Health is subject that will undoubtedly come with nuance. I know there are vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians and meat eaters and lots of them love Jesus just as much as I do and feel equally strong about their personal health decisions. That’s awesome! But for those who are curious about this author’s views on the subject, I’m happy to share what I’m learning. Fair warning, this page contains MY OPINIONS!
To get right to the point (for those of you ready to hit delete as soon as I say the wrong thing – LOL), I agree that we are fearfully and wonderfully made by our Creator and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty, even among choices about nutrition. I also believe (as the Bible teaches) that all things are permissible, yet that doesn’t mean everything is ideal or beneficial in all cases. God has given us freedom to walk according to our sincere convictions and conscience, and also to remember love for others around us. Some may strongly disagree with aspects of our liberty. We should be sensitive to discern whether those disagreements stem from merely a “religious spirit” or whether they are truly taking offense from a place of sincere conviction as it concerns wanting to honor Christ in their behavior. I don’t want to offend anyone, but I also am not afraid to have a discussion and I don’t think we should ever be afraid to reason together.
It can often be difficult to navigate all the information out there pertaining to health. Almost daily we are told that some kind of food is bad for us, and then a couple of years roll by and suddenly that food is the best thing you can consume. Things that our grandparents ate routinely and lived to be nearly 100 years (sometimes older), we’re now told will cause us to die young. Sigh… All I can tell you is that we have to make our own decisions about this stuff. My wife and I have made some decisions of our own over the past two-three years and, thus far, they have played out pretty well for us, so I will share about that. If you disagree, that’s fine… don’t do it. This is not a “thus saith the Lord” issue.
A few years ago I was extremely unhealthy. As I was approaching 50 years old I came to grips with the reality that I had not been taking very good care of this temple the Lord gave me. I’m about 6′-2″ and my weight hit 324. I was a big guy. A long with being a big guy I had knee problems. I was diagnosed with a torn meniscus in my left knee, which caused me excruciating pain and the doctor was recommending surgery or, at the very least, regular cortisone shots for the rest of my days to deal with the pain.
I love camping, but the hardest part about that activity was having to get down on the floor in a tent. It hurt so bad. To make matters worse, I had joint pain in both knees and pain in my lower back. Just climbing the stairs at work was a slow and painful process. Arthritis was starting to creep into my hands too, adding to the misery, and when I’d get home from work, I’d hit the sofa and fall right asleep. I had no energy, was sluggish all the time, and really didn’t have much energy to do anything.
I also had lots of gut issues; bloated feeling, discomfort, gas and other issues all the time. I had tried diets but could never stick to them. So, I ate a lot of junk. I knew it was not healthy food, but it was affordable and I was hungry all the time so I just kept eating. I had no idea how to overcome this.
Years back, while my wife was still in Australia and I was waiting eagerly for her to get to America after we were married (and were waiting for visa paperwork to go through), I took a healthy stab at veganism. At first I thought it was great. There were so many options that tasted great and I enjoyed eating all kinds of meatless wonders, vegetables, fruits and smoothies. I didn’t mind it at all… Problem was, I was still hungry all the time and it did nothing for my joint issues. I did experience a little more energy and I lost a little weight, but it wasn’t a total solution.
I tried other variants of, what I thought was closer to a biblically-based diet. I just simply figured that, hey, we ate plants in the Garden of Eden so that must be what God ideally wants for us today and I continued to roll with that ideology. I did re-incorporate meat, but I continue to eat lots of fruit and vegetables. I was also a huge supplement guy. My cupboard was FULL of pills… All “natural”, healthy stuff of course. I took all kinds of herbal supplements, wheat grasses, green powders, energy powers, proteins, vitamins, you name it. I could tell you everything I consumed and why. I’d go to the doctor and he would ask why I take all of this stuff and I’d enjoy giving him an earful of why I was so health-minded about all these things. But guess what? Even though I believed in it… it didn’t help! Some things did produce some marginal positive effects, but nothing significant. Most of the time I think it was just placebo.
My health slowly declined… My blood pressure was high all the time and I still had joint pain. I just figured it was part of getting old; that this was pretty much to be expected. I had itchy and flaky scalp issues, my skin was dry, and I continued to have very little energy for much of anything. I was consuming those little 5-hour energy shots all the time to get some kind of a boost. I knew fasting was a good thing and so I did that a few times, but it was really hard to stick to that even because I was just so stinking hungry all the time. I finally gave it up to the Lord entirely. I said, “God I want to get my health in check but I don’t know how… I don’t have the willpower… I can’t stick to a diet… I hate diets! I take all these supplements and a few months down the road, can’t remember what they all are supposed to do… I’m forgetting stuff all the time… I have no energy… I’ve got pain all the time… I’m not setting a good example for anyone. I can’t fit my clothes (I’m wearing 3x and 4x shirts and 46 waist pants)… I’m just miserable (even though I still am a happy guy and manage to get along… I’m just not firing on all cylinders). Just please help me Lord. I want to honor You with my health and I want to make sure I’m 100% here for my wife and able to take care of my responsibilities at work, home, family everything. I need Your help Lord….” That was the basics of my prayer…
Things didn’t change over night… I started getting up early to pray in the morning, even when I didn’t really feel like it (which was every morning – LOL). The Lord started to meet me though and I started to enjoy some deeper communion with Him. A lot of stress was also going on with my aging mothers and her progressing dementia and then Covid hit and all that mess… I also got Covid (wife did too). Fun stuff! But God was faithful.
Then, my co-worker started telling me she was doing a keto diet. I had never heard the term before. “What’s that?” I said… She said, “Oh it’s pretty cool, you just count net carbs and lose weight.” LOL Huh? That doesn’t make any sense, what are net carbs? She told me that you just look at the total carbohydrate count on food labels, then subtract the fiber count, and then subtract sugar alcohols (if any). I said, “What are sugar alcohols? Speak American!” LOL She said these were typically nutritive/low or no-calorie sweeteners. Because they are indigestible by the body, you just pass them through so you can subtract the carb count for those items. What’s left over is called a “net carb”. She said, “Keep that net carb count under 40 to 50 every day and you’ll lose weight.” So, I started trying it out. I didn’t do very well at first because I still didn’t really understand or remember what I was supposed to be looking for on a label, but I managed to kill several pounds and that got me interested. I was able to get my weight down to 316. Truth is though, after a few months I went right back to the carbs and junk food. Another diet fail…
It would be, not quite another year went by before I revisited the keto subject again and discovered that, what I had been doing was nicknamed “dirty keto”, which just means – it wasn’t necessarily “healthy”, it was just lower carbs than I usually consumed on the standard American diet (SAD). So, after more prayer and conversation with my wife, we both decided to go for this together and do it the healthy way! Stimulus checks had just arrived and so we decided to literally throw away ALL of the sugar and high-carb foods in the pantry and start over. We threw out all the bread, pasta, cereals, grains and crappy-quality seed/vegetable oils (i.e. canola, soybean, sunflower, etc.), corn syrup, dextrose, maltodextrin, honey, and also ALL FRUIT WAS TOSSED IN THE GARBAGE! We even tossed out the milk because milk has a lot of lactose, which is “milk sugar”. All of it had to go. We were both serious. There was no room for rationalizing anything. Fruit or honey might be natural (and I’m not totally anti-fruit or honey), but it’s still sugar and effects the body the exact same way as sugar and I definitely have a problem with sugar addiction, so we just stopped it. Anything that had these products in them, we dumped. My mindset was that maybe some day I can re-introduce some of these things (like occasional consumption of fruit or other food items), but until I develop new, strong habits and change my lifestyle and deal completely with the addiction, I’m not ready to play around with “moderation”… Just like an alcoholic can’t “moderate” alcohol when they have a problem… I took the same approach.
That reduced our available food choices to meat, leafy greens, high-fat dairy (because it has very low lactose/sugar), and pro-biotic rich foods like sauerkraut, unsweetened Greek yogurt, heavy cream, raw cheeses, etc. We started drinking smoothies every morning, but these were different that when I was doing the vegan and vegetarian thing… These were comprised of water, a little ice for flavor (lol), apple-cider vinegar, raw kefir (a fermented yogurt-like product), collagen powder, a greens powder, a little bit of MCT coconut oil, lemon juice, and an electrolyte supplement. Tammy and I downed one daily and we reduced our carbohydrate intake to 20 net carbs a day (or less if possible). For meals we would look up custom keto recipes and make dinner at home. It took a long time, which was not convenient, BUT we enjoyed spending time together trying new things.
We quickly found that the food we were now eating was far more nutritionally dense than the junk we used to eat. As a result, we stopped snacking and weren’t craving snacks throughout the day. In fact, our eating period was reduced to essentially one hearty meal a day. The rest of the day (except for that morning smoothie) was all fasting… There were sugar withdrawals the first couple of weeks (oh boy were there withdrawals) and I would get cramps in bed at night because I was low on electrolytes… The reason, because I started to flush out a lot of water initially… so we started taking electrolyte supplements to help and I would recommend this to EVERYONE, especially while transitioning diet.
I give all credit to Christ for His strength in helping me get the ball rolling because willpower alone had failed me so often before. Something was different this time and I was excited to work toward this goal… and I had a sense that this would not be another temporary attempt at mere weight loss but rather a really change that would transform my life (and Tammy too). With God’s help, we were off to the races and the transformation began almost immediately and the changes were rapidly visible – to my surprise!
The pounds started to fall off; after just a week it began!!! The inches around the waist started to reduce also! Tammy’s progress was slower than mine, but it was happening and she and I could see it – but, even more importantly, we could FEEL the difference! The mental fog that I had been living with for so long (and that I didn’t even realize was as bad as it was) began to clear! I felt like I was waking up… The clothes were also getting looser, which was cool.
Within the first three to four weeks something amazing happened… My joint pain started going away! I cannot describe to you how significant this was to me… It was VERY noticeable! In fact, it not only reduced, but my knee that the doc once told me required surgery and would never improve (and that I would need cortisone shots for the rest of my life to manage pain) JUST STOPPED HURTING COMPLETELY! Seriously! No exaggeration at all! In fact, it got so much better that I literally FORGOT which knee had the problem (and I actually told a doctor at a later checkup on my health that I couldn’t even remember which knee was the problem)! My back pain also went away, completely. The inflammation in my body was just being obliterated! I also used to struggle with a condition known as plantar fasciitis, which causes a lot of pain in my feet… I used to buy special orthotics to help alleviate the condition, but after just a few weeks, this too started to go away (and today I have no issues at all in that department). As the next couple of months passed, my arthritis in my hands cleared up! My scalp stopped itching and flaking! That was a pretty big one because Tammy and I both used to buy dandruff shampoo and conditioner just to deal with the itchiness and flakes… No more! I stopped falling asleep in the chair and my memory and energy level started to return! I was in total shock… How could ALL of these things be improving just from eliminating carbs and bad oils from the diet? How is it that I had never heard of this level of improvement occurring in health from simply changing the diet a bit?
Of course, to my delight, the weight started falling off too… and I WASN’T EVEN EXERCISING! To make a long story shorter, after a little over a year I had lost better than 85 pounds and my waist size went from a 46 to a 34! I was once wearing big man’s jeans… You know the ones? The “relaxed” fit or “athletic” as they call them (haha)… Nope… Now I could actually fit into a SLIM! Instead of wearing 4XL shirts and clothing from the Big and Tall section, I was now wearing XL shirts! I felt amazing!
The real exciting part happened when I went in for some bloodwork… The doc said my labs were excellent! My blood pressure totally normal! My serum D levels were optimal, my triglyceride levels were super low and my HDL cholesterol was bangin’! My A1C was also perfect so no signs of prediabetes! All markers were either good or optimal! This did NOT happen on a totally vegan diet by-the-way (which I had done before). Keep in mind, though we did cut out the carbs, we did NOT cut out meat, saturated fat, or salt! In fact, they became the virtual staples of our new way of eating.
Eventually, Tammy and I gravitated to a more animal-based diet and we started consuming LOTS of fatty meat on a very regular (even consistent) basis (and we still do). Yup, red meat… You know, the stuff they say will give ya a heart attack and cancer. We started eating bacon, butter, and lots of eggs (somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 10 a day)… If we didn’t feel like cooking at home, we’d just go to a restaurant and order plain hamburgers with no bun and no toppings. At this point we weren’t eating any vegetables either… Very few anyway. Maybe a little bit of garlic or some onions and peppers for flavor, but meat was the main course. We’d still usually eat maybe once or sometimes twice a day. Guess what? The pounds continued to melt off and the inches around the waist continued to dissolve! We also felt amazing! Even better than with keto and the best part was it was so easy to maintain. We were no longer craving sweets or carbs at all. Food was finally something we started to view only a necessary for life, not for our social existence.
Then it came time for my first colonoscopy. Ugh… I dreaded it. Turns out it wasn’t that bad, but the cool (and funny part) was that the doc said my pipes were perfect. I also had another blood test (lab work) done up and it was even better than the last time! Whomever said that eating lots of red meat, eggs, bacon and butter were bad for you didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. The funny part was that the doc, after my colonoscopy said, “You probably need to stop eating so much red meat, reduce fat, lower your salt intake and eat grains and a healthy diet.” I asked why? What health markers from my bloodwork invoked concern? SILENCE! He couldn’t identify anything of concern!
Okay, so that’s the SHORT version of things. LOL Today, over two years later, Tammy and I continue eat a diet that is completely void of any added sugars. We do not eat any fruit except for some occasional berries like blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc. Watermelon is a nice treat too. We avoid all grains as much as possible (and that includes pasta, bread, cereal, oats, beans, rice, etc.). We avoid all seed/vegetable oils and most highly processed foods entirely. We enjoy lots of fatty red meat, also fish, chicken, bacon and we don’t spare the butter or salt. We cook with healthier fats from things like beef tallow, real lard and bacon grease, butter, or oils like olive, avocado or coconut.
We eat what our ancestors used to eat… meat, butter and eggs and they’d have the energy to work long days and live long lives! Basically, we avoid the center isles of the grocery store and stick to the outside ones… Funny how, somewhere along the way, we let the so-called “health professionals” start to tell us this was bad for us… and now they are trying to push it on everybody, including lab-grown meat, fake (plant-based) meat substitutes full of chemicals and all kinds of junk, genetically modified foods, sugary/carb-loaded garbage, bad oils, just awful stuff. It’s everywhere you look… Turn over just about any product of processed food and you’ll see terrible ingredients like soybean oil, all kinds of sugars, preservatives, and stuff that would probably be better-suited to degrease a semi truck engine than to be ingested by a human.
We don’t abstain from the junk food because we “have” to, or “because we’re on a diet”, but because we choose to and we actually like the way we eat now and we aren’t constantly craving the old stuff we used to be addicted to. It’s become natural and easy by this time and this is completely sustainable for the long-haul. We love eating this way! We thought it would be more expensive, but as it turns out, we are saving money! I never realized how much money we were wasting on junk food. Yes, the junk food is cheaper, but not when you keep buying it and eating it constantly.
Now we usually eat only once or twice a day and that’s it. We don’t snack and we don’t lust for carbs anymore. The reason we don’t snack isn’t because we’re trying to abstain from snacking either; but it’s because we’re just not hungry and our mind is no longer fixated on always putting something in our face. The uncontrollable impulse is virtually gone. I say “virtually” gone because it doesn’t mean we don’t have to be mindful of temptation because, of course, we’re human and we have memories of the “good ol’ days”… but it’s so much easier to resist this stuff than it used to be.
Some would probably be amazed at what kinds of food are appealing to us now… One of our staple favorites is hamburger patties with butter on top and a little bit of salt and pepper. That can actually be a single meal! Sometimes we’ll throw in some veggies, like asparagus, or some grilled onions… but even just the meat is great. Bacon tends to be a staple side-dish too and we tend to eat quite a bit of it now and then… and we love our eggs! Fried, hard-boiled, scrambled, in an omelet, you name it… a little bit of cheese and I’m happy. Sometimes for lunch, I have a couple of brats on a bed of sauerkraut and some mustard. Mmmm… We do make other stuff too, lol, and there are limitless keto options that are interesting to make, but those are our traditional go-to items… just for example. Your mileage may vary.
Occasionally we’ll enjoy some fruit as a treat but it is NOT a habit. There have been a few times we have gone “off diet” for lack of a better term and there’s no guilt, but that is rare because when we do there is usually negative consequence; like gut issues, upset stomach, grogginess, headache, sometimes skin break-outs, etc. Once we had cake as a treat… or so we thought… We both got so sick from eating it (just a single, small slice) that we swore that was the last time. It’s just not worth the misery for three minutes of pleasure.
We’re not perfect… Sometimes we have an afternoon or evening with friends and will consume something we don’t usually eat, but we just know that we’ll have to deal with some discomfort for a day following and then we just decide how worth it that will be. Often we just opt not to go off diet. I much prefer feeling great and knowing I am treating my body well than to muck it up with even occasional junk. The results continue to be that I can actually (for the first time in many years) keep the weight off, not have joint issues, and feel awesome. Now into my 50’s I feel younger than my 40’s and I don’t believe that getting old has to suck! I’m not settling for an outcome of inevitable cancer (which took my dad’s life) or dementia, which my mother is currently suffering with as she heads into her 90’s.
I don’t believe we have to end our days in misery like that. Yes, we’re all going to die… and perhaps some of these outcomes are inevitable to some extent, because there are a lot of factors involved beyond just food. Air quality, water, activity level, genetics, etc. But if we have it in our power to do better, shouldn’t we? Why wouldn’t we? That’s a decision each person will have to make for themselves… I’ve made my decision, and I continue to make these decisions every day and every day poses its challenges, successes and failures, but I keep going and keep trying and keep trusting the Lord for His guidance and mercy. God is good no matter what!
I wanted to share some of these things I’ve learned in my own health journey just to encourage you! I am not saying my way is the perfect way to health, but if what I’ve been learning helps someone else like I have been helped, then that’s all I want to do is help. I’m obviously not a doctor or a nutritionist. I’ve read a lot and studied a lot and tried to educate myself, but I have much room to grow. I have experience some incredible benefits from ditching carbs, sugar, seed oils and the processed junk and incorporating lots of animal-based nutrition and a little veggie too, so I believe in the nutritional benefits and am just sharing my experience for whatever it’s worth to whomever is interested. If you’re not interested, no need to be bent out of shape about my decisions to eat a particular way. Most of all, SEEK THE LORD! I believe He will guide us if we invite Him into our situations, even those concerning food and health! God bless you!!!
I’ve included a bunch of before and after pics on this site, if you’re interested… It’s kind of weird to have an “after” because I’m not at my goal yet, but at least it gives you an idea of the journey and the progress. We’re real folks like you. We aren’t selling a fad diet or trying to start a cult. We’re just encouraging folks.