by UtahJane » Mon Nov 28, 2011 8:48 pm
Thanks alwaysevolving. Like your name says, it is a process. Fortunately, we can change, but like evolution, it can go pretty slowly!
I'll tell you a secret: I'm now very grateful that my first 2 months were a struggle for me. The reason I’m grateful is that now I can empathize with the experience of others. I'm sharing this diet with many others; some are actually trying it. It is hard for them, and I can honestly say I know how they feel. And I can testify that things can change dramatically. I wanted it to be easy for me, but now I'm glad it was not. If it had been easy for me, I wouldn't understand how they feel or be able to help them as effectively.
This is a difficult process for most people, even for the great Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. I transcribed the following from a recording where he was telling his story:
“Speaking with Ann, I said, ‘Look, before I can ever do this with patients we have to do this together ourselves.’ And so in April of 1984 was the last time that I had a...I grew up on an Aberdeen-Angus beef farm…so that was the end of that. And the first three months were very, very difficult. I didn’t know what was going on but now, on retrospect, what was happening was I was down-regulating my fat receptor, and that is the challenge, that is why you have to help patients in the first three months because if you are taken completely off the typical American diet, and you have them now eating a plant-based diet, that is the time when the fat receptors are down-regulating, that is when you still have some of that craving, but the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia has clearly shown us that you lose the craving after 8-12 weeks, and that is the critical time to help these people...Ann and I did this for a year and my cholesterol just sort of began to plummet. It started at about 185. I got down to about 155 in a couple of months, and I said, ‘This isn’t good,’ so I (nobody was telling me how to do this) and I just said, ‘I’m going to stop all this oil,’ and then suddenly I was down to 119, without any of these cholesterol-lowering drugs because we didn’t have them then.”
BTW, I did stick with the program on Thanksgiving Day this year. I was so busy helping to prepare the food for everyone that I didn’t take any time to make special food for myself. Off and on I started to panic that I would feel miserable when we sat down to eat and I had a very sad looking plate. But my mother set aside a yam, my brother made me a separate salad, my sister-in-law roasted me veggies without the oil, and there were a couple of items I could eat as is. Finally, when we sat down, I had a very large nice-looking plate of food. And guess what? I thoroughly enjoyed it! After the meal, when some were groaning about eating too much and not feeling well, I felt terrific!