Hello, my friends!

First, thank you. For all the support, feedback, and encouragement.

Last Saturday's email fiasco got way more replies than I expected, and most of you asked me to still send the polished version today. So here it is:

For years, I told the evidence-based version of my health story.

It was true.

But it wasn't complete.

I've talked about cancer, plant-based nutrition, lifestyle medicine, behavior change, and all the practical things that helped me stop starting over.

But there's one part I almost always left out.

My faith.

I didn't think it was scientific enough to belong in the story.

Whenever I told my story, I naturally reached for what I could explain with research. The studies I found. The changes I made to my environment. The strategies I learned.

Those things mattered.

But so did something I wasn't talking about.

Part of me thought: Just stick to the science. That's the version everybody can use.

But that wasn't the whole story of how I changed.

The morning I finally decided to change how I ate in May 2022 wasn't just about finding convincing research.

Something I already deeply believed became connected to the decision too.

Before 2022, I'd spent about twelve years trying to become healthier.

I was diagnosed with metastatic thyroid cancer at 18. It spread to my lungs and lymph nodes. After treatment, I promised myself I was going to live healthier.

I really meant it.

I'd eat better. Exercise.

Sometimes it lasted a few weeks or a couple of months.

Then life would happen, I'd stop, try another diet or plan and eventually I'd start over.

What confused me was that discipline wasn't usually a problem for me.

I finished college, and grad school. Moved countries. Built a career.

But health was different.

And I had a very real reason to care.

My husband and I wanted a family, but for years pregnancy wasn't considered safe for me. I wanted to become healthy enough that maybe someday that could change.

Still, I couldn’t keep my health habits long enough for it to matter. Still, I kept starting over.

So I assumed I needed a better strategy, more information, or finally the thing that would make it stick.

Then in 2022, my husband and I got COVID while visiting family in the Philippines.

He recovered quickly.

I didn't.

Three weeks later, I was still sick, and because of my medical history involving my lungs, I was scared.

So I started researching on PubMed, which is what I do when I encounter clinical questions at work.

I found studies that made me seriously consider moving toward a plant-based diet.

But research is also where I tend to get stuck. Another paper. Another question. Another reason to wait until I know more.

This is the part I almost never told:

That morning, I was also doing my regular scripture study.

I felt prompted to pray specifically about changing my diet.

So I did.

It was the first time I had ever prayed specifically about that.

Afterward, the thought came almost immediately to read Doctrine and Covenants Section 89, which we call the Word of Wisdom.

I belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Word of Wisdom is our church’s health code. I’d known it my whole life.

I thought I'd been following it pretty well.

But I realized I'd focused mostly on the don'ts.

Don't smoke. Don't drink alcohol. Don't drink coffee or tea.

That morning, I noticed the do's differently.

There was an emphasis on wholesome plant foods and eating meat sparingly that I'd read before but had never really allowed to challenge how I ate.

And now I had science telling me to eat more whole plant foods, and a scripture I'd trusted my whole life are pointing me in the same direction.

For me, those two things came together.

I think I need to explain why this mattered beyond simply saying, "my religion has a health code."

I believe my body is a gift from God. My body is a temple.

That doesn't mean a healthy body makes someone more righteous, or that taking perfect care of yourself guarantees you won't get sick. As a cancer patient, I know life doesn't work that way.

To me, it means my body is something I've been given to care for as well as I can.

It's how I work, serve people, love my family, take care of my daughter, and do the things I believe I'm here to do.

Taking care of my body is one way I put my values into practice.

When I try to care for that gift, I feel more aligned with God and with the kind of life He wants me to live.

So changing my diet wasn't just another nutrition goal.

The science gave me a direction.

My faith connected that direction to something I already believed about my body, my life, and what both were for.

That helped me move before I had every answer.

Faith didn't do all the work after that.

I still had to make a plan.

I asked my husband for support. I changed our kitchen environment. I deleted food delivery apps. I focused on one major health behavior instead of trying to change everything at once.

There was still lifestyle medicine. Behavior-change science.

There was still practice.

But the reason underneath the behavior had changed.

Taking care of my health had become an expression of the values I was already trying to live by.

So this time, I was able to sustain my health habits.

Not perfectly. Not without effort. And not always in the same form.

My habits have changed through pregnancy, motherhood, work, illness, and different seasons of life.

Sometimes I make them smaller. Sometimes I adjust the strategy. Sometimes I have to come back after things get messy.

But involving God in how I care for my health gives me something steady to return to.

I believe He created this body and wants me to care for it as well as I can. So I also know He'll help me do that, even when what "taking care of myself" looks like has to change.

This might sound a little strange if you don't share my beliefs, but I genuinely feel like heaven is smiling at me when I eat my veggies, lift weights, go for a walk with my daughter, or even show up for my regular doctor's appointment.

They're ordinary things.

But to me, they can feel spiritual too.

I know what I'm coming back to.

For twelve years, health had been the place where I kept starting over.

This time was different.

The funny part is that it took me years to understand any of this.

Actually, it took an evidence-based article for me to finally give myself permission to talk about it.

The American College of Lifestyle Medicine, the organization I'm board certified through, recently published a review on meaning, purpose, and spirituality.

It discusses how a person's values, deeply held beliefs, meaning, and purpose can matter when we're trying to help people make and sustain lifestyle changes.

When I read it, I almost laughed.

Apparently I still needed evidence before I'd let myself say my own faith mattered. 😉

But it helped me see that acknowledging spirituality doesn't replace the science. It adds meaning to it.

You don't have to share my faith to get healthier.

Information simply isn't the only thing that shapes how we change.

What a behavior means to us matters too.

That realization made me rethink something I've written about before: my ultimate why.

I've said my family is my ultimate why.

That's still true.

One of the deepest reasons I wanted to become healthier was because I wanted the possibility of becoming a mother.

But now I can see that my why had a why.

Part of why family carries so much meaning for me comes from what my religion has taught me about family.

My why kept deepening after I started.

First it was:

I want to become healthy enough that maybe I can have a baby.

My cancer went into remission. Then I got pregnant.

Now I was caring for the baby growing inside me.

Then my daughter was born.

Now I want the energy to be present with her and, as much as any of this is within my control, to be here for her for a long time.

I couldn't have known all of those reasons when I started, and some of them didn't exist yet.

I had to live my way into them.

That's why I think "find your why" can sometimes make behavior change sound more complicated than it needs to be.

You don't necessarily have to discover one perfect, profound reason before you begin.

Sometimes practice reveals purpose.

You start with the reason you have today, and living the behavior teaches you why it matters even more.

If you're trying to change something about your health, don't wait until you've uncovered some ultimate life purpose.

Start with what's actually true.

Maybe you want more energy.

What would having more energy make possible?

Maybe your bloodwork scared you.

What would better health allow you to keep doing, protect, or make possible?

Maybe the answer is family.

Maybe it's independence.

Maybe there's a spiritual belief underneath it.

Maybe there isn't.

There's no answer you're supposed to arrive at.

Just go one level deeper: What is this change in service of?

Then start living it and stay curious about what you discover.

Your reason may deepen. It may change. You may find meaning you couldn't have known before you began.

If you want some help exploring that, I made an AI prompt you can paste into ChatGPT or Claude.

It'll interview you one question at a time about the health change you're trying to make and help you explore the why underneath it, without forcing you to come up with one perfect "ultimate why."

At the end, it'll help you name what's true for you right now, choose one small action that expresses it, and give you something to keep noticing as you practice.

Save your answers.

Come back to them after you've been living the change for a while and see what changed.

Because sometimes you don't think your way into the deepest reason.

Sometimes you live your way into it.

With gratitude and a lot fewer things left unsaid,

Grazelle 🌱