1.01 Suzie Byatt

Suzie Byatt is London-born, Melbourne-based, type-1 diabetic, an illustrator, an art teacher, a yoga teacher, plant-based, and a mother. Suzie also runs Type One Writers, a pen pal service connecting and empowering those living with type 1 diabetes through the good old fashioned method of handwritten letters.

You can find Suzie on Instagram and Facebook.

0:00:11 Suzie Byatt

When I was about ten, my parents got us a kitten called Sam. And unfortunately he had a tumor in his stomach, so he didn't have a very long life and he had to be put down. So we didn't really get much of a chance to enjoy life with him.

But while he was with us, I remember feeling like it was a feeling or an experience or like a relationship that I never had with anyone before. So that was really lovely. So I guess Sam was the first animal that I had a personal connection with. But then because the experience of it was so sad, my parents kind of didn't really want to invite another animal into our lives.

So I didn't really have much connection with animals until I back in 2012, I think, I did some farm work as part of my visa to stay in Australia, something that I had to do. And on the dairy farm that I was working on, there was a dog called Yoi who was just such a part of the family and it was my first connection with a dog. And I thought, wow, this is really cool. This dog kind of gets me and just made me feel super happy. And I hoped that a small part of him felt like I was making him happy.

So again, once I left the farm, didn't really have much interaction with animals until I met my now husband who had a toy poodle, and he is just the absolute light of my life. My husband is too, and I just can't imagine life without our dog. He is just a huge part of our family and teaches me so much every day, mostly how to live every day with such curiosity and such joy, and every time we leave the house to go for a walk, he is just so excited and I think that's such a wonderful way to live life.

0:02:40 Adam Walsh

So how was it that you first came to remove animal products from your life?

0:02:45 Suzie Byatt

Well, I had never really eaten much meat once I was old enough to kind of make my own meals, and I think before I moved to Australia back in 2011, I remember speaking to some of my colleagues who were Aussies and telling them that I really wanted to try being vegetarian when I was in Australia. And the general consensus amongst them was, ‘Oh no, it's impossible to be vegetarian in Australia, you just won't be able to.’

And so I didn't really think anything of it. I moved here and I continued eating the way that I did, still not eating much meat. But then a couple of years in and I read something about how red meat stays in your system for up to two days and the thought of this, as a visual person, I could visualize a chunk of meat staying in my body just kind of lingering there and passing very, very slowly through my system absolutely horrified me. And it was after this that I decided to become vegetarian.

And I really loved being vegetarian. I think that was a really great experience for me. As soon as I stopped eating meat, I felt like I had a lot more energy and I was just happier. But I would say I was very much vegetarian for health reasons only. I didn't really understand or have any awareness about what animals go through for humans, for human consumption. And then it wasn't until I met my now husband, who was also vegetarian at the time, that I then started to think a little bit more about animal products.

And we started watching a lot of documentaries and things about the kind of ethics behind animal consumption and under his influence we both became vegan. And although he was kind of straight into it, I was a little bit more hesitant to give up cheese. And I was quite attached to my skimmed milk, which I'd been drinking for years and years and years. And then one day I just thought, ‘No, I'm going to try soy milk’. And to be honest, I felt like it tasted the same or better than the dairy milk that I'd been drinking anyway.

So from that point onwards, I was vegan and I didn't eat any animal products and I was really happy with that. And my decision was backed by ethical reasons rather than the health reasons that had been my, I guess, main reason for becoming vegetarian.

0:05:35 Adam Walsh

Right, so has there been any benefit to your health in adopting a plant based diet?

0:05:40 Suzie Byatt

Absolutely. So last year, at the beginning of last year, in 2022, I was actually diagnosed with diabetes. I was told initially that we should assume that it was type two diabetes on account of my age, which was 35 years old at the time. And so I very quickly engaged my plant based dietitian, who is absolutely amazing, and with her help, I managed to get my blood sugar levels under control very, very quickly with a plant based whole foods diet, without insulin I might add.

And then I remember having a conversation with my GP one day. She had called me to check in on how things were going and she asked me to test my blood sugar level and I tested and it was actually 4.6, which, if you're not familiar with diabetes and blood sugar levels, is very low. If you drop below four, then that is considered having a hypo or hypoglycemic episode, and that can be really dangerous. You need to treat it immediately.

And I remember my GP saying, ‘No, people with type two diabetes don't tend to have hypos, especially without insulin. This is kind of unheard of’. And I was kind of like, ‘Well, the numbers don't lie, this is what it is.’ So from that moment, my dietitian had previously told me that it was possible to reverse type two diabetes. So from that moment, I was absolutely determined to reverse it, put it into remission, and move on with my life.

However, a couple of weeks later, I actually received the antibodies test that we had been waiting on, which actually confirmed that I had type one diabetes, which means that I am insulin dependent. So without insulin, that would have great impacts and dangers to my health so I need to have it now, every day with my food. However, even with being type one diabetic, my blood sugars are now 97% in range. And I have been told consistently by every endocrinologist that I've met along the last kind of year and a half that my control of my diabetes is impeccable and I think that this is definitely due to having a plant based or vegan diet.

One issue that I experienced last year was when I was pregnant and I was having an appointment with my Obstetrician, who, after I had told her multiple times actually, that I was vegan, she looked at me and said, ‘Being vegan is actually really unhealthy’. And this was while she was looking at all the statistics and data and facts that she had about me as a pregnant type one diabetic woman who could see that my blood sugars were in range 97% of the time, which I think is very unusual. The endocrinologists are happy with 70% in range. So 97% is pretty good, if I say so myself. I also had perfect blood pressure, I didn't have any issues with preeclampsia, had no complications during my pregnancy, and I was so upset and angry to hear someone who had no knowledge about how I eat and how I manage my blood sugar levels, how I manage my illness and how I manage my diet make a comment like that.

She also labeled me being vegan as a problem during pregnancy, which I was quite horrified to hear because it had absolutely no negative consequences or impacts on my pregnancy whatsoever.

0:09:49 Adam Walsh

So what is the value of personal connection when promoting ideas of becoming more thoughtful towards animals?

0:09:56 Suzie Byatt

As someone living with type one diabetes, I often feel quite lonely and isolated because I don't know anyone living with type one diabetes, apart from my sister, who lives on the other side of the world and also has a very different experience of managing it. So to combat this, I set up a worldwide pen pal club open to anyone living with type one diabetes. This could also include parents of kids living with type one, called Type One Writers, which is really designed to connect, support and empower people.

I think that connecting people is a really important way to share experiences, to share ideas, to share different ways of doing things, to kind of break geographical or cultural aspects, especially of living with an illness such as type one diabetes where there's a different focus wherever you are in the world, there's a different focus on the medication or how you use the medication or how you manage it.

So I think that the process of writing a letter is a very mindful, thoughtful, and reflective one, which can be a really lovely way to encourage people to, like I said, discuss ideas of how we do things. So when I write to people, I think that it's a really lovely way to kind of say, talk about my journey and say where I've come from and how my compassion for animals has helped me manage living with type one diabetes.

And I hope to be able to kind of inspire that in other people too, or even just having the conversation is valuable in itself.

0:12:01 Adam Walsh

How do you see the influence of art in helping animals?

0:12:06 Suzie Byatt

Well, I've been making art for as long as I can remember, and I think that it can be a really powerful way to, in this case, spread awareness and kind of promote compassion and highlight issues in the animal world that are not discussed specifically. A couple of years ago, I drew an image of a rabbit in a box, and all you could see was the rabbit's head and a big, long box, which had lots of kind of clasps and button type things.

And I posted this to my social media, and it did definitely start conversations about animal testing and the way that we treat animals. And I think although perhaps it was quite a provocative kind of drawing and quite different to anything that I had shared before, I was really grateful to have a space where I could open up that conversation.

And I think in my caption, I'd also kind of said, did you know that around 8 million animals are still tested on in Australia? And I had so many people say that they wouldn't have thought that a country like Australia would still be doing animal testing. So I think it was really great to have that conversation and perhaps encouraged people to kind of reflect on the products that they use, perhaps on their face when they use skincare or makeup or perhaps the products they use in their home for cleaning, to look at where they come from, if they've been tested on animals, if they use animals in any way.

I think that was a really important thing to do.

0:13:57 Adam Walsh

And personally, has your own art practice changed since you became vegan?

0:14:02 Suzie Byatt

That's a really great question. I would say that my work has always had kind of like a mindful or compassionate vibe. But since becoming vegan, I've definitely been more drawn to including animals in my drawings or my paintings or whatever I'm creating. I think animals are such special creatures that they should be kind of honored in any form through art. I think that's a really lovely way to acknowledge them.

I also teach yoga as well as creating art and I think there's a strong connection between yogic practices and yogic philosophy and veganism or kind of kindness towards animals, and one of the yogic principles is ahimsa, which you may have heard of. You might not know the meaning of it, but it is used widely across kind of various marketing campaigns and essentially what it means is nonviolence or non harm towards all living beings.

And I think from my experience teaching yoga and kind of spending some time working in the yoga industry, there's such a big disconnection between what ahimsa means, what it means to practice ahimsa, and what it means to be kind and compassionate to all beings. And I think what I want to embody as both an artist and a yoga teacher is that kind of idea that compassion starts with you and if you have an opportunity to advocate for animals in whichever profession or personal avenue that you can find yourself in, that can be a really valuable way to do that.

So I try to draw all these kind of principles compassion, mindfulness, the benefits of nature, the beauty of nature, how important the environment is, if I can combine it all into my artworks or the way that I teach yoga, or even if it's just a theme and a yoga class, I think that's a really important way to spread awareness.

And a really effective way that I found of combining these is through the creation of some mindful affirmation cards for kids that I created last year, which highlight the beauty of animals. And the purpose of them is to highlight the qualities of specific animals in the animal world and how we can relate to them as humans. And these were designed for kids. So, for example, one of them, I have a watercolor painting of a lion, and the affirmation is ‘I am brave’. One of them is a watercolor painting of a monkey, and it says, ‘I am creative’. There's a whale that says, ‘I am curious’, and so on. So just kind of linking or aligning the beautiful natural instincts of animals and tying them in with human behavior in a way that can kind of help us become more mindful and also help us to consider animals in our daily lives.

As well as teaching yoga and creating art another thing that I absolutely love doing is teaching kids art at a beautiful little art studio in Melbourne. One of the things that we do really, really often is we focus on activities which teach kids, our kids how to draw and paint animals, which they absolutely love. We get so many requests for requests for how to teach specific animals, and this gives us a really lovely space to communicate and to connect with the kids about animals.

I mostly teach primary school age kids, so when we do these activities, I think it's really clear that the kids love all animals, the things that they say, the stories that they share just have so much passion behind them and that's so lovely to see. We talk often about their personal interactions and connections with animals. And even if we're not doing an animal centered activity, most of the kids will find a way to work some kind of animal element into their artwork, which I think is so beautiful.

Most recently, we were creating a mixed media artwork of a child holding an umbrella in the rain and in that activity we had kids drawing pigs with umbrellas, we had dogs, we had cats, we had sloths, we had monkeys, we had all sorts of animals in the artwork which made it quite surreal, really. But it was so lovely to see and I really love communicating with our kids about animals.

Myself and a few of my colleagues are vegan and we often find opportunities to talk about what veganism means and the reasons why we're vegan. And I think it's really important to have those conversations. ‘We're all vegan because of ethical reasons. We love animals and therefore we don't want to eat them.’ And I think creating that space for discussion is so valuable, especially with young kids.

0:20:00 Adam Walsh

If there's one small action that you could suggest someone take for animals, what might that be?

0:20:08 Suzie Byatt

I think that a really simple thing that you could do in your everyday life is switch your dairy milk out for a plant based milk when you have your morning coffee. Ideally you would choose oat or soy milk because almond milk has negative environmental impacts. But any plant based milk that you drink other than dairy milk will be so beneficial for yourself, for the environment, and of course, the most important, for the animals.

Transcribed with Deciphr.AI