30 Days Raw (Blog)

[Savage]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

30 Days Raw

[Berix]

I am very interested to read about your experience with raw diet - so much that I finally decided to signup to this forum and leave this message.
For me, this is more interesting topic than for example - quitting my job.

[tekomino]

Talk about extreme and middle path

[Nico Kempe]

12 clementines?!
Good heavens, and I thought 4 pieces of fruit was much..

Anyway, I'm also interested in your progress, especially since to me this looks like a pretty tough diet.

I'll do a veggie diet trial next year, which is a whole change for me already..)

[urlwolf]

I've tried a raw food diet for about 6 month before.
It was very different, including raw fish/ fresh cheese.

I'm very interested in a raw diet daily log/recipes, and honest evaluation.

Thanks

[Klamachpin]

I too am interested in a daily food log / recipes, but I would rather it not hijack the blog. I can certainly see a mid-term (2 weeks) and summary (4 weeks) update on the blog, but anything more than that may seem a bit much. Perhaps a specific thread for the food log / recipes here on the forums?

[klokkasju]

I am very eager to read about your experiences during your 30 days trial.

One particular point i'm interested in, is the amount of time (for buying all the food) and money you'll have to afford. And if it is manageable to eat without salt for 30 days. I thought the body needs some salt. I'm not talking about the oversalted supermarked stuff, but without any salt?!? .. I'm curious.

[Akashic_Librarian]

mmmmm verrrrrrrrrrry interestiiiiiingggggggg Mr. booondd - err - Paaavlinnaaa yeessss....

I would love to know LOADS about the Raw Diet, it would kill my parents if i told them I wanted to go raw, they would kick me out, but still its interesting to know about, Imight be able to slip it in somehow, and I am also interested in a diet log, probably every three days would be OK for me.

[tomjen]

Well another of your attemps would be fun to read about, but there is hardly any reason to make a blog post every day. How about weekly summaries?

Second is this the most extreem diet there is? Otherwiese why not just attempt to do something even more bold?

[Tobias Zimpel]

Hi Steve,

I am highly interested in your experiences, but I'd rather not let it hijack your blog. How about weekly reports, and some additional information on how an all-raw diet could work?

Steve, you wrote about bad combinations of different foods.

What I know (or believe in, for that mater...) is that fruits should be eaten on an empty stomach, and that high-carb foods should not be combined with high-protein foods. Anything important to add?

[Akashic_Librarian]

Tomjen, maybe Steve isn't so bothered about being radical, and more about finding something healthy...?

[ArthurHung]

As a vegetarian who is strongly considering going vegan, I think reading about your raw experiment could benefit me as well as other people trying to make that difficult transition in an indirect way.

Even the readers who aren't currently interested in improving their diet could learn about self-discipline, which will definitely be required in high form to maintain this diet, with all the trials and errors that go along with it.

[Rose of Cairo]

Hey Steve,

I think you think way too much about all these theories. You don't need to count calories or whatnot. Just listen to your body, it knows everything much better than any scientific study.

Besides, Galina Shatalova, a russian physician who was in charge of the astronauts training, did some experiments about protein and concluded that the human body is able to produce protein itself out of nitrate. Which means, breathing. Don't know if it's true, but it's an interesting hypothesis, isn't it?

I've tried raw a few times in the past, eating only fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and always felt absolutely great. I went back to cooked food for stupid habit and convenience reasons, but I know that's the way I want to go. I planned to return to such a diet some day in 2008. So if you do it now, I'm with you on this one!

[MrsCogan]

We can't compare ourselves to modern apes when it comes to diet. Modern apes are as highly evolved as we are and are on a completely different branch of the family tree. To see what's natural for our species you have to look at our immediate ancestors. Homo erectus was using fire from 500,000 years ago to 1.8 million years ago depending on how strong you want your evidence.

Evolution is a messy, gradual process so it's tough to say exactly when our own species evolved, but it was about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. Our ancestors had been cooking their food for at least 350,000 years before the first modern human saw the light of day and possibly a million and a half years before we turned up. That's a lot of evolution.

We evolved with fire and therefore cooking. Eating cooked food has several obvious evolutionary advantages. Fire kills pathogens. It makes some foods easier to digest and other foods cannot be eaten at all without breaking them down with heat. It widens food choices which is vital for health and well-being. Many seeds--dried beans, wheat, barley, etc.--are inedible raw but become available as food if you can boil them in water. Steve mentioned potatoes. Not only are they mildly poisonous raw, but they are nasty tasting. There are a lot of very healthy nutritious foods that are nasty raw but wonderful cooked.

We do have remote ancestors who were entirely vegan and ate only raw food, but they had enormous teeth and powerful jaws to deal with the tough stuff. Their gut was almost certainly a lot different from ours. Our teeth are a lot smaller and unspecialized which means they are meant for an omnivore.

I think that avoiding refined sugar and processed food is vital to our health. I think vegetarianism is fine--I was a vegetarian for about 15 years. I don't see the point of veganism, but it can be equally healthy with a little thought and care. I think an exclusively raw food diet is going too far. The potential risks far outweigh potential benefits. And, again, I don't see the point.

[MasterD]

Jo Steve,
Certainly interested in how the diet will work for you!
One of the beliefs I have at this moment is that too much fruit is not good for you because of the acidifying effect the sugar in the fruit may have on the body (pH miracle Robert Young / Tony Robbins Living Health).
I used to eat a LOT of fruit and cutting it out actually made me feel better, but that may have something to do with other changes I made too.
Keep us posted; looking forward to reading about the results you will get with it!
Dirk

[Savage]

Originally Posted by klokkasju

I am very eager to read about your experiences during your 30 days trial.

There's a Costco very close to my house that sells fruits and veggies in bulk, much of it organic. This makes large quantities of fruit very affordable. What I can't get at Costco, I buy at Whole Foods. Bananas will probably be my most-eaten fruit, which are one of the cheapest (well below $1 per pound for organic).

One particular point i'm interested in, is the amount of time (for buying all the food) and money you'll have to afford. And if it is manageable to eat without salt for 30 days. I thought the body needs some salt. I'm not talking about the oversalted supermarked stuff, but without any salt?!? .. I'm curious.

The human body has no need for added salt in the diet. You can get all the sodium your body needs from veggies. Celery is a great source of it. The idea potassium-sodium ratio is supposedly 40:1, and most people are way too high on the sodium side. My diet has often been too high in sodium, so no salt will be a big change for me.

Animals don't salt their food, and human beings don't need to either if they just eat enough calories.

[Savage]

Originally Posted by Tobias Zimpel

What I know (or believe in, for that mater...) is that fruits should be eaten on an empty stomach, and that high-carb foods should not be combined with high-protein foods. Anything important to add?

Yes, there are even food combining tips for fruit, like acid fruits before sweet fruits, melons before berries, berries before bananas. Generally you want to eat the lighter foods first like watermelon and cataloupe and the heavier fruits like bananas last.

The ideal way to eat for optimal digestion is to consume mono-meals, meaning meals consisting of a single food. So 7-8 bananas would be breakfast, for instance. But that gets pretty boring, so there are tips for food combining to minimize the energy needed by digestion.

The less energy you spend on digestion, the more energetic you feel.

[laur_454]

I'd love to read about the trial all throughout the 30 days, as this is something I've been considering myself. Good luck, Steve!

[tstesen]

I'm very interested in hearing about your experience with going raw throughout January.

Tanya

[Savage]

Originally Posted by MasterD

Jo Steve,
Certainly interested in how the diet will work for you!
One of the beliefs I have at this moment is that too much fruit is not good for you because of the acidifying effect the sugar in the fruit may have on the body (pH miracle Robert Young / Tony Robbins Living Health).
I used to eat a LOT of fruit and cutting it out actually made me feel better, but that may have something to do with other changes I made too.
Keep us posted; looking forward to reading about the results you will get with it!
Dirk

I used to be a big Dr. Young fan myself, and I attended a lecture of his a few years ago, but in reading some other reports, I have more doubts about his theories now. I think a lot of what he writes is true, but there are some problems with his recommended solution that I feel others like Dr. Graham do a better job of resolving.

Dr. Young and Tony Robbins push a lot of very expensive supplements with a ridiculous mark-up. These are manufactured products you wouldn't find in those same forms in nature. To me that's a big red flag, since they're claiming that we need to buy their engineered "nutrition in a bottle" to achieve optimal health. My intuition flashes a big danger sign at that. The message just isn't congruent.

Fruit is extremely alkalizing. However, the main issue is to eliminate the acid-forming foods. That's one of the reasons I want to do this test. I have pH strips that I can use to test my own pH levels to see what changes, although the results won't be very precise.

Eating a lot of fruit on a diet filled with acid-forming foods won't produce optimal results. If you add fruit to a bad mix, you may have an even worse mix. Many people who've had problems with fruit report feeling great when they eat virtually nothing but fruit. I've also noticed that the more fruit I eat, the better I feel. But if I eat a bunch of watermelon for dessert on top of a high-fat meal, I won't feel good at all.

[Stormhierta]

Hiya!

Interested enough in more information about the RAW diet to sign up on the forums (like some before me).

My suggested "spread" would be 3 updates the first week, covering the first 7 days, 2 updates on the second week and then one weekly with a final summation. I think this would cover the biggest "changes" and the most intense emotional period for such a dietary change - the things which would interest me (and alot of others I think), the most.

[bart]

I deleted my first reply to this post, since I do not think it was appropriate.

I am very interested too on how you proceed. I am still on a non vegetarian diet due to medical factors (and the difficulty to sort out a right vegetarian diet within the limits of what I can eat). Still I plan to make a few more gradual changes and see how it goes, probably slowly moving to vegetarian first in a cautious way, possibly move on to the next stage.

The raw diet you describe would be lethal to me, I would not survive it without extra medication, but it does sound very interesting ! Keep us posted !

[Tobias Zimpel]

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

Yes, there are even food combining tips for fruit, like acid fruits before sweet fruits, melons before berries, berries before bananas. Generally you want to eat the lighter foods first like watermelon and cataloupe and the heavier fruits like bananas last.

That's quite insightful. Any online sources on that topic that you would recommend?

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

The ideal way to eat for optimal digestion is to consume mono-meals, meaning meals consisting of a single food. So 7-8 bananas would be breakfast, for instance. But that gets pretty boring

I don't worry about that. I still believe I have some form of asperger's, so even eating the same foods every day wouldn't be all that bad for me - variety is a lot harder in my case.

However, I recognize that variety might be an issue to neurotypical people.

Steve, apart from variety for variety's sake, how necessary is it for health's sake to vary different fruits, veggies etc, i.e. would it be OK in terms of long-term health to eat only a handful of different foods, like apples, tangerines, grapes, walnuts, red and yellow pepper, kohlrabi, cucumber and green salad, to just name a few of my favourites?

I'd still be interested in how one can get a proper amount of calories (as long as burning food in a glass tube is a good measure for their nutritious value) without spending half the day on eating through a whole fruit store. Because when I tried a raw food diet based on the above list, I felt great, but I could spend the whole day constantly eating.

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

The less energy you spend on digestion, the more energetic you feel.

That's a given to me, and the first thing I recognize is a huge increase in energy and motivation when I eat lots of fruits.

Originally Posted by Steve Pavlina

The human body has no need for added salt in the diet. You can get all the sodium your body needs from veggies.
...
Animals don't salt their food, and human beings don't need to either if they just eat enough calories.

I've read about some no-salt raw foodists here in Germany who after some years added sea salt to their diet again, because they recognized that their bodies were craving for salt. So they ate it pure whenever they felt like their body needed it, and only as much to stop he craving. When you eat pure salt and your body needs it, it tastes delicious. As soon as your body has enough, it tastes just ugly. So this is a good measure of when you have enough.

[Savage]

Originally Posted by bart

The raw diet you describe would be lethal to me, I would not survive it without extra medication, but it does sound very interesting ! Keep us posted !

That's an assumption you have to be careful with. If your physiology is already messed up, then adding healthier foods to your diet can create adverse effects because the body will either not be in a condition to assimilate it properly, or the body will try to begin returning to a more proper physiology which can produce short-term negative symptoms.

So even if fruit is very, very healthy, you have this problem to contend with:

Unhealthy diet + healthy fruit = Unhealthy diet = Unhealthy physiology

Adding fruit to an unhealthy diet is like taking medicine while still consuming poison. You may continue to get worse. The solution isn't really to take more medicine. It's to stop taking poison.

So while you may in fact have a serious problem adding fruit to your current diet, remain open to the possibility that if you ate almost nothing but fruit, your physiology may correct itself to the point where you'll be able to thrive on such a diet. This is not an uncommon experience from what I've read.

For example, if you currently consume a high-fat diet, that will certainly interfere with the digestion and assimilation of fruit sugar. So a good first step would be to progress to a low-fat diet first, which will create better conditions for eating fruit. If you're diabetic, for instance, you don't need to avoid sugar. Sugar is what fuels all the cells of your body. You will, however, benefit greatly by dropping your fat intake, which will improve your body's ability to metabolize sugar. People have cured diabetes by eating the kind of diet I'm about to test. Instead of avoiding fruit, they correct the underlying problem that prevents them from metabolizing fruit in the first place.

[Bruce Achterberg]

I'd be really interested in your experiences with this 30 day challenge, and I'd be more then happy to read about it on your blog.

I'd absolutely love to see some daily food logs, and I wouldn't mind daily updates/posts/logs at all. That said, I can understand some other people may not like that format, so perhaps weekly updates will suffice. Either way, whatever format you go with, I'd really like to see some food logs (daily would be great, but I'd take "some" over "none"). Super simple ones like what you covered in your 30 Days Raw post would be fine, but free to go into excessive amounts of detail.

PS. This is just a short post I typed up to express my interest. I have a few notes taken down with more details/specifics (aka "a Bruce post" ) -- I'll try post them if I get a chance (if I post them, I'll make sure I post it before new years so the feedback is still relevant). Watch this space! (As in, this thread.)

[Savage]

Originally Posted by Tobias Zimpel

That's quite insightful. Any online sources on that topic that you would recommend?

I read about food combining in several books/ebooks, but they aren't free as far as I know. One of the best was Frederic Patenaude's Raw Secrets -- I have the ebook version, and there's a whole chapter on food combining. I bought the ebook as part of a package of raw books. He might have some free info about food combining on his blog. He also has some free info about it in FAQ form here.

I think much of the food combining info comes from Herbert Shelton's book Food Combining Made Easy.

Food combining is basically an extra consideration if you really want to minimize how much energy it takes to digest what you eat, so you have the most energy available for your other organs, muscles, etc. If you combine foods improperly, you won't feel as energetic and alert.

[The Adventurer]

Thank you for the post Steve. It is very helpful that you describe all your experiences and research in as much depth as a blog post allows. It will be good to hear some details about how the trial progresses over the next month and its good, bad and ugly parts - perhaps in short regular logs on the food eaten and the experience, followed by one or more proper blog entries evaluating the experiment.


I have done some raw and non-raw food tests, and a low fat raw diet did feel amazing for a short time. It was very difficult to get calories on it and I had to fall back on boiled potatoes, bread, legumes, etc.

The experience from my tests indicate that my personal optimum is somewhere along the lines of the 80/10/10 diet - so I would gladly join the experiment of figuring a raw diet that can work in the long term.

One thing I found missing in the post was what the plan for things to eat is - the rules were mostly about what what was not to be eaten. However calories, fats, proteins (even if much less than most believe) and micronutrients have to come from somewhere. My first step into starting the diet would be to make a good plan about what is to be eaten and where all the essential nutrients will come from - a rich non-exclusive list of what the diet will consist of. It is good to have ready variety of answers when hunger strikes and another kilo of bananas feels like just too much. Also we are trying to switch to eating the best possible food, rather than limit ourselves from the poorer food we are currently eating (see ps)

I will take a bit of time to make the list of foods and decide on the approaches and will post them then.

Cheers


PS. On a side note - When doing a change in habits I have found that it is much more effective to thinking in terms of what you begin to do and its good effects rather than you are quitting or limiting yourself from. An example for smoking would be that you begin non-smoking instead of quitting smoking. I think that your mind in this approach is focused on the new experience and its benefits and is working on making them a habit. In the other scenario, when you focus on the old habit and trying to force-quit it, the very focusing on it is counterproductive as it activates the mental schemes related to the habit (doing it and getting something from it) which is the opposite of the final effect that you are pursuing - deactivating them.
Any habit - even the obviously self-destructive ones have benefits, otherwise they wouldn't be attractive at all. As one wouldn't give up something that has benefits, the best way I have found for dealing with this is to become aware on a deep level of the greater benefits that the habit gets in the way of. There must of course be such greater benefits, or one wouldn't feel a need to discontinue the habit in the first place.
... a ps that became longer than the rest...

[Tobias Zimpel]

Originally Posted by bart

The raw diet you describe would be lethal to me, I would not survive it without extra medication, but it does sound very interesting ! Keep us posted !

My girlfriend has to do renal dialysis due to a genetic defect, and she has to look very carefully on what she eats. Only two or three bananas would kill her in a matter of minutes, because of the potassium in there, and generally all fruits, nuts and veggies are very high in potassium, so she has to be very careful with them. Another chemical she has to avoid is phosphate, which also is very high in a lot of foods.

And with these restrictions, it is quite hard to find a diet that is healthy from a general point of view as well as from her special dietary requirements.

What is usually suggested is food that is low on fruits, veggies, whole grains, and high in meat for protein consumtion (because dialysis destroys a lot of them).

Any advise, link or something on a healthy diet for dialysis patients is highly appreciated. She certainly won't go raw, vegan or even vegetarian, but still is looking for a bit more variety in foods.

[SteveR]

Hi Steve.

What about the cost? Tons of fresh fruit sounds like tons of dollars. Do you have an estimate of what you'll spend to make this diet happen?

SteveR

[Cat Dancer]

Ooh this is exciting! I think I'll try this diet too.

Steve, where do you buy your food?