Broken Table: My Spiritual Journey From Carnivorous Cowgirl To Plant-based Athlete 482i4p

Broken Table: My Spiritual Journey from Carnivorous Cowgirl to Plant-Based Athlete

Broken Table: My Spiritual Journey from Carnivorous Cowgirl to Plant-Based Athlete 1st Edition Copyright © 2020 Tanya R. Garrett All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-716-49567-0

Introduction

“If you keep kosher, the protagonist of your meal is not you; it is God.” – Mudhouse Sabbath, Lauren Winner

I have a ion for non-fiction, specifically for memoirs and personal stories. To me, nothing helps me to connect to a concept, a fact, or a truth quite so much a walking a journey with someone else in the pages of a book. As a bookworm and an introvert, it makes me feel less alone and more connected. Reading nonfiction lets me know I’m not the only one who’s made the journey. I know I’m not the only one who feels the way I do. That’s why I wrote this book. I hope that as I share my journey, someone out there will find hope and inspiration and maybe even laugh once or twice along the way. I hope that in me maybe you’ll see a little bit of yourself. If you're struggling with some of the same issues I've struggled with, maybe you'll find some comfort in knowing that I've been there too. Maybe you'll find a ive friend in my pages. If not, it’s been therapeutic for me to tell my story and make sense of it all.

Rob Bell often says, “Everything is spiritual.” Many of my other favorite authors say something along the same lines. In recent years, the area of my life where this has become most apparent is in my relationship to food. As a culture, we Americans have become very good at shoveling food in our mouths without much thought or feeling. As a largely-Christian nation, we often point to the Bible as an excuse for our behavior, but while Jesus said that food could not make us clean or unclean, he also said that what’s in our heart does make us clean or unclean (Mark 7:14-23). The fact that we’re consuming without intentionality suggests that all our food is making us unclean. If we’re claiming to be Christians—and I recognize that many of us aren’t—and if our hearts are in the right place and in relationship with Christ, we must at least pay attention to our food choices and be knowledgeable about the ingredients in our food, be

knowledgeable about the true cost of our food. We can't simply consume without thought for how we're affecting others and the world around us and still be the spiritual beings we were meant to be. We were told that what we do to the least of us, we do to Christ, so how our food consumption effects the least of us matters. Really matters.

As Rob Bell also says, “Once you see, you can’t unsee. Once you taste, you can’t untaste.” I understand that so clearly now. I never expected this journey. I certainly didn’t ask for it. Well, maybe I did unintentionally with prayers like, “Whatever your will, help me find it.” Warning: When you pray, be careful! God delivers! In any case, I now can’t unsee, and I can’t untaste. My world is forever changed, and my journey is far from over. I’m learning how every food choice can be a spiritual act, bringing me closer to God and closer to God’s creation or pulling me farther away from God and God's creation. I’m learning the expression “vote your dollars” has to be applied to every aspect of my life if I really want to have an impact. I’m learning that being authentic is harder than it looks and the most critical aspect of a happy, fulfilled life. I'm learning that every choice has an impact on my spiritual life and my spiritual health, so prayerful consideration before making a choice is always the best course of action.

I started this journey as your average red-blooded, meat-eating American. Despite loving my horses, I was a perfectly happy being a city dweller. I didn't dream of owning a big farm in the middle of nowhere. Instead, I dreamed of a small 10-acre place on the edge of town. You know, just enough room for two horses but close enough to Wal-Mart and Kroger and whatever else I might need. Despite loving animals, there was no such thing as a meal without heaping portions of meat and dairy. I didn’t want to know how they made the sausage or the hotdogs, and I didn’t want to know what was in the mac-n-cheese.

Now, I eat a whole food plant based (whole food plant-based) diet with an occasional infusion of pasture-raised eggs, and my husband and I are learning how to grow our own foods. Along the way, we spent two years living in a travel

trailer on a 37-acre homestead on the edge of civilization. Thankfully, we were the only street in town with high speed internet, so I wasn’t completely cut off from city amenities. There was no pizza delivery, but we had coyotes. Now, we live in a house on the edge of town in a new city with just enough land for dogs and a garden and are searching for our perfect country home—something in between a 37-acre and a suburban house. It’s been an unexpected wild ride, but one I wouldn’t change. Not even a little.

It’s important to understand that this isn’t just a journey about food; it’s a journey about identity. Through this, I have had to examine my values and how those values have been reflected in my actions and in how I define myself. This was a journey of defining my relationship to God and by extension God’s creation. It was equally a journey of the heart and a discovery of comion for the whole of God’s creation. I was forced to define my values and then to live those values, stand up for those values, and sacrifice for those values. I just couldn’t call myself a Christian any longer without making some changes in the way I live my life. I had to redefine what it meant to me to be Christian and redefine how I live my life as a Christian, aligning myself more completely with the teachings of the Gospels.

In the middle of this journey, I was interviewed for the position of USA Representative for the Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals. Several questions came up about my dietary choices. I felt interrogated and attacked, but it certainly wasn’t because of anything that was said or asked by the interviewer. The person asking questions was actually very kind and comionate. Being vegan or vegetarian isn’t a requirement for the group, although many are, and she made it clear that it wasn’t an expectation for the USA Representative position either. My discomfort reflected my changing heart and my changing attitudes. It held up a mirror to the cognitive dissonance taking place in my own life. I felt guilty for not having already made the choice to be whole food plant-based, because it was the only choice consistent with my values as a Christian, as a human being. That interview was one of many moments along the way that led to the dietary choices I make now, dietary choices that more appropriately reflect my Christian beliefs and my identity as a protector of God’s creation.

At a recent church event, there were no plant-based options available. I had two choices: eat a non-vegan meal or go hungry. It was an easy choice to go hungry even though the event was a full day event, because my choices are not just for health reasons. My choices are about deeply-held Christian beliefs that I cannot abandon because of a little—or a lot of—personal discomfort. Jesus allowed himself to be crucified for his beliefs, so going hungry for a few hours hardly even seems like a sacrifice in comparison. It’s an ongoing struggle not just to keep my own convictions but also to communicate those convictions to others in a loving, comionate way that educates rather than trying to make others feel guilty, in a way that connects rather than alienates.

I have lost friends over the last few years, people who once shared my views but who cannot understand the ways I’ve changed. They feel betrayed by who I’ve become. Friends who grew up in the meat, egg, and dairy industries who cannot understand how I once ed them and now advocate against them. Friends who genuinely believe that animal agriculture is the only way to feed the world just as I once did. I understand their disconnect, but I can’t go back. I am not who I was, and I cannot be that person again. I wish they were able to take the journey I did or at least love me despite my new outlook, but I had to choose my relationship to God over my relationships with them. Of course, God provided new avenues of that have helped me on my new path, but the losses still hurt. Letting go of people you care about is hard, even when you’re doing it for all the right reasons.

As with all journeys of growth, this journey began with loss and pain, but as I moved through the pain, I found a new level of understanding and connection. The broken cracks let God in and led me to a place of greater peace and spiritual awareness. The journey continues a cycle of death and resurrection; it continues to surprise me, hurt me, and delight me. I continue to look forward to what God has in store for me next, while being just a little (ok, maybe a lot) terrified that God has called me to this and that the Holy Spirit will guide my next words, experiences, actions, etc. This journey has been—and continues to be—one leap of faith after another, faith in God and faith in myself.

In the Jewish tradition, every table is an altar. That’s not that different from saving everything is spiritual, but the Jewish perception of every table as an altar is particularly relevant to my journey. I am now every much aware of what I want to serve on my altar in Thanksgiving to God and all God has provided to me and my family. I have learned that what God has provided and what is good and nutritious for me is also good for the animals and the environment. Turns out God’s plan is smarter than us. When Jesus tell Christians not to worry, because God will provide for us, he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. God’s great creation is perfectly capable of giving us a beautiful, nutritious, life-giving altar provided we respect and love it in return. My journey has evolved into a calling to help others connect to God through God’s creation by empowered, intentional eating. My journey has not only changed what I eat and where I live but has forced a career change from a safe, desk jockey IT job to a life as an author, speaker, and health coach.

I want to take a minute to talk about references to God and Christianity in this book. First, understand that I don’t believe in a God of violence or exclusion. I don’t believe that the God that created and loves us all would exclude any of us. I don’t believe in a God that needed a blood sacrifice to redeem us, because we’re all born bad. I believe God is love and the creative force behind all creation. Likewise, I don’t believe that the teachings of Jesus were intended to separate us into a group of those going to heaven and those going to hell. I believe Jesus was trying to teach us how to be human and how to make heaven here on earth. Of course, all of this is a topic for another book! But I’m telling you this, because I don’t want you to stop reading because of the Bible references. Bear with me. For centuries, humankind has been trying to put language to spiritual things, and the best we can do is metaphor. For me, I use the language of Christianity, because it’s the only language I have. If you aren’t Christian, please afford me the grace and latitude to read on. I think you’ll find that whatever your faith is, you’ll find that the principles I reference to be universal human principles.

Another note I need to make before we dig in… You’ll find I used the term

plant based rather than vegan. There are thress reasons for this. First, the vegan movement of the late twentieth century often conjures up images of PETA and other animal rights advocates blowing up labs where animal testing took place or throwing blood on unsuspecting fur wearers. I’m not that nor am I advocating for that. I still ride my horse in a leather saddle and wear a vintage leather motorcycle jacket. I don’t use the term animal rights but rather animal welfare. There will always be a percentage of the population that eats meat, and I’m ok with that. I just want those animals to have a decent quality of life, and I don’t want people’s meat consumption to be the reason they die early after years of painful, chronic disease. The second reason is health. Oreos are vegan, but that doesn’t mean they’re healthy. The world has seen plenty of fast food vegans who are anything but healthy, which is why I distinguish my diet as whole food plantbased rather than vegan. Finally, a whole food plant-based diet does allow for the consumption of a small (Some say 10%. Others say 5%.) amount of animal products. I personally choose to add a small amount of pasture-raised eggs to my diet.

So… I hope you’ll take this ride with me and find something useful in the journey.

Chapter One: Raised by the Marlboro Man

In my first memory of my dad, I’m standing in the driveway of my childhood home on Park Street in Attleboro, Massachusetts during the blizzard of 1978. I being bundled up so much I could barely move, my arms and legs wrapped in a puffy snowsuit. My dad had been shoveling snow from the driveway and digging out the family cars. The whole world had gone white, but there was my dad, a towering, brown, furry figure holding my younger brother, who—like me—was bundled up like the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man. I waddled around the freshly shoveled driveway surrounded by walls of snow confident that I was safe in the presence of my big, strong dad. Standing next to him, he seemed like a giant to me. He was the essence of American masculinity embodied in the man I called Daddy.

My hometown is a pretty typical middle-to-working class city in suburban Massachusetts. I grew up in the seventies and eighties, so there were a ton of new 3-bedroom, 1- to 2-bathroom ranches and raised ranches cropping up everywhere when I was small. Our home looked much like any other home in the area except that our house had been built at the end of a private driveway next to my Aunt Sue and Uncle Steve's raised ranch and kitty corner to our grandparent's raised ranch. Across the street was an odd shack. The resident was a descendant of the previous landowners; he took up squatter's rights on the land before it was sold to a developer and had a job delivering papers for the local newspaper The Sun Chronicle. Flash, as many of the area residents called him, could occasionally be seen heading out to the woods to hunt with his black lab. My dad fit in our town about as well as that rundown little homemade shack fit on that working-class suburban street.

Attleboro wasn't a town people move to, at least not normally. Most of the people who live in Attleboro have been there—or in the general area—for three generations or more. Many of the town’s residents can trace their ancestry back

to the 17th century. In our Portuguese Catholic community, everyone came from farmers or fisherman and worked at any number of the jewelry and manufacturing businesses in town. They wore working-class clothes from Sears and J.C. Penny. They worked long factory hours and saved money to send their children to college, so their children could have a better life than they did, just as their immigrant parents had worked hard to give them a better life. They were exactly what you would expect from Baby Boomers living the suburban American dream in their cookie-cutter houses in cookie-cutter subdivisions.

Having grown up in the expansive, sparsely populated Garfield County, Colorado, my Dad was the Marlboro man in a suit. He worked as a Database in Boston and dressed for the job in beautifully tailored suits, but his suits were always topped off by a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, even when he worked at IBM where unconventional accessories were frowned upon. In the winter, his outfit was covered by a heavy sheepskin coat, and the cowboy hat was replaced by a thick fur hat. You could easily imagine him riding out to tend to cattle in the middle of a blizzard—even when he was wearing an expensive suit. From my earliest memories, his skin had that weathered look that only harsh mountain sun and wind could produce. When I was in high school, his cowboy persona was exacerbated by his white '66 Cadillac; during a time when everyone else's car had gotten smaller and more fuel efficient, my Dad's car looked like something that should have had bull horns protruding from the hood. You half expected Boss Hog to step out of the driver's seat when he pulled up—a look that would have been completed by our family Basset Hound.

His clothes and car were only part of the cowboy persona. Saturdays were spent working hard in the yard or on projects in the house, projects other suburban residents paid people to do. His cowboy nature wouldn’t allow him to pay for services he could complete himself, even if he had to buy a book to learn how to do it. His basement library had a shelf dedicated to How-To books, ranging in topics from plumbing to rebuilding a transmission. He also wasn’t one to go to the doctor unless he couldn’t get out of bed. He was too tough to ask for help when there was a chance he could heal on his own. I one incident when my mother had to force my dad to go to the ER. He cut his thumb pretty much in half while cutting vinyl siding. He told her he had it under control, but

she insisted he go to the hospital for stitches. He had followed his dad's wish to chase an easier, white collar life, but he tenaciously held on to the cowboy roots that set him apart from his peers.

The thing I most—and miss most—about my dad were his great big, warm hugs that made you feel more loved than anything in the world, the kind of hugs where you were wrapped up in safe, strong arms. To this day, his hugs are one of the things his children, grandchildren, and friends most about him. He was often hard to get along with and could be very harsh in his criticisms, but when times were tough, you could always count on him for a hug —a genuine expression of love that made everything better. When his faults made him a hard man to love, his hugs made up the difference. His hugs said what he couldn't. His hugs were the best. In fact, it’s one of the few things about my dad that I looked for—and found—in a spouse.

He was also one of those people who had a hundred different laughs, like people who can make “Really” have a hundred different meanings. One laugh seemed to come from his toes and make everyone around him laugh. Another laugh came with a twinkle in his eye that let you know he was planning something mischievous; he was well known for his pranks and practical jokes. One laugh let you know you had just said the wrong thing, and he was MAD. Another laugh let you know you he didn't believe a word you were saying. (We heard that one a lot as teenagers!) He had more laughs than most people have facial expressions, and he could say more with a chuckle than most people do with 1,000 words.

Some of my fondest memories of my dad were hearing stories about growing up on a cattle ranch. I loved pouring over pictures of him and my grandfather and asking my dad to tell me about the horses they were riding. I loved listening to him tell me about driving cattle from winter grazing lands to summer grazing lands in the spring, heading out on fresh ponies and coming back dirty and tired. He would laugh as he told me ing cow patties for pillows and how there was always one person who leaned back into a patty that wasn’t quite dry. I

would beg him over and over again to tell me about my grandfather's horse Penny and his horse Buttons. In fact, my daughter and I named our horses after their horses. He was a great storyteller, and in his lap his childhood and the family ranch came to life. I could close my eyes and see the horses, the cattle, and the cowboys as clearly as most kids could imagine the worlds of their favorite book. I could smell the crisp air, the leather tack, and the animals.

I spent many, many hours fantasizing that instead of selling the ranch and sending my Dad off to college, my grandparents kept the homestead and handed it down to my Dad and me. I learned about my grandfather's brand, which would have become mine. I spent hours learning about how to start horses the way my grandfather had. I dreamed about what it would have been like to spend my days riding my horse, watching over 800 acres of land, and sorting out our cattle from the neighbors based on brands and ear tags. In my head, it was the perfect life. Simple and beautiful. A rancher's life was my blissful childhood dream the way other little girls dreamed of being Snow White or Cinderella. In my childhood fantasies, I lived in jeans and cowboy boots far away from the suburban life to which I was accustomed. I didn’t think much about what would happen to the steers I was fantasizing about raising.

Growing up, my dad and I would head to the local country store once a month where my Dad would instruct the butcher in how to cut his side of beef. I was never bothered by the sight of skinned cows hanging on a hook or by the faint smell of blood and dead flesh. At least if I did, I don't . They weren’t cows. They weren’t dead animal flesh. They were food. My dad taught me how to maximize the cuts of meat to get the most out of the side of beef. I learned which cuts of meat were best for which dishes. I learned how to cook just about every cut of beef you could think of. I learned to look for top quality meats and for stores where I could get local, grass fed beef. Even my husband will occasionally it that he didn’t like steak until he met me, and I taught him how to find and cook the tastiest cuts of meat.

Until recently, my favorite dish was fried steaks, which we made with cube

steaks. I loved to help my Dad prepare the breading and get my hands dirty breading the meat. I loved watching the juices come up through the breading as the steak cooked. Some of my happiest memories with my Dad involved steak or ground beef. I can still the first time I cooked them myself, with his supervision of course. The smell of black pepper and dead flesh filled the room. The blood from the meat made the flour stick to my fingers. I how proud my dad was that I had cooked a fried steak just like his. I thought about him and that day every time I cooked fried steaks.

For most of my life, I would have classified vegans as extremists in the same category as animal rights activists who blow up buildings in the name of saving animals or Pro-Life protesters who blow up abortion clinics. They were leftwing nut jobs. They were bleeding heart liberals with no grip on reality. What would we do with cows if people stopped wearing leather, drinking milk, and eating beef? There wouldn’t be any more cows, right? Who wants stinky, stupid animals with giant cat tongues if you can’t eat them and wear them? I thought their moral arguments were ridiculous; God made us to be at the top of the food chain and eat other animals. As for health concerns, healthy people have been eating meat for centuries without a problem, right? Besides, I loved fruits and vegetables and included them in every meal. My diet was substantially healthier than most, or so I thought. Why listen to those crazy vegans? Why reconsider what Americans had been doing for centuries?

The worst part about those crazy vegans? They never seemed to stop talking about why every venue should have vegan options and why everyone should consider becoming vegan. They chatted on and on about the immorality of eating animal flesh and raising animals for the sole purpose of eating them. They actually believe that humans weren’t made to eat meat, that it was unnatural and unnecessary to eat animal products. Seriously??? We are omnivores, right??? We’ve always eaten other animals to survive. More importantly, why couldn’t they just live and let live? If they wanted to eat like rabbits, that’s their choice, but why are they so hell bent on trying to force others to agree with them? Isn’t this a free country? Why do they need to push their lifestyle on everyone else? What gives them the right to tell other people how to live and what to eat?

Besides, there was absolutely no way I could have seen what my Grandpa Noren did for a living as cruel. He certainly wasn't a perfect man, but he was a good man, a man who did a lot of good in his community. He served as county commissioner of Garfield County, Colorado for over a decade. He created a county work program that allowed people who were out of work to do work for the county in exchange for food and essentials. He looked after his neighbors, he took care of his family, and he cared about his livestock. Before my Dad ed, we planned a trip to Colorado. In planning, I reached out to people at the county offices. Several ed knowing my grandfather when they were children and shared stories about how much they loved and ired him. This was not a man who would commit acts of cruelty. He just wasn't, and there was no way any vegan could convince me otherwise.

I couldn't believe it of my Dad either. Until my teen years, my Dad was my hero, and I was daddy’s little girl—a relationship only another daddy’s girl could really understand. There wasn't anyone in the world I wanted to be like more than my Dad. If there was one thing I knew about my Dad, I knew he loved cows. My grandfather—like his father—loved the horses, but my Dad loved the cows. White-faced Herefords to be exact. He could spend hours expounding on how hardy they were and how smart they were. I'll be honest. I've never met a smart cow, so I'm not sure what he saw in them, but he loved them dearly. He was very particular about where he bought his meat, because he though feedlots were cruel and unnecessary. He would go on and on about how we shouldn't be feeding corn to cows. It wasn't natural and just gave them gas and stomach pains. This was not a man that would hurt a cow. He wouldn't hurt a cow any more than I would hurt a dog.

As I got older, my relationship with my Dad became strained and complicated, as many child-parent relationships do. His tough exterior kept me at an emotional distance and left me feeling judged and alone. But his approval still meant everything to me, and I’m sure my Dad’s approval played no small part in my attitudes toward my diet and towards people who didn’t eat a standard American diet. He was a carnivore and proud of it. It was directly tied to his

masculinity and his identity as an American cowboy. I defined myself within that framework as his tough cowgirl, even when our relationship wasn’t the best. Tough people eat meat, red meat. They eat it barely cooked. It’s the American thing to do. He would have seen it as an insult to his heritage and to our family to make any other choice. This was not just preference; this was who he was, who we were as a family. I was Daddy’s little girl, so how could I define myself as anything other than a carnivore? It took significant emotional and physical pain for anything else to even be a consideration. In fact, it took a lot of pain for me to let go of the tough little cowgirl who adored her cowboy daddy. For my Dad, even pain and threats to his life couldn’t stop him from eating red meat. In large quantities.

One of my family's favorite stories about me centered on these cheeseburgers that came from a little bar in downtown Attleboro called the Park Tavern. The Park Tavern was a men's only bar and had the best burgers in town. They were half-pound burgers with everything on them from Canadian bacon to onions and pickles. You know… the works. They were huge. One Saturday, I came home from riding my horse dirty and exhausted. My parents had decided to buy dinner at The Park Tavern. I had missed dinner, but there were two leftover burgers in the refrigerator. On my way in the door, I asked my mom what was for dinner. She said I could grab a burger in the fridge. I saw that there were two. My mother was in her bedroom. Between my walking in the door and my mother making her way to the kitchen to offer to split the second burger with me, I had already eaten both burgers. I earned a new nickname that day: Hoover.

My husband likes to tell a similar story about one of our dates in the first month we were dating. I can't where we were headed, but we stopped at Sonic to grab a bite to eat on the way. He ordered the chicken strip dinner, and I ordered a bacon cheeseburger with cheesy tots. The way he tells it, we were five minutes into our meal when I started eating my tots. He looked over to see what had happened to the burger I was eating and didn't see it. He swears that when he asked me where my burger was, I sheepishly replied, "I ate it." Of course, I argue that we had been there for a good ten minutes and that I was eating while he was talking. In any case, he laughed when I ate my burger in less time than it took him to eat two chicken strips. He was refreshed to be with a woman who

would eat a big burger in that short of time and wasn't afraid to do it in front of a man. Eating large quantities of meat was part of how I was defined by my family and by myself for most of my life.

No less significant was my reputation as a cheese hound. My daughter and I used to joke that we had never met a cheese we didn’t like. Every vegetable received a heaping helping of cheese on top, as did any side. Fries, tots, broccoli. Didn’t matter. Everything got cheese on top. Other dairy products were just as popular. My husband used two gallons of milk a week. We used a pound of butter a week. Ice cream, sour cream, or whipped cream could never be kept in stock, because there was always someone using half the container for a new recipe or a favorite dessert. Nearly every breakfast and at least two dinners a week included eggs of some variety. More than two thirds of our weekly grocery budget went toward meat, dairy, and eggs. All cage free, organic, grass fed, etc. The carnistic ethos I grew up with persisted when I had a home and a family of my own. It defined the next generation just as much as the previous generation.

Chapter Two: Facing the C Word

The first painful step in my journey happened when I was a 28-year-old single mother trying to put myself through college. I had moved back in my parent's house to try and save money and adjust my budget from a full-time working mom to a part-time worker/part-time student. With the loss of my full-time employment came the loss of my health insurance, so I went in for my yearly checkup more than a few months late. I had to save the money to cover the three hundred dollars in doctor and lab fees before going in. Instead of getting the usual postcard that everything was ok, I received a message from the nurse that I needed to call the office. Everyone knows that when your doctor requires you to call or visit for results something's wrong, but I was a young, healthy woman, so I didn't give it much thought and called back as soon as possible.

When I spoke to my OB/GYN, he informed me as gently as possible that the results of my pap smear were irregular and that I needed to set up an appointment for a biopsy. I’m sure most people start with denial, but I went straight to panic. The word biopsy meant the possibility of cancer. So many of my family had already died from cancer. Of my great grandparent’s fourteen children, all but three of them died of cancer. I had recently watched my cousin—a healthy thirty-something—fight colon cancer. (He later died at 40 from a second battle with cancer.) I had a 28-year-old cousin who died from leukemia, leaving behind 4 small children. I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to leave behind my daughter. I certainly couldn’t trust her alcoholic father to be a stable influence in her life, and my husband and I weren’t married yet, so he wouldn’t have any claim to custody. I was terrified for myself and even more terrified for my daughter. In my head, I knew I was being irrational, but in my heart, I wanted to avoid the biopsy, so I didn’t have to know. I was already convinced that I had cancer and was kind of like a trapped rat searching for a way out.

My husband, who was my boyfriend of a year at the time, drove me to the biopsy. I it like something you see through a glass of water. To keep from going crazy, I disconnected. I only half-listened and was only half-present. I my husband's warm hand holding mine. I the cold stirrups. I feeling mild pain during the procedure. The rest is hazy at best. I don't the drive there, the waiting room, or the drive home. I don’t the conversation with the doctor either before or after. I mostly just feeling numb. Thankfully, my husband listened carefully to the doctor and the nurse and could fill me in on the important facts later. I don’t know what I would have done without him. He held me together and carried me through.

The biopsy didn’t help my fears. The results weren’t good. Pre-cancerous cells in my cervix. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear anything the doctor said after the word “pre-cancerous.” I was headed to surgery, but only after several weeks of nightmares. In addition to being sick, I was uninsured. I had been using the health care clinic on campus for as many of my needs as possible and used the Health Department for my daughter’s healthcare needs. Great for wellness care or minor illness and injuries, but neither place could perform the procedure I needed. The hospital wouldn’t work out a payment plan without an eighteenhundred-dollar deposit, which I didn’t have. I was lucky to have eighteen dollars in my checking . I had more than one breakdown during that week trying to figure out how I would pay for the only way to save my life.

I was desperate and didn't know what to do, but my wonderful husband did as he always does when I fall apart. He took charge and made phone call after phone call. He was going to make this happen for me. He was as determined not to lose me as I was not to leave my daughter behind. After two days, he ended up on the phone with a kind social worker who informed him that the taxpayers of Tennessee approved a Medicaid program that provides free health insurance to people suffering from cancer. The only thing I wanted more than to not take a handout was to get the cancer out of my body. I wanted to be there when my baby girl graduated high school, got married, and had a child of her own. We had to spend a day running around from state office to state office completing paperwork, but when it was done, my surgery was scheduled. I was still terrified,

but at least I could breathe again. At least there was an option. There was hope.

The surgery went well. They got everything. It was the most invasive surgery possible for cervical cancer, but it was over. In the short few weeks between the biopsy and surgery, the cells developed from pre-cancerous cells to cancerous cells. If I had waited much longer to go in for my yearly checkup, I may not have survived—a difficult realization for a single mother. I tried to be grateful that things went well and that I was on the road to recovery, but I had a hard time shaking the knowledge that my body had developed cancer so quickly. It's hard to explain what it feels like to know that in your late twenties your own body can't take care of itself and that had things gone just a little differently, your child would be alone. I made my child one promise the day she was born; I promised her that I would always have her back. I could have easily broken that promise and that didn't sit well with me. In fact, it horrified me. I just couldn’t live with it. Things had to change.

Moving forward I would have follow-up appointments every three months for a year or until I had at least two regular pap smears. I would then have follow-up appointments every six month for two years or until I had two regular pap smears. It wasn’t a mastectomy, but it was still pretty much every woman’s worst nightmare. For most women, there's nothing we dread more than our annual trip to our OB/GYN, and I would now have to visit four times a year. I completely understood that it was not optional. It was truly a matter of life and death, but it sucked. I hated the situation. I hated my OB/GYN. I hated the virus that caused the cancer cells. I hated my own body for putting me in this situation. I hated the world and everyone in it. I was angrier than I’d ever been or ever imagined I could be.

I had two and a half years of appointments every three months, and I never had a normal result. Not once. Finally, I was told that I need a surgical biopsy. They were concerned with some scar tissue that had developed and wanted to proactively ensure that if there were cancer cells they would be removed. I had read the statistics. Less than half of one percent of woman ever need additional

treatment for cervical cancer. I had already been living in fear for nearly three years, and I was going to be facing surgery… again. I broke down in tears right there on the phone with my doctor. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. Three years of fear and anger transformed instantly into despair and desperation. I begged my doctor for answers. Thankfully, he was patient and understanding, but his answers surprised me. Despite everything I had heard about cancer being primarily genetic, he informed me that in his experience reoccurrence was largely a function of a woman’s immune system. Most women’s bodies can quickly get control of the cancerous cells, but in some cases, a woman’s immune system just isn’t equipped to fight it.

I still didn’t understand why this was happening to me. I was—or so I thought— a healthy thirty-one-year old woman. Why would my immune system not be able to fight this? If it wasn’t genetic, then why were so many people in my family dying from cancer? What else did we have in common? I was confused and frustrated and had a million more questions. I didn’t know what I could do to fight back, and I was tired of feeling helpless, angry, and afraid. I went through the second surgery, which also went well, and I became obsessed with learning everything I could about cancer—its causes and possible cures. I was NOT going through this again, and I was NOT going to be another member of my family to die a slow, painful death from cancer. I was going to figure this out. I was angry, and I was on a mission. No more cancer. No more surgeries. No more fearing for my life. No more wondering if my daughter was going to grow up without a mother. I was done. I was going to fight back with everything I had.

What I learned was shocking. As it turns out, cancer cells are a normal part of our bodies. In fact, they help women’s bodies reinforce their uterine wall during the early stages of pregnancy. Cancer has always existed. The reason it’s exploded in the last 50 years is directly related to what we eat. Our food sources are literally killing us. Our diets in the last 50 years have become increasingly processed, which means nearly everything we eat is loaded with sugar, and sugar feeds cancer. When I gave up full-time employment to go back to college, we made massive cuts to our expenses, and our diet changed to include a lot of mac and cheese, hot dogs, spaghetti, and tuna fish. Since processed meats are a Group 1 carcinogen, half our diet was literally giving us cancer. Since most

processed foods contain some form of sugar as a preservative, the other half of our diet was feeding the cancer. What bothered me the most wasn’t the damage my husband and I were doing to ourselves but the damage we were doing to our children by feeding them a diet of processed garbage.

I can’t even begin to describe the guilt I felt when I realized how horribly we were feeding our children. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t like we were feeding them Oreos and candy for dinner. We “cooked” every night, but the things we were cooking were processed junk, and we didn‘t know it. In fact, we weren’t really cooking, we were just heating and mixing processed chemical mixtures. Everything had some element of real food but really had more chemicals and preservatives than actual food. We were shortening our kids' lives, and we didn’t have any idea.

At the time, my husband and I weren’t married, so during the week, it was just my daughter Kelsey, but on the weekends, we were with my husband and his three daughters. I thought we were doing the best we could given that we both working students trying to raise kids, but we were being deceived into thinking we were feeding our kids healthy foods. We should have been reading labels and making those decisions for ourselves, but we were trusting corporations and government agencies to put healthy foods on the shelves of our grocery stores. Like most parents, we were unknowingly sacrificing our children’s health for the sake of convenience and cost.

Sadly, I discovered that the sugar free, natural alternatives weren’t substantially more expensive than the sugar-laden mainstream options. Everyone has been so programmed to think that natural, healthy cooking is so much more expensive, but I was finding out that health cooking wasn’t expensive at all. In most cases, it is cheaper to make things from scratch. In some cases, the cost was almost half as much. Most of the time, we could make batches of food from scratch on the weekends and have healthy leftovers for the busy week ahead. It required a little more work and planning on our part, but it’s amazing how motivating feeling like a bad mother can be. I was determined to do a better job for our children.

Chapter Three: Making Sense of Death

In August of 2011, my Dad was itted to the VA Hospital in Nashville. He was having another heart attack. Over the years, he had survived three heart attacks and surgery for an aortic aneurism. In each case, the doctors said he shouldn’t have survived; it was a miracle he was still with us. The doctors found a blockage, but because of the stint from the aortic aneurism surgery, they couldn’t put him on a heart pump and perform standard by surgery. The surgery itself would kill him. They called in a high-risk surgical specialist, who told us there was nothing he could do. In addition to his previous surgeries and heart problems, he had a blood disease that had seriously compromised his immune system. All the doctors agreed that it was time to call my brother and sister in Massachusetts, so they could come to Nashville and say good-bye.

We made tear-filled phone calls. Children and grandchildren drove in from Massachusetts. We spent several days in the hospital taking turns spending as much time with him as possible. We said everything we could. We cried and hugged. It was a difficult, emotional time for the whole family. For a few days, time seemed to stand still while our hearts broke in the CICU waiting room. My father wasn’t an easy man, but he was a deeply loved man, and none of us were ready to say good-bye. When he was taken off the machines, we were supposed to lose him. We had been told that his heart could no longer beat on its own, but by the Grace of God, he walked out of the hospital a week later. What was supposed to be our last few days with him turned into a second chance, which was nothing less than a miracle.

In the hours before they took him off the heart pump, our priest and a family friend from church prayed over him. I had the honor of being present during those prayers. When I’m asked how I know there’s a God, that time is one of the moments I point to. Battle and Donna called God to be with us, and all of us felt God’s healing presence. God was with us, and God granted us more time. God

healed my father enough that day that he could go home and spend the next fourteen months with his wife, children, and grandchildren, doing and saying anything left undone or unsaid. God granted us enough time to break down our defenses and to let each other in.

Sadly, the next fourteen months also involved regular visits to the VA for infusions of blood and plasma and regular ambulance trips to the ER. His trips to the ER became so regular that the EMTs knew who he was and where to take him. Because of his condition, he wasn’t supposed to go the nearest hospital, which was a mere 5 minutes away. Instead, he had to be transported to the VA in Nashville. During that time, the strong, strapping cowboy I had grown up with withered away pound by pound until he was a frail old man I barely recognized. Every phone call meant a trip to the hospital, because we never really knew if this would be the last visit. For over a year, we lived in fear that this trip would be the last one, the last time we say our good-byes. The silver lining was that we said all that had previously been unsaid. For the first time in my Dad’s life, his guard was down, and I was able to know his heart. Since any day could be his last, we left nothing unsaid and nothing undone.

During those fourteen months, he and I had long talks about being a parent, about what it meant to have a home. We talked about God, Jesus, the Gospels, the Trinity. We talked about happy memories and worked through some of the bad ones. Growing up, my Dad had always been very hard and critical. Very little got through his tough exterior. During the last year of his life, I had a chance to meet the man underneath, the deeply wounded, frightened man who pushed everyone away, so he couldn’t get hurt. I understood him for the first time in my life. I had always loved my Dad, but the last year with him was different. I was able to love him exactly as he was rather than wishing he was the hero of my early childhood or wishing he was more like my friends’ dads. We hadn’t been close since I was a teenager, but we were close again, which made losing him so much more painful.

In October 2012, he made his last trip to the emergency room. I

vividly our last visit with him. My daughter was sitting on my lap in the one chair in the room. We watched my Dad sleeping. He would periodically stop breathing and then gasp for air. He had a look of pain on his face. Neither Kelsey nor I spoke. We were heartbroken watching my big, strong father look small and pained in that hospital bed. I was choking back tears trying to be strong for Kelsey, but I could barely breathe past the crushing pain in my chest. I couldn’t believe that we were there… again. Only this time, there would be no miracle. This time we would have to say goodbye and let go. This time would be the last time.

When he woke up, he wasn’t happy to see us; he wanted my mother. I choking back the desire to beg him to let us stay, because I wanted more time. Instead, I assured him that we would go get my mother from the waiting room. I knew he needed her more than he needed me, and this wasn’t about me, but I didn’t want to give up any more time with him. My tears let loose as I walked back to waiting room, and they continued almost non-stop for the next few days. We spent the rest of our visit that night in the ER waiting room where I asked God to let him stop suffering. I wasn’t ready to say good-bye, but I couldn’t take watching him suffer anymore. It was just too much. We all needed peace. More than anything, he needed peace.

That night, I arranged with my work and Kelsey’s school for Kelsey and me to be at the hospital the next day. I knew in my heart that this was the last trip to the hospital. He wasn't coming home this time. Thankfully, I was doing contract work at the time, and my boss was a terrific human being who was more than happy to accommodate my schedule. Unfortunately, by the time we made it to the hospital that morning, we had already missed my dad's last conscious moments. The brief conversation in the ER the night before was our last. Just before we arrived, they cleared his hospital room, so he could use the restroom. He ed out and never woke up again. We were there when he finally left his world, which was one of the hardest moments of my life. By the time he was gone, I had finally accepted my dad for exactly who he was, and I was able to love him without reservation. I also knew that he was proud of me and that he loved me—something I hadn't known for the first thirty-seven years of my life. His last fourteen months were a tremendous gift that left a deep hole in my life

and in my heart.

In the wake of his death, I reached out to my Dad's two oldest sons from his first marriage: my half-brothers Steven and John. Steven and I had a rocky, on-againoff-again relationship. He was very much like my Dad, and he was still very angry about the way my Dad treated him after his parents divorced. Much like our Dad, Steven had a tough childhood that prevented him from maintaining close personal relationships. We would get close, and then he would pull away. I wouldn’t hear from him for a few months, and then he would pop back in my life as if not a day had ed.

I knew how hard it was for him to let go of the pain and to love me, because in his heart our Dad had left him and stayed with me, so I tried to just love him when he would let me. I never asked for apologies or explanations; I just enjoyed the time we had together. After Steven married his third wife, things changed. He disappeared from my life for over twenty years. I sent letters and emails and made phone calls, but everything went unanswered.

After my Dad ed, I emailed Steven, and to my surprised, he emailed me back. We picked up where we had left almost twenty years before, but this time was different. Steven opened up about why he had always pulled away and why he had disappeared for so long. There were long emails back and forth itting our fears and working out the things that had always kept us apart. We talked about our faith, our children, and our grandchildren. We talked about how much it meant to both of us to be in each other's lives again. It made the pain of losing my Dad easier. It didn’t fill the hole exactly; it just made it more bearable.

I had my big brother back. He was one of the few people in the world that really understood me—my values, my dreams, and all my darkest secrets. Next to my husband, he was my best friend. Getting an email or a call from him made the world brighter, kinder. I never understood how we could spend time apart, but we had always been kind of like magnets, either pushing each other away or

completely stuck together.

Unbelievably, just nine months later, I got a call from Steven that he was in the hospital. He was cheerful and said it wasn't anything serious, but something in his voice scared the hell out of me. As the news came over the next few days, I was in shock. What he had been told was a simply thyroid problem was in fact fifth stage thyroid cancer. Once again, I was facing the loss of someone close to me at the hand of cancer. I vacillated between being angry and being in denial. I just couldn't accept that I would lose him too. After finally coming to with our Dad's parenting mistakes, we were close again, and now I was losing him. I had a trip to Kentucky Horse Park planned with friends, but I canceled it, so my husband and I could go visit Steven in Virginia. I knew every minute of that trip that it would be the last time I would ever see him. It was one of the most painful and special weekends of my life.

Before my Dad’s ing, our family had several other losses. The fall before, I lost my horse to a broken leg, leaving her two-month-old foal orphaned. For several weeks, we weren't sure if her foal would make it. The August before, we lost my grandmother to Parkinson’s. She was my godmother, and we had been very close when I was growing up. Unfortunately, I wasn’t doing contract work anymore and had just started a new job. I couldn’t take the time off to go to Massachusetts for the funeral. Three weeks after my Dad's ing, we lost one of our dogs unexpectedly. Someone in the neighborhood had treated for moles, and she ate a poisoned mole. She was gone in less than 36 hours. Now, my brother was gone too. It was more than I could stand. I was deeply broken. I was grieving more than I could stand. I'd always been a person that others could count on for love and , but I had nothing left. I pushed everyone away and had a complete breakdown. My daughter and I spent three weeks on the couch eating junk food and watching movies, barely changing clothes or leaving the couch, never mind leaving the house. My grief consumed me.

In the weeks that followed, there wasn’t just a deep emptiness from all the losses that year. There was an anger welling up in me, a deep resistance to going out of

this world the way all my relatives seemed to. I was determined to drastically change my lifestyle, so my daughter would never go through the agony of watching me waste away. The same anger I felt after my second surgery was coming back with a vengeance, and it was driving me to make some major lifestyle changes. I didn't just want to be a good weight for my age or relatively healthy. I wanted to be the healthiest possible version of myself. I wanted to wake up every day and know that I was doing the best possible thing for my body. I wanted to know as much as possible about nutrition, health, and fitness, so I could arm myself for my future health, and I wanted to be an example for my daughter. I wanted her to know how to best take care of her own body, so she too would live a long, healthy life.

There was something else in my anger and desire to change. I was no longer afraid of death. I was afraid of the dying before death. My dad literally spent years getting sicker and sicker, dying a little more each day. My grandmother lost her cognitive functions day by day until she couldn’t take care of herself and didn’t recognize anyone she loved. My brother went downhill more quickly, but no one would have recognized him in the last few weeks of his life. I watching my maternal grandfather undergo cancer treatment. The strapping handsome Marine we knew and loved disappeared pound by pound before he finally ed. The thought of dying little by little was far more terrifying to me than the thought of actually being dead. One my riding heroes was on her horse just days before her death. She got sick and died in just a matter of days. Given the choice, I preferred that to the slow painful death my relatives had all endured.

Chapter Four: Exploring the Diets

I’m a scholar at heart. Nothing motivates me more than research and acquiring knowledge, so when it came time to get serious about getting healthy, I hit the books. I read anything and everything I could find on just about every diet I had ever heard of. The underlying theme of most diets was to change habits, which made sense. There didn’t seem much sense in any diets that didn’t. If after losing weight, you go right back to your old habits, it only makes sense that you would gain the weight back and be just as unhealthy as before. To me, diets like the Special K diet, the Slim Fast Diet, and Nutrisystem that substituted your food with their food were all temporary fixes to a weight problem, which wasn’t what I needed. Those diets just didn’t make sense to me. The only thing that made sense to me was a plan to change my relationship with food and to help me understand what my body really needed for fuel.

Weight Watchers was a different story. My husband and I had tried it in college when we had put on a little weight. We didn’t pay for the program, but we bought a friend’s used books. We did the calculations to figure out what an appropriate caloric intake should be for our age, sex, and weight. We read up on how the point system worked and had our own little weigh in each week. It was an easy program that helped us shed our extra ten pounds and keep it off, but I was looking for something more in depth that would help me better understand the chemical reactions between my body and food. I didn’t just want to shed a few pounds; I wanted to fundamentally change my relationship to food. I wanted more than portion control; I wanted knowledge about nutrients. I was looking for a more holistic approach to understanding food.

At the time, the Atkins diet was seeing a major resurgence, but I’ve never been one for fads. If anything, making something popular meant I wouldn't be interested until after the hype died down and the product or trend was still standing. Also, the Atkins diet seemed like a great way to sell the company's line

of processed snacks and foods, which was a pretty big turn off for me. In general, I'm leery of anything when the purpose is to sell products. It's too easy to get focused on the profit margin rather than the principle, so I overlooked the Atkins diet in favor of the Mayo Clinic Diet.

The Mayo Clinic Diet starts out with some basic rules designed to change your relationship to food. You have two phases: Lose It! and Live it! It has a clear path to maintenance after you lose weight and get fit, and of course, you have the wealth of nutritional knowledge from Mayo Clinic doctors, nurses, and nutritionists at your fingertips to learn as much as you want about food. There's a journal you can buy to help you track your eating habits and progress.

I jumped right in. Much to my husband's chagrin, I started by cleaning out the cupboards and the refrigerator, tossing any carbs that weren't whole grains and any fruits or vegetables that weren't fresh or frozen. My husband was particularly attached to several of the pastas, juices, and canned fruits that ended up in the trash can. He was even more frustrated by our next shopping trip. He was annoyed that I had no intention of buying our usual selection of highly processed foods and that we completely skipped the cookie and snack aisle.

To make matters worse, I read every label of every item we bought, so it took significantly longer than usual. I'm typically very organized when we head to the grocery store, because I hate grocery shopping and want to be in and out as quickly as possible. My grocery lists are organized by aisle, so we could trek down the list and be in and out in thirty minutes or less depending on the size of the checkout lines. This time we were in the store for over an hour and a half, but we went home with everything I needed to start my diet on the right track, so for me the trip was a success.

During the first thirty days, I tracked everything I ate. EVERY. LAST. THING. I measured serving sizes and portions and was as accurate as possible. It wasn’t easy, particularly trying to eat seven servings of fruits and vegetables every day!

But I used Hebrews 12:11 (NLT) for inspiration: “No discipline is enjoyable while it is happening—it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way.” The new habits really paid off. I lost 20 pounds and dropped a dress size in the first six months. I felt better than I had in 10 years, and I was even able to come off my statin meds for high cholesterol. More importantly, I was becoming more and more knowledgeable about the effects various foods had on my body, and I was developing a healthier relationship to the food I consumed.

By summer of 2017, I had lost nearly 40 pounds. I was just under 10 pounds heavier than I was at 18. I felt great, but I wanted to kick it up a notch. I wanted to be the healthiest possible version of myself. By this time, low-carb diets and Paleo diets were the hottest thing in diet trends, so I decided to do a little research. I found an entry on the My Fitness Pal blog written by a nutritionist at the Mayo Clinic about low-carb diets. She argued that low-carb diets when approached as intended with whole foods and plenty of vegetables could be very beneficial and very healthy. She argued that a traditional low-carb diet focused on increasing low-starch fresh vegetables and eliminating highly-processed foods like white bread, which was completely consistent with everything the Mayo Clinic nutritionists advocated.

I decided to give it a try. I ed a Facebook group for low-carbers and read several getting started guides. I discovered there weren't that many differences between low-carb diets and my current diet. I would have to cut out a few foods and could add back in some fat. I was a little disturbed by how many fruits and vegetables I would have to cut out of my diet. It didn’t sit well with me that I would be giving up so many natural foods, particularly food like apples and oranges that I knew were loaded with micronutrients and had great health benefits, but I decided to give the diet a chance and the benefit of the doubt. I set a date, went shopping, and gave it my all.

My husband was a big fan of the low-carb diets, because we suddenly were eating a lot of sausage, eggs, cheese, ground beef, steak, etc. I purchased various

low-carb products at Netrition.com to substitute for breads and pancakes. We found low-carb, sugar free ice creams and candies. We ate omelets and sausage every morning. Most of our lunches and dinners were meat with a heaping side of salad and fatty, low-carb dressings. We had low-carb bagels, sugar free jellies, and lots of butter. We ate as much as we wanted. We didn’t pay attention to calories; we only watched carbs and macros. I lost those last few stubborn pounds and looked fabulous, but I was far from feeling fabulous.

My energy levels spiked and crashed drastically. I either had a ton of energy or no energy at all. I also wasn’t sleeping very well. I would get to sleep just fine but wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep. The worst part though was the constipation. For the first time in my life, I had to buy laxatives. It was NOT fun!!! I love fruits and vegetables, but many of them are not allowed on strict low-carb diets. No more carrots. No more apples. I was easily meeting my protein, fat, and carb macros, but I was NOT getting my daily allowance of fiber even with leafy greens at every meal.

It was nice to drop another dress size, but I was not ok. I didn’t FEEL healthy. I felt lean but not healthy and athletic. I missed feeling great every day. I was also getting sick more often and staying sick longer. My immune system just didn't seem to be doing as good a job as it was when I ate as many fruits and vegetables as I wanted without worrying about carb count. I also found that my hair and nails that had always grown like crazy were suddenly breaking and unhealthy.

Another disturbing thing for me was the attitude among many of the people I encountered in the low-carb community toward processed foods. Their basic attitude was that if it was low-carb, it was healthy. I actually witnessed an argument on Facebook where several people attacked someone for saying Diet Coke was unhealthy. I was shocked at how willing these people were to ignore scientific facts. Long-term consumption of aspartame causes damage to your body. No doubt about it. In addition, there are numerous studies showing that carbonated soft drinks increase your health risks and rot your teeth. But the

people in the group were convinced that because they lost weight, they were healthy.

When I read the labels for many of the low-carb substitutes, I was equally horrified. They may have had a great carb count, but I couldn’t pronounce half the ingredients, and the list was LONG!!! Most of the people following low-carb diets were concerned with their weight but showed little concern for their overall health. They didn’t seem to even understand that there was a difference. A solid meth habit will help you loose weight, but it’s NOT good for you.

So… I moved on to the Paleo, Primal, and Whole 30 crowd. (NOTE: There are descriptions at the end of the chapter if you aren’t familiar with these diets.) They seemed much saner and much more concerned with their overall health. Weight loss was great, but health was the key. They were more concerned with their overall relationship to food than with the end results of losing weight, which was a refreshing return to my original intent. For them (and me), weight loss was a side effect of being healthy. It signified a happy, healthy physiology. These diets also allowed me to bring things like carrots and sweet potatoes back into my diet. It was a huge relief to be able to share a carrot with my horse again!

It took me a while to learn the differences between the three diets, but followers of each were very accepting of one another, so it was easy to ask questions and get clarifying information. They were generous with sources and reading materials as well. Also, all three of these diets can easily align with the habits from the Mayo Clinic Diet, so I felt at home. I didn’t gain back any of the weight I’d lost during my low-carb experiment, and I was feeling much better. I was back to a diet of mostly fruits and vegetable, which felt great. My immune system was strong, and my intestines were back to normal, as were my hair, nails, and energy levels.

When it was all said and done, I ended up sticking with the Mayo Clinic Diet

with a few enhancements from my foray into the Paleo/Primal/Whole 30 lifestyles. I do still eat some grains, but on a limited basis and only whole grains. I generally only eat high carb foods that I've made from scratch using whole grain ingredients or that God made that way like apples and bananas. I indulge in as many fresh vegetables as I want, eating whenever and wherever I'm hungry. When my jeans get a little tight after indulging in holiday sweets, I spend a few weeks re-dedicating myself to the habits in the Mayo Clinic Diet and logging my meals in a new Mayo Clinic Diet Journal.

Of course, my ongoing life challenge is finding the will power to resist the holiday sweets and avoid winter weight gain! I’ve spent a lot of time working on replacing poor winter habits like sitting on the couch with a tin of Danish butter cookies with heading to the gym for a workout. For the first time in my adult life, I lost weight over the holidays last year! Instead of packing on ten pounds, I lost five. I’m still a work in progress, but it’s always about replacing less healthy habits with new healthier habits, which takes time if you want long-term, sustainable progress. Improving your health is marathon and not a sprint. But I’m also learning that my relationship to food isn’t just about my physical health, it is also a fundamental way to be spiritually healthy.

Paleo/Primal: The Paleolithic diet is based on the belief that sticking to food our caveman ancestors would have eaten leads to optimal health. This includes meat, fish, vegetables, wild fruits, eggs, nuts, and more. It excludes grains, legumes, dairy, and processed foods. Guidelines include eating a relatively high amount of healthy fats such as coconut oil, avocado, ghee, and olives. Vegetables, raw or cooked, are the primary source of carbohydrates. Red meat, poultry, pork, eggs, and organ meat are all encouraged with a placed on organic and grass-fed meats. Fruits are limited, and exercise encouraged.

Whole 30: Whole 30 eliminates sugar, dairy, grains, legumes, and processed foods. Dieters must stick to the plan perfectly for 30 days. After 30 days, foods can be added back in as long as they don’t cause problems. Whole 30

is essentially a modified version of an elimination diet.

Low-carb: Low-carb diets limit grains, starchy fruits and vegetables, beans, bread, pasta, white rice, baked goods, and soda. Low-carb diets focus predominantly on meat, poultry, dairy, eggs, and non-starchy fruits and vegetables. This style of eating often leads to weight loss, reduced appetite, reduced calorie consumption, and an increase in satiety.

Keto: Created to help control epileptic seizures in people who do not respond to medication, the Ketogenic Diet is based on the process of ketosis, in which the body uses ketones for fuel instead of glucose. Ketones are a byproduct of fat metabolism that are utilized in times of starvation, carbohydrate restriction, or excessive exercise. For the body to reach a state of ketosis, calorie intake must be limited and comprised of 80% fat. The remaining calories should come from low-carb vegetables and protein.

Atkins: Created in the 1960s by Robert C. Atkins, MD, the Atkins Diet is based on the idea that the body will burn fat for fuel when carbohydrates are significantly restricted. There are four phases of the Atkins Diet. The first phase severely restricts carbohydrates and focuses on protein, healthy fat, and vegetables to jump-start weight loss. The second phase incorporates nuts, berries, and yogurt to add more variety and add carbohydrates back into the diet. The third phase allows fruit and legumes. The fourth phase for maintenance allows bread and grain. The Atkins Diet promotes highprotein, high fiber, low sugar, and the elimination of trans fats.

Chapter Five: Mudhouse Sabbath

My husband and I are Goodwill addicts. Weird, I know. Our date nights usually include a trip to Goodwill with a ten or a twenty in our pockets to see how many cool deals we can get. We used to love 99 cent weekends, during which everything in the store with the color of the week was 99 cents. One day, I found this cool little hard-covered book for 99 cents. It was Mudhouse Sabbath by Laura Winner. Winner was raised Orthodox Jew but converted to Christianity. This book was an exploration of all the things she missed about her Jewish heritage, which I found particularly interesting. As a Christian, I have always tried to learn more about Jewish culture. It somehow makes me feel closer to Jesus the man when I can gain a better understanding of the culture in which he was raised. I think it’s a shame that we’ve lost so much of our Jewish roots. Seeing Christian culture through Winner's eyes provided insight into my own beliefs and spiritual desires.

Winner devotes a chapter to eating Kosher, the how and the why. I found her explanation of why intentional eating is so important in Jewish culture particularly interesting:

God cares about our dietary choices. This should come as no surprise; you only have to read the first two chapters of Genesis to see God's concern for food. Humanity's first sin was disobedience manifested in a choice about eating. Adam and Eve were allowed to eat anything they wanted except of course the one fruit they chose. And the New Testament makes clear that God cares about the most basic quotidian aspect of our lives. (Our God, after all, is the God who provides for the sparrows and numbers the hairs on our heads.) This God who is interested in how we speak, how we handle our money, how we carry our bodies - He is also interested in how we live with food.

While reading her words, something stirred in my soul. I became incredibly curious about Kosher eating and about what a diet in the time of Jesus would have looked like. I wanted to understand how first centuries Jews ate and why they made the choices they did. I wanted to understand their relationship to food and how that relationship reflected their love of and reverence for God.

While I was reading Winner's book, I listened to a few episodes of Rob Bell's podcast where he was talking to his friend Rabbi Joel. In one of the segments, Bell and Rabbi Joel talked about Kosher eating. In particular, Rabbi Joel explained why meat and dairy were never supposed to be side by side. He explained that milk was the elixir of life while meat was dead flesh. The two aren't supposed to touch or come in with the same pan, utensils, or cooking appliances, because one represents life and the other represents death.

Most of us Christians and Americans in general don’t put that much thought into our food. We just don't think that way, but we follow someone who did think that way. It made me wonder if maybe we should revive some of that deep thought with respect to our relationship with food. It is after all one of our most basic daily needs, and if everything is spiritual, our food should be too. If you think about it, food is the most basic way we interact with God’s creation, and in every major religion with which I’m familiar—except Christianity—food is addressed in the theology of the religion. Of course, as my journey continued, I discovered that Christians throughout history have had some pretty significant ideas about God and food.

As I explored the Jewish relationship to food, I was particularly intrigued by their relationship to meat. I was fascinated by the Kosher rules regarding what you could and couldn’t eat, about how animals were raised and slaughtered. In many ways, it was a meat-eating animal welfare advocate’s dream. Did you know that to be Kosher certified a Rabbi has to that the farm is humanely raising the animals and that all the animals are humanely slaughtered? What does that say about God’s opinion of factory farming?

That last question made my heart hurt. What would God say about the cheap meat at Wal-Mart that came from an animal living in a stinking feedlot hopped up on antibiotics and eating an unnatural diet of corn and animal byproducts? What would God say about grinding up the bodies of dead pigs to make feed for the pigs still left in nasty overfilled hog barns? What would God say about how slaughterhouse workers are treated? What would God say about Tyson chicken farms or Smithfield hog farms?

Understanding Kosher eating rules made it difficult for me to justify the meat consumption of the average American. Thankfully, Tennessee is largely rural and populated with several family farms. I was very grateful for the numerous alternatives to the factory-farmed meat in grocery stores, because I couldn’t even look at the meat aisle in Kroger any more. Row after row of factory-farmed meat made me sick to my stomach and made my soul cry out. I couldn’t consider myself a Christian and buy my meat there anymore. I physically couldn’t do it.

I did some research and found a local meat processing company just 10 miles from us. They were animal welfare certified and only offered locally-sourced animals products. They would even give you a tour if the place wasn’t busy. Everything they sold was humanely raised and humanely slaughtered. I could live with giving them my money and eating their meat, at least at this point in my journey.

My new understanding of what God expected of us from our food choices also meant giving up many of our favorite restaurant choices. There weren't going to be any more trips to Huddle House for steak and eggs. There weren't going to be any more trips to McDonald's for sausage biscuits. There wouldn't be any more trips to Sonic for a foot-long hot dog. Even our favorite Cracker Barrel was largely off the list, because we couldn’t conclusively the source of their meats.

We weren't giving up any foods—at least not yet—but we were deciding to vote

our dollars and only restaurants who were willing to that their meat was humanely-raised, humanely-slaughtered, and locally-sourced meat. Sadly, none of the chain restaurants will take that stand and very few local restaurants would either. To be honest, I was more than a little surprised that almost no one—not even small local restaurants—could their meat sources. As someone who loves to cook, I know that the best way to raise the quality of your cooking is to raise the quality of your ingredients, yet no one seemed to know where their ingredients came from.

That speaks volumes about how Americans have come to view their food. What does it say about local restaurants in a state with a large population of farms and ranches that they don’t get their meat at local farms? Even on the surface, it seems fundamentally illogical to get beef shipped in from a feed lot five states away when you have great local sources of humanely-raised grass-fed beef available. Consequently, eating out became largely off the table for us, which would be great preparation for future dietary changes. Eating home more meant making better food choices and having more control over our diet.

Chapter Six: What the Health?

During the summer of 2017, my brother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. My husband was devastated and a bit panicked. I could completely relate after losing a sibling to cancer. Not only does it hurt to face the possibility of losing a sibling, but it also leaves you facing your own mortality—a very scary thing when you’re only in your forties or fifties. Needless to say, he did the same thing I did after losing my brother. Of course, I'm a bookworm, and he isn't; I read books and articles, and he watched YouTube videos and documentaries.

One of the documentaries I watched with him was What the Health made by filmmaker Kip Andersen. To be honest, I agreed to watch it because I thought it would be another documentary about the devastating effects of sugar and preservatives in processed foods, and I had been trying to get my husband to give up cookies and sugared cereals for years. I thought it would talk about how big pharma is encouraging bad behaviors and profiting from the resulting cancer, diabetes, and obesity. It did, but there was a whole lot more, and I’m still to this day re-watching and processing this wonderful documentary.

First, I love Andersen’s style. The way he puts his films together, you take a journey with him researching the topic alongside him. He doesn’t start you off telling you that meat is bad, and then give you a thousand reasons why. He doesn’t start out with a theory and let it color his research. He asks questions and goes where the answers lead him, asking more questions and learning as he goes. When the film is over, it’s your choice what you do with the information. No guilt trip included. It's a refreshing change from a lot of the propaganda machines you find when you start watching documentaries. Many of them are nothing more than glorified ads that feed into the divisive and verbally-violent arguments of the left versus the right rather than really exploring a topic and challenging both the viewers and the filmmaker to see things in a different light. I’ve become a big fan of Kip Anderson.

In What the Health, Andersen set out to investigate the cause and cure of chronic diseases. The disease statistics alone are astounding (http://www.whatthehealthfilm.com/facts/):

There are approximately 350 million worldwide with Diabetes. 1 in 10 healthcare dollars is spent on people with diabetes. 1 out of 3 Medicare dollars is spent on people with Diabetes. In the US, 1 out of every 4 deaths is from cancer. Two-thirds of adults are either overweight or obese. (I have since learned that it is actually 75%.) 70% of deaths & morbidity are largely lifestyle related & preventable. Most10 year-olds in the US have fatty streaks in their arteries. By 2040, 1 out of every 3 Americans will have diabetes. Over 17 million people die every year from cardiovascular disease. The amount of people who die from cardiovascular disease is the equivalent of four jumbo jets crashing every single hour, every single day, every single year. 3,000 people die each year in the US from food-borne illnesses.

Let those statistics sink in for a few minutes. To put the death toll in perspective, 9/11 claimed 2,977 lives. You have to ask, where is the outcry for this? Why isn’t anyone going to war on the food problem in this country?

I’ve watched What the Health several times trying to wrap my head around the

facts, and every time I do, it makes me more and more angry that sources people trust like the American Cancer Society are blatantly ignoring the facts and perpetrating a fraud as big as the cigarette companies did. When the World Health Organization classifies processed meats as a Group 1 carcinogen—the same group as asbestos and tobacco—and red meats as Group 2A carcinogens, you would expect that information to be somewhere on the American Cancer Society’s website. Instead, the American Cancer Society encourages eating processed meats.

Likewise, studies show that one serving of processed meat per day increased risk of developing diabetes by 51%, but the American Diabetes Association features recipes for red & processed meats. No less frustrating are the Susan G. Komen pink ribbons on dairy yogurt containers when for a woman with breast cancer having just one serving of whole dairy a day can increase a women's chance of dying from breast cancer by 49%. How can non-profit advocacy groups be so thoroughly immoral?

Every day I see professors of Agriculture advocating for factory farming and processed meat on social media, leading their pupils to question the health statistics being buried by the meat and dairy industries. Non-profits that are supposed to be raising awareness and educators who are supposed to be teaching the next generation are assisting the meat and dairy industries in selling lies that are proving to be deadlier than the tobacco cover ups of my generation. Eating 1 egg per day is just as bad as smoking 5 cigarettes per day for life expectancy, but the egg industry funds studies that confuse consumers. One study featured in What the Health that claims eating eggs isn't unhealthy was comparing eating an egg to eating a Sausage Egg McMuffin, a tactic similar to the misleading studies the tobacco industry released. Sadly, people are buying the confusion and coverups hook, line, and sinker, and they’re dying for it.

Advertising for the milk, egg, and meat industries is no less misleading. How many ads have you seen that imply that drinking milk is the key to having strong bones? If milk makes strong bones, why is it that the countries with the highest

rates of dairy consumption have the highest rates of osteoporosis? Why is it that the largest, strongest terrestrial animals on the planet are all herbivores? Casein is the main protein in dairy products, especially in cheese. Human breast milk has 2.7g/liter of casein compared to 26g/liter for cow's milk. Human milk has the lowest protein content of any other species, so why do we choose to consume milk so different from what God gave us? Why are we the only species on Earth that drinks breast milk—yes, cow’s milk is still breast milk—after weaning?

Humans’ closest living relatives are chimpanzees, who get 97% of their calories from plants. When you compare the anatomy of omnivores to frugivores, it’s clear that we are frugivores, yet the myth persists that we are omnivores. Our teeth and our digestive system match those of our distant primate cousins, yet we continue to insist that we are more like our dogs and cats and that we need meat to survive. We continue to ignore hard scientific facts in order to defend our misguided cultural ties to a meat culture that is killing us. We continue to make an emotional choice rather than a rational choice.

All of this is backed up by bad USDA policies. USDA dietary committee have received money from producers of animal products, sugar, and alcohol industries, all of which are a clear conflict of interest. The USDA itted that eggs cannot legally be labeled nutritious, low fat, part of a balanced diet, low calorie, healthful, healthy, good for you, or safe, and yet they continue to recommend eggs as a part of a healthy diet. To make matters worse, animal products are promoted through federal (USDA) commodity checkoff programs, programs that are responsible for meat & dairy slogans and that give money to market meat and dairy products. The dairy industry spends at least $50 million a year promoting its products in public schools, and meat and dairy spend at least $557 million annually promoting their goods through checkoff programs. In addition, meat and dairy spend at least $138 million lobbying congress for ag-gag laws that criminalize whistle-blowers who photo-document abuses by the animal agriculture industry. That’s over $745 million per year spent to deceive Americans. What if that money were spent providing lowincome neighborhoods with community gardens? Or eliminating food deserts? Or telling people the truth?

We have a $5 billion stent industry, and we have a $35 billion statin drug industry in the US. Treating chronic disease is a $1.5 trillion industry, which is the GDP equivalent of the tenth richest country in the world. The American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association accept millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies despite the clear conflict of interest. The pharmaceutical industry spends more money on lobbying Congress than any other single industry.

Heart diseases can be stopped and even reversed with plant-based diets; when people adopt a fully plant-based diet their cholesterol levels plummet within a few days. 99.4% of people who adopt a fully plant-based diet were able to avoid major cardiac events. By getting rid of heart disease, the United States would save $48 trillion, which is three times the gross domestic product. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry would lose, and they do their best to make sure people keep buying their stents and statins.

Of course, for my three bowls of cereal a day husband, the most disgusting and life-changing part of the film was to find out that there are actually standards for how much pus can be in dairy products. For me, it was the realization of just how many antibiotics are present in our meats. There are at least 450 drugs that are istered to factory-farmed animals. The pharmaceutical industry sells 80% of all antibiotics made in the United States to animal agriculture. 23,000 people die each year from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the World Health Organization said that we are nearing a post-antibiotic era in medicine, but no one is asking why even though we’re literally eating antibiotics three time a day (or more) with our meals.

One of the most heartbreaking sections of What the Health included interviews with rural North Carolina residents, who are personally experiencing the darkest side of the factory farming. Sadly, many of the hog facilities are located near communities of color and low-income communities, exposing those communities to swine flu (H1N1), which originated in North Carolina, and

liquid pig manure pumped into waste pits that leach into rivers and streams and are sprayed unfiltered onto nearby fields. The 10 million pigs in North Carolina produce the waste equal to 100 million humans, which is the equivalent of the entire human population of Eastern US states flushing their toilets into North Carolina. One man described having to skip church and cancel family events because the facility near his home was spraying on the weekends, and no one could stand the smell. Given the horrid living conditions of humans living near the facilities, the fact that dead pigs are processed into feed to give back to the hogs still in the facility isn’t very surprising. An industry that has so little regard for human life wouldn’t have any value for the life of an animal.

Chapter Seven: Cowspiracy

About a month after watching What the Health, Netflix recommended my husband and I watch another film by Kip Andersen: Cowspiracy. I’ve since learned that Kip made Cowspiracy before making What the Health, but we watched them in reverse order. By the end of this film, I was literally in tears. I am a natural crier—commercials make me cry—but these were tears of real hurt. I think it took me two or three weeks to really process this film and get to a point where I could go out in public without wanting to preach from every street corner. I still have to resist the urge to argue with friends on Facebook who advocate for eating bacon and drinking milk.

Like Kip Andersen, as someone who cares deeply for God’s creation, I do what I can to improve my carbon footprint. At the time we watched the file, we had a farm, so I had two trucks, but I work from home, my husband is retired, and we made as few trips to town as possible. We combined shopping trips with trips to church. Our barn was fully solar, and our house renovations included as much off the grid functionality as possible. Now that we live closer to the city, I have an energy-efficient Toyota and still try to reduce our travel. We keep our heat on 65 in the winter and are looking at how we can improve our energy efficiency in our new home. We look for products that minimize packaging and have sustainable manufacturing practices. We do our best to choose natural, simple products and to shop local, sustainable farms and businesses.

Sadly, Cowspiracy educated us that most of this did little to protect God’s creation from the most destructive force: animal agriculture. Exhaust from all types of transportation—fossil fuels burned for road, rail, air, and marine transportation—is only responsible for 13 percent of greenhouse emissions, but livestock and their byproducts for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. What’s worse are the methane and nitrous oxide emissions resulting from animal

agriculture:

In a 20-year period, methane is 25-100 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. In a 20-year period, methane has a global warming potential 86 times that of carbon dioxide. Cows produce 150 billion gallons of methane per day. Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide has 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide stays in the atmosphere for 150 years.

Reducing our meat consumption would produce an immediate effect on the environment by reducing methane emissions. Emissions from animal agriculture are expected to increase nearly 80% by 2050, while energy-related emissions are expected to increase 20% by 2040. If we eliminated the burning of fossil fuels, we will still exceed catastrophic levels of carbon dioxide just from the factory farming of animals.

One of the two things that hit me the hardest was the realization that children in poor countries are being denied food and medicine, so factory farming can continue to have cheap GMOs to feed livestock and cheap antibiotics to keep livestock from succumbing to the disgusting conditions in which they are raised. While over 80% of antibiotics sold in the US are used on livestock, we’re told that there just isn’t enough to ship to poor children in Asia. Even though we grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, we still have starving children all over the world, because at least 50% of the world’s grain is fed to livestock: “82% of starving children live in countries where food is fed to animals, and the animals are eaten by western countries.” How can we call ourselves a developed

nation and leave people starving, so we can have cheap meat that is literally killing us? How is that even sane? It’s too unbelievable to even process. Yet, the facts check out. The truth is that Americans are getting fat eating livestock that is eating food that should go to someone else. It’s a fact I just can’t unsee.

Giving the exploding population, it only makes sense for at least many of us to choose a plant-based diet. We just don’t have enough land to everyone. An acre and a half can produce 375 pounds of beef, but that same acre and a half can produce 37,000 pounds of plant-based foods. Feeding one person on a vegan diet only requires 1/6th of an acre. Feeding a vegetarian requires ½ an acre. Feeding a person eating the standard American diet requires 9 acres! Translate to a family of four, and you have a range of 2/3rds of an acre to 36 acres. Just based on those numbers, there’s no way that we can afford for all of us to continue eating meat. When you consider the overall effects the standard American diet has on the environment, continuing to eat this way is at best negligent: “A person who follows a vegan diet produces the equivalent of 50% less carbon dioxide, uses 1/11th oil, 1/13th water, and 1/18th land compared to a meat-lover for their food.“ (Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, 2014)

The second thing that really hit me was something Kip said as he was exploring backyard farming. He witnesses a backyard farmer killing one of his flock for dinner. The next day, he was supposed to witness the death of a non-producing hen, but instead he chose to save her and bring her to a chicken sanctuary. He made the observation that if he couldn't kill the chicken himself maybe he didn't have the right to ask someone else to do it for him. I still can't even think about that scene without crying. I know myself. Maybe there was a time in my life when I could shoot and dress a deer, but I just couldn't anymore. I can't even kill a spider or a wasp without feeling guilty, and I’m insanely arachnophobic! I feel guilty when my cat kills a rat in the barn, even though I know he's doing what God created him to do and keeping my grain safe. If that's who I am, how can I ask someone else to slit a cow's throat, so I can eat a hamburger? I can't. I just can't.

For me, this was the moment I made the final choice to eat a plant-based diet, and it's a moment that continues to stick with me. I in ROTC being told by an old Master Sergeant, "The key to being a good leader is never asking anyone to do something you wouldn't do yourself." He was right then, and he's right now. I have no right to expect a minimum wage slaughter house worker to endure what I won't just because he or she makes less money than I do, and I certainly don't have any right to ask him/her to do something I flat out won't do. I may have unknowingly made that choice in the past, but I will never knowingly make that choice in the future.

Chapter Eight: The Price the Poor Pay for Carnism

After watching What the Health and Cowspiracy, I spent a lot of time looking at how current American practices of carnism—the societal "norms" around eating meat—effect the poorest people in our country. As is true with our "war on drugs", the poorest among us are paying the biggest price. They carry the weight of the ugliest work in factory farming, they live in the areas where factory farms are pervasive, they are often the ones eating the products of factory farms, and they are the ones who can’t afford the pharmaceuticals to treat the chronic diseases that come from eating factory-farmed products. Their subjugation to these practices is as systemic as Jim Crow laws were and every bit as damaging and heartbreaking. The saddest part is that so much is predicated on myth rather than fact. Those very same people don't see how much power they possess to change the situation. They simply don’t know that there’s another way to live, and few have any incentive to educate them.

Let's start by looking at ag gag laws and who they really protect. Ag gag laws make it illegal for animal welfare activists to infiltrate an agricultural business for the purpose of exposing abusive animal practices. Advocates claim that animal welfare activists unfairly represent themselves and unfairly represent the business that activists are investigating by taking individual actions out of context, but the truth is much more insidious. Ag gag laws protect the handful of corporate owners and investors who need their practices to remain out of the public eye, so Americans will continue to financially their systemic animal abuse. Don't believe me? Try to get inside a corporate owned slaughterhouse. Then, go to a small farm and ask the same questions. Go to a corporate processing plant and ask for a tour. Then, go to a local processor and ask for a tour.

What you find is that corporate facilities have a laundry list of reasons why you can't see their farms and plants. Their employees are restricted in what they can

and can't tell you. Local farmers and local processors are proud to show you around and show you how they do things. In my experience, people only hide things when they have something to hide. How many Americans would eat sausage if they knew how the pigs were raised and how the sausage was made? Would they drink milk if they had to see a calf being pulled from its mother to live in a plastic crate in a see of plastic crates to be slaughtered for veal? Or would they rather drink milk from a local farmer whose calves are happily playing together and being bottle fed by said farmer? The happy cows you see on television commercials aren’t living on corporate farms, and the majority of the animal products produced in the United States are produced by large corporate farms.

On the rare occasion that footage makes it out of the so-called “humane” corporate slaughterhouses and processing plants, the footage is horrifying. You see male chicks being ground alive. You see chickens and turkeys squawking as they are picked up by their delicate legs and run over a blade to have their throats slit. Both are common “humane” practices. I hate birds, and I still can’t stand watching what they are put through for the sake of cheap chicken nuggets and Thanksgiving turkeys. Baby pigs are castrated and have their tails cut without anesthesia. For cows and pigs, you routinely see improper use of the bolt pistols resulting in the animal having its throat slit and limbs hacked off while it's still alive. How many of us really want to be the cause of this? How many of us want to subject the poorest of us to the job of working in these facilities?

Have you ever wondered why you never see a Smithfield hog farm or a Tyson chicken farm in suburbia? They are all in poor rural areas. Where else could you contaminate people's air and water supply and have no one with the power or money to fight back? It's no coincidence that in a state like North Carolina hogs outnumber people 40 to 1. Rural North Carolina has literally been overrun with factory hog farms. Hog waste is being sprayed into the air, and the residents are paying the price. All of this for cheap bacon and sausage.

I spent several years living in rural Tennessee where Tyson chicken farms are

everywhere. Some days, all you can smell is chicken poop. In the heat of the summer, it can make the quiet of the country simply unbearable. Many of our friends and neighbors worked at the Tyson chicken plant in the next county over. While many can't imagine an economy without Tyson, many more a rich, tight-knit agricultural community where families made a living off trades and family farms. They a time when everyone they know wasn't dying of cancer.

The news cycle has been dominated the last few years with the immigration problem, but they never discuss the part factory farming plays in the immigration problem. Companies like to hire undocumented workers as chicken catchers and slaughterhouse workers, because these workers know they have no legal rights and won’t challenge the horrible working conditions. The companies continue to deny these practices, but farmers and slaughterhouse workers continue to report working with undocumented workers daily. Workers have even reported ICE raids where only the experienced, higher-paid workers are arrested and deported, while newer, lower-paid, undocumented workers can continue working here illegally.

When you consider the human cost of carnism, the plant-based movement is no longer just an issue of animal welfare, it is also a major social justice movement. The systemic subjugation of poor people—particularly poor people of color—by factory farms can’t be tolerated by good people trying to fight for justice for all people, which means that as someone who took a vow to honor all people and fight for social justice, I must also actively fight against the factory farm system.

Chapter Nine: Eating Plant-Based

“The godly care for their animals, but wicked are always cruel.” Proverbs 12:10 NLT

We now eat a fully whole food plant-based diet and have found this new way of life to be a fun and interesting food adventure. We’ve really enjoyed expanding our diet and our food knowledge. It’s been fun to try new recipes like mushroom fajitas, black bean burgers, and cashew cheese. Before this, I had no idea what a chickpea looked like! I love to cook, so I’ve loved having an excuse to load my Kindle up with new cookbooks. It has made me a little sad to ditch my copy of Michael Symon’s Carnivore, but I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know the Vegan Roadie Dustin Hardie and to play in the Thug Kitchen. I’ve started a new collection of cookbooks from Forks Over Knives toThe McDougall Quick and Easy Cookbook to Plantpower Way: Italia. My new favorite lunch is tofu “egg” salad with avocado, tomato, and spinach. I never thought I would ever eat tofu, never mind actually like it!

I spent some time as a Pampered Chef consultant and transitioning to plantbased gave me an excuse to use products I haven’t used much and to buy a few new ones. My veggie spiralizer is now my favorite kitchen gadget! I love making pasta from zucchini or sweet potatoes. I also have a new appreciation for my hand chopper and manual food processor, which help me make fresh salsa and guacamole. My masher is my new best friend. It helps me mash black beans and butternut squash into a big batch of black bean veggie burgers. I’ve also taken advantage of the consultants I know who do meal prep, learning how to make large batches of burger mix or hummus and freeze in individual meal-sized portions.

I’ve been learning about vegetable gardening, and we’ve started composting to prep for gardens and to reduce our waste. We’re making plans to grow everything we need right here. It’s really exciting to think that we could be fully self-sustainable, which would not have been possible if we were still eating a standard American diet. I’m also excited to think that I can provide fresh fruits and vegetables not just to my friends and family but also to my community. In fact, this dietary journey has led me to new ministry opportunities including working with a local group that helps urban neighborhoods start community gardens. We have a dream that one day we’ll host cooking classes and gardening classes, and I hope to be certified as a whole-food, plant-based nutritionist.

As the former USA Representative for the ASWA, I often had the opportunity to discuss the horrors of factory farming, but I now also have the knowledge to link my animal ministries to ministries for the poor and the environment, giving people a more complete picture of how animal agriculture is affecting the global food supply. I also have a much better understanding of the effects of animal agriculture on critical natural resources like our water supply. The journey I’ve taken from carnivorous cowgirl to plant-based homesteader included a lot of learning and a lot of networking with people working to raise awareness about deforestation, aridification, poverty, and many other related topics.

One of the biggest benefits of changing our diet has been our improved health. I’ve lost over 40 pounds. My husband has lost close to 50. We’re both healthy, lean, and fit. When the flu went around last spring, nearly everyone I know was sick for at least a week. I was sick for 48 hours. My husband was sick for 36. I’m 44, and he’s 52. We rarely get sick, and when we do, we bounce back quickly. At 30, I was suffering from adult ache, rheumatoid arthritis, and high cholesterol despite statin meds, steroids, and skin treatments. My adult acne has completely cleared up, and it’s been several years since I’ve had any t swelling never mind any t pain. I’m not only off my statin meds, but I also haven’t had high cholesterol in over two years. He no longer needs cholesterol meds or meds for PVC and acid reflux.

The greatest benefit of this journey, though, has been my spiritual formation and progress. I wake up each day knowing that my dietary choices are consistent with my faith and my values. I know that who I am on the outside reflects who I am on the inside. I once heard a preacher say that Christians should be like a banana; when you peal back the layers, you should know exactly what you’re going to find underneath. That’s who I am now. At least with respect to my diet. I’m still a working in progress in other areas, but at least in this, everything I eat is consistent with who I claim to be. I no longer animal cruelty, environmental damage, or the subjugation of the poor through my food purchases.

One of the things that surprised me was the reaction of my friends and family. I’m not sure why since it’s probably exactly how I would have reacted ten years ago. I guess I had just hoped that they would be more ive of my personal choices and my journey. I had hoped that they would know me well enough to know that I was not trying to make that choice for them nor was I judging their choices. This was a spiritual journey and a personal spiritual choice. I had also hoped they realized that I was a strong person who didn’t make these choice lightly. I hadn’t been “lured to the dark side” by liberal friends—a comment that always makes me chuckle since most of the liberals I know aren’t plant-based. I sometimes wonder if their reaction isn’t a subconscious recognition of the cognitive dissonance inherent in their own food choices, a subconscious recognition that I’m making choices they wish they could.

I’ve started noticing how other ers of whole food plant-based eating get treated on social media. Again, intellectually I’m not surprised, but it is disheartening and disappointing. It’s easy to see how people could think the minority of people who have chosen a different path could be wrong. It’s easy to see how people would choose to believe that the egg, dairy, and meat industries could be telling the truth when they are backed up non-profits like the American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association, and Susan G. Komen. It’s hard to believe in the truth when it’s labeled conspiracy theory or when whole food plant-based researchers and nutritionists are labeled quacks by the media, despite excellent credentials and good science on their side. In a society that turns a blind eye to animal abuse, it really isn’t much of a stretch to commit verbal

violence on people trying to speak the truth. But I believe that those of us who have seen can lovingly and kindly open the eyes of others as we allow God to work through us. We can soften people’s hearts and transform the world into a kinder and more beautiful place.

There are a few truths I’ve had to accept along this journey. If I believe that your right to throw a punch ends at the tip of my nose, then I also must accept that my right to eat meat ends when it destroys your earth too. If my primary identity is a follower of Christ, then my greatest obligation is to the least of us, which means I can’t be ok with food that should be going to poor children being used to feed cows and pigs, so I can have a $1 sausage biscuit from McDonald’s. If I love the Lord my God with all my heart, my mind, and my soul, I must also love God’s creation as God loves me, and you can’t call yourself an environmentalist and industries that are the leading cause of greenhouse gases, desertification, and deforestation. If my Baptismal Covenant is really a meaningful guide for my life, I am honor bound to fight for social justice, and eliminating factory farming is absolutely an issue of social justice. That being said, I am as honor bound to love meat-eaters the same as I love plant-based advocates, even though I understand how much their meat-eating costs the earth and the poor, so my methods of seeking social justice must be peaceful. Not ive. Just loving and peaceful.

The most difficult truth to accept has been in my relationships. When God calls you to see something in the world and change it, there will always be those who oppose you. Often, they will be the people closest to you. As Jesus said, “A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own hometown and among his relatives and his own family.” (Mark 6:4 NLT) Sometimes you can set boundaries and still be in relationship with those people. Sometimes you just have to let those people go, because they just can’t accept the person you’ve become. I find comfort in Matthew 10:37: “If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine.” (NLT) The relationships I’ve lost have hurt, but the rewards of being closer to God and fulfilling God’s plan for me have far outweighed the pain.

To be honest, I’m kind of angry about how much my daughter’s generation has gotten the shaft. My generation will be the first generation in US history to have a shorter life expectancy than the previous generation. Nice legacy, huh? What’s worse is that we’ve completely lost our distrust of government and large institutions. This country was founded on the value of dissent and the belief that sometimes the minority voice is the sanest in the bunch, yet we’ve lost all ability to question the establishment or the sanity of the majority. My generation is literally the zombie apocalypse in action. We see only the next thing to consume. We don’t see the consequences. We don’t see the long game. The sad consequence of that is that we’ve turned our children over to a system that fattens them up and makes money off the resulting diseases. In many ways, we’ve created a system that literally uses them like batteries in The Matrix. We’ve really screwed them over. What’s worse is that we expect them to toe the line and hammer them when they say anything about wanting to challenge the system or the status quo.

When I was a kid, we didn’t just go to school to be fed watered down half-truths from a government approved textbook. We read actual primary documents. We didn’t just have math and science; we had music, art, home economics, and shop. I’m not a seamstress, but I can stitch a button back on, so I don’t have to buy a new shirt. I can read directions and follow a recipe. I know how to peel and cook a potato. I know how to balance a checkbook, bake a cake from scratch, and read a nutrition label. I know how to read an article in the newspaper, spot the bias, and analyze the argument for myself. Basic life skills.

Sadly, none of those skills were taught in my daughter’s schools. Thankfully, she had a mother who made sure she knows those things anyway, but most of her friends didn’t and still don’t. Their parents sent them off to school and didn’t bother to challenge the school or the teachers or even take the time to ask why they weren’t getting a decent education. My grandparents tried to carve out a better future for their children. That’s how it should be. Everyone should want more for the next generation, but my generation took it as an insult that anyone would want better than what we had.

In How to Be Here: A Guide to Creating a Life Worth Living, Rob Bell comments, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” I’ve come to realize that this is absolutely true. Most Americans allow life to happen rather than actively living their lives. They allow others to make their choices for them, which is most true with respect to their food choices. They allow grocery stores to determine what they’ll eat without considering what those food choices are doing to the environment, to animals, or to their own bodies. They coast through life with little thought or involvement in the same way that they coast through the grocery store shoveling things into their cart without much thought.

When life happens and they don’t have an emergency fund, they blame everyone else for their misfortune. When they re-elect Congressmen that haven’t performed their primary job function in over a decade, they’re shocked and offended when those same Congressmen still don’t do their job, and government employees pay the price. Of course, it must be someone else’s fault. When they’re a hundred pounds overweight and have been told by their doctors to eat better and exercise, it’s a tragic twist of fate when they come face-to-face with a heart attack or diabetes. It’s like driving down the Audubon at a hundred miles an hour blindfolded, expecting not to have an accident, and blaming the the road when you do.

The most tragic consequence of this zombie apocalypse is the rising level of violence in American society. We’re allowing violence to exist without actively acknowledging it or opposing it. We’re committing acts of violence without taking responsibility for our actions, instead blaming circumstances or the actions of others. Our food sources perpetuate violence on a particularly vile level, because modern animal agriculture preys on animals that can’t defend themselves and impoverished groups that have no voice. That violence extends throughout every aspect of our society from social media to foreign policy. We have become a society that doesn’t value freedom or independence but instead values the ability to take what you want without considering the cost or ramifications. Even a political system based on the concept that the minority should be protected from an emotional, out-of-control majority has become a

system that holds moderate or minority opinion hostage between increasingly radical and violent majorities. At what point do we say, “Enough!”?

Chapter Ten – Cultural Blinders and the Big Lie

Over the last two years as I've been writing this, I've been advocating more and more for a plant-based diet and have become more sensitive to people's responses to giving up the Standard American Diet (SAD). Not sensitive in the sense that I'm letting people bother me, but sensitive in the sense that I'm taking notice and analyzing where those responses come from. More and more I'm realizing that as a culture Americans have bought into the lie that it's natural, normal, and necessary to eat meat and dairy, which couldn't be further from the truth. It's only the development of tools that allowed us to eat meat and only with the rise of agribusiness in the last quarter of the twentieth century that we've increased our meat and dairy intake to its current gluttonous levels. For example, in 1908 the average American was eating about three pounds of cheese, but by 2008, the average American was eating over thirty pounds of cheese for an additional 550,000 calories of fats and hormones a year. We are not apex predators. We are not naturally carnivores or omnivores. These are myths of modern America.

What surprises me the most is how people respond when faced with scientific facts and well-founded scientific arguments. Their level of denial and defensiveness continues to surprise me, particularly with respect to NOT classifying humans as omnivores or carnivores. Scientific classification is not based on what an animal chooses to eat or what an animal looks like but rather on specific biological attributes such as teeth and digestive system features. For example, a horse is not considered a ruminant like a cow as most people assume but is instead considered a forage animal like a rabbit, because a horse's digestive system more closely resembles that of a rabbit. Similarly, humans are not classified as omnivores as most people assume, because humans choose to eat a diet similar to dogs and other omnivores. We are in fact classified as frugivores based on our teeth and our digestive system, which more closely resembles the teeth and digestive systems of primates and not canines. When you look at the evidence and the pictures that that classification, it’s hard to deny, yet Americans can and do, claiming that the facts are somehow bad

science created by vegans. It would be comical if it weren’t so sad and damaging.

And let’s talk about milk. I grew up in a household where drinking milk at every meal was more enforced than brushing your teeth before bed. But what is milk? It’s cow’s breast milk. All milk is breast milk. Breast milk is designed to provide growth hormones for mammalian infants. We are the ONLY mammalian species on the planet that continues to consume breast milk after weaning, and we’re the only species that drinks the breast milk of another species. There’s nothing normal or natural about it.

Ever wonder why the milk industry stopped the “Milk. It does a body good” commercials? Because they can’t lie outright, and milk doesn’t do the body good. There are less occurrences of osteoporosis among people who don’t drink milk than people who do drink milk. Milk consumption in children increases the chance of cancer later in life, and milk consumption in adults increases the chance of heart disease and diabetes. What’s good about that?

But parents continue to give milk to their children, and programs like WIC continue to encourage parents to do it. Before World War II, milk was a luxury, something to be used sparingly among the middle- and working-classes. After World War II, there was a significant rise in milk production as a result of modern agricultural methods, creating a surplus. The milk industry responded by launching a marketing campaign to convince Americans that they needed milk to be healthy, just as cigarette companies once campaigned that doctors recommended smoking, and Americans have bought that marketing as scientific fact, which it isn’t.

I recently attended a lecture at a local chiropractor’s office. They offer clinical nutrition testing and supplements. I loved that they were offering a lecture on the effects of processed food. The information was good but outdated and based on cat research, which does not translate well to the nutritional needs of humans,

since we’re frugivores, and cats are carnivores. The final statistics offered regarding human life span decreasing and human fertility rates dropping drastically were compelling. They finished with a demonstration on how the clinical nutrition testing works.

While I commend their desire to improve people’s nutrition and their focus on whole foods, I was tremendously disappointed at their insistance that I could not reach optimum health if I didn’t eat meat and eggs. That insistance is based on a poor interpretation of a study of baby rat growth and amino acid intake that was published in Vogue Magazine in the seventies. The idea that we must eat meat to be healthy has been debunked several times, but the medical community doesn’t seem to be getting the message, and Americans at large are still obsessed with eating meat, eggs, and dairy.

More and more evidence surfaces every day that indicates that eliminating meat and dairy from your diet significantly reduces your risk of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Some of that evidence indicates that a whole food plant-based diet can reverse those conditions, yet people continue to dub plant-based diets as unnatural and unhealthy. It doesn't seem to matter how much scientific evidence is compiled in favor of a plant-based diet or how much scientific evidence is compiled showing how unhealthy the consumption of meat, eggs, and dairy are, plant-based advocates are categorized as strange, unhealthy, and radical. It's interesting to note that the word radical means returning to your roots, because that's exactly what whole food plant-based diets do. Plant-based diets reverse our diets a thousand years to a more natural way of eating.

The meat, egg, and dairy industries have become so much a part of our enculturation that it has literally become un-American NOT to eat bacon, eggs, sausage, steak, and butter. When you tell people that you don't consume animal products, you might as well tell them you think Hitler was a great guy. Sadly, it's no less true when you talk to the average Christian. Mainstream Christians don't seem to want to acknowledge that when we look at how we treat the least of us —the only standard by which Christ tells us we'll be judged—we're literally

taking food from starving children in developing nations, so we can have our cheap sausage biscuits at McDonald's. Every time we serve burgers at a church picnic, we're condoning animal abuse, deforestation, desertification, and massive contributions to greenhouse gas emissions while we continue to pride ourselves on pushing for stronger vehicle emissions standards and laws that make it a crime to leave your dog tied up in freezing weather. We wonder why a generation that values transparency and alignment between beliefs and action isn’t coming to church, but when we examine our proclaimed values against how we’re behaving, isn’t it obvious?

The church has bought the big American lie that it's ok to consume without thought of the consequences as long you go to church on Sunday hook, line, and sinker. We don’t want to rock the boat or challenge the status quo, even though our Lord and Savior was known for doing just that. In the Center of Action and Contemplations daily email on January 1, 2019, Fr. Richard Rohr wrote, “Religion tends to prefer and protect the status quo or the supposedly wonderful past, yet what we now see is that religion often simply preserves its own power and privilege. God does not need our protecting.” Unfortunately, this is a perfect description of the Episcopal Church’s relationship to food.

We have an opportunity to live our beliefs in the way we spend church money, but rather than challenge the status quo, we continue to serve factory farmed meat that s everything we claim to oppose. The very definition of cognitive dissonance is a church that claims to love the environment but continues to the leading cause of deforestation, desertification, and greenhouse gas emissions; that claims to seek justice while watching 3.2 million people die from preventable obesity-related diseases each year; that claims to help the least of us while food for the poor is being feed to livestock, so Americans can have cheap meat; and that claims to welcome all, but doesn’t provide healthy whole food plant-based options at events where food is served.

I was at a church meeting a little over a year ago where one of the lay leaders in the church announced that his son had landed a job with Tyson. He encouraged

fellow church to buy Tyson products and the company. I was honestly in awe. Tyson is well-known for taking advantage of impoverished rural areas. Their chickens are raised in deplorable conditions. Their slaughter practices are the definition of animal abuse. They grind male chicks alive, because it isn’t profitable to let them live. All of that so they serve cancercausing chicken to the American public through every venue imaginable. How is any of that consistent with the values of a church that claims to advocate for social justice and claims to be committed to seeking and serving Christ in all persons? How is that consistent with a church that claims to advocate for the environment and the protection of animals?

At some point, we must hold ourselves able for the lies we tell ourselves, and we must start by telling the truth. We can’t continue to espouse values we aren’t willing to live out in our daily lives, and we can’t continue to pretend that we don’t see what’s right in front of us. We can drastically reduce and potentially reverse climate change by changing to a plant-based diet. We can also reduce and potentially reverse the alarming rise of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease in the country. We can also eliminate hunger by redirecting our global agricultural yield away from raising livestock and to feeding the world's children with plantbased proteins. All of these are clearly vital issues for the future of our world, issues the church has a responsibility to acknowledge and address. The church has a responsibility first to open its eyes, then to help open the eyes of its people, and finally to be the conscience for the rest of society. The church cannot continue to simply the status quo and continue to buy and serve hamburgers and hot dogs with church dollars for church functions. We just can’t.

I’m encouraged by the existence of groups like the ASWA that are trying to hold the church to a higher standard and are trying to help the church see that the care of God’s creation must include ending animal agriculture. Conversely, I’m disappointed by the lack of attention the national church, dioceses, and local parishes pay to the resolutions of the General Convention related to animal agriculture. The Episcopal Church has ed several resolutions committing to sustainable agriculture and ending harmful, abusive animal agriculture practices, but what does every Episcopal Church continue to serve at church functions? Factory-farmed hamburgers and hot dogs purchased with church dollars!

Every discussion I’ve tried to have with vestry and event organizers has been shut down or pushed aside. We talk about financial stewardship. We talk about the rights of same sex couples. But we continue to ignore the ramifications of church spending with respect to food. We refuse to even engage in the discussion. We don’t want to consider having to spend more money to feed people or having to tell people the truth about consuming factory-farmed meat, despite having declared as a church that we will not factoryfarming.

“I don’t want to know” is the standard American answer when a plant-based advocate tries to educate people regarding the horrible, violent way animal agriculture does business. It isn’t any different in the church. The blinders are just as strong and opaque. Ag gag laws and people’s desire not to know remind me of John 3:20-21 NLT: “All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light, so others can see that they are doing what God wants.” We must ask ourselves if deep down we know we’re wrong if we aren’t even willing to shine a light on our actions? If we were sure that what we are doing is natural and normal, wouldn’t we be willing to see how it’s produced? Wouldn’t we be willing to let others see how it’s produced? Wouldn’t we be confident that when someone shined the light on animal agriculture, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with how the animals are treated? We must it that our desire not to know is driven by an inner knowledge that the violent practices used to produce meat for human consumption are dark and wrong and very much in conflict with who we claim to be as Christians.

Chapter Eleven: Cheating, Frustrations, and Commitment

I really thought giving up meat would be harder than it was. I thought I would miss it and dream about juicy cheeseburgers. Somewhere along the way my heart accepted that a cow has as much right to live as my horse does and that a pig has as much right to life as my dogs does. Now when I see a Red Robin commercial, I see my horse on a plate, and it makes me sick to my stomach. When I see a sausage biscuit, I see my dog ground up into meat, and it makes me ill. When I see milk and butter, I image my poor mare being raped and having her baby stolen, so she can be forced to produce milk, and I cry. It may seem silly or over the top, but it’s much the same reaction I have when I see an abused child. For me, all life is now precious and not just the socially acceptable ones. I’ve even stopped killing spiders, even though they still scare the snot out of me! It’s really more a transformation in heart and consciousness than a change in diet. One simply resulted in the other.

One day two years ago, I was having a bad day. I was depressed and frustrated with several things going on in my personal and professional life. To cheer me up, my husband took me to town to get my hair cut. We were going to eat at the Mexican restaurant next to the salon afterwards, but as we left the salon, we decided to eat at the Chinese restaurant on the other side. I don’t know if they have a menu. I’ve never seen anyone order anything but the buffet. I was in a foul mood, so I wasn’t the least bit concerned with what I shoveled onto my plate. I hadn’t been there in nearly a year, so I picked out several selections that had once been my favorites. Mostly vegetarian selections, but I threw in some chicken teriyaki and some beef and broccoli—two of my former favorites.

I ate most of my food before getting to the chicken. I took one bite and was instantly nauseous. The feeling of dead animal flesh in my mouth was so

disgusting to me that I felt sick. All I could think of was the poor chicken that had been inhumanely raised, transported (more than once), and slaughtered. The growth hormones and antibiotics in the meat. For me, eating a chicken has become no different to me than eating my dog, and I don’t even like chickens. Not only did I spit out the chicken, but I was so nauseous I couldn’t eat anything else. The idea of eating dead animal was just more than I could stand. I never even got to the beef and broccoli. In our new city, on the rare occasion my husband can talk me into Chinese buffet, my plate has selections like fried zucchini and vegetable spring rolls. I don’t even bother to consider any of the meat selections I once loved.

My husband at the time was plant-based for health reasons, so he felt comfortable cheating on his diet when we went out. For him, it was the equivalent of occasionally having a piece of cake when you're trying to lose weight. I don't try to push my views on other people, so how he chooses to eat is up to him. The problem comes in when we're trying to choose a place to eat. Sometimes he would come home with a pizza, and I was caught between not wanting to hurt my husband and not wanting to consume a food that turns my stomach, figuratively and literally. The worst part is that when I did give in and share food with him that I'd rather not eat, I felt guilty about the animal cruelty committed to make the cheese and later I felt bloated, and my ts would swell. I felt awful not just emotionally but physically as well.

It was even worse when we were eating out with other people. If we were going out to eat with new friends, we had to go through the whole “my wife doesn’t eat meat” routine. If we were going out to eat with family or old friends, they tended to suggest previous favorite spots, because they didn’t want to acknowledge that I had changed. I was supposed to be the same person I was five years ago, and I wasn’t. I didn’t want to be difficult, but I also didn’t want to people for dinner and have nothing to eat. It doesn’t exactly make me feel like welcome company.

When I decided to be accommodating and go to a restaurant that I knew

wouldn’t have anything remotely resembling a plant-based option, I would end up eating a plate of French fries and onion rings, which were most definitely NOT healthy but were at least not overtly carnivorous. Once I had a waiter comment, “Well now I’ve seen everything!” when I said that I didn’t eat meat. Apparently, the elderly gentlemen had never met a vegetarian. Probably not that surprising in rural Tennessee, but not exactly welcome when you’re ordering dinner in a small open diner. Now, my husband is fully-plant based, so at least we’re a united front, and we now have two children eating plant-based, so we don’t have to argue with everyone we eat with.

The other frustration I faced was potlucks or social outings that included food. I enrolled in a Master Gardeners class. Little did I realize that the two-and-a-halfhour class time included thirty to forty-five minutes for a “snack.” On the first night, the meal was provided by the already certified Master Gardeners. There was some fresh fruit I could eat but nothing else. The second night, the older southern women who provided the meal—barbecue, cheesy potatoes, coleslaw, and dessert—were offended when I didn’t eat. I explained that I didn’t eat eggs, dairy, meat, or sugar, they exclaimed, “There’s fruit!” Unfortunately, the fruit had been cooked in vanilla pudding made with milk and eggs, so it wasn’t an option. Even the coleslaw had eggs via the mayonnaise. It used to be customary to ask in advance if anyone has any special dietary needs before providing food, but these days, it’s customary to eat the food whether you have special dietary needs or not. I wasn’t trying to shame or judge anyone. I was just exercising my right to choose what I put in my body, but it made me the least popular person in class. Even the organizer who brought donuts was offended that I wouldn’t eat a donut. This is of course the same crowd that complains at how easily offended millennials are by racism and sexism.

In a Bible study session at church a couple of years ago, we were looking at a age from the Gospel of John recounting a conversation between Jesus and Peter in which Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loves him, which we all assumed was a reference to the three times that Peter denied Jesus. One of the discussion questions asked, “Do you see yourself in Peter?” I truthfully haven’t given much thought to Peter until the last few years, but the older I get the more I’ve come to love and appreciate Peter. I’ve really come to appreciate the first

letter of Peter as humble advice from a man who—like most of us—has worked hard for every inch of spiritual development. Once upon a time, I would have answered that discussion question with a resounding “No!”, because I consider myself an incredibly loyal person. In fact, I think most of my friends and family would consider me an incredibly loyal person as well. I would never deny someone I loved as deeply as Peter loved Jesus, or so I thought.

What I’ve come to realize is that I do deny Jesus every time I decide to follow the pack instead of following my faith. Every time I choose consumerism over simplicity or make a choice without considering the cost to others, I’m denying my identity as a Christian and doing exactly as Peter did. Now that my eyes have been opened to the terrible cost of meat, dairy, and eggs, every time I “cheat”, I’m Peter standing at the gate or warming himself by the fire and insisting that I’m not a disciple of Jesus. It’s easy to choose fitting in over standing up for what I know is right, but it isn’t a road I can take without a serious spiritual cost. Now that I know, I can’t unknow. If I choose anything other than a plant-based path, I will experience the same feelings Peter did when he heard the Rooster crow and had to face the fact that he had done that which he swore he wouldn’t, facing the fact that I’ve betrayed my Lord and Savior.

The key is finding a way to be comfortable establishing boundaries with others in a loving way. I must learn how to be fully honest while also being loving and respectful. I also must learn that people’s reactions say more about them than they do about me. This is a challenge for anyone, but particularly so for my personality type (2 on the Enneagram). I’m built to help others, and my worst fear is not being loved, so making a decision contrary to going along with what others want is my greatest challenge, but it's a challenge I have to face to be true to my Christian identity and to be true to the path that God has called me to. I can’t go along to get along.

I also can’t be argumentative and contrary. I must find a way to live in the tension and still be a loving part of the community. I must find a way not to be hurt or offended when unknowing people make discriminatory statements or

inappropriate jokes at my expense. I must find a way to turn those moments into opportunities to let in the same truth God showed me to help enlighten others, even if it makes me uncomfortable or puts my social standing at risk. I must choose to acknowledge who God made me to be.

Some of that has required leaving communities where my plant-based path is not respected as a part of my spiritual path. I ended up leaving the Master Gardener’s class, because I wasn’t going to be shamed every time I chose not to eat unhealthy foods. The class also wasn’t covering any of the topics that mattered to me like composting and organic gardening. I have also parted ways with the Episcopal Church. I could live with progress moving slowly, but what bothered me the most was the lack of conversation. With one exception, no one ever responded in any meaningful way to my desire to share nutritional information and to make church events more welcoming for people eating a whole food plant-based diet. In fact, as a last-ditch effort, I wrote a two-page imioned letter to the Presiding Bishop. I received a three-sentence response (with a typo) that was a clear brush off. After two years of trying to bring inconsistencies and opportunities ministry to people’s attention, I realized that I needed to move on to a community that could see the world through the expanded lenses through which I now see the world. It was a heart-breaking decision, but sometimes that’s just how it goes.

Chapter Twelve: Next Steps

The other day, I was watching Evan Almighty and suddenly found tears running down my face. Evan's wife is sitting in a restaurant with her children, listening to Jon Stewart making fun of her husband. She has a conversation with God that convinces her to return to Evan and to trust her husband's calling. It's a comedy, and it's funny, but it hits close to home for me, because there's an element of faith undergirding my story. We read the Bible, but do we really believe that when God calls us, we should answer and be faithful? We read the Gospels, but do we really believe in the miracles? We talk about how God so loved the world, but do we really believe that God loves every strand on our heads? We talk about prayer, and we pray, but do we really believe that God will answer our prayers? I look around and see a deep lack of faith in the world around me. What's worse is that I recognize it in myself, in my own heart.

Maybe because it's the time of year I’m writing this, but I am deeply troubled by humanity's inability to believe in God's love and God's promise of reconciliation, and I know that I'm called to do something about it. I'm continuously amazed and a little incredulous that God would choose me—a bookworm and an introvert who hates controversy and confrontation—to spread a message about faith. How is someone who avoids talking to people supposed to be an evangelist and change the world? Of course, this is the God that chose a murderer to lead his people out of Egypt. The truth is that I have no idea how to do this. I pray for faith. I pray for guidance. I let the Holy Spirit move in my life. I have no choice but to wait for God to reveal God's will, because I don't know what to do. It's humbling. It's freeing. It's terrifying.

Every time I click publish on a post or a video, I'm terrified of the consequences of putting myself out there. The act of writing this book hasn't been so bad, but only because it’s a bit like talking to an imaginary friend. The act of editing and publishing on the other hand is terrifying. I’m horrified at the

prospect of actually publishing and promoting a book, so I pray for strength and fortitude, neither of which are my gifts. My husband has them in spades, but I do not. I'm comionate and empathetic but not strong and sometimes not faithful, so I keep praying and taking the next step. I push myself to move through the fear and the uncertainty, trusting that God’s plan will work out. Most of all, I try not to think about what happens after this step, because I would be paralyzed with fear by how much I’m going to have to put myself out there. I could have been very comfortable being a wallflower in a monastery.

The bottom line is that if I'm going to call myself a Christian, then I am called to strive for justice for all persons. Not just Americans. Not just Christians. Not just people I agree with or people I can see. All persons. Factory farming isn't just giving Americans cancer; it's destroying our environment and taking food out of the mouths of poor children. It’s also sanctioning the abuse of billions of animals every year and leaving the working poor who have to care for and slaughter those animals with lasting emotional trauma. Animals feel pain and are just as much God’s creation as we are. The difference is that God charged us as cocreators with their care, so what is it doing to our souls to participate in such mass abuse of God’s creation? I'm not my husband, and I'm not the sort of person who can stage protests and argue in court. But I am a comionate story teller, so I can continue to share my story and the story of others and through those stories, raise awareness and soften people’s hearts. I hope.

During Lent of 2018, I was struggling with something new. I was finding it hard to be at church. Most of the church’s dinners have a single vegetarian option and no vegan options. The vegetarians at church usually want me to try their vegetarian dishes, but I don’t eat dairy, and they seem to love their cheese. At one potluck, there was one vegan dish; vegan cinnamon rolls loaded with cane sugar, which I can’t eat. Not only can I not stomach the practices of the dairy industry, but I literally can’t stomach dairy anymore. A few times my husband hasn’t checked the label when shopping and inadvertently bought a product with dairy in it. There have also been a couple of times when eating out that I couldn’t find a vegan option, so I acquiesced and ate cheese. On every occasion, my ts swelled up like balloons, and I had awful stomach cramps. The pain is so not worth the few minutes of food consumption to make someone else less

uncomfortable. I have similar reactions to cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup. It reminds of when I quit smoking and would occasionally cheat while out with friends. The sinus headache the next morning was always a painful reminder of why I quit. Eventually, I stopped cheating. I’m at the same point with dairy and sweets.

Eating vegetarian just isn’t an option for me, but I’m also not the kind of person who is willing to complain or get into a confrontation, so I kept finding myself in situations where I had to choose between eating something I can’t and don’t want to or just going hungry, which people usually don’t take well at church functions. You can’t just sit there and not eat, so I found myself struggling to figure out how to deal with those situations. My food choices aren’t just a “personal choice”; they’re a spiritual imperative, and I was really struggling to find the words to convey that in a way that was loving, informative, and nonjudgmental. I was spending a lot of time searching for other authors who were saying what I wanted to say. I was spending a lot of time praying, asking the Holy Spirit to send me the words. I don’t want to hurt people, but I must be who I am.

Once you see, you can’t unsee. My heart hurts when I see people shoveling factory-farmed food into their mouths without thought or concern for how it was produced or what it’s doing to their bodies. I want to cry not only because I love the animals, but also because I love the people too. I don’t want my decision to live my conscience or my desire to help by raising awareness to make anyone feel shamed or judged. That would only add to my hurt. I want a way to say “I love you” in my own way. Until I could find it, I limited my commitments to public functions for my own sanity.

Of course, I eventually left the church, because once I did find a way to express my feelings, I found no one wanted to hear it. No one wanted anyone around who willing to challenge the comfortable status quo. To say “We welcome you” is not just to be friendly; it also means making room at the table, which you aren’t doing if you won’t even acknowledge a plant-based advocates concerns.

My daughter and I joke that they need to add the disclaimer that they welcome you as long as you eat hot dogs and cake. It’s a sad statement when a convicted child molester receives a kinder welcome in your church than someone advocating for healthy options at church functions.

One of my favorite videos features social psychologist Melanie Joy, PhD and introduces the term Carnism. Joy compares the normalization of meat eating and the societal rules around it to the conversations about slavery, misogyny, and persecution of LGBTQ persons. Just as white people once justified slavery of non-white races, considering the practice normal, natural, and necessary, Americans now use similar justifications for eating some animals while not eating others even though those distinctions make little to no sense. While a pig is actually more intelligent and more feeling than many breeds of dog, we would never consider eating the neighbor’s Golden Retriever, but we eat pigs that have been raised in horrific conditions to provide us with cheap sausage and bacon.

While the video doesn't provide plant-based advocates with a language to discuss this dissonance with others, it does at least help people understand the dynamic and social conditioning that we’re working against. Most people care about justice and doing right but have been conditioned—as I once was—to believe that plant-based eating isn’t normal and threatens our social structure, and the average American has been conditioned to fight against anything and everything that’s perceived an un-American. It’s a sad truth, but in our carnistic culture, vegan might as well be burning a flag on the town square. We fall squarely in the legal but not socially acceptable category.

The more time I spend in a countercultural lifestyle, the more I realize that our excessive consumption of animal products is just another symptom of our need to consume everything in sight to fill the hole in our souls, but we’ve missed the basic Christian message that the only thing that can fill that hole is God. It is only through reconciling ourselves to God that we can stop the insatiable hunger to have just one more thing in the pursuit of happiness. In February 2019, took my novice vows to be itted into the Third Order of the Society of St.

Francis, which is an Anglican/Episcopal religious order for people of all kinds who live by Franciscan principles “in the world” rather than in a monastery. My formation journey helped me to realize that consumerism damages our relationships more than any other characteristic of American society, yet consumerism remains an evil people can’t see, driving Americans into debt and a new form of slavery.

We need God now more than ever. We need the teachings of Jesus now more than ever, so I pray every day that the Holy Spirit will guide me to help me break free and in doing so help others to do the same. There was a certain irony in my formation journey as a Franciscan. I discovered that I am absolutely a Franciscan but not Anglican, which forced my break with the Episcopal Church to be true to my Franciscan self.

Chapter Thirteen: Plant Pure Nation

As I’m writing this morning, I’m starting the day with my current favorite breakfast: a smoothie of cucumber, zucchini, tomato, spinach, lime juice, and flax seeds. My husband is eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, which wouldn’t have been in the house a year ago. Too much of a temptation for me. After years of steadily improving my diet, processed foods just don’t taste right to me any more. They taste waxy or too sweet. Once upon a time, I would have sat down to a ham and cheese omelet with some loaded hash browns for breakfast. I would have never imagined drinking a green smoothie! I never would have tried my other favorite breakfast: a toasted tomato and avocado sandwich. I wouldn’t have bought avocados never mind eat them. But here I am, and I feel great about my choices. I get sick less. My chronic rhiniti—and resulting sinus headache— only rears its ugly head if I get sick. I’m losing weight while eating 8 times a day, and the weight I’m carrying at the moment looks a lot better and leaner that in did ten years ago.

My whole food plant-based diet eliminates not only animal products but also oils, salt, and sugar. Instead of counting calories and weighing food, I use an app called the Daily Dozen. It’s a free app from Dr. Michael Greger—author of How Not to Die and founder of nutritionfacts.org—that allows you to track 24 items each day including vitamins, beverages, exercise, and the foods you need to stay healthy. For any category, you can open the category and see a list of foods in that category. Instead of spending my day hungry, every time I’m hungry during the day, I check my list and see what foods I still need to eat for the day. I might opt for a handful of unsalted cashews or for a bowl of sliced fresh fruit or a bowl of sweet potato chili. Instead of struggling with my eating, I enjoy my food and look forward to my next meal. I’ve let go of any guilt or shame attached to my eating. I don’t worry about where my food comes from. I don’t worry about where the calories will go either.

The responses I get when I tell people what I don’t eat are funny. The two questions I get most frequently are “Where do you get your protein?” and “What do you eat?”. The first is funny because everything has protein. The strongest animals on the plant are herbivores, but no one asks where they get their protein. Gorillas are frugivores and don’t eat other mammals. No one asks where they get their protein. The second question is funny because I eat A LOT of food. Beautiful fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and legumes. To me, the most boring diet on the planet is one of these “carnivore” diets. They eat meat, meat, and more meat. I make delicious, colorful dishes full of fragrant spices and vegetables. I eat whole grains and whole grain pastas with nut-based sauces and vegetables sauces. My diet is rich and varied. What do I eat? FOOD! Not processed fake foods but real foods. Where do I get my protein? Nuts, legumes, whole grains, vegetables, and fruit. They all have protein. A better question is where do you get your fiber? Most Americans aren’t getting anywhere near enough, but I get plenty. Plenty of protein too.

I tried being a Plant Pure pod leader. (Sounds goofy doesn’t it?) What is a Plant Pure Pod? It's a group of people who share and advocate for a whole food plantbased diet. It’s not about pushing your beliefs on others but rather about living a good life, setting an example for your neighbors, and sharing information about whole food plant-based diets. It’s about meeting people where they are and helping them to make better choices. Fr. Richard Rohr says, “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”

We know the standard American diet is killing us, but changing your eating habits is hard, especially when the food you’re eating is literally engineered to get you addicted. Pods provide knowledge and to help people make that transition, so when we moved to a new city that didn't have a pod, I decided to start one: Cookeville Health Connections. I wake up every day free from the health concerns and the burdens of our unhealthy food system that is weighing down so many of my neighbors, and I want to share with them the promise of the freedom I’ve found. Sadly, I couldn’t drum up enough interest in a year of advertising around town and on social media to get more than one person. A sad statement of health in our area.

I’m continuously blown away by the medical statistics in this country. So many people are obese, and so many more are suffering or dying from preventable lifestyle diseases. The number and cost of medications that Americans are taking to treat chronic conditions caused by poor nutrition are astounding. My heart breaks when I walk through the aisle at the grocery store and see the number of overweight and obese people struggling to walk through the store as they shovel poison into their shopping carts. Most days I leave wanting to cry. Other days I leave angry. Angry at a system that hides the truth and subsidizes unhealthy foods, giving people the false impression that eating healthy is expensive. Angry that anyone should feel shame around their eating habits or their weight when companies engineer food to turn people’s bodies against them. Every time I leave the grocery store, I recommit to spreading the word about nutrition and the wonderful, abundant life people can have with a whole food plant-based lifestyle.

In my own experience, the side effects of medications have been far worse than giving up animal products, sweets, salt, and oil. When I took a statin med—the generic version of Simvastatin to be specific—on the advice of my primary care provider, I didn’t think much about the side effects. The drug had been tested by the FDA and recommended by my provider, so I assumed I was taking a minimal risk. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Here are the common side effects: heartburn, gas, bloating, stomach pain, indigestion, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, headache, t pain, muscle pain, skin rash, sleep problems (insomnia), mild memory problems or confusion, or cold symptoms such as stuffy nose, sneezing, or sore throat. Those are the side affects you can expect that you shouldn’t call your doctor if you experience. So-called “normal” side effects. I personally experienced muscle and paint, insomnia, and memory issues. I found that just a 30-minute ride on one of my horses would leave me sore for 2-3 days. I had previously been able to ride two horses for an hour each every day. I found myself forgetting things at work at an alarming rate. I also experienced an increase in sinus migraines. As scared as I was about having a heart attack, the medication significantly downgraded my quality of life.

When I think about the average American taking eleven prescription medications or the more than ninety percent of diabetes patients who have Type 2 diabetes, I struggle with seeing the United States as the land of the free. No one suffering from chronic illness is free. No one taking medications out of fear for their lives and suffering the “normal” side effects of those meds is free. I get angry when I hear people debate about who should pay for healthcare and who should provide it or istrate it. If we stop subsidizing foods that are killing us and gave that $30 billion dollars back to the people, people could afford to eat a healthy, nutritious diet that would eliminate their chronic diseases and the need for all the meds.

My heart breaks when I think that the poor among us are dependent on public school education for knowledge and are dependent on grocery stores to provide healthy foods. Instead, they are given misinformation regarding nutrition and peddled processed poison, leaving them vulnerable to diabetes, heart disease, and chronic inflammatory diseases, which leaves them vulnerable to big pharma. More than seventy-five percent of healthcare dollars in the United States go to preventable lifestyle diseases. That’s just insane.

American are dying in droves. Americans are living half-lives. I can’t imagine that any of it pleases a God that wants us to live abundant lives. What makes it even more sad is that the poison peddled in American grocery stores is produced at the cost of the poorest among us on the world stage. We have been given everything we need to feed the world, but the way we’re using our resources is destroying our environment, destroying our bodies, and starving our global poor, but it is all buried beneath the lie of American greatness. People are consumed with what’s going on with the NFL or who’s competing on The Bachelor or the latest in-fighting in Washington and aren’t seeing what’s right in front of them. They’re driven to consume regardless of the cost and are consuming gluttonously while starving for connection and basic nutrients. The irony is inescapable and gut wrenching.

A few months ago, I listened to a supply priest give a sermon on Noah and the

flood. He suggested that the rain was God’s tears. As I pondered his message, I wondered if the growing desertification caused by our horrendous agricultural practices is God’s despair—that moment when there are no more tears, that moment when you’ve cried so long that there’s nothing left of the sadness. There is only an empty acknowledgment that what you loved has left the world. Of course, as a Christian, I know that moment of desolation opens the doors for God’s healing and that the promise of God’s ultimate reconciliation is still somewhere on the horizon. In my heart, I believe that we’re at a breaking point, that very breaking point where God fills the hole, and we experience resurrection. I must believe that to continue the fight.

I find hope in Millennials. I hear people criticizing Millennials, but I think it’s my generation and the so-called greatest generation that went horribly wrong. Baby boomers were obsessed with producing and selling more, and my generation is obsessed with acquiring more stuff at any cost and consuming anything and everything in sight. The result is that my generation is a disconnected mess of addictions, medicating with the latest wonder drug. We created a figurative zombie apocalypse and live as slaves to debt and consumption. We must work to pay the debts they’ve acquired and the debts we’re accumulating buying things we didn’t need to impress people we don’t like. We don’t sleep because of all the sugar and caffeine we consume, making us exhausted and in need of more sugar and caffeine. We are hamsters on wheels feeding the corporate leviathan.

Millennials, on the other hand, seek the truth in a way that Americans haven’t done for many generations. They would rather camp in the woods and connect to their friends and nature than have 3,000-square-foot homes. They seek more natural ways to eat and heal. They seek more peaceful ways to raise awareness. They buy less things, and they usually buy used. They recycle and upcycle. They question the government. They question the status quo. The whole food plantbased community is growing because Millennials refuse to tow the party line. They want to live abundantly and meaningfully and refuse to accept anything less.

As a part of the whole food plant-based community, I get tremendous from the people around me not only to continually improve my diet but also to continually improve myself. Last year, I participated in the Plant Fit Summit and the Vegan Warrior Summit. The presenters ranged from doctors and activists to chefs and body builders. The best part was the diversity of presentations. I didn’t watch every presentation. Instead, I was able to pick and choose topics relevant to my life and ministry. Chef AJ was a particular favorite. She’s amazing not just because of what she does but also because she has overcome so much and continues to share her story with others to help and them. She’s overcome abuse and food addiction and helps others do the same. Another favorite was Dr. Will Tuttle author of The World Peace Diet, who offered a free of guided meditations to all the participants in the Vegan Warrior Summit. I also thoroughly enjoyed hearing from Maša and Michael Ofei who created The Vegan Minimalist. They more than any other presenters represented and ideal to which I strive.

Every presentation at both the Vegan Warrior Summit and the Planet Fit Summit without exception offered positive insights into how to improve your life and most presenters offered their own struggles as an example of how anyone can follow in their footsteps. For me, the greatest takeaway came from Dt. Tuttle’s presentation: we are all on a journey, and we all have the opportunity to be better tomorrow. But there was a deeper message in both summits. All of us are connected and should be loving and ing one another in our journey. Being plant-based—or anything else in life—is about making progress not about being perfect. The point is to make healthier choices every day.

The life of continuous improvement plant-based advocates choose is not unlike the life of improvement and development many Christians embark on at their baptisms, choosing every day to be a better re-presentation of Christ here on Earth. In my own Christian journey, I have committed to a Rule of Life based on the teachings of St. Francis and have committed to improving myself spiritually every day through that Rule of Life. I’ve committed to learning to grow my own food, to abstain from ing anything but sustainable agriculture, and to trying to purchase used or upcycle whenever possible. My rule of life isn’t a destination. It doesn’t reflect who I am; it is an ideal to which I strive.

Chapter Fourteen: Seeing the World as It Is

In an email on Sunday, December 16, 2018 entitled “The Source of Action”, Richard Rohr wrote about his motivation for starting the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico:

Over the years, I met many social activists who were doing excellent social analysis and advocating for crucial justice issues, but they were not working from an energy of love. They were still living out of their false self with the need to win, the need to look good—attached to a superior, politically correct selfimage.

They might have the answer, but they are not themselves the answer. In fact, they are often part of the problem. That’s one reason that most revolutions fail and too many reformers self-destruct from within. For that very reason, I believe, Jesus and great spiritual teachers first emphasize transformation of consciousness and soul. Without inner transformation, there is no grounded or lasting reform or revolution. When subjugated people rise to power, they often become as dominating as their oppressors because the same demon of power hasn’t been exorcised in them.

The lesson he learned is just as critical for the whole food plant-based movement. Make no mistake about it. People who don’t eat a Standard American Diet or adopt a meat laden fad diet are discriminated against. We are seen by the meat-eating majority as anti-American, radical, liberal whackos. Even among many so-called liberals, plant-based advocates are still considered radical and too left-wing. (This is an interesting situation when you’re plantbased and a Libertarian!) We face ridicule daily from co-workers, friends, and family. We’re asked ridiculous, condescending questions like, “How do you get

protein?” But even in the face of that, we must avoid becoming defensive, selfrighteous, and violent ourselves. We must maintain a tender heart and a sense of loving all creation—even loving those who advocate for carnism. We must the transformation we went through and be there to assist others in making the same transformation.

Plant-based advocates must maintain a focus on raising awareness. We must see to help others see. As Rob Bell puts it in What We Talk About When We Talk about God, “Not in a superficial, check-the-box, oh-yeah-now-I-get-it casual sort of way, but in a ‘Oh dear God, my eyes are finally open’ sort of way” (99). We must vigilantly pray for God’s help in softening people’s hearts. The whole food plant-based movement is righteous. The whole food plant-based movement is God’s work. But we must always that all of us are God’s children, and God loves the sinners as much as he loves the righteous, not forgetting of course that while we might be righteous in our food choices, we’re sinners elsewhere in our lives. We must always act and speak with the love of God, allowing the Holy Spirit to move us and to speak through us. We must trust that God’s plan culminates in a world without violence of any kind where his creation is loved and respected for the miracle it is, for the essence of God it carries within it.

As Dr. Tuttle often reminds us, the whole food plant-based lifestyle is a lifestyle of peace, and only through peace can we really change the world. It is the message of all major religions, and it is unequivocally the message of the Gospels. It is the message of our great prophets Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu. It is the only message that will radically change our world. Even in Proverbs wisdom there is an understanding that peace, love, and understanding are the only ways to really transform people:

The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive (16: 21 NLT) Violent people mislead their companions, leading them down a harmful path (16:29 NLT).

Only when we can meet meat-eaters where they are and love them as they are will we ever have the chance to share our story and the promise of a more peaceful and healthy life through whole food plant-based eating.

I’ve personally come to realize that I can't love the Lord my God with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my strength if I don't also love God's creation as God loves me. God’s creation encomes all that we see, all that feel, and so much more that we don’t see. It includes the people we love and the people we don’t and even the people we can’t stand. It includes the adorable puppies in the pound and the smelly hogs and chickens. It includes the land, the sea, and the air. I know in my heart that when God gave us dominion over all the Earth, God—like any parent—hoped we would live up to expectations, loving what God created and caring for it. I’m sure that like any other parent God knew we would fail over and over again but remains hopeful that we will learn and be better, moving always toward a more peaceful and loving present.

As an INFJ, I crave the truth. I love getting to the heart of the matter. More importantly, as someone who has experienced radical grace and healing, I know that it all begins with standing in your own truth. You can’t worry about someone else’s truth. We recently had some pre-holiday family drama with one of our exes. It was a bit heartbreaking. Not because it effected our life in any way, but because it’s been over twenty years since the divorce, and she’s still reliving the pain and anger. We genuinely feel comion and pity for her and wish she could it the role she has played in her relationships, so she could move on and let go. Over the years, we’ve watched her end relationship after relationship, becoming even more bitter and angry with us. She’s been engaged three times but can’t seem to get to the happily ever after. My husband and I have been together for almost twenty years and married for over ten years. Our relationship isn’t perfect, but we’ve learned how to stand in our truths, communicate to one another, and—most importantly—take responsibility for our relationship. We’re here because we choose every day to work it out.

Being whole food plant-based isn’t that different. Every day, I have to own my

truth. I have to choose to feel the pain of knowing that 1.2 billion animals will be raised and slaughtered inhumanely for human consumption, knowing that many of them are living in pain and that many of them will be in abject fear as slaughter approaches. I have to choose to feel the pain that we aren’t living up to God’s expectations. Without that truth, there is no reason to change, no reason to seek better practices. In owning that truth and the truth that I once actively ed the system that perpetuates that abuse, I find the motivation and will to continue living an openly countercultural life that leaves me open to ridicule and criticism. I actively choose truth over popularity or comfort.

Two years ago, I attended the Values in Action conference through one of the conference’s satellite locations. The Irish poet, theologian, and mediator Padrig O Tauma spoke about how he uses story to heal and bring people together. He works in Belfast, arguably one of the most war-torn cities in European history. His work is daunting but made possible through raw honesty and storytelling. I believe this can work for the whole food plant-based movement as well. As Rob Bell states, “Simply by being honest about what’s really going on inside you, you live less and less divided” (What We Talk About, p. 192). In his book Breathing Under Water: The Spirituality of the Twelve Steps, Richard Rohr talks about how the raw honesty and the sharing of personal stories in twelve step programs opens the door for God to really transform people. It is this kind of honesty, sharing, and openness that will allow the whole food plant-based movement to transform hearts and minds and bring us to a place of greater love and peace.

For the first time in my adult life, I lost weight in the winter. I would normally pack on the pounds and loose them in the spring, keeping a few more year over year. December of 2018 started a new trend though. I keep losing regardless of the season. Of course, it’s much easier when you attend parties where they’re serving little weenies, cheese dip, dairy-filled deserts, etc. When all you can eat is the whole grain crackers and the dish you brought, you’re not likely to indulge in too much food!

When I went to the eye doctor last year, I had been experiencing a lot of eye fatigue later in the day. I thought maybe it was going to be time to switch to bifocals, but my eyes for the second year in a row were better! I’ve been wearing glasses for over thirty years. Every year, my sight has gotten incrementally worse until two years ago. For two years now, my prescription has been too strong and causing my eyes to strain to reverse the over-correction. My husband attributes it to our significantly improved diet. While I’m skeptical, I can’t deny the improvement.

I honestly thought this lifestyle would be harder to maintain, but it just isn’t. I feel great about my choices. I feel healthy. I feel strong. I rarely feel tempted by foods I once loved. Like Jacob who wrestled with an angel and became Israel, I have received a great blessing. It didn’t come without a cost, but the cost was a small price to pay for the abundant blessing my new life holds. The greatest blessing is perhaps the opportunity to preach the Gospels through my actions. St. Francis encouraged his followers to always preach the Gospel through their actions and attitudes, which is precisely what this whole food plant-based lifestyle allows me to do every day. I no longer feel a disconnect between my actions and my beliefs. I live honestly and abundantly in the knowledge that I faithfully—although rarely perfectly—seek and serve Christ not only in all persons but also in all of God’s glorious creation.

In the Center for Action and Contemplation daily meditation on Tuesday, December 27, 2018, Richard Rohr wrote:

From the very beginning, faith, hope, and love are planted deep within our nature—indeed they are our very nature (Romans 5:5, 8:14-17). But we have to awaken, allow, and advance this core identity by saying a conscious yes to it and drawing upon it as a reliable and Absolute Source. Image must become likeness.

The whole food plant-based movement seeks to recapture this nature by removing the disconnect between us and our food and by removing the current

level of violence from our food sources. We were never meant to love some animals and not others. We are as connected to God’s creation as we are to God. In Healing Our Violence Through the Journey of Centering Prayer, the Late Fr. Thomas Keating stated,

The positive being that emerges from you and me [is] the image of God. The problem is that this image has been distorted by the emotional programs for happiness and over-identification with false values or groups so that the purity and power and beauty of who we really are is kind of hidden with layers of false self, both conscious and unconscious, so the spiritual journey aims at that.

The whole food plant-based movement seeks to remove the false norms placed on us by a consumer culture, lifting the weight of those norms and allowing us to return to our true nature—kind, loving reflections of God.

Beyond Carnism has a YouTube series to help plant-based advocates increase their advocacy effectiveness. They remind plant-based advocates that one of the most effective ways to spread the whole food plant-based message is share whole food plant-based cuisine with others. For me, participating in potlucks allows a great opportunity to expose non-vegans to some of my favorite whole food plant-based dishes. They also advise plant-based advocates to our own carnism. When we don’t, we’re not being very respectful or loving of our meat-eating brethren: “We’ve lived in a carnistic world, but they haven’t lived in a [whole food plant-based] world.” It’s up to us to bridge the gap. That is a big reason I’m sharing this story. I want people who are considering going plant-based but don’t think they can do it to understand that if a cattle rancher’s granddaughter can do it, anyone can.

One of the main messages of the Beyond Carnism series is this: that you are not your audience. It’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen to advocate for the whole food plant-based movement, which is focused largely on preventing disease and improving health, rather than advocating for veganism. While many

Americans have very little interest in saving animals or ending factory farming, their families have been affected by heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. While many Americans—especially southern, conservative Americans—don’t buy into issues of climate change, they have fought weight problems and food addictions. When you can offer an effective alternative to mounds of costly prescription medications to treat the growing number of lifestyle diseases, you offer something more personal and tangible to plant-based activism. In the words of Chef A.J., the animals don’t care why you stop eating them. If you can convert people to a whole food plant-based diet by advocating for their health, I say go for it.

The third installment in the series discusses four key obstacles to effective plantbased advocacy. The first is carnism, which is the set of cultural beliefs that tell Americans that eating meat and dairy is normal, natural, and necessary. Carnism drives Americans to defend their consumption of animal products. The second is a lack of advocacy skills. As Dr. Joy points out, many plant-based advocates come to whole food plant-based living not from a background in advocacy but instead from a love of animals, so they very often have no formal training in public speaking or writing and have little understanding of how to win over an audience. Many plant-based advocates want to convey their message and advocate for social justice but don’t know how. The third is emotional reactivity. When people first have their eyes opened to the pain and suffering of others, their first instinct is an emotional response. For plant-based advocates, most have chosen the whole food plant-based lifestyle after recognizing the pain and suffering of animals used for food, so their first instinct is an emotional response to protect those animals, and they often lack the objectivity to discuss the issues in public without appearing militant. The fourth is a lack of information. While most plant-based advocates know the world would be better if we ceased animal agriculture, they don’t have the background or education to be able to articulate concrete facts and figures when arguing for a whole food plant-based diet.

Thankfully, there are more and more opportunities for plant-based advocates to learn advocacy skills and to get more concrete information on the benefits of a whole food plant-based diet through organizations like Beyond Carnism. There are more and more online conferences each year where people can hear from

experts in nutrition, psychology, and environmentalism. There are more and more VegFests—physical conferences where plant-based advocates can hear speakers and shop from plant-based vendors—throughout the country. There are also more plant-based communities cropping up the Vegan Warrior Academy that allow plant-based advocates a place for as they work on themselves and their advocacy skills. Most importantly, as the whole food plant-based movement ages, more and more plant-based advocates are sharing their stories and talking about their own carnism. As the movement gets more and more former of the meat and dairy industries who not only ate animal products but also actively participated in animal agriculture, the movement gains more and more credibility among average Americans. In addition, as more athletes and prominent figures in Hollywood like James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger adopt a whole food plant-based diet the movement gains more mainstream attention.

Chapter Fifteen: Becoming a Health Coach

After my own journey to find health and fitness, I felt compelled to help others. I’ve always been driven by a need to help people, but this was something stronger. So many people walk around every day believing that they must be sick, overweight, and consigned to a life of daily medications, and it isn’t true. I can’t not speak out against those cultural myths and try to stem the tide of the overwhelming health crisis we find ourselves in. We’re spending over a trillion dollars a year on healthcare in the United States, and more than seventy-five percent of that is going to pay for preventable lifestyle diseases. Those numbers are increasing every day, and if we don’t do something to change how people are eating and living, health care costs will bankrupt this country regardless of who is paying for the health insurance. I can’t sit by and do nothing. I must roll up my sleeves and help.

I spent several months researching health coaching programs and decided on the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN). They have several key concepts that fit beautifully with my new outlook on life and the world around me. One of those was fitting out. There are some people who fit in wherever they go. I’ve never been one of those people, and most of the people who find their way to IIN haven’t been either. We’re different, and IIN celebrates that. One of the first lectures encouraged us to stop trying to fit in and start fitting out on purpose, to start celebrating who we are. We were encouraged to explore what sets us apart and to celebrate those traits as what we have to offer the world.

Another tenet of IIN that I love is their belief that diets don’t work. IIN health coaches are exposed to hundreds of dietary theories but are encouraged to focus on creating healthy habits rather than pushing any one diet. One of those habits is crowding out, which means rather than removing things from your diet or your life crowding those things out with healthy foods and habits instead. It makes perfect sense when you think about it. If someone tells you that you can’t have

chocolate cake, the first thing you want is chocolate cake. But if you eat a salad before your meal, chances are pretty good you won’t have room for the chocolate cake when the time comes for dessert. Likewise, if you try to stop late night eating with will power, you’ll probably end up beating yourself up for not succeeding, but if you figure out that you’re eating at night, because you’re bored, you can replace the late night eating with a trip to the library, the gym, or somewhere else that engages you. If you figure out that you’re eating at night because you’re lonely, you can replace the snacking with a call to a friend or a social outing.

The most important reason I chose IIN was founder Joshua Rosenthal’s vision in creating IIN. He believed that you could change the world by changing the way people eat, which I wholeheartedly agree with. The more I learn about nutrition the more I’m convinced that what’s good for our bodies is also good for the planet. Did you know that crop rotation and no-till agriculture increase the microbiome in the soil thereby increasing the microbiome in the gut of whoever consumes the produce? It also increases the nutrient density of the produce. Turns out that traditional agriculture isn’t just better for the soil and the environment; it’s better for us too. The longest running comparison of traditional agricultural methods and conventional agricultural methods has also shown that traditional agriculture yields are comparable to conventional agricultural yields in a good year and exceed the yields of conventional agriculture by as much as forty percent in years of drought and excessive rain. Again, what’s good for us, is also good for the environment.

Choosing IIN has been one of the best decisions of my life. I’ve ed a network of people dedicated to creating a ripple effect in the world, to getting people off medications and on to health diets, and to changing the world by changing our relationship to food. The more I tell my story the more I find others who are where I’ve been and want help making the progress I’ve made. When they see that I’ve lost seven inches around my waist, that my skin has cleared up, and that I’m as fit and strong as I was at 25, they want that too. IIN has helped transform my life, and my mission in the world. I’m now a part-time health coach and am more spiritually fulfilled than I’ve ever been in my life.

Chapter Sixteen: Accepting the Role of Prophet

For some religions, the word prophet is reserved for people like Mohamed or Jesus. For me and most people raised in churches where the laity (not clergy) have a strong role in the leadership of the church, a prophet is someone who through divine inspiration brings a new meaning or view of God to people. A few are famous and revered in the world at large like Mother Theresa, but many are busy in the day-to-day work of the church in the world. During my journey, I came to recognize that the work advocates for a whole food plant-based eating are doing is very much the work of the church. Like St. Francis, they are on the outer edges of the church and are largely scoffed at, but they are working to bring the church into greater alignment with the love and reconciliation that God through Christ has called the church to. It is a prophetic new vision for the church.

Unfortunately, with this new vision comes criticism and ridicule as anyone who has pushed the church to new truths has endured. People cling to their tribalistic identities even—and sometime more so—within the church and too often only seek out what confirms their tribal identity. They see what they want to see, so their identities can be confirmed, and if you are challenging that, you will be treated much as Jesus was in his hometown. You will be run out of town. I’ve come to recognize that if you’re being criticized, you’re doing something right, because despite the warm and fuzzy persona the modern church has given to Jesus, he was brutally honest, especially with those closest to him. Being a part of the church means telling the truth, even when it ruffles feathers. The truth is still the truth.

The truth I am here to tell is that every table is an altar. Jesus as a first century Jew would have believed this and anyone who follows him should too. The American Christian churches need to hear this now more than ever. At a time when America is dealing with an obesity epidemic and alarmingly high health

care costs largely due to preventable lifestyle diseases, what could be more important than treating our meals together as a sacred time to fuel and to heal our bodies? What could be more Christian that breaking bread together in a way that expresses a genuine love for ourselves and one another?

Imagine how differently we would treat food and people if we really saw our table at home as an altar, as a sacred space. We would not bring our cell phones to the table. We would take time to set the table, to pray before meals, and to be with one another while we ate. Imagine how differently we would shop for our food and prepare our food. We would choose more locally grown foods produced by people we have met at farms we have visited by people making a living wage. We would shop less at chain stores and spend more time knowing where our food comes from. We might even grow some of it ourselves.

Imagine how differently our lives would be if we treated every table that way. We certainly would not pull through a drive through, order our food through a speaker, and take it home in a paper sack, or worse… Eat it in the car. We would want every step of the process to be treated with love and kindness. We would want everyone involved in the process to be treated with love and kindness. We would not allow violence and persecution to be so prevalent in our food systems. We would pray before meals. We would talk to each other. We would cherish the meal and the time we spent together, not just on holidays but every day at every meal.

While the statistics can be intimidating and can make us feel powerless, we have all the power. We can choose what we buy and what we eat. We can change our lives. To quote Lord Birkenhead in Chariots of Fire, “We are the committee.” The market will produce what we demand, and we have the power to demand something different, something healthier, something made in peace and love. We have the power to vote our dollars every day in everything we eat to force the food industry into a new way of producing. We can bring the food back to our local communities. We can bring nutrients back to the soil. We can remove pollutants from our environment and our table. In the end, it’s entirely up to us,

and I will continue to spread the message that the church is responsible for reminding people of both their power and their responsibilities in this world, particularly when it comes to their food choices and the consequences of those food choices.

Epilogue: An Emotional Ride

The last decade of my life has been one hell of a ride. When I look back on my life 10 years ago, I can barely recognize it. I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. I drank. Not much by my family’s standards, but we belonged to a wine club and always had alcohol in the house. I had trouble getting to sleep at night and had to hit the snooze seven or eight times each morning. I consumed a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke every day to cover my caffeine addiction. I was 100% focused on achieving what everyone told me I should. I colored my hair, bought the right clothes, and ate what everyone else did. I was starting to struggle with my health and my weight. My previously beautiful, clear skin was covered in dark sunspots and adult acne. I was rapidly losing my self-confidence and my ability to look in the mirror without being disappointed and eventually disgusted.

The worst part was that my life-long ion for riding and competing horses was all disappearing. As a gained weight and suffered the side effects from medications, I lost all muscle recovery. As my confidence in life waned, so did my confidence in the saddle. I had an amazing horse who was willing to step up and doing anything I asked, but I became terrified of riding… And falling. My balance and strength were awful, and I fell repeatedly, which had not happened since I was in my teens learning to ride young, green horses. At one point, I thought I would have to give up riding and sell my horses. Part of the breaking point for me I suppose.

During this journey, I went through stages of anger and despair when I was overwhelmed by the suffering and pain around me. I’d have days when I couldn’t talk to people or get on social media, because the tears or the anger were too overwhelming to control. Some days, I was ready for a fight, and it took everything I had not to unload on the nearest bystander. Other days, I wanted to check out and walk away, because the world was just too ugly and hopeless to save. It’s difficult to open your eyes and your heart. In the process,

you end up taking on the suffering and pain of others, and that’s just hard. But I’ve learned that in that pain and suffering, God breaks you open and finds a way in. We’re so programmed to think that having the strength not to feel pain is to the key to getting what we want, but real strength comes in those moments of pain when we realize we can’t get through it alone, and we don’t have to. We’re all on the crazy ride of life together.

Now, I’m finding a middle ground. My Franciscan formation and my 12 step recovery reminds me that the way I live my life is the best way to preach the Gospels and in doing so, advocate for a better way of eating—a way of eating that isn’t just better for us but also better for the planet. I’m living my life in the most fulfilling and comionate way I can, and I hope that inspires others. I pray that our country—our world—will find more comion and that we’ll learn to practice more consistency between our practices and our beliefs. I pray that we’ll stop covering up violent practices and no longer accept that violence is normal, necessary, and natural. I pray that in some small way I can contribute to transforming the world into a kinder, more comionate place for us and for the animals.

While there are facts and figures in this book, neither were the point. This was a story about personal transformation. If you want to read more about the facts and figures, I’ve included a list of some of the giants in the field of whole food plantbased nutrition, including the works of T. Colin Campbell whose own story is compelling. He started life on a dairy farm and while becoming an expert in nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University ended up advocating against milk consumption and, despite solid science, was shredded by the scientific community. I found a lot of comfort in his story, because if someone with his credentials could be ignored, I didn’t feel so bad about being shunned and ignored myself.

When people find out I don’t eat processed food, salt, or sugar, they assume my diet is boring and unenjoyable. Nothing could be further from the truth. I absolutely love food. I love trying new recipes. I love cooking, and I really love

eating. I don’t think God ever intended for us not to enjoy something that sustains us, something we have to do multiples times a day. The thing is that when you stop eating food designed to make you addicted with an overload of fat, sugar, and salt, the tastes of natural foods are so much better. You can start smelling fresh fruits and vegetables and start appreciating their juicy sweetness. Foods cooked from fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and spices can be rich and filling, but they don’t leave you feeling overfilled and dragging the way meals made from processed foods do. The best part is that they don’t damage your body or add weight to your waistline. It’s a win-win. You can treat your food and your body as sacred and still have fun doing it. I certainly do!

Additional Reading

21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health by Neal D Barnard MD FACC

The Cheese Trap: How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Get Healthy by Neal D Barnard MD FACC and Marilu Henner

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 by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II

How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease by Michael Greger M.D. FACLM and Gene Stone

How Not to Diet: The Groundbreaking Science of Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss by Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat by Howard F. Lyman

The PlantPure Nation Cookbook: The Official Companion Cookbook to the

Breakthrough Film with over 150 Plant-Based Recipes by Kim Campbell and T. Colin Campbell

Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism by Melanie Joy PhD and John Robbins.

Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition by T. Colin Campbell and Howard Jacobson