Raw Foodism
 

i am trying this thing now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_foodism

and using these 2 forums for support:

http://www.rawfoodtalk.com/index.php

http://www.rawfoodsupport.com/index.php

this diet is supposed to be really healthy but one thing is for sure - it results in dramatic weight loss.

i don't think any elite athletes follow this diet unmodified. this guy thinks he's 1337 of course:

http://www.youtube.com/user/runningraw

but with slight modifications like adding some whey protein, maybe some fish etc i think it can work very well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_lalanne

personally i am about 50% raw right now. i supplement about 200 grams of whey protein a day plus i indulge in baked potatoes :)

also if you decide to bite the bullet make sure to read my article about choosing a blender for your green smoothies:

http://www.diy-av.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=471

Does you diet include any meat, milk or sugar?.

You're probably wasting a lot of that.

Yeah, wasting money.

Not to mention unnecessarily taxing his liver. But the guy hasn't really shown much in the way of sense, so I am not surprised.

Look up 80/10/10. Its where its at.

Look up eating wholesome, homemade, and nutritious food, it's where it's at.

Miracle diets are for the desperate and needy. Just eat good food and watch your portions, it's not really hard.

no.

no sh1t.

only problem is i think we might disagree about what "good food" is.

is home made cheesecake good food ?

Another article on raw foodism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupidity

Yes.

If portioned for an accounted correctly into your daily food intake then yep, it is good food and a tasty source of your daily intake of fat. Still, I've not had cheese cake in two years (and I only ate it then, blended up into an experimental mocha shake, because my jaw was wired shut).

The raw-food diet is terrible, if not outright destructive, on your digestive system. We cook foods to help with the digestive process. The minimal nutriment loss due to cooking is still less then the loss you have by your body's inability to digest the raw foods into usable form. You experience rapid weight loss on a raw-foods diet because you are essentially starving yourself.

Thrive Diet is fairly raw and dude is a professional ironman triathlete.

i hear ya bro. i am using a 1800 watt commercial blender to give myself a head start with digesting food. i blend nuts into milk. i blend greens into something that looks like tomato juice - only green. in addition to this, as i said, i mega-dose highly bioavailable whey protein as well as some microwaved potatoes. i know if all i ate was salad i would starve to death.

i think raw food diet is superior for the following reasons:

lets say you can only extract 25% of nutrients out of greens ( this is quite a conservative number ) blended up in a blender which has 1800 watts of power and 300 miles per hour blade speed ( such as my blender ). i say this is OK because you will get a PROPORTIONALLY BALANCED FRACTION of each nutrient. that is to say you will get 25% of carbs, 25% of vitamins and 25% of minerals in it. so if you blend enough of the stuff you get everything u need ( except for calories and protein, which you should get elsewhere ).

with cooked food on the other hand - it lets you extract 100% of the calories from what you've been cooking, as well as 100% of protein and 100% of fat but at the same time many nutrients are completely destroyed. and worse than that - some NEW chemicals are created by cooking that don't naturally exist and the body isn't evolved to deal with.

my claim is that losing 75% of nutrients is a lesser evil as long as all nutrients are lost proportionally. on the other hand losing on only maybe 5% of nutrients in cooked food is much much worse because the nutrients are lost SELECTIVELY and other artificial and harmful chemicals created.

i don't advocate a strict raw diet for anybody - especially not for an athlete. i advocate a diet that is approximately 50% to 80% raw. the rest of the diet should consist of wholesome home-made foods as the other poster suggested - to bring up the total calorie and protein content of the diet.

basically i try to drink as many green smoothies per day as i can ( which is about half a gallon of relatively thick green stuff ) but keep in mind that there is NO WAY to get everything i need out of them, and make up the rest with either "real food" or protein shakes

to me the advantage of a green smoothie is that it is balanced ( many nutrients in small quantities rather than few in large quantities ) and that it's free from all of the crap that you wouldn't want in your body like hydrogenated fat, table salt, sugar etc.

the main purpose of cooking vegetables is to break down the fiber which humans cannot digest and which locks the nutrients in the vegetable. with enough power a blender will physically break down the fiber and thus release the nutrients.

juicers serve the same purpose - they physically release the nutrients which the body can't chemically release from whole plant.

thermal and mechanical "cooking" really serve the same purpose here but thermal is much more crude. it's like the difference between controlled demolition of a building and burning it down.

I am a big advocator of a good diet & what one consumes. I think its more important for overall general health than exercise, but you only live once, I might have an oatmeal raisin cookie once in a while, I ain't gonna kill myself with crazy diets.

A crazy diet doesn't necessarily guarantee long-life span neither (although I do agree it will extend ones personal life span).

I know quite a few 100% raw foodies. They claim to feel healthier, have more energy, and require less sleep. They happen to be very "scientific" about their diets almost to the point of being religious about it. I don't dispute their claims, though they seem to keep their weight down, they also have an almost gaunt and undernourished appearance. While skinny, I wouldn't necessarily say they are 'fit'. Its probably because their focus on health is all about a pure, clean lifestyle vs using exercise to stay healthy.

I wouldn't say their diet is crazy, but the degree to which they pursue it IS crazy. It's an elitist lifestyle (gross over-generalization). I think the idea of having a predominantly raw diet is good and achievable, along with balancing it with good old-fashioned nutrition. Spend time understanding where your food comes from, the impact to the environment for producing and transporting your food is very important - doing so will generally lead you to a more wholesome and healthy lifestyle that positively affects your diet along with other aspects of your life.

While I don't think it's a way to eat and live, and I find it ironic that most raw foodists rely on a machine(blender) to make their food digestible ..... I respect your right to do so. The only way to learn sometimes, is try.


But hey ...... wouldn't a true raw food advocate would eat foods in their raw sate without blending them to oblivion in a Vit-Mix ? Is this natural?

How does consuming whey protein, any highly processed protein, fit into a "raw food" picture?

I don't see the irony. Raw means that the living nutrients have not been killed off by being exposed to high heat. 108 degrees is typically the lower limit they use. So you can have a warm raw soup while still maintaining the living nutrients. Blending does not increase the heat of the food, thus it doesn't kill off any living nutrients. There's no irony.

Would be quite interested to see if these guys could outlive my fathers mother who lived to 97. She started smoking at the age of 14 (yes 14) & from the age of 50 onwards drank alcohol (sherry) pretty much everyday. And the diet, terrible. She was very skinny, undernourished etc..

I'm gonna tell you straight up, if you're going to do raw foods take it upon yourself to buy and read 80/10/10. DO NOT waste your time with your stupid little blender and high fat nut-avocado junk diet. Unless you like being fat, stoughed up, and brain dead, that is.

How long have these high speed blenders been around? Not long.

The irony is blended food is not natural, and isn't that a reason for raw food?

so you get more nutrients out of the raw food, but are we really nutrient deficient from eating cooked food?

I went 6 months on all raw food and I never felt better in my life. That was a few years ago and since then I have morphed my diet into a high raw, mostly animal/dairy free diet. I think eating foods that are unprocessed and unpackaged is more important than following a regime, and most people would do much better to eat whole foods whether they are cooked or not. Being an active person, it is hard to get all the calories I need from all raw, so I eat healthy cooked foods as well. I do want to go back to eating 100% at some point, simply because of how I felt when I was eating that way. It's not for everyone, but it certainly does work for many people.

I agree. And yes, this leads to a host of unanswerable questions ....

While there are more nutrients in raw food, how does the body utilize them, and to what degree is this beneficial, if at all? We assume more is better, but is it? Does it matter?

Are we just a body to be fed by earth? What role does the mind and most importantly... spirit play in nourishment? How does one quantify this?

Oh ... forgive me .... I could go on with this forever. We all do as we do.

-cheers