My Personal Story of Transformation

Approximately 20 years ago, I found myself in a bad place. In a doctor’s office chair getting my first diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis and Planter Fasciitis. My joints were all red, swollen and very achy. I was having intense pain throughout my body and especially in my hands and feet. I went to several different doctors and was treated for several different diagnoses but the two that stood out the most was the RA and Planter Fasciitis. The options at that time for RA was to take medication that would potentially help slow down the effect it had on my day-to-day life. I was also told that once I started the medication, I would have to take it for the rest of my life.

I had a friend at the time that convinced me to give her 30 days to make a difference in my life without medication. At that point I was willing to try anything. Even with the medication, the Dr was not promising to reverse anything but rather to just slow the decline. To me, that felt like planning to watch a train wreck in slow motion. My friend seemed convinced she could turn it all around and stop the imminent crash altogether. I chose to give her way a shot and so began my initial transformation.

We stopped by the grocery store on the way home and bought a selection of fruits and vegetables, all the ones I knew I liked and some I had never tried. Nothing pre-prepared or processed in any way. Nothing artificial. If it was not in the same state that it came from the earth, it did not go into my cart and if it did not go into my cart, it did not go into my body for the next 30 days. That was our deal.

I was supposed to see the doctor again at the end of the 30 days, but I was starting to see signs of improvement, so I postponed the appointment for another 30 days and then 30 more days and so on. I did see my other doctor during this time, and she was aware and supportive of what I was doing. As I transformed so did the symptoms of my RA. I began to get treatment for my feet and started to exercise them appropriately and this aided in the transformation. I ended up going back to the Rheumatologist after a years’ time and all symptoms of the RA had disappeared.

Over that year I had been slowly adding back foods that I liked and trying other things. If something started to bother me noticeably, I would cut it back out. Over time, I reintroduced most of the foods I liked, but was still able to keep most of my medical issues at bay for the most part.

Jump ahead to August 2017. What a month that was. It came in loaded with incredible excitement about the upcoming total solar eclipse and the astrophotography workshops I was going to be teaching during it. In a whirl of adrenaline, that event came and went, and the next weekend was just as exciting as I was teaching an adventure photography workshop up in the beautiful Virginia mountains. The last day of that workshop changed my life forever.

A bad accident on a mountain bike landed me in a wheelchair with several injuries, the worst of which included an injured shoulder and a leg full of rods and screws. Life as I knew it, ended that day. I went from being a ridge runner to trying to learn to walk again. I went from regular exercise to almost none outside of physical therapy. I went from eating mostly healthy to living primarily on take out. I went from living life to the fullest to struggling to make sense of it all.

Over the course of the next year, everything changed. The people around me, the place I lived, how I viewed life, even the plans I had for my future changed, especially since I did not know if I would ever be able to enjoy any of the outdoor activities, I was so enthusiastic about before my accident.

Some wonderful things happened as well including meeting someone very special and starting to get a new focus in life and find new things about it that I enjoyed. My wife and I got married the following summer, bought a boat and a lake house, in that order, and started to live a new life together.

While some things were great, other things were slowly slipping away. Because of my limited mobility and lack of focus on what I ate, I began to gain weight. My eating habits got worse and worse day by day. I was learning to walk pretty good again but was starting to have other pain that I had not quite put my finger on yet.

By the end of the following year, the entire world began to come apart at the seams or so it seemed. As the pandemic set in, any hope I had of going back into photography and teaching workshops went flying out the window. I was a lost creative in a world that seemed to be slowly imploding.

Then one day, I went with my sister to a nearby shop so she could pick up some meat. As we sat there waiting our turn to enter (remember those days near the beginning of the pandemic?) I saw a truck come into the parking lot. From where we were sitting, I saw them unload this beautiful big steer. I got out and went over to the stall where he was and looked at him. At that moment, both of our lives were about to change. I wanted desperately to buy that big guy and take him home with me so he could survive and live his best life. However, I had nowhere to keep him and could not have afforded him anyway. As I stood there, my heart broke and a piece of my soul felt like it faded away. I apologized to him for not being able to help him and promised to find a way to help others along the way. Sometime before that day was the last time I ever truly enjoyed eating meat of any kind. A true inner transformation was starting to take place. I might not have been able to save him, but he sure helped save me. It was at the height of the pandemic. Everything was hard. I had no idea where to start, but I knew I had to do something. I did not feel good. My legs and shoulder hurt all the time. My joints were swelling again. After my turn to battle covid, I had no energy and could not seem to find it anywhere. I felt like I was caught up in a losing battle. About this time, I had begun to write a fiction novel about a woman who went into an alternate world where everything was as different from the one I was living in as it could possibly be. The deeper I dove into the novel, the more sense it all made. The characters lead me down roads I could not have previously imagined or figured out. I knew in the world that the God of my understanding had originally created, there was not meant to be pain, or limits of any kind really and animals were our friends, not our food. Yes, later after the flood those things changed a bit, but that was not how it was originally intended. The deeper into Caprice I went, the more I realized how possible it was in our world here as well.

One thing led to another. I ate less and less meat as I grew increased amounts of food in my little garden, which also forced my body into more rhythmic and consistent exercise. Day after day, week after week, everything in my life began to transform. Instead of building wheelchair ramps because of the returning pain in my legs and joints, I started building greenhouses. I was quite limited in my knowledge base but was staggering along the best I could. Then I landed on this incredible organization called Forks over Knives! Suddenly it all began to make a lot more sense. I watched several movies and documentaries, one of my favorites was “The Miraculous Healing Power of Food”. That was truly and irreversibly a life changing point of my life. We had already bought all our food for the upcoming holidays and I had planned to start a new year’s resolution to drop meat from my diet altogether and start the Forks Over Knives Planner Program on January 1st. However, on December 26th, 2023, I woke up that morning with a complete knowing and understanding that I was a vegetarian. I went to work going through the FOK meal planner and making my list of all the foods I wanted to try. When my wife woke up and came through the living room, I said “Good morning and by the way, I am a vegetarian now.” Only slightly taken back since she saw it all coming, she said, “Well I guess I am too then.” We laughed, had our cup of coffee, and never looked back.

Much like it happened 20 years earlier, I began to see extensive changes in my body, my life, and my mind. By earth day 2024, my novel was out, and I was doing my very first book signing for it. At the same time, my wife and I bought a much larger piece of property and decided to start our very own Caprice where we could absolutely live our best life and share it with anyone else that was interested. The novel began to take off, people started reaching out wanting to know how they too could reach that state of being. Our property immediately started showing just how alive with wildlife and native plants it was. The fertile soil and our renewed lease on life began to become the center piece of our existence. Getting to know the wildlife there and relating them to the incredible and communicative wildlife in my novel moved us to eliminate any foods that caused animals to be held captive or harmed in any way.

At the time of this writing, we are almost 8 months into our full-on journey of a whole food, plant-based diet. We are both in better shape than we have been in years. We have each lost between 25 and 30 lbs. We are very excited about what the future holds. Our new property has already been certified as a national wildlife habitat and every day we are learning new ways to live sustainably and in partnership with the earth as it was meant to be instead of working against it. Life could not be better !!!!