Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses - Softcover

Adams, Eric

 
9781401962210: Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1401962211 ISBN 13: 9781401962210
Verlag: Hay House LLC, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Brooklyn Borough president and Democratic nominee for New York City mayor Eric Adams is on a mission to tackle one of the most stubborn health problems in the country: chronic disease in the African American community.

African Americans are heavier and sicker than any other group in the U.S., with nearly half of all Black adults
suffering from some form of cardiovascular disease. After Adams woke up with severe vision loss one day in 2016, he learned that he was one of the nearly 5 million Black people living with diabetes-and, according to his doctor, he would have it for the rest of his life.

A police officer for more than two decades, Adams was a connoisseur of the fast-food dollar menu. Like so
many Americans with stressful jobs, the last thing he wanted to think about was eating healthfully. Fast food
was easy, cheap, and comfortable. His diet followed him from the squad car to the state senate, and then to Brooklyn Borough Hall, where it finally caught up with him.

But Adams was not ready to become a statistic. There was a better option besides medication and shots
of insulin: food. Within three months of adopting a plant-based diet, he lost 35 pounds, lowered his cholesterol by 30 points, restored his vision, and reversed his diabetes. Now he is on a mission to revolutionize the health of not just the borough of Brooklyn, but of African Americans across the country.

Armed with the hard science and real-life stories of those who have transformed their bodies by changing
their diet, Adams shares the key steps for a healthy, active life. With this book, he shows readers how to
avoid processed foods, cut down on salt, get more fiber, and substitute beef, chicken, pork, and dairy with delicious plant-based alternatives. In the process he explores the origins of soul food-a cuisine deeply
important to the Black community, but also one rooted in the horrors of slavery-and how it can be reimagined with healthy alternatives.

Features more than 50 recipes from celebrities and health experts, including Paul McCartney, Queen Afua,
Jenné Claiborne, Bryant Jennings, Charity Morgan, Moby, and more!

The journey to good health begins in the kitchen-not the hospital bed!

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

For the past three decades, Eric Adams has served the residents of Brooklyn as borough president, state senator, police officer, and coalition builder. In November of 2017, he was reelected for a second term to represent Brooklyn as borough president. In July of 2021, he won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, pledging to create positive change in the lives of all New Yorkers.

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INTRODUCTION: My Health Journey
  
In March 2016, life was good. I had the best job in the world: representing Brooklyn as borough president. I had just turned 56. I felt healthy. Maybe I was a bit overweight, but so were most people my age. I exercised regularly, and like all New Yorkers, I walked everywhere. I even got on the basketball court now and then.
 
I looked and felt fine—that is, until the day I woke up blind.
 
Terrified, I blinked my eyes rapidly, willing the world around me to come back into focus. Finally, I could barely make out the outline of my alarm clock. I stumbled to the mirror and saw, to my horror, that my right eye was bloodshot. I couldn’t see anything out of the left. My stomach felt like I had swallowed acid. I had spent 22 years as a New York City police officer patrolling violent neighborhoods, investigating homicides, and raiding drug dens, but none of that prepared me for the fear I felt that March morning.
 
I immediately went to my doctor’s office. The stomach pain turned out to be an ulcer, he explained, but my vision would probably be impaired for the rest of my life.
 
“Why?” I asked.
 
“Eric,” he said grimly. “I ordered an A1c test, the one that measures your blood sugar percentage. A normal level is between 4 and 5.6 percent. An A1c level over 6.5 means you have full-blown diabetes.”
 
“What’s my A1c level?” I asked.
 
The doctor cleared his throat. “Seventeen percent.”
 
Everything seemed to go numb. The kind of people who had A1c levels like that were wheelchair-bound and were taking regular insulin shots, or so I thought. I weighed 210 pounds—how could I be like them?
 
“Your high blood sugar damaged the blood vessels behind your eyes,” my doctor continued. “That’s what caused the vision loss.”
 
“There must be some mistake . . .” I stammered.
 
He shook his head. “With that A1c level, you’re lucky you’re not in a coma.” He whipped out his pad and prescribed insulin along with a battery of other medications. “Unfortunately diabetes is very common among African Americans, Eric. You’re going to have to get used to the meds. You’ll be on them for the rest of your life.”
 
DNA OR DINNER?
  
All of a sudden, I had diabetes. It would define the rest of my life. Everywhere I went, everything I did, I would have to keep in mind: Is this safe with my condition?
 
At first I obeyed my doctor’s orders. What else could I do? After all, he went through four years of medical school, a residency, a fellowship, and many years of practice to arrive at his conclusion. If he said I’d need meds for the rest of my life, surely he was right.
 
And so I went about my normal business. I learned to live with my impaired vision. But then came the side effects from the medication: the upset stomach and general fatigue. Moreover, the pills didn’t help the general aches and pains I started having after 40. Whenever I saw a clock, I thought of my own life slowly winding down.
 
Like many Black people, diabetes runs in my family. We even have our own word for it: “sugar.” When I was growing up, it seemed that everyone in the family eventually came down with it. After my aunt Mary was diagnosed with sugar, she brought a colorful pill organizer wherever she went. I thought that was normal. After my mother was diagnosed with sugar, she had to get regular insulin injections. That was normal. When my aunt Betty died of sugar at age 57—that, too, was normal.
 
I remember attending a family reunion with my mother not long after Betty’s death. When we arrived, I realized Mom had forgotten her diabetes medication. “We have to go back for them,” I told her. But Mom rolled her eyes and yelled out to the family, “Anyone have any diabetes medicine I can take?” Nearly everyone in the room pulled out a plastic case and shook their pillboxes in unison.
 
My family had pills that were every color of the rainbow: metformin, sulfonylureas, statins, blood pressure medications, and many others. As a kid I watched my family rely on these drugs, and now, at age 56, it was my turn. When I left the pharmacy after my diagnosis, I thought: Is this really my future? I had put myself through college, worked my way up from a beat cop to a captain to the New York State Senate and then to Brooklyn Borough Hall. I had a plan to become mayor of New York one day. I stared at those sad little pills in that sad little box and thought: I’ve come too far to live out of a pillbox, man. There must be a better way. A healthier way.
 
When I asked my doctor about other options, he held up his hands. “I’m sorry, Eric. There aren’t any. If you lose some weight and stay on your meds, we might be able to keep your diabetes from getting worse. That’s the best you can hope for.”
 
That’s the best I could hope for? I wasn’t going to accept that. I wasn’t going to accept a bad situation and just live with it. I certainly didn’t do that after I was arrested for trespassing at age 15. It was a dumb thing to do, but the white cops thought it was appropriate to take me to the basement of the 103rd precinct, beat me up, and toss me into a juvenile detention center. Instead of accepting that this was how police officers would always treat young people of color, I vowed to join that same force and change it from within. As a police captain, I co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group focused on improving relations between police officers and African Americans. When I was elected to the New York State Senate, I fought vehemently against the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy and other forms of racial profiling.
 
There are some things you just don’t accept, and bad health is one of them. My family and my doctor believed that sugar was genetic. It’s just something that happens when you get older, they said, especially for Black folks. As a former police officer, though, I knew better than to take anything for granted. I was going to evaluate the situation based on the evidence and come to an informed conclusion, just like I would at a crime scene. Was chronic disease and pain encoded into my DNA? Or was there something else going on?
 
The obvious place to look was my diet—one born from long hours on the beat. For many years I worked the midnight to 8 A.M. shift, so there weren’t many quality food options available. There was only fast food. I became a connoisseur of the dollar menu. I’d roll my patrol car through the McDonald’s drive-through at midnight for a double cheeseburger, swing by KFC at 2 A.M. for coffee and fried chicken, and throw back a few slices at Pizza Hut before dawn. If it was a particularly bad night, I’d hit up Wendy’s for a shake and another burger and fries. For years and years, it was the same routine: fast, cheap, and easy meals—or comfort food, as you might know it.
 
For current and former police officers like me, comfort food means something deeper. It means safety. After responding to a multifatality traffic accident or to a murder, the last thing I wanted to think about was how healthy my food was. Picking up groceries at the store was not a priority. I needed food that would take the edge off. Psychologists have a term for what I experienced: vicarious trauma, also known as “compassion fatigue.” While on duty I was calm and collected, but after,...

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Verlag
Hay House LLC
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1401962211
ISBN 13 
9781401962210
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
201
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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