Jude Eastman wears many hats: teacher of first grade, reading specialist, life coach, and cosmic entity. Oh yeah! She’s working to lower her cholesterol numbers without meds.
In order to make it to a healthy Body Mass Index or BMI, her weight needs to come down too so… Here’s to eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, taking more dog walks, scheduling more trips to Curves to work out and signing back up for bellydancing!
Jude has eaten a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet and eaten vegan for short stints in the past. She has been a flexitarian eater in recent years (mostly vegetarian, with occasional seafood). Her children are vegans and have been for some time. Thanksgivings at Jude’s house have seen only Tofurky the table for some years. She read Dean Ornish’s book, Eat More, Weigh Less and bought the Engine 2 book by Rip Esselstyn. Great food, but the will to be purely vegan never completely stuck.
The realization that she’d been taking Zeitia for her cholesterol for a couple years and her numbers were still over 200, pushed her to see if eating “vegan style” would be the cure. Then she found the Eat to Live plan by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. This was something she could latch on to. There’s virtually no measuring. Eat a pound of raw vegetables, a pound of cooked, fresh fruit and a small portion of whole grains. Do not add oil, sugar or salt and eat as little processed food as possible.
Jude started blogging because of a post on the Daily Beet on the Engine 2 site. Rip Esselstyn was asking readers to join a challenge he’d given Jonny O and to “get
on the Vegan Wagon” in support of Jonny’s health and for our own (scroll down to see Jude as VeganWannaBe #3). Plus I already blogged for my life coaching on Blogspot and I wanted to try out WordPress.
Honestly, this teach can really VEG–veg out that is! Her coworkers love to look at some of her vegetable concoctions at lunch and say one of two things: “Wow, that looks really fresh and yummy” or “What the heck is that?”
Visit http://veggieteach.wordpress.com/ and help Jude stay plant strong with encouraging comments and helpful hints. In return, Jude will reward you with her everyday trails and Ah-has, along with recipes and pictures of many of Jude’s meals.
** Weekend Blog Reads is a weekly column where we feature great vegan blogs to help spread the word about people doing great things for the vegan movement. Do you have a vegan blog to share? Email editor@veganmainstream.com.
