Phil Green is a heavy equipment mechanic for the military. Which is to say, he can fix things that people rely on for their lives.
And yet his own body was in a terrible state of disrepair. As a red, white, and blue son of Texas, Phil's diet was (in his own words) "fried everything." Except for the barbecued meat.
A baseball player in his younger days, Phil abandoned any pretense of fitness or health when he gave up sports and started a busy career. Eating out all the time expanded his waistline and led to profoundly ill health.
A fling with Atkins in 2001 got him to a good size, but did nothing for his galloping symptoms except make them worse. And when he fell off the low-carb plan, of course he blamed his "failure" on the carbs, rather than the inherent unsustainability of the Atkins diet.
At the age of 40, as a new father, Phil reached new lows of poor health. He weighed so much that he stopped weighing himself. He had fatty liver, high blood pressure, chest pains, cholesterol in the 300s, trigycerides in the 500s, horrible memory, prediabetes, and cardiovascular disease. He prayed that when he died, his wife and kids would somehow be OK without him.
When a doctor finally told Phil that if he managed to survive his inevitable heart attack, stents, and bypass surgery, he would almost certainly end up with dementia, that was the wakeup call that got this skilled mechanic to begin to look into the inner workings of his own body.
Upon his doctor's advice, Phil embarked on a "crazy" diet: whole foods, vegetarian, with nothing processed. Even while indulging on tortilla chips and sardines twice a week, Phil noticed improvements almost immediately. Hypertension gone, cholesterol and triglycerides smack in the middle of the normal range, 30 pounds lighter. Which begged the question:
"If I keep going, what's going to happen?"
Listen to the interview to find out. Spoiler: the health and weight changes were just the beginning of Phil's profound transformation. (Wait until you meet his cow!)
We covered:
- Phil's health challenges
- floating through the day with an impaired memory
- eating like a good old boy
- starting with Dean Ornish's The Spectrum
- binge-watching plant-based documentaries on Netflix
- "other diets were so hard, and this is so easy"
- loving more and caring more about his family
- why we don't hear about this
- getting hassled at work, then getting questions
- hunting and fishing
- "I hate for anything to suffer now"
- discovering deep wells of compassion after giving up meat
- saving a stray dog
- buying and saving Rose the cow
- starting to run
- influencing others through a no-judgment zone
- explaining heart health to mechanics ("the heart is like an oil pump")
- "you don't pour grease down your kitchen sink, why would you pour it into your body?"
- "the machines I fix are used in war - and that bothers me"
- and much more...
Links
The Spectrum - by Dean Ornish, MD
Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead
Forks Over Knives
Persimmon Hill Horses and Rescue on Facebook
Phil's GoFundMe for Rose the Cow (completed, shared here for archival purposes)