Hey there, everybody! My name is Matt, and I’m the founder of No Fear, Just Food. The goal of my site is to connect people with quality resources in support of a disease-fighting, healthy-eating diet. The best part about it is that it actually works and you get to ward off what some doctors consider “life-long” and “genetic” illness with food! So why am I here, and why did I start this website? Let me tell you a little bit about myself and my backstory.
Growing up, I loved playing video games; if I wasn’t outside playing, I was on the computer or watching the TV screen playing console games. On a vacation to the beach while I was in middle school, I was playing Mario Party with my sisters and our friends on a rainy night. I turned to look away from the game because something didn’t seem quite right. I noticed I was seeing the characters off the screen. I told my mom and she took me into the bedroom so I could get some rest. After laying down in the bed, I have no recollection of the next several hours. I was unconscious and unresponsive, experiencing a seizure. My parents tried to wake me as my sisters and friends slept, but were unsuccessful. They called 9-1-1 and an EMS crew arrived, bringing me outside and loading me in the back of the ambulance. They couldn’t bring me out of my current state, requiring advanced life support personnel to assist on my way to the hospital.
Several hours later I awoke from my deep state of unconsciousness, confused in the hospital with an IV in my arm. I underwent a few MRIs and several other tests, determining that I had in fact experienced a seizure. After a few days in the hospital, and after several rounds of foosball played in a hospital gown, I went home to continue on, being told I couldn’t play video games for the next several years. Yep, I was one of those kids that was the reason behind the annoying “This game could cause seizures…” disclaimer you may have found at the beginning of many games when they start up.
Years later, I find myself at a friend’s house playing video games when I’m cleared to do so, only to find myself experiencing my first migraine with an aura. A condition that I am left with in certain circumstances where my brain’s neurons misfire in response to certain light frequencies and cause me to see spots of color swirls and flashing zig-zags of black and white, often blocking out some or most of my vision. This condition I will live with into the present day.
So why am I telling you all of this? Recently I had gone to the doctor and had an MRI performed, revealing that I have small “white spots” in my brain, meaning there is less circulation to those parts. These spots are often seen in older populations, meanwhile this concerns me at the age of 27. But where does this website and a plant-based diet fit into all of this? After research through means of reading books and watching documentaries, I have been lead to the conclusion that a plant-based diet helps to lessen the chance, and can even reverse the impacts, of a stroke. But you didn’t have a stroke, you had a seizure… Well, by having seizures and migraines, it has been shown that the correlation between migraines, seizures and strokes is fairly high. My grandfather had a stroke while I was young and I would like to prevent such occurrences from happening to myself. Seeing my very artistic, fun-loving grandfather confined to a nursing home, where his ability to speak and move was severely impaired, was very hard. Experiencing this within my own family gives me the desire to avoid this phenomenon altogether.
Along my journey, in 2009, I joined my local fire station as a volunteer when I was 19; I was going to do something bigger than myself to help my community. I still serve the same fire company to this day. It didn’t used to faze me we would go on medical calls for sick subjects or those just needing assistance to get up or down the stairs. People need help sometimes and injury or illness can cause additional help to be necessary, and that’s okay. It wasn’t until recently (2017) when I began seeing these patients and couldn’t help but think to myself “I wonder what condition I’m going to develop when I get older.” Let me tell you, that is not a state of mind that anyone wants to be in. I look at patients’ lists of medications and it honestly scared me seeing lists as long as a standard 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet of paper. I couldn’t help but think “Is this what I’m going to have to take when I’m older?” “Am I just going to have to sit back and find out what concoction my bar tender of a doctor is going to serve me in my older age?”
But then I found it…the answer to my questions of what I will be susceptible to when I grow older… The answer was that I didn’t have to contract this slew of conditions that would hinder my lifestyle. In 2017 my father was given the news that he had the potential to have prostate cancer. My father is a praying man and turned to God for guidance. What he got was a hand guiding him towards a plant-based diet. He was already on a few medications for blood pressure and cholesterol, though he never truly ate an “unhealthy” diet. He usually tried to eat fairly well, staying away from a lot of the classic treats and fatty meals. After a lot of research, he found himself in a situation where it was either a plant-based diet or exacerbating his potentially cancer-ridden condition, so he switched. He quit cold-turkey. Do you think you could do that? I sure couldn’t. I will note that a few days into his diet we went to a Mexican restaurant and he accidentally ordered a quesadilla, not thinking about the cheese, haha!
Outside of his one accidental quesadilla mishap, he had been completely dedicated to the plant-based, or what he calls “cancer-fighting” diet. After a couple months, he had gone back to his doctor in response to his medications, and following an evaluation, it was determined that he was cleared to get off of them and leave them behind. Tests that had been performed to determine his susceptibility to cancer had revealed that it did not appear that he had prostate cancer. So what did he take away from this experience? Did he go back to his normal diet when he was cleared? Hell no! Once he saw the power of a plant-based, “cancer-fighting” diet, he continued on his journey, losing weight and feeling better. Why quit when you’re ahead, right!?
It was about the time my father found this diet and the power behind it that I was thinking about my future conditions, so I figured I’d give the plant-based way a shot. What would I have to lose? In all honesty, for me to be thinking about switching from meat and cheese and everything animal-based it had to be something powerful. Meat and protein was my powerhouse after working out. It was my link to be stronger, and anytime I could, I’d have a grilled chicken sandwich or a burger, or some whey protein to get the supplemental, muscle-building protein that I needed. Little did I know that even my “lean,” “low-fat” options would present themselves as the very things standing in my way from reaching my full potential.
So here I am today, am I on a 100% plant-based diet? Nope. But am I close to it? Yep. I’m going to be honest with you all, I don’t eat everything plant-based, but I’m a work in progress. Like many of you may have experienced in the past or will experience, it’s tough to switch completely and go cold-turkey, so I give my dad some serious credit for taking that journey head-on. So my story to this point has lead me to make sure that at least 90% of my food throughout the week consists of fruits, veggies, nuts, whole grains, and other plant-based options. If I do indulge in options that are on the spectrum of animal products, I try to make sure it’s something healthy and that the plant foods heavily outweigh the animal ones on my plate. Along my journey I will be blogging about my daily and/or weekly successes, but also my failures. I’m going to put it all out there for you to relate to, but also to hold myself accountable. I’m not here to feed you some bullsh$%. I’m here to hopefully inspire people to realize that they can leave their conditions (and the related medications) behind, and trade it all for food.
I will tell you all in summary that my reason for switching over to what some might consider the “dark side” (but I consider the “alive side”) is for my own health, so that I can climb every mountain I face with stores of energy, so that I won’t be tired all day, so that I can prevent diabetes (as my grandfather that I never met passed away due to complications from the disease), so that I won’t have to worry about a stroke or any other disabling or limiting conditions, so that I can grow old and see my newborn nephew grow up, and so that I can be an inspiration for those looking for a helping hand across the fence into a life without fear and with redirected focus on living a free and active life.
I want to thank you for joining me on my journey, and if/when you feel inclined to follow along and make some changes in your life, I will do my best to keep my site updated with useful tools to help you along. Feel free to leave a comment and tell me something about your journey, whether you’re new to the plant-based diet, you’re a seasoned veteran, or you’re just looking for more information. I want to learn more and do more to bring people together with food that will not only taste good, but help people to feel good, so let’s do this thing together!