Raw Food Diet Update
I’ve been eating 100% raw foods for most of the past year, and many people have been asking for any update on my raw food diet experience. Here’s some info on how I’m eating these days.
First off, I’m still 100% raw, and I absolutely love this diet. It’s hard for me to imagine ever wanting to go back to cooked food.
Today’s Menu
Here’s what I ate today (Saturday).
Breakfast
1 quart of green juice – apple, celery, cucumber, kale, dandelion greens, parsley, fennel, lime, ginger
2 tbs of fresh coconut meat
Lunch
flax crackers with fresh guacamole
1 mango
1 quart of water
I made the guacamole extra spicy this time by adding 1 habanero pepper, 2 jalapeño peppers, and some dried red chili flakes. By the time I was done eating, I was sweating. My daughter had some of this with me and kept fanning her tongue, but she seems to enjoy spicy food just like her dad. 🙂
Snack
bowl of blueberries (about 1 cup)
Dinner
large salad of mixed greens, grape tomatoes, and clover sprouts with fresh salad dressing made from orange, lemon, raw tahini, and Celtic sea salt
about 15 olives (cured in salt water, not vinegar)
1 mango
Evening
1 mug of senna herbal tea with lemon juice
Recent Changes
Lately I’ve been making some adjustments to my diet. I’ve been delighted with the results thus far, but I want to keep experimenting to see if I can optimize it even more.
First, I felt I was eating too many nuts. I especially fell in love with Brazil nuts and would eat several ounces of them each morning. I decided to cut back on the nuts for a while and favor other fat sources instead, namely avocados, olives, and coconut. I’m probably averaging about 10-12 avocados per week now. So far I don’t notice much difference as compared to getting most of my fat from nuts.
Secondly, I decided to cut back on the bananas for a while. Bananas have been a huge part of my diet for the past several months. I would buy them by the 40-lb case (about 105 bananas). That would last about a week. Most days I was getting at least 50% of my calories from bananas.
Bananas are a hybridized fruit, however, and some raw foodists say it’s good to reduce or eliminate them in the long run, partly due to their high sugar content. Others disagree and say that bananas are wonderful. I’m testing a low-banana diet for a while to see how it goes. Today I didn’t eat any bananas.
I notice that when I eat no bananas, I tend to enjoy greater variety of other fruits. I love bananas so much that sometimes it’s the only fruit I eat all day. When I favor other fruits, I get more variety.
Cooked Food vs. Raw Food
I have zero interest in cooked food. Most days the thought of eating anything cooked never occurs to me. It just doesn’t seem like something I’d want to put in my body. When I look at anything cooked — especially processed food — it feels energetically dead to me, no more appetizing than cardboard.
Raw foods have such wonderful life energy. I love eating raw not just for the wide variety of tastes and textures but also for the different “feel” of the foods I eat. For example, mango feels very light and energetic to me. An apple feels a bit lighter, more airy. An avocado feels earthy and grounded. Every meal is a unique energetic experience.
Cooked food lacks this energetic variety. It’s all 100% dead, so it has the same energetic feel as a newspaper.
It was hard to transition to eating raw, but it’s been easy to maintain. It doesn’t require any special level of discipline to keep eating 100% raw, certainly not with months of success behind me. It feels normal to me now.
My tastes buds have shifted since I started on this path. I especially love the taste of greens. It’s hard for me to go more than 24 hours without a big salad. I love the juicy tenderness and subtle taste varieties of different greens.
Psychic Boost
I am way more psychic/intuitive than I’ve ever been. Erin and I have had some fascinating experiences as a result of this. Sometimes I know the exact sentence she’s about to speak, or I can sense what another person is experiencing before they tell me. I’m really enjoying this enhanced ability.
I noticed the biggest increase in this area after my 30-day juice feast, even more than I gained from the initial transition from cooked vegan to raw. Juice feasting gave me a huge intuitive boost somehow. I don’t even need to meditate to pick up psychic impressions anymore. It’s like the connection is always on.
Raw Food Diet Book Recommendation
I recently read an awesome book about raw food nutrition called The Sunfood Diet Success System by David Wolfe. I met David briefly in Sedona last year. His book is very long and detailed (almost 500 pages), and it filled in many of the gaps for me. Many of the tweaks I’m making to my diet this year are based on recommendations from his book, which is an outstanding guide for long-term success on the raw diet. Practically every question you may have about raw food nutrition is thoroughly addressed. There are whole chapters on specific foods like avocados and olives. I especially liked the menu plans in the appendix. There are week-long sample menus for transitioning to raw, 80% raw, and 100% raw.
I don’t recommend David’s book for raw food beginners unless you’re really committed because I think the complexity would overwhelm most people. It’s too much information to assimilate unless you already have a strong background in raw nutrition.
Moving Forward
I’m optimistic about the long-term potential of raw food nutrition. It takes a lot of education and testing to adapt to it, mainly because our bodies have been clogged with toxicity from eating an unnatural diet. The longer I stick with this diet, the better it feels. I’m more awake and alert mentally and intuitively, and emotionally it’s like I’m just now discovering what being human is supposed to feel like.
The funny thing is that my social life has improved dramatically since going raw. Although some people expressed concern that this lifestyle would cramp their social lives, my experience has been the opposite. With the increase in mental and emotional clarity and the ability to read people more easily, socializing is more fun. Consequently, I intentionally spend more time interacting with people, and I enjoy it now more than ever.
Going raw was one of the best decisions I ever made.
It all boils down to eating foods directly from nature instead of consuming factory products and/or killing our food with fire. Recognize the simple truth that nature doesn’t corrupt its food to satisfy a profit motive. Natural food is grown, not manufactured. I hope that at some point in your life, you’ll choose to walk away from frankenfood and shift your diet to uncorrupted raw plant foods. Become the healthy, vibrant human being you are destined to be.