When Baltimore native Jamani Funderburk first eliminated meat from her diet, it wasn’t about animal rights or weight loss. It was simply an experiment. However, she quickly noticed physical changes, including increased energy and relief from menstrual pain.
The roughly 18-month experiment soon flourished into a vegan lifestyle, and now Funderburk’s greatest desire is that the food she eats honors God.
“In Genesis 1:29, he tells us we are supposed to consume the fruit of the earth,” she explains. “And we’ll see it also in Revelation 22:2, it says the herbs were given to us for the healing of the nations.”
Her now-husband Devin, who suffers from Crohn’s disease, was also seeking a path to healing. Together, they turned their personal journeys into a shared mission: helping others take control of their health through food and faith.
Since the Funderburks are determined to be helpful to everyone who desires a healthier lifestyle, their new e-book “A Fruitful Life: How to Transition to a Plant-Based Diet” walks readers through “how they reversed chronic illness, renewed their minds, and discovered the joy of living well — physically, emotionally, and spiritually.”
Feeling Light and Pain-Free
After changing her diet, what first caught Funderburk’s attention was that she felt lighter after meals. There was none of that heaviness that leads to mandatory naps. And after about nine months, she eliminated dairy products, which made her feel even better.
“I was about 8 when I was diagnosed with anemia, and my pediatrician put me on iron pills, which I took for over 13 years,” Funderburk says.
She also got relief from the debilitating menstrual cycles she’d experienced for most of her life. Funderburk had migraines so intense they made her vomit. At times, she’d pass out. And as a teen performer — singing and acting as Young Nala in Disney’s touring production of “The Lion King” — she often had to push through pain.
“When I would go to performances, I would literally be sick. All the time,” she says.
A Move to California
After a year on the road, she wanted to be a normal teenager — to go to prom, finish high school, and live like everyone else. Even while auditioning for national commercials and TV gigs, she had one foot in the entertainment world and the other in a more grounded reality.
After high school, she enrolled at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Los Angeles, completing a four-year program in three years with a degree in musical theater. But instead of running toward Hollywood, she started to feel God pulling her in a different direction.
“Once I got a taste of what the industry was really like and living in Hollywood,” she says, “the Lord really took the taste out of my mouth.”
The Turning Point: “What the Health”
Funderburk says what really motivated her to adopt a vegan lifestyle was watching the documentary “What the Health?”, which served as a spiritual and nutritional wake-up call.
“I said, oh, this is how our food is really being processed,” she says. “I love animals, I love nature, I love the environment, but I’m not one of those vegans that changed my diet because of animal cruelty necessarily. But when I saw that documentary, something just pulled at my heart, and I was like, this is it.”
Although shifting to veganism helped her physically — her anemia improved, her energy returned — it also revealed emotional patterns she hadn’t addressed.
After graduating from college, “I went into a phase of depression,” she says. “I was trying to figure out what was going on with me and my lack of identity, not knowing what I wanted to do in life anymore.”
She began turning to food. “If I was sad, I would eat. If I was happy, I would eat. And it didn’t matter that I was vegan, I was still using food the wrong way,” she says.
“And the Lord actually took me through a journey of healing from that, and showed me that food was to be used as a survival tool rather than a kind of comfort.”
A Fruitful Life
Funderburk says she and her husband want to show people that healthy food can be satisfying, both for the body and the soul, because God created us to live abundantly. “We can’t live abundantly if we’re sick. We can’t do all that God has called us to do if we’re unwell,” she says.
And even skeptical relatives have come around. Last Thanksgiving, the duo hosted a fully plant-based dinner.
“A lot of people were like, well, I’m going to eat before I come because I feel like I’m gonna be hungry,” she says. But after the meal, they felt full. “They were like, you know what? I feel light. I don’t feel like I have the ‘itis!”
