by Dr. Dean Ornish

Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease: The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery

Breaking The Food Seduction by Neal Barnard, M.D.

Breaking The Food Seduction

The authors of these books are rock stars to me for their leadership and perseverance in promoting healthy eating habits at a time when doing so can put them at odds with traditional eating habits as well as some powerful well funded food industry lobbies.

There are many so called diets out there but very few if any others can claim to not only prevent heart disease but also to reverse it! Make no mistake; this is not fad diet or a temporary weight loss plan. This is a sustainable, lifelong lifestyle change.
I can’t say at this point what the inside of my arteries look like since I haven’t had another heart catheterization. What I can say is that after following Dr. Esselstyn’s eating guidelines for 3 months my cholesterol dropped from 184 (supposedly ok but on my way to a heart attack) to 99. My LDL (bad cholesterol) went from 126 to 44. My HDL (good cholesterol) went from 40 to 41. My family physician was pleased with all these numbers but said he was most impressed that the good cholesterol actually went up while the other numbers dropped so much.

According to Dr. Esselstyn’s findings in his studies he says that for your arterial disease to reverse itself that your total cholesterol needs to be less than 150 and your LDL needs to be less than 70. I was very pleased to see my numbers come down in just 3 months, but that was just the beginning for me.

I was planning on doing a 23 mile rim to rim hike across the Grand Canyon in May of 2019, but I knew I was going to need to loose some weight to be able to do it comfortably. I wasn’t sure how I could achieve this weight loss but found out that by following Dr. Esselstyn’s eating guidelines I was able to loose a total of 50 pounds in 7 months without ever having to be hungry. I was able to eat as much as I felt I wanted to while cutting out the things that I was addicted to eating in the past. It was great for us to use Paula’s insight in many good recipes and sharing of her dishes of food that she had already made to help us find things that work for us.

Joyce was very concerned about my weight loss and where it would end but as it turns out so far I have leveled at minus 50 pounds and have been holding steady at plus or minus 3 pounds for the past year. I didn’t do anything to start or stop the weight loss other than try to follow the guides on fats and oils and eat plant based whole foods.
I can honestly say that I feel healthier now than any time in the last 30 years. I also feel my brain is working better now than it was before this lifestyle change. For the past 2 or 3 years I was having feelings of anxiety or loss of focus sometimes while driving at interstate speeds and passing trucks. It is hard to explain the feeling, but I can say that those feelings are completely gone since shortly after beginning the new eating program. It makes sense because the arteries that are clogging in our hearts also are most likely becoming clogged in our brains as well.

One more positive that I have found is that I have been training a lot in the last 6 months for an ultra event that was to be held in June of 2020. Due to Covid-19 it has been rescheduled for next year. During my training I have been walking increasingly long distances each week leading up to the event’s original scheduled time. During the last 7 weeks of training I have had one walk each week of 27 miles or more. Since March I have logged single day walks of 38, 46, 52 and finally 63miles on June 1st of 2020. The remarkable thing to me is how fast my body recovers after one of these walks. Paula says that many of the top athletes in the world are finding that plant based eating reduces inflammation and speeds recovery time.

I am sure that these kinds of radical eating habit changes aren’t for everyone but I know that it has caused a radical health improvement for me, and It has been so worth it. I feel that I am enjoying a level of health that I didn’t think I would ever see again.

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