Hello, my friends!

I've told my health story for years while leaving out one of the most important parts. I didn't think it was scientific enough to talk about.

I've talked about cancer. I've talked about plant-based nutrition, lifestyle medicine, behavior change, and the research that finally moved me to change how I eat. But I rarely talked about the role my faith played when I finally changed how I ate, back in 2022.

Today I'm telling you what I left out: a COVID scare in the Philippines, a verse I'd read a hundred times without really seeing it, and why lifestyle medicine has more room for that than I assumed.

Part of the omission was practical. Most of the people I talk to aren't religious, and I'm a clinician who cares a lot about evidence. So when I told this story, I gave people the parts I thought I could defend scientifically: the studies, the behavior-change strategies, the changes I made to my environment.

All of that is true. But I was telling an incomplete version of what happened.

Before 2022, I'd spent about twelve years trying to get healthier. I had cancer at eighteen, and afterward I did what a lot of people do after a health scare. I promised myself I was going to change.

So I tried. I'd find a healthier diet, start working out again, do well for a few weeks or a couple of months. Then life would happen, and I'd stop, only to find something else and start over a little later.

This was confusing, because discipline wasn't usually a problem for me. I finished school, moved countries, and built a career, following through on the things I decided mattered. Health was the one place I kept starting over.

Even wanting to become healthy enough to safely have a child wasn't enough to make the behavior easy on its own.

Then, in 2022, my husband and I got COVID while we were visiting family in the Philippines. He recovered pretty quickly.

I didn't, and since I was high risk, I was scared. So I did what I usually do when I don't know what to do: I started researching.

I came across studies on plant-based eating and health, and the evidence got my attention. Around that same time, I was also reading scripture.

I'm a Latter-day Saint, and we have something called the Word of Wisdom. It's a health code I've known my whole life.

I always thought I followed it pretty well, because I'd paid attention to the things it tells us not to consume. But that morning I noticed something I'd mostly overlooked.

There were also things it was asking me to do. One of the things I saw much more clearly was this emphasis on eating plants.

Body image: Flat illustration, minimalist style. Two thin lines/threads, one representing a line graph of research data and one representing a page of open scripture, curving from opposite sides of the frame and converging into a single line moving forward. Off-white background (#F9F8F5), ink-colored linework (#1A2B4A), the converged line rendered in soft purple (#C4A8D4). Clean, no shadows, no text. Square 1:1 or 4:5 portrait.

So I suddenly had the research I was reading, and something I already deeply trusted, pointing me in the same direction. The science helped me understand a direction I could take for my health. My faith made that choice personally meaningful in a different way.

For me, that combination was enough to stop researching for a moment and move.

For years, I wasn't sure how to talk about that without making it sound like I was replacing science with faith. But I've since learned that lifestyle medicine has language for this. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine, the organization I'm board certified through, now talks specifically about meaning, purpose, and spirituality as part of whole-person care.

Their guidance recognizes that sustainable behavior change also depends on a person's values, beliefs, sense of meaning, and purpose, which can influence their intrinsic motivation and how they connect health behaviors to the life they care about.

Reading that changed something for me. Acknowledging that my faith mattered turned out to be scientifically grounded. I'd simply been treating part of the human experience as though it didn't belong in the story.

This doesn't mean everyone needs religion to change their health. For me, spirituality was part of it.

For somebody else, the thing underneath the behavior might be family, independence, service, creativity, identity, or something else entirely. Either way, the behavior starts to mean something beyond the behavior itself.

I've written before about my ultimate why: getting healthy enough to have a child, then caring for the baby I was carrying, then caring for the daughter in front of me now. My Ultimate Why: Four Layers Deep

That's still true. But looking back, even my why had a why, and my faith shaped the way I thought about family. It shaped why family carried so much weight for me in the first place.

The meaning kept changing as I lived the habit. I couldn't have told you all of it when I started, because some of those reasons hadn't happened yet. I had to live my way into them.

That's probably the biggest thing I'd change about the usual advice to find your why. You don't need to sit down and discover your deepest, most profound reason before you're allowed to start changing. Sometimes that reason only becomes visible after you've been living the behavior for a while.

So start with what is true right now. Maybe you want to walk because you want more energy. Ask yourself what having more energy would make possible in your actual life.

Maybe you want to change how you eat because you're worried about your bloodwork. Ask what better health would let you protect, participate in, or become.

You don't need to manufacture a profound answer. Follow your current answer one level deeper, then start practicing the behavior, and pay attention to what begins to change. Because sometimes practice reveals purpose.

By the time I looked back, faith, family, science, and behavior change had folded into a single story instead of four separate explanations. The evidence gave me direction, and my beliefs gave that direction meaning.

My family gave me something deeply personal to move toward, and living the change kept showing me new reasons to continue.

So maybe you don't need to know your ultimate why today. Maybe you just need a reason that's true enough to begin, and permission to let that reason grow with you.

I made something to help with that part. It's an AI prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude or another AI assistant. It interviews you one question at a time about the health change you're trying to make and helps you follow your own answers a little deeper.

By the end, it helps you name the reason, your ‘why’ that feels true right now, one small action that expresses it, and something to keep noticing as you practice.

You don't have to find your reason before you start.

Sometimes you find it by living the habit.

With gratitude (and a lot fewer things left unsaid),

Grazelle 🌱