I became vegan in 2011 after watching "Best Speech Ever" by Gary Yourofsky! Right before I went vegan I had my blood work done and my total cholesterol was high, 168. I was also getting sick like allergies twice a year. It was causing drainage accompanied with weazing and infections which was why I got my blood work done.

6 years after going vegan I had to know my bloodwork. It was down to 125! I wasn't sick that entire time. And I had only removed animals and their secretions. I did nothing else.

For that first 6 years I only knew what not to eat but really didn't know how to eat until 2017. I started studying nutrition a little and learned about a whole-food, plant based diet and how it's the healthiest.

When I realized no one needed to eat animals at all (unless they're in extreme desperate circumstances of course) I also realized it was likely hurting everyone; the slaughterhouse worker, the consumer, the health care system, zoonotic disease, on and on....
I became very intrigued by nutrition most notably. If the healthiest way to be is vegan then why kill animals at all?
So, now I have devoted my entire life to learning what I can about nutrition, advocating, and capturing other people's vegan stories for vegan linked. ❤

After a couple of years in the transition phase, in January of 2021, I committed to being 100% plant-based. I'd slip a day and pick myself up recognizing how sick whatever it was I ate made me. The time before 2021, I was mainly plant-based and it gave me a chance to learn more, especially from the luminaries who pioneered the science-backed studies confirming the benefits of living a plant-based lifestyle. I experienced more, learned more, and talked to more who were inspiring and encouraging. Today, I realize the vision I had of veganism was shaded by the veil of misunderstanding. Hearing people talk about being vegan, even in retrospect doesn't due it justice. I heard the words of compassion and feeling love. I had to experience it from a mother's perspective. I could imagine what it felt like to have your child snatched away from you. I could imagine how it might feel to be raped and impregnated, forced to have the child, and have it stolen away from you. I could imagine how a chicken who was born to lay eggs, would do so only to never see them incubate and hatch. I could imagine the pain of living years couped up in a pen and treated horrendously in horrendous conditions. It reminded me of what my ancestors felt like in the hull of a big boat after being stolen from their homes and carried for months in untenable conditions only to be sold to a human who treated them like animals. I have felt the impact of living in a smog riddled environment; concerned about growing plants because of acid rain and polluted ground water. These are still concerns and I am more than ever committed to being the example of living a healthy whole food, plant-based vegan lifestyle. At nearly 70 years old, I plan to see a few more decades healthy and prosperous as I help others to share their message and help others as well.

It was a slow and winding path starting in college and culminating shortly after the birth of my third son. I was influenced both by health issues (mine and my kids plus older relatives), bands I listened to, plus a distaste for most animal flesh and an unbearable sense of injustice, dread and despair whenever I let myself connect what was being served up to what had to happen prior. Once I decided to be fully vegan, I have never, ever looked back. I even became a plant-based Registered Dietitian!

Hello, I've been working on the website hard since April 1st 2024. So, you may see some changes. But, I've made significant progress. All the core functionality is there though. So join, make friends, post to the blog, add listings, and add events to build up your community and a vegan world! Ok, back to work. Here's a bit of my vegan journey. I need to update it but here's a start:

I went vegan after watching Gary Yourofsky's best speech in 2011. I literally did nothing more than stop eating what little animal I was eating already and just ate more of everything else I ate, including french fries. In 2017 I had my bloodwork done to save money on my insurance. My total cholesterol was 121!

I remembered having my bloodwork done about 6 years earlier; in late 2010, right before I happened to go vegan. My total cholesterol was 168 then. Six years of not eating animals, no other changes, brought my LDL and Triglycerides down that much and HDL up too. The visceral fat fast that had been progressively accumulating around my waist just like my father, and both of my grandfathers, vanished. And still now at 51 in 2024 I'm basically the same as I was when I was in my late 20's. And, I no longer get sick. Before going vegan I would usually get sick twice a year at the change of the seasons; hence the reason I had my bloodwork done in 2010.

All of this intrigued me. So, I started listening to doctors on YouTube. I also just started walking in my neighborhood for the first time. I would take these long walks and absorb so much of it that I was inspired to prepare more whole plant foods, dig deeper into nutrition, and that led into a little into science, biochemistry, anatomy, evolution, and logic, looking at how others are doing around me, how I've improved but my extended family didn't when they were in their 30's. I'm now 50 with the same body I had in my 20's and very sedentary with all this editing and not being very happy with walking in this neighborhood anymore.

I went vegan for ethical reasons in 2011. In 2017 I realized everyone can be vegan and may even be significantly healthier as a result eating a well-planned vegan diet. Understanding the potential a vegan way of eating has for human health I became obligated to do all I can to share this information, learn more, explore far, and help others along the way as much as I can. To make sure, again I had to ask, "is there any reason to eat animals?" and no one could justify it for anything other than social conformity, an infantile habituation really.

In an effort to organize my contributions and efforts, free content creation for vegan businesses and events, I started VeganLinked.com as a website directory. I didn't have the budget or help to accomplish much beyond that in the first stretch of working on the site. I took a break from developing the site after a few months into it and just left it on autopilot while I was building up the YouTube.com/VeganLinked channel.

Now the channel is approaching 100K subscribers. I’ve shot hundreds of interviews around the country on location, solo. I produced a documentary for Jane Velez-Mitchell in 2019. I bought a house an hour and an half from me in 2020 to produce videos with Dr. Garth Davis; after fixing the house up, renting it b/c I can’t afford it, putting an accessory building on the property and turning that into a studio.

Garth and I did about 5 videos before he and his family suddenly had to move back to Texas. At the same time Dr Kong approached me about the book she was working on called Vegan Voices; composed of stories from 50 different authors.

I offered to interview some of the authors from her book if she helped me with travel and coordination. And it was that first run that set motion for hundreds more interviews to come.

Right away, about 3 interviews in, I realized I needed to do a documentary. I had helped Jane with hers but that was her vision and entirely her style. I just did all the editing and helped think things through and shot some of it.

The documentary I would love to do hasn’t been done really. And it’s unfolding now through the interviews as they progress.

As time has permitted over the years I have tried to come back to the website. Each time I have spent a couple or few months dealing with the developers and ultimately brought it a step further. I worked hard on the site from 12/22 to 3/23 and really overcame some milestones (with listings & events) that were holding me back for years. This enabled me to focus on and try and take the site to a new level (with user profiles) which brought on new issues. Now in 2024 I’m getting past those user issues and implementing a forum and hopefully getting to a point of stylizing the site and actually start promoting it.

So, that’s just some of how things evolved in my vegan life; from ethics to health, to everything and everyone, to doing all I can and now this is all I do. I would love to pull off a huge documentary. But, thus far it’s just been me with really zero budget. Consequently, it may just end up being more of a compilation instead of reshooting specifically for the documentary and with a team.