Sadly, Edible San Diego changed their website so you can no long click to read this feature, but luckily I have a copy of the text so I’m embedding it below. My original opening paragraph read: If you can honestly say that you feel great, sleep well, wake up energized, and you’re happy with the condition of your body, skin, hair, and nails, then read no further.

I was excited for this assignment because it seemed a very apt topic for the start of a new year! Personally, I’m thrilled I had a chance to write it and meet all of these amazing and engaging people, including a bodybuilding vegan, a Mexican-American food educator, a Keto-evangelist martial arts fighter and a gluten-free psychotherapist who was my hands down favorite when she said she’d like to apologize for all the eyerolls she gave to people on a gluten-free diet.

Food to the Rescue: How 6 people changed their lives by changing what they eat! 

By Debra Bass

As in most things, intent makes all the difference. Making dietary changes to punish yourself typically leads to failure. But if your objective is to feel better, you can make the same changes with less resistance and more long-lasting positive results. It won’t feel like a sacrifice because you have a greater goal.

If your diet makes you miserable, then it’s not the right option for you, no matter what anyone says. Your happy medium might be more animal protein, less animal protein, or no animal protein at all. And your preferred diet doesn’t have to have a name. Maybe you’re 80% vegan and 20% carnivore, or 60% keto and 40% fruitarian. Don’t let labels dictate your lifestyle; experimenting with different eating lifestyles, however, can serve a purpose. It can help you determine what satisfies your body and what satisfies your soul—or it can help you determine what doesn’t.

Mentally and physically, there is no one way to eat healthily. And it should go without saying, but we’ll say it now: If you can honestly say that you feel great, sleep well, wake up energized, and you’re happy with the condition of your body, skin, hair, and nails, then read no further.

You don’t need to adopt a specific dietary preference to live your best life. But if you’re curious about how these San Diegans turned their lives around with wildly different dietary styles, read on.

This article shares the dietary experiences of six individuals and is not intended to make medical claims, provide dietary advice, or suggest treatments for health related issues. Consult a qualified healthcare provider with any questions regarding treatment for a medical condition.

Branden Williams, 38, vegan

“I like to say that I went cold tofurkey,” Branden Williams explains in a manner that sounds like a joke but implies that he’s dead serious. “Vegan and sober. Everything happened all at once.”
He says that he looked in the mirror and knew that he could do better.
“I was like, I’m not going out like this,” he says.
He was 5’10” and 270 pounds. “I ate lots of food that came out of a box, I wasn’t active, and I didn’t know how to be myself without alcohol,” he says. If he was going out with friends to a concert, he’d drink before going out to loosen up. If he was home, he’d drink to relax. If he was out, he’d drink to enjoy himself.
“One day, I realized that everything I was drinking and eating was making me feel bad,” Williams says.
He went to the doctor to figure out why he was suffering from horrible migraines, irritability, and poor sleep. After lots of testing and a CAT scan, there was no clear diagnosis. No one told him to change his diet. He figured that out on his own.
“I just thought, I’m already living in one extreme and it’s clearly not working for me, so why not try the reverse,” he says. Williams was also motivated by his aunt who had been following a vegan diet for more than 30 years. She was 62 years old and had none of the health complaints he was dealing with.
“It saved my life. Really. I can’t imagine what I would be like if I hadn’t made that change,” Williams adds. Now, he says there is no going back. When he switched his diet, he also started going to the gym regularly to lift weights.
“I didn’t know what I was doing the first three to four months but I kept going,” he says. The same was true of his new vegan diet, but he studied and gained expertise about the physiology, vegan cooking, animal cruelty, psychology, and politics.
He’s now a personal trainer and he’s committed to being a lifelong vegan. His son and his fiancée are also vegans. When Williams and his fiancée first met, she was skeptical about vegan diets.
“She was saying the same thing everyone else parrots: ‘I could never,’ ‘What about your protein?’ ‘Aren’t you hungry all the time?’ And I was like, damn, you’re cute but you just don’t get it,” he says. They didn’t talk again for months. When he saw her again, she looked different and her skin was glowing. She had switched to a vegan diet on her own.
Williams says that his son saw the change in his dad and embraced vegan food without much resistance.
“He could see me as an example. He saw the before and the after. He saw round, unhealthy, angry dad,” Williams says. He’s lost more than 80 pounds, although that’s not as important as how he feels.
“I’m calmer. It has changed my overall mental and physical health,” he says. “But no one could have come to me the day before I started and forced me to be vegan. I had to be ready. So I don’t preach to anyone, I just live as an example. People will change when they are ready.”

Colleen Someck, 58, flexitarian

Before Colleen Someck could start “dancing in the kitchen,” she had to learn to like food again. She survived an eating disorder that escalated when she was 19.
“I knew I had a problem because I was binging and purging and feeling guilty and ashamed,” Someck recounts. “I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t fix it.”
She had semi-successful recoveries but always relapsed. When she finally attempted to get help at a rehabilitation center, they turned her away because she wasn’t thin enough. So you can guess the damage that wrought.
“I can look back in hindsight and see that I wanted to punish myself. I felt less than, like I had no value,” Someck says. “Food … food was bad.”
She used extreme diets to mask her dysfunctional eating. She was macrobiotic for a while because it gave her an excuse to make small meals and avoid most readily available foods.
Someck describes her routine as exhausting. She was moody, hungry, and lonely. She didn’t have the energy she needed to get through the day, but she was still running miles every day in order to lose even more weight.
She doesn’t remember a last-straw or rock-bottom moment, but she remembers deciding that food is not bad. In the days that followed, her only goal was attempting to not purge or binge. The successful days stacked up, and eventually she knew her life had shifted.
“I think I was in recovery for 20-some-odd years,” Someck says. “So now, all food is good.”
Dancing in the Kitchen was her first cookbook in 2016. Her second is currently in the works. Most of the recipes are vegan, but she includes tips and suggestions about adding meat or eggs to certain recipes.
“You have to listen to your body. I’m not going to tell anyone that they can’t or shouldn’t eat something,” Someck says.
She describes herself as a flexitarian because she eats mainly vegetarian, but she no longer gets stuck on labels. If she orders soup and it turns out it was made with chicken broth, or if there’s birthday cake and everyone is celebrating, she doesn’t flip out or exclude herself. She says that if something doesn’t fit into what she normally eats and she wants to eat it, she does.
“I can’t play those mind games. I won’t do it,” she says. “I choose food that makes me feel the best that I can be. That’s it.”

Christina Kantzavelos, 30, gluten-free

Christina Kantzavelos would like to officially apologize for all the eye rolls she gave people on a gluten-free diet.
“I learned the hard way that gluten intolerance and celiac disease are very real,” she says.
Kantzavelos admits that she ignored her symptoms for years. She was at her worst in graduate school, but she assumed that stress was the obvious cause.
She suffered through bloating, swelling, migraines, and cramps and took it all in stride. The last straw for her was acne.
“It sounds vain that it was acne that sent me to the doctor and not the other stuff, but, well, it was a lot of acne,” Kantzavelos admits with mock horror. She never had acne as a teenager, so developing blemishes after graduate school seemed a cruel twist of fate.
Visiting dermatologists didn’t yield a solution. The lotions and potions didn’t help, so a friend recommended she see a naturopath, something else that Christina would have normally greeted with an eye roll, but this time she was desperate. The naturopath diagnosed her with celiac disease almost immediately. Later tests confirmed her condition—and then everything changed.
Her gluten intolerance made her a lot more tolerant of gluten-free enthusiasts.
“Yes, it’s a fad diet for some people, but the fact that it’s a fad drives up demand, which means that there are a lot more options for people like me,” Kantzavelos says. Besides, going gluten-free won’t harm anything but your taste buds, she explains.
She’s found some great gluten-free options, including some things that rival their gluten-laden counterparts. But occasionally, she starts raving about a product that she thinks must taste as good as the original and she presents it lovingly to her spouse or family for confirmation.
“The response is usually, ‘um, no, I can tell it’s missing gluten,’” she says. “So my baseline has definitely shifted.”
The good news is that she doesn’t care and she doesn’t feel like she is sacrificing. Her diet is stricter than most because of other dietary issues, but she says that it doesn’t feel limiting since she focuses on what she eats that makes her feel good.
She’s gluten-free, dairy-free, and soy-free. She keeps her sugar intake to the bare minimum, doesn’t drink alcohol, and mostly follows a low-histamine eating regimen as well. When she “cheats,” she eats lentils, nuts, other legumes, avocados, and sometimes eggs.
“I know it sounds really sad that those are my cheats, because most people think of those things as really healthy, but they don’t agree with my body. So if I eat them, I do it in moderation,” Kantzavelos says.
A licenced psychotherapist by profession, Kantzavelos is also a writer. Her favorite topics are wellness and mental health.

Tony Cohen, 54, keto

Tony Cohen, founder of the San Diego Keto Club, calls himself one of the first human guinea pigs for exogenous ketones. He received a FedEx package filled with two clear sandwich bags of white powder from a friend in San Diego. There were instructions about how to pee on a ketone testing strip (a practice that is no longer in favor) and more instructions on what to eat and when.

It says a lot about Cohen’s life at this time that he started ingesting the mystery substance without knowing much about how the keto diet worked. He was living in New York and he was broke. “I probably suffered from some type of depression, although I wouldn’t have said that at the time,” Cohen admits.

He lived in a tiny studio above a pizza and ice cream parlor in Spanish Harlem with no natural light and was teaching Krav Maga, a relatively obscure mixed martial art, at the time. While he previously trained to be a chef in Northern Thailand, he didn’t have a kitchen, so most of his meals were of the typical New York commuter variety. He had a bacon, egg, and cheese bagel for breakfast, a slice or two of pizza in the afternoon, more pizza for dinner, and ice cream for dessert. Every day.

“It was a downward spiral that I couldn’t work my way out of,” Cohen says. “So when that package came in the mail, I was ready to make a serious change.”

He says that timing is everything. It also helped that he didn’t consider it to be a “diet”; it was more of an experiment. It wasn’t a fad yet, and Cohen, a born contrarian, seemed to embrace it.

“When I started three years ago, people thought I was an idiot,” Cohen says.

But it was the right diet—or should we say eating regimen—at the right time.

“If you had told me to diet, I would have told you where to go,” Cohen says, but gradually “I only had pizza and ice cream a few times a week instead of every day. Then I’d eat the pizza and skip the ice cream or eat the ice cream and skip the pizza, and then I just stopped eating them both altogether. But it didn’t happen overnight.”
The keto diet consists of eliminating refined sugars and eating low carbohydrates with a proper balance of high-fat foods. Ketosis occurs when there isn’t enough glucose, the body’s primary fuel source, so the body starts to break down fat stores to produce energy. There’s a lot more to it and taking exogenous ketones is entirely optional. Tony recommends starting with small changes such as cutting down on processed food.
“It can be really overwhelming. You have to do it in steps,” he says.

Steph Gaudreau, 39, paleo

Steph Gaudreau thinks the “caveman diet” analogy is the worst thing to happen to Paleo dieters.
“It’s a trope that has not done us any favors, but it’s an association that sticks,” she says. Even though it’s ridiculous to think that we can or should eat like a prehistoric human with a 30-year lifespan, we can eat simpler food, she says. As famed food writer Michael Pollan would say, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
Even though the Paleo name hails from the Paleolithic era, she says that we shouldn’t pretend that the dietary needs of the modern human haven’t evolved since the Stone Age. Among other innovations, our crop-growing skills and cooking technology allow for a more appetizing and nutritionally balanced year-round diet. We can do better than caveman meals.
“I’ve tried every diet under the sun and I always fell back into old habits,” Gaudreau explains. Starting the Paleo diet was incidental. In 2009, she was active in the mountain biking and racing community. She needed a way to fuel her body and she stumbled upon a way of eating that provided the fuel that increased her performance and satisfied her cravings.
“For years, I had digestive problems and weird menstrual cycles. I was hangry and had sleep issues, and I thought, I guess that’s just how I am,” Gaudreau says. “But so much of that was governed by my diet and how I was eating.”
When she started the Paleo diet, it was the first time she started a diet that wasn’t about losing weight. It made all the difference, she says.
“People saw that I was changing, and I don’t just mean losing inches. I was different and thinking differently, and that’s what got me into starting the blog,” she says. At first, it was just recipes, but soon she was explaining what she could about her journey and how others might experiment with the diet for their own health.
Gaudreau went from teaching high school chemistry and biology to blogging full-time in 2012. The blog was how she met her husband, who was living in Scotland at the time. They bonded over Paleo and racing, dated long distance for a couple years, then married in 2014.
“It’s great to have a partner who was already committed to Paleo,” Gaudreau says, but she’s really referring to conscientious eating.
She says she understands that some people are really adamant about not eating meat and she assures them that she doesn’t want animals to suffer either. Ethical eating is a lot more difficult than eat this or don’t eat that.
“I don’t think anyone has a simple answer, but I know that if we eat less meat, and better meat, we could support a more sustainable, ethical, and environmental process,” Gaudreau says. “There will always be death associated with the way we grow our food unless we start growing it in a lab, and that has its own ethical problems.”

Esperanza Peralta-Guerrero, 69, kitchenista

As a first-generation Mexican-American, Esperanza Peralta-Guerrero spent most of her life cooking a traditional Mexican diet—lots of flavorful pork dishes cooked in lard and supplemented with processed sugar. She had a desire to eat and cook healthier meals, but she didn’t know where to begin.
A friend invited her to her first yoga class at Olivewood Gardens & Learning Center in National City. That day, they were also doing cooking demonstrations. Peralta-Guerrero was immediately interested and signed up for the Kitchenista program. It took a year for her to get through the waiting list, but she says the program changed her life and the life of her family.
“I’m most proud of my mom,” she explains. Her mom is now 90 years old and at the time that Peralta-Guerrero started the program, her mother was pre-diabetic. She shared all the information with her mother who was initially skeptical, but gradually, her mother changed a lifetime of cooking habits and started eating meatless meals, eliminated processed foods and switched from sugar to Stevia.
“She really accepted all of it and started eating more vegetables and more salads, which are not traditional in a Mexican meal,” Peralta-Guerrero says. “I think it’s because she felt the difference, not just saw the difference in me.”
The Kitchenista program stresses the benefits of cooking with organic foods and shares meatless recipes and ways to incorporate healthy substitutions into traditional meals.
Peralta-Guerrero says that her husband grumbled a little about missing red meat at mealtime, but he had faith that she was looking out for his best interests. She says that he too noticed a difference in himself.
“I don’t know how to describe it, but for me I felt not so heavy,” Peralta-Guerrero says. “I feel like I have more of a balance in my body. I don’t miss the meat or any of the foods that I used to eat.”
Though she concedes that she didn’t give up tamales, she now eats them with chicken, not pork, and she only eats those from her own kitchen or her mother’s so she knows what they are made with.
Three years as a Kitchenista has changed her entire eating life. She now has a small garden at home and grows many of the fruits and vegetables that her family eats most. Her husband has planted tomatoes, zucchini, chiles, and bell peppers, and they also have nectarine, peach, golden mandarin, apricot, and lemon trees. She says that it sounds like a lot, but you don’t need much space to start a family garden.
As a volunteer educator at the center she learned that food gardens aren’t so difficult to maintain. Having fresh produce is also a great motivator to use them in meals and share them with family.
After Peralta-Guerrero finished the program, her 47-year-old daughter did the same. Now, when her family cooks together, they are creating healthy meals that everyone enjoys. Peralta-Guerrero hopes this cultural shift will mean that she will be preparing nutritious meals with her mom and daughter for years to come.