I had followed a Paleo diet for a few years with good outward physical results (when combined with daily hour-long workouts). My wife, while not strictly plant-based, has always leaned to the vegetarian end of the nutritional spectrum since I have known her, which made it that much easier for me to do so later on.
The thought to engage in such an eating lifestyle never occurred to me until the last few years when a couple of things happened. I encountered a new patient with rheumatoid arthritis who wasn’t doing very well on his complex medication regimen. After a discussion about the dietary effects on autoimmune disease, he took it upon himself to explore the plant-based path and found it to be helpful for controlling his symptoms. That got me thinking about the idea of using such a dietary outlook to treat and prevent disease. Around the same time, we also came across a unique spiritual community that challenged the way we had experienced traditional Western religious culture through our lives. After delving into this newly found church community and checking out some neat Bible podcast resources, it became evident to me that a plant-based diet was the ideal intention for the sake of all of humanity and the Earth.
Obviously this is not the only conclusion to be taken, but given my professional background and influences, it is the one that resonated with me. When ideas are supported by multiple worldview approaches, those have the potential to radically change our lives individually and communally. I have yet to have any significant health issues in my life, so I cannot speak personally to the long-term effects of the plant-based diet in my experience. I can only tell the individual stories I hear and reference the mammoth amounts of data supporting plant-based nutrition for disease prevention and reversal.
However, since going plant-based, I have participated in an Ironman triathlon, a few of our long distance, local overnight relay races, and the hardest marathon I have ever done, with a net elevation gain of about a thousand feet.
I recently turned forty years old and I can say I am in much better physical shape than I ever have been in my life. All these pieces of inspiration have encouraged me to write about Biblical topics that may shed a nugget of narrative pertaining to how we eat and engage with our surrounding world. Writing has become a wonderfully therapeutic and integral part of this journey into what in the world the Bible had to say for its initial audience and has had to say for its subsequent audiences of different eras regardless of changing or updated worldviews.