by Varius » Wed Dec 23, 2015 3:12 pm
Hi everyone, I am a 27yr old man who started adhering to a whole food plant-based diet 100% (it adheres to McDougall program guidelines) early this year and have had amazing results.
My reason for following the diet was primarily for long-term health and also because I thought it would help with digestive system problems I was having. What I have found though is that following the diet has aided me greatly in a myriad of ways in the short-term. The thing is I had been suffering from multiple crippling health problems, namely, the previously mentioned digestive issues, severe insomnia, severe eye strain and also a wrist injury that wouldn't heal. I had been searching for and trying ways to cure these conditions separately. Incredibly, adhering to the diet has substantially improved all four of these conditions. The digestive problems and eye strain have been near eliminated and the insomnia and wrist injury have improved quite significantly. It has been life-changing for me because the aforementioned problems were seriously affecting how I could live. Now I can focus more on what I want to do in life rather than the things that are preventing me from doing what I want to do. I have also experienced a lot of other benefits such as decreased body odor and improved aerobic performance. Something I want to mention is that for most of of last year I was following the diet about 85-95%, but I only experienced these benefits once I was adhering 100% (apart from the digestive issues which had gotten a lot better at 85-95% and improved further at complete adherence). It was very surprising, I had decided to start adhering 100% for long-term reasons but sometime after starting noticed I was feeling way better and realised that it must have been due to the change in diet.
I am very grateful to the people who have spread the message and educated the public about a plant-based diet -- Dr McDougall, Dr Esselstyn, Dr Campbell, Dr Barnard, Dr Gregor and others -- and want to give them a huge thanks as I take my health very seriously and wanted to follow a diet that would set me in good stead for the rest of my life. I must say that Dr McDougall is my favorite though! I am a huge Dr McDougall fan and love watching his informative, entertaining and passionate talks. What I am most grateful to Dr McDougall for, is his "starch-based populations are healthy" nutritional paradigm which has which has cleared my eyes and allowed me to see past the confusion and complexity that characterises nutrition science. I started researching nutrition quite intensively a few years ago in order to find the optimal diet and it seemed like an impossible task with all the different factors you could take into account but Dr McDougall showed me how I was missing the forest for the trees and how there was a simple nutritional paradigm that could explain why some populations suffer high rates of chronic disease and why others were largely free of them. The starchivore paradigm has completely changed how I view humans' relationship with food in terms of what we are designed to eat. So again a huge thanks to Dr Mcdougall, you are one of my heroes.