In March this year, my husband Stefan’s blood pressure had reached an all time high.  Although he’d been medicated for hypertension from early adulthood, a combination of a busy, active lifestyle and poor (often misinformed) diet put his blood pressure at such a level he was told he’d need to be hospitalised to control it due to the severe risk of stroke or cardiac arrest.  This was a couple of weeks prior to lockdown.  In the middle of a renovation with two young children and COVID-19 likely to cause our family to go down to one income we actually couldn’t afford for Stefan to be hospitalised!  We decided to take control of his health through nutrition.  From that point on, we made the collective decision to go whole food plant-based, no oil.

Lockdown provided us with the luxury of time to scour through as many websites as we could to source recipes, information and advice.  Initially, it felt like an expensive exercise to get ourselves properly set-up where we were continually having to buy pantry items mentioned in a recipes that we’d only use once or twice. We had no idea where to start or what to buy. But we stuck at it and started to see massive gains in energy, weight loss and general feeling of wellbeing.  Critically, however,  Stefan’s blood pressure started to track downward.  It still wasn’t great, but there was positive movement.

Stefan regularly has medical checkups monitoring his blood pressure.  The GP noted the significant improvement but was dubious about the diet change.  He insisted that Stefan get full blood work up to ensure there were no nutritional deficiencies.  His results came back so positive that even the GP was surprised.  Everything from iron, calcium, liver, thyroid and B12 were either normal or above normal range.  Biggest surprise was the incredible drop in his bad Cholesterol which came down 4.5 points.

I have just had all my blood work done too and it has all come back either normal or above normal range.  Energy levels are high, neither of us feel like we are missing out on anything as most other diets insist on e.g. low carb.

After six months. Stefan’s blood pressure is now more often than not in the normal range, and we’re still 100% on board with the plant-based lifestyle.