- I couldn't get from the chair to the door
without being completely winded.
(gentle instrumental music)
- My dad has always pushed me to be athletic, to work hard.
Basically, to be the best that I could be
all while working six to seven days a week
for literally the entire 27 years that I've been alive.
Now I always remember him being overweight
and not having enough time to exercise,
because he literally works so much.
A few years back, he started changing his habits
and it started with bicycling.
And more recently, about six to eight months ago,
to my surprise, he decided on his own to go vegan.
He's lost weight from this
and some other changes that he's made.
And I think his story is really inspiring
for not only people his age, but for people everywhere.
So today, I wanna share a look into my dad's journey.
(gentle instrumental music continues)
(light instrumental music)
- First I'm watching you,
realizing it's probably a good thing.
But then I watched the Netflix "Game Changers."
And within that movie,
the centrifuge test was significant for me.
Whenever they spun the guy's blood
and he was eating, he ate a ham sandwich
and all that stuff.
And there was a layer of fat that was in the blood.
As a mechanic,
if you have a lot of dirt in the oil,
the oil is gonna have troubles
getting all the dirt to the oil filter.
Same thing with your blood, mechanically.
The more stuff you put in your blood,
it's gonna be harder to get that stuff
to the filters to process it out.
So if you just don't put that stuff in the blood,
it's gonna be better for you.
(upbeat jazz music)
First month was pretty easy actually.
Thing is as I ate two pieces of chicken a night
and a turkey patty for lunch.
And then there was a lot of butter.
I'm a butter freak.
But then there's replacements for all this stuff.
So the first month was really quite easy.
And you can actually eat very poorly as a vegan, nowadays.
You can get the Ben & Jerry's ice cream
that tastes just like ice cream.
You can go down and get vegan donuts.
You can eat poorly.
So it's not like you're having to give up a whole lot,
but I'm trying not to eat that way.
Sometimes I'll have that,
but most of the time I don't.
I get up in the morning,
I eat or I put probably 10 carrots,
another 10 celery sticks,
and I don't know how to judge the volume of spinach,
it fills up the chute in the juicer twice, and three beets.
And that's what I do first,
immediately when I get out of bed.
And it's about 32 ounces of vegetable juice.
(graceful music)
I've been juicing for 30 years, five days a week,
every week, always.
But I started doing the juice because I had pneumonia,
hospitalized, pneumonia.
I couldn't get from the chair to the door.
They kept changing the medicines.
They kept giving me this.
They kept giving me that.
And then it would start coming back.
So I asked your mother to go over
to Target and get a juicer,
stop by Vons and buy a bunch of deep green veggies.
And I started juicing and I started improving.
And so from that moment on, I just never stopped.
My cholesterol is 120.
All the things that a person who is 300,
now I'm 295.
But most of this time,
of the 20 years,
I was 350 plus.
And I'd go to the doctor and they would always be going,
"What, no, we gotta redo this test.
This, oh no, no, no, no, no, we gotta redo this.
This can't be right."
"And another doctor said, "Well, of course.
You turn your body into an alkaline state
by doing all this vegetable juice."
So that's why he thinks that
all my vitals are right.
(truck engine running)
(truck wheels rolling over gravel)
I get up at 3:30, do the juice.
Come down here, do my books.
Then people start dropping their cars off.
And then the day starts, we start working on cars.
Then I usually have,
I'll either have a piece of Ezekiel bread
with peanut butter on it.
Or most of the time now I'm doing the shake
with a scoop of protein powder,
fruit, some peanut butter powder,
and Ripple, it's a replacement milk stuff.
And it turns into a nice thick shake.
It's almost like eating a soft serve.
(gentle electronic music)
It's like eating a milkshake for breakfast,
a very good one.
And then for lunch, it's a Beyond Burger
with a ketchup, mustard,
lettuce on an Ezekiel bread,
which you a sprouted wheat bread.
It's really, really full of fiber.
Then for dinner, I eat the BTW hash.
The BTW hash would be the rice,
pinto beans, one cup of each,
and then one pepper
and three or four mushrooms
with tahini sauce.
And then I eat some strawberries.
And if I'm really stressed,
I'm gonna eat something else before I go to bed.
But it still is, whatever I'm eating, is still vegan.
There's the group who basically
won't even talk to you about it.
They just blow it off.
That's a weird group, because it's what I've chosen to do.
And I'm not telling them they need to do it.
I had a young man in here and he's talking about something.
We got going about something on politics.
I don't know why it was relevant, but I said,
"Well, yeah, I'm vegan."
And he says, "Yeah, yeah, that's what they'd all say."
I said, "No, no, no, I'm vegan."
"Yeah, yeah, they'd all say that."
"Dude wait.
I am personally, I am vegan."
And he stops and he looks at me (laughs).
You know, a 295 pound old fart,
normally isn't vegan,
so it's actually kind of fun.
I'm watching what you're doing.
I'm seeing your videos and I'm sitting there for what?
It's been about four or five years?
Eh, I should try that.
And then after I tried it, it's like,
"Oh, this isn't hard."
But I tell you how I'm feeling,
and boom, you look at what I did and say, "Oh, that's why."
I worry about people that are trying to do it.
I worry about them not being able to do it,
because they can't just call up their son and say,
"What should I do about this?"
'Cause I don't know where they would go.
Now they could log onto your channel,
but if they don't know me,
they wouldn't know to go to you.
B12, I think was the most important.
Then the omega-3
was the second most important.
And then the alteration of protein.
You gotta get some guidance.
You gotta have a plan.
(slow hypnotic music)
Well, when I first started getting real serious
about doing it every single day,
I was having to stop going up Windmill View hill.
It's not a big hill.
You know, a normal biker guy would say,
"Oh, well that's not much of a hill."
Well, you know, I had to stop three times
going up that hill to catch my breath from seeing stars.
And now I just recently had to expand
my route out to go seven miles.
And I'm having to go back through
certain parts of the neighborhood twice
to keep my ride at 45 minutes.
Where in the beginning, it was 2 1/2 miles
and it took 45 minutes.
I try and make my ride so I'm going uphill,
'cause our neighborhood is lots of hills.
And so I minimize the downhill as much as I can,
and maximize the uphill as much as I can.
(blissful orchestral music)
Okay, I started at 385 pounds.
I might've been 390,
because when I start doing something,
normally, the first thing I do is not step on the scale.
I'm going, "Oh my gosh, I need to do something."
And the advice that I would say is, well,
there's another thing that you have to remember,
and that is that exercise is exercise,
dieting is dieting.
The two do not have to be together.
You can be overweight, you can eat poorly,
and still put in a half an hour a day of aerobic exercise.
Now once you start doing the aerobic exercise consistently,
it may make you change how you eat,
especially, will make you change when you eat.
'Cause you're not probably gonna eat a bag of chips
and a Big Gulp on your way home
just before you get out of the car to walk around the block.
But I've had several older people who I've said,
"When you get home, don't walk in the house.
Walk around the block."
"Well, I can't make it around the block."
"Well, walk down the street.
As far as you feel comfortable and come back."
And the one guy that I'm thinking about,
about six months later, he came in and says,
"You know, I'm walking around the block now twice."
And he says, "I am feeling better
and I've taken off 40 pounds."
I, you know, still need to lose another 50 pounds.
I am not gonna stress over that.
So the advice I would say is don't view the whole thing
as something that has to happen in six months,
like you see on "Biggest Loser."
They see that and it's like,
you gotta go down there and you gotta spend,
you know, five hours in the gym, flipping ropes,
and doing all this stuff.
The flipping rope thing for me,
I watch that and I just go, "My god, that looks miserable."
For some reason, that rope flipping thing,
just, it just, eww, I hate that.
But if you just wanna start feeling better,
half an hour of aerobic exercise to your level,
and your level will change,
and then make small alterations in your diet.
Look at it as a process.
It's gonna be for the rest of your life.
And you're not gonna have to eliminate everything.
If you like ice cream,
you can have ice cream every once in a while,
just fit it into the bigger picture.
Thanksgiving dinner, last year,
this last Thanksgiving dinner,
it was an interesting thing that I noticed.
I ate way too much 'cause you made the ribs,
the seitan ribs.
And we had macaroni and cheese.
We had all these things.
And I went ahead and I ate 'til I was way over full.
And it was interesting that there was some vegan ice cream.
Well, after we ate,
I was way too full to have anything else.
So we sat down and we watched some, a Christmas movie.
And by the time that we finished the Christmas movie,
I was no longer stuffed.
I felt good.
And now it's time to eat some of that vegan ice cream.
The next morning when I got up, I felt normal.
When I eat incorrectly,
it seems like within an hour or so,
everything's processed and it's over.
You know, the energy level is significantly better.
I need my knee replaced.
So therefore, I'm not getting out there and going places,
but I feel like maybe.
I see no need to change.
Honestly, I thought that I was gonna see
that commercial for Omaha beef
and I was gonna be sitting there drooling
and licking the TV screen for that filet mignon.
I don't care.
I really don't care about the steaks.
I just, I'm not seeing any need to change.
(blissful orchestral music ending)
(upbeat instrumental music)
(upbeat hip hop music)
♪ What, what, what, what ♪
♪ What, what, what ♪
♪ What, what, what, what ♪
♪ What, what ♪