Oklahoma man loses more than 40 pounds by leaving meat, dairy behind

The 55-year-old Elgin man imagined gobbling down bacon-wrapped burgers, bacon a la mode and other bacon-laden dishes, while losing weight and getting his blood glucose levels under control.

“No, Randy. I didn't say bacon. Vegan. It's a vegan diet,” Steve Ryan said.

Hale had to reconsider.

Vegan — as in eating beans instead of beef, carrots instead of cheese, and whole grains instead of whole milk.

“I kept thinking, ‘No more cheeseburgers,'” said Hale, who wears a white beard and, at the time, a belly like Santa Claus.

Ryan had lost weight and eliminated his diabetes medication by following a vegan diet recommended by New York Times best-selling author Dr. Neal Barnard, after finding another diet too tough to handle. A few weeks later, the friends got to see the effects of the diet in action as the slim Ryan eased his kayak through a lake in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Oklahoma, while his buddies puffed along. Again, Ryan encouraged Hale to try the diet to try to help control his diabetes and get into shape.

Hale has worked for two decades as an environmental education specialist who gets paid to hike the trails and give medicinal and edible plants talks in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. So he didn't have a really good excuse for not staying in shape in a beautiful setting. But what he needed was motivation. After that weekend, he found that motivation in his first grandchild, Cailin.

“I was thinking, ‘When she's old enough to drive, maybe she'll be driving me to dialysis or maybe I'll be an amputee. Or maybe I could chase the kids around in my motorized scooter,” Hale said.

The 5-foot, 6-inch arthritic, diabetic man weighed 185 pounds the first day of his diet on July 28. Today, he's an energetic, nonmedicated, 140-pound feel-good guy on a mission.

If he hurts anyplace, he eats sweet potatoes with barbecue sauce and spices up almost everything with turmeric.

“Turmeric is an anti-inflammatory nuclear bomb,” Hale said.

“My dog has arthritis, and I'm thinking of trying to get sweet potatoes and turmeric in her. Maybe she'd walk better,” he said.

Hale took on a diet like that adopted by celebs like Bill Clinton, Ellen DeGeneres and Alicia Silverstone, said Neal Barnard, a nutrition researcher, author, medical doctor and former tobacco user.

Barnard gave up what he calls “contraband” because of his job before medical school of helping a pathologist with autopsies. As they clipped out the ribs and exposed the heart of a massive heart attack victim one day, they found a miserable looking, oxygen-starved heart. Throughout his body, petrified chewing gum-like substance clogged virtually every artery.