Mar 29, 2018
How would it feel to need to sit down in the middle of the road because the pain in your chest was so bad?
You couldn’t even wait until you got to the other side. And what if your cardiologist said “I’ve done all the stents I can, the blood vessels in your heart are falling apart and there is nothing wrong with sitting down”?
Dulcie Corbett didn’t like to hear this. She was too dynamic to be crippled by heart disease. She had gone trekking in the Himalayas on the day she retired from work at aged 60. She wasn’t even sure she had heart disease. All she knew is that to relieve the terrible pain in her chest she needed to sit down and hug herself. And she needed to do it often.
So when her GP recommended the book “How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease” by Dr Caldwell Esselstyn, at first she read it and thought it all sounded too hard. But when the pain continued unabated, she read it again. And she realised that Dr Esselstyn was simply asking her to make a choice. A choice between living with the crippling of heart disease or trying a healthier diet that might help her feel better. What was there to lose? Based on how bad she felt she simply had to try the diet.
The rest is history. Dulcie, who is Claire's aunt, adopted the whole food plant-based diet with the added “extras” of no oil (“not a drop”), no nuts and no avocados, and she has never looked back. The no oil bit was an initial stumbling block and giving up cheese was hard, but her blood cholesterol fell dramatically and the chest pains went away. She literally felt fantastic in a week.
Dulcie doesn’t do much sitting around these days. And the 13 tablets she was taking before the dietary change have dropped to 4, one of which (aspirin) she is on for life. This is a terrific story about the powerful effects of whole foods plant-based nutrition, how it can reverse heart disease and the realities of eating this way.
Dulcie tells us how and why this all happened, how it felt before and after, the practicalities of how she did this, how she needs 3 monthly blood tests to keep on track, how she has very occasional sinning days (where she eats fish) for relief of the strictness, how she deals with eating out at restaurants and functions, how she entertains at home and best of all how she got back on her bike 2 months ago to ride 12km to prove she could still do it.
Dulcie is a small lady with a big story. She has an immeasurable zest for life and she was the main reason Claire and Andrew adopted a plant-based diet. Dulcie has also influenced her daughter and her grand-daughters which is surely the ultimate gift of a family elder – inspiring your descendents to make the healthiest choices they can based on your own living example of improved health and happiness.
Thank you Dulcie for joining us on the podcast and for championing this way of life. You are our hero and we love you.
Claire & Andrew
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Links to people, organisations and other resources mentioned in this episode:
Book - How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Dr Caldwell Esselstyn: http://www.dresselstyn.com/site/books/prevent-reverse/about-the-book/
Book - How Not To Die by Dr Michael Greger: https://nutritionfacts.org/book/
Book - The China Study by Dr Colin Campbell: https://nutritionstudies.org/the-china-study/
Book - Finding Ultra by Rich Roll: http://www.richroll.com/finding-ultra/
New Normal Project website: https://www.newnormalproject.com.au/
New Normal Project podcast: http://newnormalproject.libsyn.com/
New Normal Project on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/newnormalproject/
New Normal Project on Instagram: @newnormalproject
New Normal Project on Twitter: @newnormalproj
Email Claire & Andrew Davies: info@livingtheplantpowerway.com