CHANGE

change student so far away from home, I
took that harder than I may have if I were
with my family in Canada. I obviously asked
her what I could do to prevent these
symptoms from worsening and hopefully
avoid diabetes all together. Her answer
was a change in diet.
I have always been very active and I ate
relatively good, but that would not stop me
from consuming a full bag of chips in under
twenty minutes by myself. I did some
more research because I couldn’t possibly
understand why my diet needed to change
because I was normally really active, thin
and healthy in my daily life with the food
I ate regularly. Everyone normally links
diabetes with being overweight and if I am
being honest I did too for a while, but what
I found while doing research on my diet
is that being overweight only plays into a
small part of diabetes. The main cause of
it is an unhealthy diet. That shocked me,
so I looked more into the healthiest diet
regimen that I could follow, the top result,
becoming vegan or vegetarian. I spent
so many hours researching these diets I
even found a really good documentary on
the subject called “The Game Changers”. I
found that documentary extremely helpful in
my decision to change my lifestyle and diet.
That is how I came up with the idea to go vegetarian
till the end of this semester to “test
the waters” of a new diet I also thought it
would be an interesting topic to write about.
I told my doctor back home what my plans
were and she told me that it was a great direction
to go for my health, and after one
week I noticed my symptoms were less severe
and I could bike to school easier without
being out of breath and having to take
breaks. After the third week my symptoms
were completely gone and I felt way more
energized and after the first month it became
routine to order off of the vegetarian
menu in restaurants and to make sure I did
not eat unhealthy, fatty foods. Overall, after
these months, I would say that this experiment
was a success and I will continue with
my vegetarian diet.
17