Managing Diabetes with a Plant-Based Diet: 57

Good morning, everyone, or good afternoon, wherever you are in the world. Good evening. Good middle of the night. I never start the podcast that way, but for whatever reason, I am a little, uh, shuffled today, and I think it's because I am talking to the wonderful Lynn Bowman, and I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while. She is going to share with us today about her health journey, about her book, and some, to put it in her own words, grandmotherly advice. So welcome, Lynn. I'm so happy to have you here.

Actually, those are your words, Cheryl. My words were, I'm a grandma. I know stuff. Right?

Right.

Only I'm usually a little bit more potty-mouthed than that, but I try and behave when I'm a guest on a podcast. So I will, I'll try and behave. But yeah, it's, you know, when you've lived a long time, things look a little different to you. And podcasting, what fun. And I wanted to just, I know that you're in the Southwest and I wanted to be sure you knew about Ojo Caliente. So we'll talk about that. Later. But it's a hot spring that is the most wonderful place in the world, I think. So yeah, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody, wherever you are. Hi.

So, Lynn, could you just start out by sharing with people a little bit about your health journey? Because I think it's kind of interesting, not only just people's life stories in general, but particularly when it were in regards to their health. Quite often it's a series of events that lead to a realization or a big change in one's and I think you have a really interesting story to share in that regard.

Well, let's go way back then because, as you know already, we've talked— I'm old. I'm 76. And so, it's been a long time. And, in my case, as in many people's cases, it began with what we're now calling a trauma. So many— I just finished Gabor Maté's book, by the way, which if you haven't read it, fantastic, and I recommend it. Highly, The Myth of Normal. But in my case, mother died when I was 18. And so in a matter of months, I went from being a high school kid with a family to being a freshman at UCLA with no family and no home to go home to. Everything, my dog was gone. Everything that I had known growing up was gone. And it was because my mother had a chronic disease that finally she succumbed. She was in her early 40s. I was 18. So that from then on, my life changed and health became more important than anything. It was so clear to me at that age that if you aren't healthy, you just, there's so much in life that you can't have, won't have, don't know what, whatever. My mom had been ill for a long time. She had a chronic kidney disease. So fast forward a decade or so, and I found myself— this is a longer story, but I became the single mother of 3 in kind of rapid succession and realized also that I was a type 2 diabetic, which back in the day was treated very differently than it's treated now. So in my early 40s, I had this diagnosis and No, everybody said, well, just lose some weight and don't eat carbs. That was essentially the health advice, which, you know, that's not particularly bad advice, but it's not particularly good advice really either. And so after all these years, and particularly in the last 15 years, I'd say the treatment, our whole view of food is medicine and you know, how we see staying healthy has changed. And for me, it changed enormously. I actually started writing this book that I have out now, Brownies for Breakfast. I started writing it 4 years ago. And in 2019, for me, everything kind of changed again because I had the book about half written. I went to a conference being given by the Plantricians. Do you know the Plantricians?

I do not.

It's a fascinating bunch of people because it's a group of MDs, docs from all over the world who have been pioneers in healing with food. And they are renegades. I mean, this is not the way allopathic medicine has been practiced, Western medicine. This isn't what we do. These guys, typically, you know this, you've heard this before, MDs go to medical school and they get like an hour of nutrition out of all these years of misery that they go through in medical school. They also are trained not to sleep, which is interesting to me because another thing that I've discovered, and you may have as well, is that sleep is the basis of healing in many ways. You actually cannot heal unless you're in deepest sleep. So going back to 2019, the Plantricians Conference, I— there were a couple of people there that I really wanted to meet and hear, one of them being T. Colin Campbell, who wrote The China Study, which most of us who are interested in health in any way found that to be a seminal book in our lives. And then Dean Ornish, who had been healing heart disease for quite some time with food and exercise. And he had been through a lot of, you know, people just dismissed him. I was like, how can that really be happening? But he had the receipts. So I went to this conference, all these people from all over the world, and all day long, every day, I watched PowerPoints. Talk about torture. Oh, good grief. From 8 in the morning until 8 at night, PowerPoints. But it was evidence. It was data and more data and then lots more data, overwhelming data about what really is healthy, what really is healing people, what's wrong with people. And a number of these docs who were there presenting were surgeons, for an example, who had cut open kids and found their veins full of plaque. Which didn't used to happen. This is a new thing. And so after 5 days of this conference, I mean, I just, everything that I thought I knew about nutrition, about diabetes, and I was doing well. I mean, you know, my numbers were good. I wasn't being medicated heavily at all. I, you know, things were good. But I, from that moment on, I decided that I was gonna experiment with data points of 2, myself and my husband, very sweetly agreed. He said, I'm in. Okay. Love it. 33 years, by the way, and he's still being put through these things. He's a good sport. So I decided that I was gonna experiment with being strictly vegan. And for 6 months, and I had just had my numbers done, for 6 months, I did not have one sniff of animal food of any kind. Nothing. And I was a girl who had never met a pork chop I didn't like, you know, who ate steaks and protein because that's what I had been told too was healthy. And it was sort of working, you know, it was working pretty good. But 6 months later, after being completely vegan, I went back, did my tests, and lo and behold, I had lowered my numbers. Hemoglobin A1C came down substantially. Went back in for my yearly exam with my labs. And she said, you know what? This just doesn't happen, especially in people your age. Doesn't happen. But guess what? It did. So it wasn't as far, let's say, as I've gone now because I took that. And by the way, I'm no longer strictly vegan. And I'm not selling that today, but I am saying that to me and my husband had the same results, by the way, although he wasn't diabetic, but we both lost weight without trying. We both felt great. And what it is, is eating whole food, real food, plant-based food. And that's the secret. That's really it.

So I think you, I think you really highlight an interesting point here. And I think we kind of said this a little bit before we actually started recording, is there are any number of ways for people to get healthy, and quite often it's very individualized. So of course, I come from a perspective of a, you know, of a low-carb keto lifestyle now, which is typically very animal-based, but that is not the only way to do it. I would say there are a lot of people that have tried your route that it didn't help them. It didn't work for them because— And I can tell you why. Well, yeah, let's get into that.

Yeah. When people say vegan, they're not telling you how they're vegan. And I've been in Starbucks—

It's usually garbage.

And watched people order their vegan food. And it's sugar and flour and crappy food in many cases. So just being vegan has nothing to do with being healthy. And I certainly want to make that clear. And if I get on a rant about something, it's sugar because I'm here to tell you I don't want any of you eating sugar. Nobody, never. And Grandma here, Grandma Buzzkill. No, no, no, big bucket of no on the sugar. Okay, got it.

Okay, people are used to that on this show.

Are they? Okay, good.

Oh yeah, well, obviously you can't be in ketosis and eat a bunch of sugar, so that's true, that's absolutely true.

But if you do eat meat, and I'm sure you've covered this more than once, if you do eat meat, please Eat good meat, sustainably, responsibly raised meat. Huge difference. It's a completely different thing chemically in your body than factory farmed meat. And not to mention, of course, the effect that it's having on the earth and your community and everything else. So I do eat very little, not a lot. I live in an agricultural place and my friends are all raising beef grass-fed beef and goats and pigs and lambs and everything. So it's hard to avoid meat where I live, but I eat a small amount, maybe once or twice a month, if that much, of grass-fed. My favorite is a flat iron steak, but it's grass-finished and fed. That heifer never ate anything except good natural grass. So totally different thing. And then we live at the coast, so I eat some fish, not very much, some fish, but mostly plants. Whole food, real food is the other word, magic word, real food. And so that goes for meat, fish, everything. Is it real? And I don't eat cow-based dairy at all because it's extremely hard. You know this, Cheryl, I'm sure, to find real cow-based dairy. If you go in even the health food store, you won't find real. And dairy can be a problem for a lot of us. Even cow-based dairy is a different protein than goat-based or sheep-based dairy. I do eat feta cheese and sheep's milk cheese and goat's milk cheese. And again, I know the goats. They live right down the street from me. We have a couple of goats here and they all have names and they're adorable. But that's what we've lost in our foodways is this connection to where does it come from. And you can't be a food geek as I am and to some extent, and I know you are, without having learned that it's people in a building in New Jersey who are engineering food to be craveable who are at the basis of our health epidemic. And I'm calling it an epidemic, you know, advisedly. It is an epidemic. We are in horrible shape in this country and we've exported our bad health around the world. And it's because we have engineered our foods to add to the bottom line and shareholder wealth of people who don't care about our health. We have to care about our health. And to do that, you have to stop buying crap in bags and boxes.

And— Yeah, that's one of my favorite things to say because quite often people will hear keto and they have a certain perception of it or they have a certain idea about what it is. And I think that when you are doing it in practice and when you've done it for over 6 years like I have, it looks much different than what people think of it as. And what I will always tell anybody when I'm, you know, they're asking me about how I've gotten so healthy or how, what my diet is like and all that stuff, I'm like, you know, you, you can get like 90% of there if you just eat real food, whatever that looks like that for you, whether you're a vegetarian, whether you're a vegan, whether you're a carnivore, whatever it is. Eat the highest quality real food that you can afford. Yeah, that's it.

Yeah. Um, which is not as easy as it sounds once you start.

Agreed. Agreed. Because not everybody is lucky enough to have neighbors with goats and chickens and, and, you know, grass-fed beef down the street from them. And that does make it more of a challenge, um, but not impossible. And I still would say, you know, whether you can get grass-fed or not, the more real food that you can get, that you can afford, eat that. Any— over anything in a box or over anything highly processed. So if you can't get grass-fed all the time—

Thank you for bringing that up because people often ask me, I'm sure they ask you, isn't it a lot more expensive to eat that way? And the answer is no, absolutely not. And when the pandemic started, you remember this, and because it wasn't that long ago, although it seems like, you know, centuries ago. And there was a big panic about the shelves being empty in the grocery store and so on. Well, I was over there in produce by myself and the shelves were full. There was plenty of celery, plenty of arugula, plenty of spinach. It wasn't a problem at all, ever. Where were you? Which aisle were you in? That you were having trouble finding what you wanted. So, and yes, I'm being snarky because I'm a grandma and I get to, but it's so easy to have food growing in your kitchen on your sink. Some of the most nutritious food that you eat is parsley and bay leaves. And rosemary, those things that you can have in a little jar on your sink, those are great food. Those are fabulous food. And we forget about them. And you should be eating those 2 or 3 times a day if you can. And people go, how do you do that? Well, you snip the parsley onto everything. You just don't forget to add it to everything, your eggs, your sandwich, whatever you're doing, your pasta, put some dark greens on it. And a lot of people are catching on to the raised bed idea where you can have, instead of a lawn in front of your house, you can have a few little raised beds where you're growing enough to feed yourself practically. I mean, you can grow an enormous amount of food in a small amount of space. And if you have kids, you're also giving them, I think, the most important education they get. Between growing food and sitting down with you to eat the food at a table with a napkin, with a knife and fork, you know, with— and helping you put it on the table, helping you take it off the table. That's the education I wanted my kids to have. And I want your kids to have it too. Because frankly, I don't wanna sit down and eat with anyone who doesn't know how. I think this gets forgotten in the baseball and football and choir practice and Mandarin and all this with our families. What about what you learn at the table? And you learn health, of course, you learn where the food came from and what it is and how to fix it. But you also learn how to argue civilly. You learn how to part of a group, right? You learn how to pass the salt. You learn how to use the napkin. And I have my workout friends, in fact, and I came from workout, so that's why I'm dressed today. And I love these women. I have a great trainer, a little local gym, and everybody's kids are going off to college now. And so lots of discussion about that. We got a whole cohort headed off for college and such an exciting time. But what you want is to have your kids be the ones who know how to do stuff, right? Just getting into college is part of it. But knowing how to run a washing machine, how to keep their room clean, how to source food and so on, whatnot, just these basic kind of skills. You know, your kids need to leave home with that skill set. I think you don't want them to be the one in the dorm who doesn't know how to eat at a table.

Right?

And there are so many kids now, there are a couple generations of kids who have eaten every meal since toddlerhood out of a bag or a box in the back of a car. 'Cause they're going places all the time to learn stuff. And I would like to propose that maybe that's not the most important stuff that they're learning.

I couldn't agree with you more. And it's a challenge when you have the teenagers, you know, they've got a mind of their own, as you well know, you remember that. And it's definitely a challenge, but it is, I think, being exposed to it. And I'll say this from my own personal experience. I grew up on a farm and I grew up with a dad that was really involved in the whole '70s health craze and running boom and all that. And although I might not have appreciated it at the time as much, I will say that those, you know, family dinners and being around people that cooked and being around people that were concerned about health did eventually sink in. It didn't actually take long. By the time I was in my 20s, I was running myself and read The China Study and all of, all of the things. So I think the exposure is maybe half the battle, even if you feel like they're not listening or they hate doing it. Would you agree with that, or have you seen that?

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, and I get single mom and I had 3 and I was the sole income for them. So I get it. I mean, you know, you gals, the couple generations behind me, it's more voluntary in a way. You know, you have careers that you've chosen. I had a career because I had to. I had kids that needed to eat and I needed to find a way to feed them and house them and so on. And so I did. And no regrets. It's turned out okay. My kids are all in their 40s and doing great. And they all at this point really get it about food and health. So Some of that, yeah, comes at the table growing up with, and I had guests at home partly because of what I did for a living, but I would invite people to come to the table at home even though it was a scrabble. But also that's where my cookbook came from. Everything I knew how to do, I knew how to do in 15 minutes. I knew how to get a meal on the table that looked nice, tasted good, and was healthy in 15 minutes. Because you come screaming in the door at night with these hungry little, you know, wild people, and that's what you need to do. And I knew I couldn't eat fast food if you're diabetic. And this is the thing you may have touched on more than once because once you start reading labels, which is the thing I'm always hollering about. If you do eat something in a bag or a box, read the label, read it aloud, read it because it's gonna remind you every time that the first 2 or 3 ingredients are gonna be sugar and salt and processed flour and a bunch of things that you can't pronounce. In which case, guess what? Not real food. And in my case, it was life-threatening if I had continued to eat that stuff. And the difference is, unfortunately, there's so many people— I was diagnosed. I knew I was diabetic. But so many people don't know. They're diabetic. And for those of you perhaps who are of the male persuasion and maybe over 40, you guys, you don't get seen. You don't go and get examined. You don't get your blood work, partly because you're afraid somebody's gonna say, right, you've gotta stop doing this or start doing that or whatever. But the downside risk is that when you're in your 40s, particularly late 40s, early 50s, the cumulative damage from diabetes begins to affect you in a big way. And the one that gets people's attention is when I say it's a huge cause behind erectile dysfunction. Mm-hmm. And it's, it's related to diabetes frequently, and it's absolutely related to what you're eating. So Hello? To me, that's all.

That'll get their attention.

Reason to get her fixed, you know, to learn how not to be there.

Well, Linda, since you just went back to the topic of diabetes, can you maybe describe for people, because I think this is, this is something that people in the audience are very interested in, focused on, kind of learning some of the nuances. And I'd love to hear, since you had a a diagnosis at around 40, and now, you know, you're nearly 35 years from that. Can you maybe describe a little bit how the management of it has changed and what you have learned personally about what helps you keep that under control? Because I know that there's a lot of people in the audience that are either newly diagnosed or starting to work on— they, they know that they have it, they, they kind of blew it off before. But your point, like, it's erectile dysfunction, it's heart disease, it's, uh, loss of limbs, it's It's blindness. It's a lot of very serious things that people want to put out of their mind, but I kind of like to say it every once in a while, not to be doom and gloom, but just to be like, there are serious consequences of not getting this situation under control. So if you could just talk about how it's changed a little bit and some of the things that you've learned personally, I think that would be hugely useful.

Well, the biggest difference for me was, and I'm going to go back to this 2019 moment for me, I had been a big meat eater. And what I learned at that conference was that diabetes is— it's insulin resistance gone particularly haywire. And that resistance is frequently from your cells being loaded with animal fat. And I'm not gonna use technical terms because I'm not really qualified to do that, but it's the kinds of fat that come from animal foods and that prevent your cells from taking up the glucose from your blood. So that was a big shock to me. I had always been told to avoid carbs and eat protein. And in my mind, protein was animal foods. So a couple of things, we've already talked about it. If you're going to eat animal food, you need to eat animal food that is not full of the fat that comes from factory farming. So you need to eat grass-fed food, animal foods. So that was a big one. The other one was I had always avoided carbs, not understanding that, and because of getting bad information, that vegetable carbs, squash, for example, or beans are carby. They're also the best food you can eat. They're fantastic food. And if you are not eating crap, if you're not eating sugar or processed grains or additives, you can eat— I eat all the squash I want. I eat all the starchy vegetables I want. I don't avoid them at all. And I weigh now less. I mean, I weigh what I weighed in high school and not from dieting. But my body just adjusting. And if you are struggling with diabetes, you may know that insulin as a medication makes it almost impossible for you to lose weight. And yet the cure for you is in fact to lose weight in a healthy way, to lose weight by eating lots of good food, which sounds a little weird, but I don't diet. I don't limit the amount of what I eat. I don't count calories. I don't measure things. I just eat good, whole food. So tons of greens. I eat fruit. People say, well, fruit, what, you know, sugar. No, no, no. Eat whole fruit. No problem. I don't eat any more than maybe 3 fruit servings in a day or 4, maybe on a great summer day when I'm eating peaches out of my trees or something, but it's whole food, no worries. And that just goes across the board. If you get in the habit of making sure you eat whole food, you're gonna be eating a diabetic diet. It's just anytime you get off into a box or a bag, you're gonna be eating processed grains and sugar and all the stuff that that is a problem for diabetics and everybody. And that's the other thing you learn is that the diabetic diet is nothing more than exactly what everybody should be eating. That was real news to me. I had always thought that we were off in a corner having to deprive ourselves of things. No. It's just that I learned a long time ago to be careful. And then I learned in 2019 a very specific thing about the content of what I eat. And so since 2019, my numbers, I am now no longer diabetic. I'm no longer in diabetic territory. And everybody can do that. You can do that just by eating real food, whole food, plant-based food.

So since, since you are primarily plant-based, what advice do you have for people that struggle to get enough protein to maintain muscle mass? Because especially as we get older, our bodies can no longer break down the amino acids that we get and use them. So you actually need more protein as you get older. And multiple studies now have really proven that out. So if you are primarily plant-based, what are your best tips on getting enough protein in a day? And I know you said you didn't count your macros or anything like that, but what, what is your guesstimate on how much protein that you're getting each day based on this? Plant paradigm?

Probably more than most folks, but I always have to recalculate. Let's see, what was the how many grams? Because I eat 2 or 3 eggs most days in the morning. And I mean, I have chicken friends who have these gorgeous eggs and they're eggs that are different, by the way, because these hens have eaten bugs and worms and grubs. And so along with the grass. So these are gorgeous eggs with beautiful marigold-colored yolks. So they're very, very good food. And if you're vegan, you're not gonna eat eggs. I love eggs and I cook with eggs in all kinds of ways. So I eat quite a lot of eggs and I eat beans and I eat a ton of nuts. My book title is Brownies for Breakfast because like a lot of the baked goods in the book, they are made from nut butters. So instead of flour and oil and butter and sugar, these wonderful yummy desserts are made out of protein. They're nut butter. And I use a lot of pumpkin instead of flour. And so right there, you say, you know, my way of eating is actually pretty high protein, but it's just plant-based proteins. A new discovery that I love and I recommend to everyone is chickpea pasta. And it does come in a box, but if you look at the box, it's got one ingredient in it. Chickpeas. That's it. And the— and they're gorgeous little shell thing. I think you can get them different shapes, but the ones that I buy are shell pastas. And here's the secret. And why is it that grandmas always talk recipes? They can't get through a paragraph, right? Without a recipe. Bear with me. Here it is. You take the pasta and put it in boiling water, bring it back to a boil, Turn it off, put the lid on, and it just sits there for 8 or 9 minutes and cooks without, so you can run in the other room and dry your hair and whatever, come back and it's okay. It doesn't get mushy. It's wonderful. And there's another recipe in the book called Genius Soup, which everybody needs to know and do. It's simple, it's old-timey, it's full of the best nutrition. And you can pull a jar outta your freezer 'cause you made a batch and then you put some in your freezer and it's so cheap, by the way. And here it is. It's in your freezer. So how fast is that? You pull it out, you dump it in the pan, you bring it to a boil, you put the chickpea pasta in it, bring it back to a boil, put the lid on. When you take the lid off, the pasta has absorbed all this soup. And it's so you have this kind of wonderful, yummy casserole thing. You can sprinkle some nutritional yeast. Oh, another great source of protein. Nutritional yeast flakes and seeds. I eat a ton of seeds, hemp seeds, chia seeds, and such.

Do you ever do sancha in tea?

No, I will pay attention to that. You like it? It's good.

Yeah, it's a— yeah, it's, um, it's— well, it's a great plant-based protein that I used to be vegetarian for 7 years, so even though I'm no longer in that category. There, I definitely learned a lot of that stuff then. And I think that, you know, some of the things that you mentioned, if you are being more plant-based, you still have to have a focus on protein. It's just critical, especially if you're getting older like we are. Once you get to be over 40, we do nothing but lose muscle mass.

You know, and I'm here today with you to show you Kay, I'm 76. I got some guns. Kay. Right. Not in bad shape for an old lady. And that's eating very little animal protein except eggs. Protein, I think, is a little bit misunderstood too, because I think you're mentioning is people just don't associate it with plant foods. They associate it with animal foods. And there is tons of it. And calcium is another thing people, well, what if you're not eating dairy products, you're not getting, yeah, you are. Vegetables are full of calcium. Broccoli has a huge amount of calcium in it. And if you are cooking yourself with animal, with vegetable foods, excuse me, you're using a lot of different Kinds of food together. You're mixing up things. What happens when you stop eating Big Macs, when you stop driving through and eating sort of the SAD, the Standard American Diet, which is all beige, brown, and white? All of a sudden, you're eating so much more variety. You're eating foods that are all this color and these things that you just maybe never bothered to include in your diet before. So you are including nutrition of all kinds that you were not getting before because you just, you didn't need to. You were grabbing a burger or a donut or whatever. Donut, by the way, I have donut recipes in my book, but they're made from, they're made from nut butter and pumpkin and things and spices. So it's a meal. It's real food and protein. They have eggs in them or egg substitutes and seeds and the nut butter. So there are all kinds of ways to eat. You just have to be conscious, Cheryl, don't you think that's it? You just, you have to think about it. I, again, I don't like to measure just because I'm me and I don't, but I know I'm getting a ton of nutrition because I'm eating these things over and over again that I at one point measured. In my book, I have macros so you can see you know, calories and potassium and protein and things. But also, I like people to be aware, and Colin Campbell has written about this, those nutritional macros that you see on labels are lies. They're not true. They're somebody's guess, their marketing. But it makes sense when you think about it. Any two carrots, for example, Those two carrots raised in two different kinds of soil with two different sets of farmers and two different kinds of fertilizer or whatever, those two carrots have totally different nutritional profiles. All carrots are not alike. All cows are not alike. You know, it's a guess. It's an approximation. And so, you know, I don't like the idea of being really kind of strung out on, do I have 37 grams of this or 39 grams of this? You don't know. You know, even if you're paying close attention, what you do know is, did you eat a real food or not?

Well, Lynne, before we wrap up here, can you just tell everybody, first of all, maybe hold up the book, say the name of it again, and then chat about where people can find you. What's the best way to get in touch if people want to learn more about what you're doing or ask you questions and all that kind of good stuff?

Thank you. And it, it's easy because my website, Cheryl, is lynnbowman.com. And if you go on that web, it's just make sure you spell it right. L-Y-N-N-E-B-O-W-M-A-N. Um, and you can sign up right on the front page to be on my list, and I will send you the brownie recipe and I'll send you the latest on sugar substitutes because so many people kind of struggle with that. So I have a couple pages on what the best ones are and why and so on and so forth. I will mail that to you free. And then I mail other stuff out, not frequently 'cause I'm lazy. I don't like to do it. But if I have a killer recipe, and I mean killer in the best sense, okay, recipe, I will send it out. Like I recently did a beefless stroganoff that everybody really love. So I sent that one out. And that's— and then everything else is on my website because yes, I have Instagram and Facebook and I do YouTubes and so on, all that. But the easy way to find those things is on my website. And here's a book, Brownies for Breakfast.

Great name, by the way.

Thank you. And the subtitle is A Cookbook for Diabetics and the People Who Love Them.

Perfect.

And it's— I like to think of it as a fun book because I don't think you can bore people into better health, frankly. I think it's okay if we entertain each other a little bit, but it's full of things like this, which people don't usually think about diabetic foods being like this, but they are. It's just, they're real food.

And just in case you're listening via audio, she's showing the photos from the book that are some lovely sweets. So just so you know what she's showing us right now.

And you can also see my dogs and my friends.

Oh, fun.

And I say that because People ask me about the photographs, and I want you to know that I took them all myself with my iPhone. And I did that specifically because I want you to be able to make things that look like the book. You know how cookbooks are, that you see this gorgeous thing and then you make it and it's not even close, right? The nailed it idea. So, so This is— this book is full of actual real photographs taken by a real person, me, of the real recipe. And it's real food. And that's the whole idea. Here's my house, farmhouse.

Oh, awesome. Love that. Well, Lynn, so I will make sure that your website is in the show notes as well for everyone to be able to get in touch. And I just want to thank you so much for sharing your story, your knowledge, your passion today. And hopefully everyone learned something. You don't often hear about plant-based nutrition on this show very much. But as I said, there are any number of ways to get healthy. And quite often it just requires experimenting on yourself, which is what Lynn did. And she is now doing very well. So I think that that is all fantastic. And I just want to thank you for sharing all that with us today.

I am so happy to be here and would love to come back any time.