"Are you a vegan?" The friendly cashier asks JD who is wildly twisting and straining against the horrible grocery cart restraints, waving and saying "Bye! Bye! BYE!" (as he is prone to do in a very piercing and insistent manner as soon as we pull our cart up to the check out lane). Immediately upon being noticed by the very person whose attention he is so consumed with getting, JD transforms into his shy mode (ducking head, smiling mischievously while glancing up through fluttery eyelashes). I am only momentarily confused by the cashier's question, because I see that JD is wearing his cute little organic cotton t-shirt that says "Not A Meat Eater" across the front so I chuckle and reply simply that yes, we did eat a vegan diet for the first 7 months of the year, but we don't anymore... [The shirt (that I got from www.smallplum.com with a Groupon) (1) still fits and (2) was clean, and since those are the two main only requirements when I am hastily selecting an article of clothing to wrestle onto my streaking 18 month old who prefers to stay naked (or at the very least make an adventure out of getting dressed) that's what he happened to be wearing in the grocery store check out lane that day in spite of the fact that we are no longer on the vegan diet.]
The truth is, the quest for health has taken us down a number of roads this year - veganism being only one of them. It all started out with a ski trip. That's right. In January, Jonathan packed up his snowboard, bought some new boots and took a well-deserved mini vacation to Winter Park, CO with several other guys for a weekend of fun (and, I secretly prayed, NO injuries - as he has been know to incur injuries in almost every sport including disc golf. Little did I know, he would end up spending most of his time snowmobiling instead of snowboarding. Yikes.). Upon his return (and after it was confirmed that he still had all of his limbs), he started telling me about the trip - one of the main points of the story ended up being the amount of MEAT that was consumed. Sausage and bacon for breakfast. Ham sandwiches for lunch. Steak for dinner. Etc. For three days. Also on this trip (in between bites of meat), Jonathan had a conversation with a guy who highly recommended The Engine 2 Diet by Rip Esselstyn (a professional triathlete turned firefighter here in Austin), saying that after completing the suggested 4 week jump start plan, he had lost quite a few pounds, lowered his cholesterol significantly, and noticed a big difference in his overall well being.
Now, usually, I am the one pushing the envelope when it comes to healthier eating, so it came as a bit of a shock to me to hear my husband asking me to buy this book so that we could read up on the diet and potentially make the switch to a vegan diet! I got the book, we both read it and really liked what it had to say. This was not the first book I had read about the evils of the Western diet (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Detox for Women and The China Study to name a few) not to mention documentaries such as Food, Inc. and Forks over Knives. I fully believe that you are what you eat (and what your meat eats...) so it was easy to take the plunge into veganism after being once again grossed out by the facts.
We both liked all of the food on the E2 diet (which eliminates all oils in addition to animal products) and things were "moving" along very nicely (pun intended!). We did not really miss meat, milk, cheese, or eggs at all. We were getting by just fine with tofu, tempeh, veggie burgers, almond, soy, coconut and rice milk, nutritional yeast, etc. Luckily Austin is highly conducive to this type of lifestyle. With Whole Foods and Central Market within walking distance and Sprouts a five minute drive away, we were set. We also found lots of yummy vegetarian and vegan restaurants.
A month or two into this very hip diet/lifestyle change, however, Jonathan began having headaches almost daily and even a few migraines. This continued for several weeks and as time went on he also started feeling completely fatigued in the middle of the day in addition to having pain in his lower abdomen that was at times moderate and at other times more severe. He was frequently achy and feverish and often sick with cold like symptoms. He began coming home in the middle of the day to take naps. When we used to spend the weekend going on "family adventures", Jonathan would often be too tired and/or sick. So I would try to spend as much time out of our small house with JD as possible so he could get some rest. As much as I hate to admit it, while I was genuinely concerned for Jonathan and his health, I was most concerned with the fact that I wasn't getting much time "off." I was becoming much less sympathetic (and I did not start out as very sympathetic person to begin with) towards all of these ailments as they began piling up and much more easily frustrated. Jonathan, of course, was extremely frustrated as well. He was not able to work as much as he needed to, he did not know why he was constantly feeling sick and tired. Some days he was just plain depressed and not much fun to be around and honestly, again, I thought mostly of myself. I know you feel bad but do you have to make JD and I feel bad too?
During this time, I happened upon Paul's prayer for the Ephesians in chapter 1 that God would "make you intelligent and discerning in knowing Him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is He is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life He has for Christians. Oh, the utter extravagance of His work in us who trust in Him - endless energy, boundless strength!" It encouraged me to read these words and know that God intended a glorious way of life for us and wanted to give us endless energy and boundless strength. I prayed for those things. When I felt extra tired I remembered those verses and tried to "claim" them for myself. It helped at times. Sort of. Other times, I just wanted Jonathan to hurry up and get better so my life could get back to normal. And these feelings would make me even more upset because, of course, I realized how utterly ridiculous and selfish they were. I was blessed with an incredible husband and was feeling cheated b/c he wasn't able to help me as much as I had grown used to being helped. (I knew a few single moms who would probably be rolling their eyes at me for these petty complaints.) I wasn't even the one who was sick! (I have several close friends and relatives who have dealt with intense, debilitating pain on a daily basis while carrying on with life, jobs, kids, even athletic careers with less complaining than I was doing b/c my husband was sick!) JD and I had both remained very healthy, and yet at one point I had convinced myself (through a lengthy search of the Internet) that Jonathan had mono. I actually yelled at him as soon as he got home that day, saying "I had better not get it!" I was literally in a panic at the thought of trying to take care of JD on my own while dealing with mono. Wow.
Eventually, Jonathan went to the doctor who said he had an infection and gave him a round of antibiotics to take for 7 days. He felt better. For a little while. When the antibiotics were finished, he quickly started going downhill again. One night, he woke up around 230 am feeling feverish and having intense abdominal pain. He went to the emergency room. The doctor there once again diagnosed an infection and gave him a round of 10 day antibiotics. These seemed to help for a few days but even before he was done taking them he began to feel the symptoms returning and worsening. He went back to the doctor who finally gave him the 20 day round of antibiotics. But the symptoms remained. We were not sure what to do. Now I really started wondering What is wrong with my husband!? A friend of Jonathan's had recommended a holistic doctor who had helped both him and his wife with ongoing issues when no other doctors had been able to. During one of his prayer times, Jonathan felt led to make an appointment with this doctor in spite of the fact that he doesn't take insurance.
Over the course of several weeks and many comprehensive tests later, we learned that Jonathan has high levels of toxic metals in his blood (lead being one, I don't remember the others), is deficient in vitamins K and D, has a significant hormonal imbalance, is highly gluten intolerant, has developed allergic reactions to many foods (including garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, and shellfish to name a few), and has a candida infection (quite possibly made much worse by the 3 rounds of antibiotics he took). He is now taking multiple vitamin supplements, a comprehensive all natural wellness formula, having chelation treatments once a week, applying hormone creams twice daily, and cutting all gluten, sugar, soy, dairy (and several other things I don't even remember) out of his diet. Finally, we had some answers. And finally he started to feel better on a consistent basis. We were thrilled with this new doctor (and more than a little disgusted with the previous three traditional doctors who had been focusing on all the wrong things, even making the situation worse!) Needless to say, it is pretty hard to be a vegan without eating soy products (and really, when we started thinking about it, we would rather just eat whole foods than all that processed soy anyway - tofu, tempeh, soyrizo, veggie sausage and veggie burgers which are really just soy) and so our vegan days are behind us, probably for good. Our meals right now consist mainly of some combination of meat (usually chicken, turkey or fish), beans, veggies, and rice, quinoa, millet, or corn grits... Eventually, Jonathan will be able to add sugar and some other things like garlic, tomatoes, and potatoes back in (thank goodness! I hardly know how to cook without garlic!)
All of this has been challenging in many ways. Just last night I was on the verge (okay, I had passed the verge) of tears because I could not think of anything to fix Jonathan for supper and when I came out of JD's room after putting him down for the night, Jonathan was fixing his own supper. The kitchen has always been my domain, one of the areas in which I feel very confident and able to contribute and provide for my little family. I enjoy cooking healthy meals. I felt so helpless, like I was letting Jonathan down, not being a supportive wife. Of course, this is not at all how Jonathan felt and even admitted to enjoying coming up with some of his own creations in the kitchen (last night it ended up being some sort of ground turkey, black-eyed peas and grits combination - I didn't try it...). So, I got over my feelings of ineptness at least for the night.
I'd like to say that there is a nice clean way to tie all of this together and end the story like "Jonathan is all better and I have learned how to be a better, more selfless wife." But that's not really the case. For Jonathan's part he is starting to get better- he's having more good days than bad now. For my part, I recently read back over the verses in Ephesians that had encouraged me several months ago, (the ones I had wanted to "claim" for myself when I was feeling depleted of energy) but this time I put the emphasis on the other parts of the passage: "I ask God to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing Him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is He is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life He has for Christians. Oh, the utter extravagance of His work in us who trust in Him - endless energy, boundless strength!" Maybe the reason that it didn't really "do the trick" for me was that I had been reading it wrong. Maybe (like those traditional doctors) I was focusing on the wrong things.