How I Learned to Reverse the Aging Process

And stations, we are now approaching two and one half minutes before the start of hour number one of the Line of Fire with Dr. Michael Brown. Two minutes from Mark. Two minutes. And stations coming up on 90 seconds until the launch of hour number one of the Line of Fire with Dr. Michael Brown, Salem Radio Network's Channel SR2. 90 seconds from Mark. 90 seconds. And stations, it's now one minute before the start of hour number one of the Line of Fire with Dr. Michael Brown. One minute from Mark. One minute. And stations now the final time check before the start of hour number one of the Line of Fire with Dr. Michael Brown. 30 seconds until hour number one from Mark. That was our final verbal time check for the Line of Fire with Dr. Michael Brown.

We'll have a long tone at 10 seconds before, followed by a short one at five seconds. Have a great afternoon, everybody. Friends, I'm celebrating 10 years of reversing the aging process.

I'll tell you how today. It's time for the Line of Fire with your host, biblical scholar and cultural commentator, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Call 866-34-TRUTH to get on the Line of Fire. And now, here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown.

This is the line of fire, Michael Brown. Thrilled to be with you. Thrilled to be alive. Thrilled to be serving God, knowing God at this critical time in world history. Thrilled to have health and vitality by the grace and goodness of God. Thrilled to be able to be a blessing to you. I so look forward to radio every single day. It never gets old. It never gets tiring.

Love being with you. It's a privilege. It's an honor.

Thanks for taking time to listen, to watch. Here's the number to call if you want to get in the conversation today. 866-34-TRUTH.

866-34-87884. I do want to give a very important, brief update having to do with Israel and ongoing events from the weekend up until now. I do want to do that briefly. But otherwise in the show, I want to devote time to really sharing with you some of the miracle that I've lived with these last 10 years through healthy eating. I want to encourage you that if God could help me and if he could help Nancy, both of us lifelong unhealthy eaters, Nancy, a glut, meat, all the wrong foods, if he could help us, he could help you. Now, I'm not one to answer medical questions.

I don't have knowledge there. Questions about nutrition, this food, that food. I can tell you what I do.

But Nancy would be the one to explain why and how this works scientifically, etc. But if you have a question in terms of my own lifestyle, or how to get started, how to overcome things, things I've learned, and you want to talk to me about that, by all means, give me a call 866-348-7884. If you read our book, Breaking the Stronghold of Food, and we're able to put things into practice and have seen changes in your own life, wonderful. By all means, let us know.

You can give me a call 866-348-7884. It's possible if I have time, a little later in the broadcast, I'm going to play some clips, some extended clips, from an interview I did with Nancy almost seven years ago. The one time I got her on the air. It's audio only, so you'll just have to listen and picture her beautiful smiling face as she's speaking.

But, I may play some of those clips for you as well to encourage you to hear a woman's voice, her own life experience. Okay, if you're not getting our Frontline newsletter, the issue that we'll be working on for September is really going to focus on Israel, with some great testimonies of Jewish people coming to faith, and then understanding of what we're battling with spiritually and the significance of some of the things taking place there today. So, if you're not getting our Frontline newsletter, take a moment, go to thelineoffire.org, thelineoffire.org, and simply click subscribe. There you go. Put in your name, email, zip code, and we will be in touch with you.

Thelineoffire.org, click subscribe. Okay, it turns out that this past Saturday morning, so Saturday, August 24th, Saturday morning, Hezbollah was planning on launching a surprise attack against Israel. According to the sources that we have, Israel would have been bombarded by 6,000 Hezbollah rockets. Now, Iran has been promising retaliation against Israel and rattling its sword, but nothing's happened after Israel took out Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, when he was in Tehran, bringing great embarrassment to the nation and really striking a blow against Islamic radicalism. So, Iran has been threatening but nothing's happened.

Iran's even been mocked in the Muslim world, the Arab world, like where's your attack? Well, it seems right now Iran said we're going to do it through Hezbollah rather than risk an all-out war with Israel and the decimation that could cause and bring. So, Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy based in Lebanon, also working out of Syria.

In Arabic, the title means the party of God, Hezbollah, the party of God. So, they were supposed to launch a surprise attack, but Israeli intelligence, as my friend Avner Boesky in Israel pointed out when he wrote about this Saturday morning, this time Israeli intelligence working well and working together with U.S. Department of Defense found out about the surprise attack, and Israel launched a preemptive attack and basically took out those 6,000 rockets. They would have attacked the equivalent of NSA and CIA headquarters in Israel. They would have attacked Israel's only international airport, main airport. So, it would have launched a war. I mean, Israel would have had to retaliate massively and that would bring great suffering on the people of Lebanon as well because Hezbollah has entrenched itself in Lebanon. Lebanon used to be known as a great jewel of the Middle East, known for its beauty and its antiquity and its culture and it's just been so decimated because Islamic radicals have taken root there. And even the massive explosion a few years ago, do you remember that?

Did you see any of the footage on YouTube? Just devastating. A massive explosion and then a more massive one. It's one of the most unreal things I've ever seen in my life and it's understood a lot of that had to do with explosives that got restored in an unsafe way right in the heart of the city and then explosions brought so much devastation. I just read this in Jerusalem Post, according to the IDF, because Hezbollah then started lobbing hundreds of missiles and rockets into Israel, minimal damage, but that was their counterattack after Israel preemptively struck. Ninety percent of Hezbollah's rockets fired from civilian areas. Ninety percent of all rockets fired at Israel from Hezbollah have been launched from civilian areas, IDF announcement. Of course, just like Hamas, of course, they're going to bed themselves in civilian areas telling Israel, if you want to take out our rocket launchers, if you want to take out our terrorists, you're going to have to bomb civilians. This is what they do. This is against all rules of law, but of course, they're terrorists.

They don't fight by the rules of law. So remain diligent and vigilant and praying for the safety of Israel and for God's purposes for all in the Middle East and for the salvation of all Jew, Muslim, Arab, Gentile, all involved because salvation and mercy would be poured out. Okay. Saturday marked 10 years. Yes, 10 years. What a miracle. What grace.

Ten years. God graciously intervened in my life. And since then, although I was a chocoholic and ate a lot of chocolate sweets every day, haven't had chocolate sweets for 10 years.

It's glorious. I was a pizza-holic. I could have literally eaten pizza, two meals a day for my entire life and never tired of it. If I had pizza and chocolate and that's all I could eat, I would have been absolutely thrilled. Haven't had a slice of pizza, cheese, pizza drenched in 10 years. I've had some healthy substitutes that we've made and things without cheese or either just with a red sauce on Ezekiel bread, that kind of thing, and a red sauce with low sodium and low sugar tastes great to me or with a fake cheese we've used in things that has the cheese taste, but none of that.

Not a French fry or anything fried. I don't miss it. There's no craving.

There's no feeling of being deprived. I am alive. Here, this weekend. So Friday night after radio flew into Tampa and then drove from there to a hotel. Brandon then got up early to speak twice Saturday morning and do a lunchtime Q&A together with Joe Dallas and an apologetic seminar. Then Sunday morning had to get up really early, preach three services, the first service being eight in the morning, preach the three services and then hung out with some of the leaders and workers over lunch to the airport home, hang out with Nancy and get to some writing, then chill, get up today, come to the office, recorded five 30-minute broadcasts.

We also have a 30-minute broadcast that we launched on a couple hundred stations plus around the country for those that can't carry our live show, just an equipping teaching show. Now doing this live radio, then after this recording an interview with Jonathan Cahn for his new book coming out, and then home to hang out with Nancy, have a productive night, work out right. I'm thriving.

As I approach 70, friends, this is my mentality. I kid you not. I kid you not. And this is, please hear me, all to the glory of God who helped to intervene, who changed me, who graciously reached down and changed me, who had mercy on me, because I was a food wimp. And people say, well, Mike Brown, you're so disciplined. In many ways, I am disciplined. But if I was so disciplined, why did it take me 59 years to get things right?

And for some decades during that, I felt bad. I shouldn't be overweight. That's not a good witness. It's not healthy.

I shouldn't be addicted to food. And I still didn't get free. So everything I say, my only boast, my only boast is in the Lord.

I hope that's loud, excuse me, and clear for all of you to hear and understand. But 10 years ago, 10 years ago, the breakthrough came. And now as I approach 70, this is my consciousness. This is literally how I feel.

I'm not boasting of tomorrow. I turn 70, what, six months from now, five months from now, in March of 2025. I feel like I've got to get in the best shape I could possibly be in spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally, because I'm just getting to the starting line.

That's how I feel. I can't wait to, I feel like the greatest breakthroughs, the greatest blessing, the greatest fruitfulness, the greatest opportunities to glorify God, the greatest harvest, it's all yet ahead. And I want to be able to run my, I don't want to slow down. I don't want to run wiser and better than ever, but I don't want to slow down.

I want to be able to run with full energy and zeal. So I'm in the back room before going out to speak at the church in Brandon, Florida, near Tampa, on Sunday. And it was the last service of three. The first one started at eight in the morning. I'm a late night person. I can go to sleep three or four in the morning if I'm on a roll of writing. So I've got to really change my schedule and readjust my body clock to make sure I go to sleep early enough and I've got to get up early and speak. And because I need sleep like anybody else.

So it was before the last service, the former youth pastor was in there now with another pastor of the church. I said, hey, but why don't we do some jumping jacks before I go out and speak? Because you know, he works out regularly. I said, why don't we hit some jumping jacks?

So literally right before I go out and speak, we do a hundred jumping jacks. And he, he'd never done a hundred straight. So he said a really fast pace. I thought, okay, I'll go with you.

And he made it, he made it to the end and, and you know, we're talking, joking through it and a hundred, just get up from there and preach. And the energy, the vitality, it's, it's real friends. It can happen. You can get off so many medications. You can see healing come to parts of your body.

You can be changed. If we cooperate with God, this is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It's made to glorify him. And if we cooperate with him and put the healthy good things that he put in this earth, if we put them in our bodies, it's like, it feels like a miracle. I'm living proof. I'm living proof. I'm going to give you specifics, details, facts, information, how to live, and then hopefully play some clips from Nancy as well that will bless and edify you.

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Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks so much for joining us on the Line of Fire. 866-34-TRUTH if you have a question or comment regarding this radical lifestyle change. Again, I'm not the nutritionist. Nancy can answer those questions.

She's not here to answer, but I'm just telling you, she's the one to answer. If you want to join in a group on Facebook where you can get answers to questions or interact with other folks who are struggling or who are making progress, it's WE'RE breaking the stronghold of food. Make sure you have WE'RE. WE'RE breaking the stronghold of food on Facebook so you have to request to be in and then you'll get allowed in. WE'RE breaking the stronghold of food.

If you want to have folks around here to encourage you, post a prayer request, say, hey, I'm trying to make a change and I'm struggling. And yes, yes, right before the show today, I had my daily TriVita drink, the nitric oxide and myo health together, just having one bottle of water and drink it. That's part of my daily health supplement.

I take a few of the NoPalea product supplements every single day. I found it to be a great help. Many others have as well, which is why they're such a big company. They've helped millions of people. So by all means, check those out.

By all means, check those out. But they are no substitute for healthy eating. So here's what happened. I was as high as 275 pounds.

That's the highest I'd ever gotten in my life. And I remember thinking, okay, what next? I've got different sets of clothes, right, probably going down 30, 40 pounds, maybe even a little bit more than that 50 pounds. And so if, if I lost weight, I could wear the other clothes and, and then maybe vary between 20 to 30 pounds over the years.

But now it's just getting high. Okay, I'm not getting I'm not getting bigger clothes. Yeah, you get the I mean, look, I used to get the jeans, and they were stretch jeans.

And it was like a 44 stretch waist is probably 48, certainly 46, maybe 48. Now I'm 34. But I, you know, what matters, it was just try to make yourself feel better, right?

So I do that. I thought, okay, where's this going? Where's this end? I said, I'm not going to get bigger clothes.

It has to stop, something has to change. And the biggest thing I became conscious of was always getting tired. I have a very rigorous schedule.

If you come with me, for example, on a trip to India, at the end of a couple days of travel, we get off the plane, and sometimes go straight from there to preach with a 10 and a half hour difference in time zones, literally off the plane, go preach. I have a very intense schedule. And I was starting to get tired. And I sat Nancy down. And I said, I don't know that I can keep up the schedule, which really got her attention because she never heard me talk like that.

I was always enthused about the next thing and the next step. And I didn't realize it was diet related, but I had about three headaches a week. I had high blood pressure.

The highest we ever monitored it at home was 149 over 103. And high blood pressure is called the silent killer. And subsequently, years later, I found out that I had a lot of hardening in the biggest artery. And I found out I have an aneurysm in my iliac artery. It just could burst.

This is due to bad eating and high blood pressure and things. It could just burst one day. And you're gone. You didn't even know it was there. It's there.

And you're gone. And I had constant lower back pain. A chiropractor told me if I lost 30 pounds, the back pain would go away. I had sleep apnea. And doctors had told me there was nothing that could be done about it.

So I had to use a breathing machine, traveled with that around the world. My cholesterol was high. And Nancy really got a burden of pressure. She really prayed.

She really cried out. And she also cried out that God would help her give her creative ways to get me to eat healthy things because she knew I just didn't like new foods. And I was accustomed to the unhealthy foods. So the healthy didn't appeal to me. And I wouldn't taste them or try new things. And I'm on the road constantly. I was about to go overseas to Hungary, to Singapore, to India, to Malaysia, plus all over the States. How in the world am I going to start eating healthily doing that? These are all the obstacles.

And just my bad addictive habits. But finally and I was praying. She was praying more earnestly, though. Finally, August 23rd of 2024, I sat her down and I said to her, my plan is not working. My plan is not working. And she knew what that meant.

That was code. Meaning, okay, I have to make a radical change. Now, she had radically adjusted her own lifestyle. She used to be a binge dieter. She gained a lot of weight, lose a lot of weight, yo-yo dieting.

I guess it's called yo-yo dieting, binge yo-yo dieting, but back and forth. And then she'd lose a lot of weight. Her hair would start to fall out.

She'd panic. You know, a woman wants to have her hair clumps of hair, so she'd start to eat unhealthy again, put the weight back on, and back and forth, back and forth. And she read Joel Fuhrman's book, Eat to Live, and now the end of dieting. And she started to live like that, changed her life dramatically. So she said to me, no food passes your lips without my approval.

That's what she said. I'm going to take control of your diet. That was frightful to hear, but by God's grace, next day went cold turkey, went through three miserable days of withdrawal, and then that broke, and then it was a matter of renewing my mind. I had to understand, you see, food, food was my reward. Some people eat discomfort food. They eat when they're afraid. They eat when they're nervous. Nancy said she just loved to eat, so it was eating as a glutton. For me, food was my reward. So not only was I addicted to the unhealthy foods, but it's my built-in life reward. Come on. Yeah, I get to eat this, eat this.

You know, I travel over this country. Of course, I can eat what I want at the airport, on the plane. I can eat.

I'm writing all night. Of course, I can eat, you know, as I'm writing and munching all night. Food was my reward built into everything in life.

I had to reprogram my mind so that food became the fuel for a healthy life, and a healthy life was a reward. So here I am, about to turn 70, on no meds, no medication of any kind, same with Nancy, and tiniest, tiniest drop, tiny, I mean, barely perceptible of arthritic pain in some fingers. I mean, it's barely there. Otherwise, I can tell you, pain-free.

So I didn't want to be dishonest. Otherwise, totally pain-free. Lower back pain, that went. When I lost the weight, it hasn't come back in 10 years. Sleep apnea, I don't need the breathing machine anymore. The sleep doctor that I talked to said that I was only the third one out of 5,000 or so patients he had that had graduated from the breathing machine. And he said, half of those people, if they lost 100 pounds, they wouldn't need the machine anymore.

That's basically what I lost. I went from 275 pounds, I hit 176, so basically lost 100 pounds in less than 8 months without dying. He said, what do you weigh today? Today was about 179, so I'm in the high 170s, I would say, somewhere around there.

I've been as low again as 176, so the weight's still off, because by God's grace, no deviation. How about this? I used to have three headaches a week. How about no headaches in 10 years? Uh-huh. How about that?

Think of that, friends. This is why I'm so full of joy and vitality in life, because of this divine energy of healthy life. That's why it's really reversing the aging process.

Okay. What about blood pressure? It went from as high as 149 over 103 down to, oh, about 100 over 65 on average. And then cholesterol, I got the numbers here for you. I got the numbers here for you. Let's see. All right, so cholesterol went from 243 down to, my last blood test, 129.

How's that? Triglycerides, which was supposed to be under 150, they went from 129, my last blood test, 63. LDL, the bad cholesterol, supposed to be under 100, it was 174. Now it's 60, my last blood test. HDL, the good cholesterol, it's supposed to be over at 60, it was 35.

Last one was, let's see, 74. And there are parts of my body functioning according to blood tests like a man in his 20s. I've reversed the aging process.

You see, Nancy, you wouldn't believe it. Healthy eating, friends, it's not a miracle in that it's just, it's the way God set it up. We were changed, you can be changed. The book that we wrote about it is called Breaking the Stronghold of Food.

Breaking the Stronghold of Food. It'll tell you our story. We'll be right back.

Hey friends, Michael Brown here. My delight to serve as your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. We are living in such urgent times today, friends, that all of us are in the line of fire.

There's a target on your back, there's a target on my back. If you simply seek to live by biblical values or just conservative moral values, you could be canceled, you could be cast out, you could be put down, you could be silenced. I'm here to say, friends, that I am not about to be silenced, and I don't believe you are either. It is time for us to stand up, it is time for us to say enough is enough, it is time for us to push back in Jesus' name.

Not fighting the way the world fights, no. Overcoming evil with good, overcoming hatred with love, overcoming the flesh with the power of the Spirit, overcoming lies with truth, and that's what we're here to do on the Line of Fire broadcast. And friends, it's not just a broadcast, it is a movement of people around the world.

God's people standing up saying, enough is enough, and saying, Lord, here we are, send us, use us. I want to urge you today to join our support team, because we are on the front lines together, and we are literally touching people around the world, in America, in the nations, in Israel, and together with your help, we're going to amplify this voice and spread this movement around the globe. So I encourage you, go right now to thelineoffire.org, thelineoffire.org, click donate, monthly support. Thelineoffire.org, click donate, monthly support. When you do, you become a Torchbearer, we immediately send you two great, life-changing books, we immediately give you access to many classes I've taught, others have to pay to take those, you get them for free.

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Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Welcome to The Line of Fire. Thanks so much for joining us, 866-34-TRUTH. Hey, by the way, just a reminder for those who call into the broadcast, if you do get on the show, we ask you not to call for three weeks to give space to others, and so we're not having the conversation with the same person each day, so folks sometimes not aware with it, and our call screeners have to tell you that if you call and don't get on, you can keep calling until you get on.

One day I may not take many calls, we may not be able to get to every caller, but if you'd like to discuss today's topic with me, 866-34-87884. Tell you what, let's go into this interview that I did with Nancy about seven years ago, because it's just important you hear from a woman. As my two editors with our book publisher, we put out Breaking the Stronghold of Food, as they remarked to me, women gain weight differently than men. They said, we just look at a piece of cake and we put weight on, and we need to hear from your wives. That's why Nancy and I wrote the book together, Breaking the Stronghold of Food. Again, our Facebook group is We're Breaking the Stronghold of Food. There's one also with the book title, Breaking the Stronghold of Food, but that's not interactive, we don't use that, haven't used it for years. We're Breaking the Stronghold of Food.

It's the Facebook group if you want to get some encouragement or ask some questions relative to diet, lifestyle, health, et cetera. I'm not going to be able to play the full interview for you, but let's go back into this interview. This will be a segment over nine minutes long, Nancy and I discussing this about seven years ago. In the first segment, we were talking about, you were getting more and more concerned about my health, a lifetime unhealthy eater, not so much a glutton, but just unhealthy eater. You tell me I was snacking all the time as I'd sit and write all night. I say, but look, I'm doing these great workouts and I must be in good shape. You say, you're going to kill yourself with these crazy workouts. Your blood pressure is high, but it didn't paralyze me. Being overweight didn't paralyze me. I was still active, but when you got overweight, it had a paralyzing effect. Did you try to diet over the years and lose weight? I know you hated being overweight.

Right. I definitely hated being overweight and I tried many times to lose weight, which I was able to. There was no problem. I believe most of us can lose weight. We don't have metabolic problems. It's a matter of we lose the weight and then we gain it back or we just can't stick to a diet and so we just give up halfway through. That was my problem. I was able to lose weight, but eventually I would gain it all back. Being overweight was totally paralyzing for me. Everybody's different. Mike wasn't like me. He has a very public life.

He could go out as a fat person and minister. I know it bothered him a little bit, but it was nothing like it was with me. I was totally ashamed of the way I looked. I didn't want to leave the house. It really permeated every part of my life, every part.

When I was undisciplined in my eating, I was undisciplined in my spiritual life, in my house cleaning. Everything went by the wayside because it had such a profound effect on me holistically. The fact that I loved you, that I told you you were beautiful and special, that didn't do it.

No. That was very nice that you told me I was beautiful. One look in the mirror would tell me that you were...

I know you meant it, but I could see myself. You were paralyzed. You didn't want to go out of the house. You were ashamed of being overweight. How did you feel all the time when you were overweight? Physically, I started to feel very sick. I can't really put my finger on it, but my body ached from head to toe. I felt that there was something seriously wrong with me.

I was starting to get scared for my health. I wasn't just overeating. I would eat whatever I wanted. If I wanted a half a stick of butter on a big plate of noodles, I would not hold back.

I put that half a stick of butter in. If I wanted donuts, I'd have as many donuts as I wanted. If I wanted ice cream, I could eat as much as I wanted. I would eat and eat and eat until I was so full that I felt physically not sick, but in pain from eating so much. Did you eat for emotional reasons? Some people eat for comfort or for other things.

For me, it wasn't really for emotional reasons. I'd eat if I was happy and celebrating. I'd eat if I was sad or frustrated. I'd eat if I was...

It didn't matter what the reason was. I'd eat all the time. Would you say that biblically defined or the way we'd understand the word that you were a glutton? Absolutely a glutton.

No doubt about it. I think maybe it's a little different than some people because I would just eat and eat and eat. I know there are some that would eat the way I would, but it's a little unusual. I remember we'd go out for dinner together. We'd eat out a lot, especially the kids being out of the house and me running all around and stuff. We'd eat out a lot. I remember you'd start to have some rolls of biscuits at the beginning and maybe a little salad or an appetizer. You'd start to get full. I'd say, Han, if you eat too much now, you'd be full at the beginning, but then somehow you'd finish the meal and then have dessert on top of it. I always wondered, you're a little person. Where'd you put all that?

I don't know. The thing is I loved the taste of food. I absolutely loved it, but I would eat beyond my satisfaction.

In other words, a few truffle balls are good, but when you get to almost the end of the whole package of them, they don't taste so good anymore. There was something in me that drove me to keep eating. I remember the times when you lost a lot of weight, maybe like 50, 60 pounds, but then you had to stop because your health was breaking down. It wasn't just the yo-yo dieting, as it's called, of lose the weight and gain it, and then you gain even more.

I think fat cells increase. It's actually harder to keep taking it off, but your health would break down. Even you go totally vegan or something, you realize something was missing.

How did you stumble upon the new lifestyle that we follow now? Just to say that my health broke down. I would go on severe diets, seemingly healthy with lots of vegetables, and my hair would start falling out. I was afraid that I'd end up being a fat, bald woman. That was my fear.

I remember when the hair would start coming out in clumps, and we were terrified of it. That put a fear in me to even start any diet at all. I was afraid to start again.

That's hanging over your head now. You're fat, you're paralyzed by it, you feel miserable, and you don't know a way out. I don't know a way out. I didn't want to start a whole dieting routine. It was just like I'd done it before, and it just never worked.

I would gain it all back. I just didn't have the incentive to just start a diet. What about just eat a little bit less here, a little bit less there?

That doesn't work for me. There is no such thing as moderation in my life. That's the kind of person I am. I'm a bit extreme, so I couldn't just have one bite of a piece of cake or one piece of chocolate or one taste of a little lasagna or something like that. There is no such thing as one bite, one taste. It is one bite of those highly palatable, salty, fatty foods, sugary foods, just creates some kind of, the switch goes on, and it creates an incredible desire for more and more and more. I don't feel that way with peaches or broccoli. I will not want to sit... People don't have a fruit tooth, do they? Well, I mean, you can, but it's self-limiting.

How many cups of broccoli are you really going to want to eat? It doesn't bring about that intense desire as a lit truffle ball. You're not going to have a lust for food when it's healthy. It's very difficult to have a lust for food when it's healthy.

You got to a place a few years ago where you knew you had to do something, but you didn't know what to do. I remember you do these radical diets, and your weight loss would just stall. You'd stop losing weight. It's like you're hardly even eating anything, and then the hair would start to fall off. It was kind of a vicious cycle.

Then you're looking online. What did you discover? Well, I was so scared for my health. That was the thing that got me.

It wasn't just being fat and not wanting to leave the house and not wanting to have a social life and just feeling like a total misfit, but I knew I had to do something for my health. I searched online and stumbled across Dr. Fuhrman's website. I started reading everything, and I thought, oh, just another gimmick, another diet, but I read more and more, and I was so impressed with his knowledge. He's an actual doctor. He has a practice and impressed with the fact that through the years, he admittedly would change certain recommendations he had based on the newest scientific evidence. So that really impressed me that he was willing to say, you know what, I'm not quite sure what happened there. Anyway, there is our old music in the show.

I thought the clip ran just a little bit longer, but we'll give you a little bit more from Nancy before the show is out, and I wanted you to hear from her own mouth, her own words. So people said to me, what does your diet look like? So here's what I had.

We'll make today an average day, okay? So in the morning, I have some overnight oats. They taste like brownies to me, but they're super healthy.

One of Joel Fuhrman's daughters puts this out, overnight oats. So I have that. It's not a large quantity. It's about 250 calories. So I have that, and then some fruit. So I had an apple, and then one Brazil nut. I have one Brazil nut a day, just as something healthy Nancy told me is good to eat. So I had that, and then, all right, so that was basically for morning, and then just a little bit of some super healthy granola.

Again, it's actually a Dr. Fuhrman product, so just everything in it is healthy and good. So dinner tonight, that'll be a massive salad, my daily massive salad. You say, how massive? Well, I take a four quart bowl, and I fill it. So I will put in it, say, organic romaine or baby mix, something like that, baby spring mix, and that'll be like five and a quarter ounces. Put that in, cut that up so it's smaller. Then what will be, be like a small handful of organic raw sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds. So total of a small handful of that.

It's just like a little measuring cup. I throw that in, and then a heaping tablespoon of flax seed, and then maybe about four walnuts, just kind of crushed up, thrown in the salad. Then I'll have some cruciferous.

So this is a mixture Nancy will make of cabbage and broccoli and kale and other things like that mixed in together. That's super healthy. And then some sprouts. There are broccoli sprouts and other things that are super healthy. Have that, and then like a whole cucumber, organic, a whole red or green or yellow pepper, a ton of onions and a ton of tomatoes, and then a healthy dressing. And it'll take me between 30 and 45 minutes to eat it. And it's wonderfully satisfying. And everything going in produces health and life and vitality.

It's just amazing. And then for dinner tonight, I'll probably have, so later, like mid-evening, I'll have some organic pastas, like some, what is it, like a bunch of beans made into pasta. I'll have that and some healthy sauce, and that'll be it.

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These statements are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on the line of fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. All right, here's what we are going to do. Michael Brown here, so blessed to have this time together with you. I want to get you one last segment from Nancy where we continue this discussion.

So for all the ladies listening, you can hear a female perspective on this amazing transformation. Oh, when I said at night, so mid-evening, because I'll have my salad late afternoon and then mid-evening tonight, I'll have say this healthy bean pasta with a healthy red sauce with it. And then after that, we have a little more fruit and a bar. It tastes like chocolate to me.

It tastes like chocolate to me, but to you, it might taste like dates or beans or something, but it's delicious. I'll have one of those a day as well. Let's go back. We'll play clip number two, guys. We'll go back to this conversation with Nancy about seven years ago. So Hon, when you made this lifestyle change, you were following Dr. Joel Fuhrman, F-U-H-R-M-A-N, his Eat to Live philosophy, and you had read about nutrition for years and years. I mean, you knew all kinds of stuff about it. I didn't even know what the words meant. And now you're seeing change come, but you realize you got to get rid of all the stuff that you used to love eating and eat all this new stuff that you didn't like eating.

So you cook something. What happened? Well, let me just back it up and say that initially when I started changing my diet, I did not have the thought, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. I couldn't. I thought, okay, I'm going to have cheat days.

I'm going to have cheat weekend or something like that. I just could not give up everything. But I got to the point where I realized I need to toe the line a little bit more. So I was going to go wholeheartedly for everything. I went to the supermarket. I bought tons of vegetables.

There was hardly any room in my refrigerator with everything that I purchased. So I made a bunch of soups and stews, and I couldn't wait to get my mouth on that spoon to taste. You made a big, like a big...

I don't know how many quarts it was, but it was a big pot. And I took one taste of that, and I thought, this is absolutely disgusting. I cannot eat this. You almost gagged on it, didn't you?

Yes. I thought, I can't do this. I can't do this. You think I'm going to eat this the rest of my life?

Right. There's no way. I didn't start crying. I started crying once with my journey. But I was on the verge, and I thought, how am I going to do this? Because I knew there was nothing else out there that was going to help me regain health. So I didn't have the heart to throw it away. So I froze individual servings of the soup, put it in my freezer, and I thought, okay, I'll just try something else for a while and leave it in there and see what happens.

So months later, after I'd been eating healthfully for a bit, I took out the soup and defrosted it and tasted it, and it was absolutely delicious. Seriously. Seriously. How do you feel about it today? I love it.

I love it. So the thing is, I thought, I'm not one of those that can retrain my taste buds. It's just not going to work. But I was determined enough that I was going to force myself. I was going to give it my all. So I'd force myself to eat mushrooms. I'd force myself to eat foods I didn't like. And also, there's the recommendation of very, very little salt. And I was a salt-aholic. I salted everything. I mean, we're talking teaspoons and teaspoons of salt on meals. So having food with little to no salt was very, very hard for me for quite a while.

But I forced myself. I made smoothies and added I tried to hide mushrooms in them. That was my first attempt at getting mushrooms down. And you're able to make them in a smoothie. If you put in a few cooked mushrooms, maybe two small cooked mushrooms, you're able to do that. And you don't taste them. You don't feel them.

They get ground up. And so that was how I got the mushrooms down. But eventually, I actually learned to like mushrooms. And I would just eat a plate of mushrooms. Yeah, a doctor told me years ago, Mike, your taste buds, your palate will crave whatever you feed it.

And it is amazing. Like, I'll walk to the grocery store like, look at those apples. I'll look at an apple. I said, well, I can't wait to eat this.

It's stuff I never would have touched or barely touched before. Now, you started to feel the benefits pretty quickly, eating healthily. The weight started to come off steadily, regularly. What started to happen to just energy, all that? What started to happen to you? Oh, my energy totally changed.

I had zero energy and zero gumption to get out of the house. And my energy started to soar. I just felt physically better. The pain in my body started to leave. I just felt clear in my head. Life just took on a more chipper atmosphere.

It's like the sun was shining. Yeah, it was just much better. And the other thing about being in control of your eating, when I was out of control, it wasn't a happy time. I mean, I didn't like not being in control of myself.

It felt like your life was like a thunderstorm all the time. Right. So the aspect of being in control and disciplined was a real positive thing.

You left your spiritual life too. Right. All right.

We only have about three minutes, but you were doing great. But you worked it out that like, whatever, once a month or that you could have a cheat day and you're going to know exactly what you're going to eat, how much. Did that work?

For a little while it worked, but it started to get to the point where one day became two days and then two days became three days. When I whetted that appetite again for those forbidden foods, it opened up a Pandora's box and I couldn't stop it. And so there was no way to do anything like that in moderation for me. Now, there are some who can have a little taste of something now and then, and it's not bad for them. But for me and for many, many other people, having those foods just opens up the floodgates and then you become out of control. And you got involved in some online forums with others who had changed their relationship to food and were doing great. And then like, hey, I've got vacation. I'm just going off for a few days or birthday party.

I'm just going to splurge a little. And you'd read the same thing over and over about them. They would always fall a hundred times out of a hundred. It was just, you know, you learn if I'm six, I'm going to be 62. Oh, that sounds awful.

You look amazing. I'm going to be 62. And I've learned over the years that, you know, for decades after dieting, I've proven to myself that 100% of the time when I eat those foods, it drags me into overeating every single time. So as a 62 year old, I'm smart enough to know now I can't do that.

You know, we have a chapter in the book called blessed with the gift of being all in. And by God's grace, December 17, 71, I told the Lord, I'll never put a needle in my arm again. I was free from that day on.

Why would I go back to it? Well, August 24th, 2014, by God's grace, I changed my lifestyle, my relationship to food, and I haven't deviated. I live, we have a whole chapter in the book of confessions of recovering food addict. And, you know, all the time as I travel, people see me and the radical change and I lost 95 pounds. And as people sit around getting younger, they can't believe it. And they'll say to me, Dr. Brown, how often do you cheat?

You know, the guys picking me up at the airport, the pastures, I look at him, I said, how often do you cheat on your wife? And that's the way I've looked at it. That's the way you've looked at it in terms of no deviation. And the rewards are such that it's like, first we enjoy what we're eating, but what sacrifice is there to be as vibrant as we are? Do you think this book can help people make a change if they'll do what we say?

I do, but there has to be a commitment. I mean, it's not, it is not an easy road. You know that. You've experienced that.

Yeah. The fact is the same grace that God gave to Nancy and to me, He can give to you. You say, we're here today, healthier than ever, better than ever. Nancy and I are both 69.

And, and really, aside from knowing that they're less years ahead than behind, right. And aside from there's going to be something with aging, I mean, your hair turning gray, mine's been gray for quite a while. Nancy's just slightly, she's a redhead, but I would just slightly, you know, I, I need to read, use glasses more, you know, reading glasses, same with Nancy, those kinds of things, but we're not experiencing the aging process.

What I mean is there's nothing that we did in our twenties that we can't do now, obviously. I was never a fast runner or a high jumper, but I could jump higher and run faster then, but you know, working out, you know, doing everything that we do, Nancy taking hikes with her, with her, with our daughter, Meg, or with grandkids. And I'll work out with my grandson, Andrew, who's an athlete. He's playing college baseball.

He's in tremendous shape. We'll work out together. It's, we, we just want to share encouragement with your friends. So it's 10, Saturday was the 10th year anniversary, the 10 year anniversary. So that's why I wanted to celebrate it with all of you. And please, I should have said this at the beginning of the broadcast.

I didn't because I normally do. The last thing I do is judge someone for being overweight because I was overweight for so much of my life and obese according to, to what stats would be for some of my life because Nancy was overweight or obese for much of her life. The last thing in either of our hearts is criticism or condemnation.

What's the matter with you? This is, this is really hard and because it's food and we have to eat. It's one thing you give up drinking alcohol, you give up drugs, you give up gambling. You don't need those things to survive, but you need food. And we're in a culture that's constantly eating unhealthy things and some of our lives revolve around it. And you may be the only one in your house trying to eat healthy and prepare foods for others. We recognize it's hard, which is why we have such compassion and why we say, cry out to God and say, God, I really need help because your life could be changed. So many sicknesses could disappear.

Your quality of life could vastly increase and the length of life could vastly increase. And you can be here for friends, for family, for God's mission, for years more. The book, Breaking the Stronghold with Food, or you can join the group on Facebook. We're Breaking the Stronghold with Food. We'd love to pray encouragement for you. The Lord is faithful. Tell Him, God, I really need your, I need help. If you really cry out and you start to take some steps, you can, just as we do.