MARY’S STORY

My mother, Mary McQuirter, is a true inspiration. She went vegan with me thirty years ago, when she was fifty years old. And today, she’s still healthy, fit, and active at eighty. She has no chronic diseases and takes no medications. In fact, her doctors tell her she has the health markers of someone thirty years younger. Here, my mother tells the story of how she went vegan and how it changed her life.

MY EARLY YEARS

I grew up on a farm in Camden, South Carolina, in the 1930s and 40s. We grew all our own fruits and vegetables, like kale, collards, sweet potatoes, green beans, watermelon, strawberries, and many more. And my Aunt Mary had a farm next to ours with an orchard full of peaches, plums, and all types of apples. We also picked wild blackberries and grapes in the woods that my mother preserved to make jam. We raised chickens, cows, and pigs, but we didn’t eat meat every day, like we did with fruits and vegetables. Sometimes we ate beans instead or we just had meals without meat.

In 1955, right after high school, I moved to Washington, DC, and lived with my oldest sister, Manolia. She grew some of the same vegetables in her backyard that we had in the country. But at the time, I had no interest in helping her grow vegetables. It reminded me too much of the hard farm work back home.

I began to eat more fried and processed foods after I moved to DC, and within a few years, I started having chest pains. My doctor told me to cut back on fried foods, so I did somewhat, but not that much.

It wasn’t until I was married and pregnant with my first child, Veronica, that I started reading about eating healthier. I wanted to find out how to have a healthy pregnancy and how to raise healthy children. This was in 1960 and Dr. Benjamin Spock’s books on raising children were among the ones I read. By the time I had my second and third children, Marya and Tracye, a few years later, I was eating fewer fried and processed foods, but I still had a long way to go.

OVEREATING

When my girls were young, one weekend I decided to bake a three-layer German chocolate cake with coconut-pecan frosting. As it turned out, none of the girls liked the cake, and I ended up eating the entire thing by myself in two days. I got very sick and that’s when I realized I had a problem with overeating. I had also been eating apple turnovers just about every day because the law firm where I worked had free pastries for breakfast. The first year I worked there I gained about ten pounds.

My sister, Ann, was already going to Overeaters Anonymous (OA), so I decided to start going with her. Everyone was surprised I was there because I wasn’t overweight. But just because you’re thin doesn’t mean you’re healthy.

When I found out there was an OA meeting near my office, I started going there during my lunch hour. At OA, I realized the reason I was overeating was that I was stressed. This was around 1970 and I was separated and bringing up my three children on my own. I was also dealing with racism at work as one of the first black employees at a majority white law firm. I realized that I was self-medicating with food to deal with the stress.

With OA’s help, I was able to manage my overeating. In the process, I found out that it was harder to stop overeating foods that contain sugar, especially pastries and desserts, because sugar is addictive. So with OA’s help, I also stopped eating sugar.

Then one day, after ten years had passed, I decided to eat a pastry. I figured that I had everything under control. But then one pastry led to another and after six months, I was back to being addicted to sugar. So I gave it up again. It was difficult at first—I was so addicted to sugar that I would often stand in front of a bakery just to smell the aroma. But the second time around, I was finally able to let it go completely. And still today, I don’t knowingly eat anything that has refined sugar in it. I still eat desserts, but they’re made with healthier sweeteners (as are the dessert recipes in this book).

HOW I WENT VEGAN

Letting go of sugar renewed my interest in learning more about healthy eating. And I read about several studies that came out linking pork and processed meat with an increased risk for cancer. So I decided to stop eating those foods, too.

Around that time, one of my brothers, Esau, died of a heart attack when he was in his fifties. And some of my cousins died of heart attacks soon after that, and they were also in their fifties. That’s when I learned that red meat was linked to heart disease. I was forty-seven at the time and it was a real wake-up call. So I immediately stopped eating beef.

I also saw a documentary on how chicken was processed—about how they just cut off all the bad parts and sell the rest. So I threw out all the chicken in the freezer, and that was it for me with chicken.

By that time, Tracye was in college and was thinking about becoming a vegetarian, and she was encouraging me to go vegetarian, too. So I started reading all the books she had about it. I learned how harmful and polluted fish was, and I decided to let that go, too. So at that point, I had stopped eating all meat, but I was still eating cheese.

When I went for my annual physical, I told my doctor that I was a vegetarian and had given up everything but cheese. He said I should have given up cheese first because it had the most fat. So, that led me to eventually stop eating cheese. That was the hardest to give up! It took me about a year or so to do it. But once I made up my mind, I was able to let it go.

And that’s how I went vegan at fifty. Looking back on it now, I know that giving up sugar first gave me the courage and strength to give up meat and dairy. I already knew I could do it.

MY BIGGEST CHALLENGES

In the beginning, being vegan was challenging in some ways because I had to learn about what to eat and how to prepare it. So I started experimenting with how to season beans and vegetables without meat. Tracye and I also experimented with cookbooks and recipes from the newspaper. This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before we had the Internet, so we didn’t have as many resources available then. Fortunately, there were also vegan cafes close by, like Brown Rice and Soul Vegetarian, near Howard University. I also liked eating at Indian and Ethiopian restaurants because they had vegan dishes on the menu.

I think the most challenging part about being a vegan in those early years was going to restaurants with our extended family, where there were hardly any vegan options on the menu. Back in those days, it wasn’t as easy to ask restaurants to prepare a vegan meal because they were so unfamiliar with veganism. So we usually just ate before or after we went to the restaurant. Or if we knew we were going to be at the restaurant for a few hours, we’d sometimes bring food with us, eat in the car, and then go in. We did what we had to do!

Being a vegan is effortless. It’s just a natural part of who I am and I don’t have to think about it. I know what to eat to stay healthy.

Every year we also have a big Thanksgiving dinner with our extended family and when we went vegan, we started to bring our own food, which we still do today. In the beginning, it was challenging because some of our relatives used to tease us with “What are you eating?” “Don’t you want some chicken?” Some of my brothers, in particular, joked about it, but my sisters accepted it for the most part.

I remember when we went down to South Carolina to visit one of my older sisters and she said “Oh, you don’t eat our food anymore?” That was hard. But then she prepared a huge pot of string beans and took a portion out for me before she put meat in it. So for my sisters, it wasn’t that big of a deal. They always ate a lot of vegetables anyway.

My friends were the same way. They didn’t have an issue with me becoming a vegan either. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we were older. But they didn’t treat me any differently because I wasn’t eating the same things they were eating. When we ate out, we chose places where everyone could eat or we went to a vegetarian or vegan restaurant. Most of them liked the food, anyway.

Even at work, when food was served at meetings, there was never an issue. Just as I was a vegan, I had co-workers who ate kosher and other kinds of food. So the firm just provided different types of food. I didn’t feel isolated at work in any way. In fact, at Christmas, I baked vegan cookies and my co-workers loved them.

CHANGES I EXPERIENCED AFTER GOING VEGAN

After I went vegan, people often commented that my skin looked good and had a healthy glow. I definitely noticed that, too. I think it’s because I didn’t eat a lot of processed vegan foods. There weren’t that many vegan versions of meat and cheese available back then and I didn’t like the way they tasted. I preferred to cook from scratch and eat whole foods. And I still prefer to eat that way today. It’s one of the main reasons I’ve been able to stay healthy all these years.

Years ago, I also started growing fruits and vegetables in my backyard. I also had a community garden plot with Tracye and now I have one with Marya and my granddaughter, Mara. So I’ve come full circle.

Today, at eighty years old, I still don’t have any chronic diseases, I’m not on any medications, and I’m not overweight. I weigh the same as I did in my thirties. I also exercise six days a week. I mainly take exercise classes at my senior center, usually twice a day. I do Pilates, aerobics, weight training, yoga, tai chi, and stretching and toning. Some of the other women in my exercise classes tell me I’m their inspiration. I love walking, too. Before I retired twenty years ago, I used to walk two miles in the mornings before going to work and at lunchtime. And, of course, I still walk today.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT BEING A VEGAN

Being a vegan is effortless. It’s just a natural part of who I am and I don’t have to think about it. I know what to eat to stay healthy. And I’m healthy enough to do all the things I want to do and not feel any restrictions on my life. So I have the courage to try new things. I know that if I can bring up three children on my own, give up sugar, and go vegan, then I can do anything!

I know there are no guarantees when it comes to health. Things can happen through no fault of our own. But I also know that eating healthy vegan food gives me the best chance of maintaining good health. And as long as I live, I want to be as healthy as I can be so I can enjoy my life.

So when I tell people my age and they say things like “Oh, you look good! You don’t look your age,” I just tell them, “Well, how is an eighty-year-old supposed to look? Maybe this is it!”