Is low fat raw vegan food the optimum diet for me? … and you?!!!
As I am writing this I´m bursting with joy and have an incredible sense of energy. I have been holding off as long as possible to tell anyone about it just to make sure that this is not another temporary upward blip. However it´s been 9 weeks now of feeling fantastic most days!
Due to a number of health complaints, I´ve been experimenting with my diet for two years now and since August 2007 I´ve been eating mainly raw vegan food. Going raw helped tremendously, especially at first. However I really struggled whenever I ate lots of fruit over a couple of weeks. Chronic fatigue and explosive diarrhoea many times a day would result. I had to modify my diet to include lots of sprouted beans and seeds, nuts, healthy oils, seaweed, super foods, leafy greens, supplements and so on. I would have to keep off the fruit, yet I craved it. If I was very strict with my diet I felt really good and my symptoms were greatly reduced.
One of my typical high fat meals
I found the diet hard work though and I often felt like I was missing something. Quite often I would lapse onto cooked food, or give into eating more than just a few pieces of fruit a day. Consuming more than small amounts of either would leave me feeling totally fatigued, tired and very often depressed, not to mention the diarrhoea many times a day.
Over the summer I was away a lot and for a couple of weeks I resorted to the standard UK diet together with an occasional food indulgence. I thought that I´d be ok but I ended up again with chronic fatigue and digestive issues which, even with raw food, I couldn´t get rid of. I really hit a low point three months ago. I scored incredibly highly on the candida yeast-overgrowth questionnaires found online. So I started with some expensive probiotics and (yet again) tried to follow the anti-candida methodology. I cannot express how low and fatigued I felt, but I can say that it really does bring tears to my eyes to express how much better I´ve been feeling over the past 9 weeks compared to just 10 weeks ago.
On the night of Thursday 9th October 2008 I was vomiting and retching during the night. I could sense the same problems coming again the following week (I was feeling very sick again) and so I decide to fast, I couldn´t eat anyway.
Around that time there were lots of discussions about the 80-10-10 diet on the RawFoodUK forum (a yahoo group). I´d always dismissed these discussions and ‘The 80-10-10 diet’ book because my body could never handle the fruit. However after reading and listening to a few forum links I felt that I should try and do things a little differently this time.
After checking out the www.nutridiary.com website I was shocked. Even though I had already reduced my consumption of fat, I was startled at how much fat remained in my diet as a percentage calories. I never realised that even fruit and leafy greens have reasonable proportions of fat in them. When you add in a few seeds, nuts, an avocado (or 2 or 3!) and some oils, then daily fat consumption was in my case at least 45% of calories and some days it was much higher. There was then a post on the RawFoodUK forum of a link to a video of Doug Graham. It proved exceptionally helpful. I immediately ordered the book ‘The 80/10/10 diet’.
After 30 hours of fasting, on the Friday evening (17th October) I did an enema. I took 2 litres of distilled water and added probiotics to it. I drank 0.5 litre and the remaining 1.5 litres went in the other end, and yes I was surprised! I also did this on the Saturday morning. Then I started to eat again. We had some guests round on the Saturday evening and I must confess I ate some cooked food. Amazingly I was fine.
Doug explained how too much fat gives you poor digestion and how it slows everything down. It reduces the effectiveness of insulin, causing a slow processing of sugar. Sugar builds up in the bloodstream and cells cannot get enough energy. The excess sugar also feeds the candida which creates more toxins to drag you down. It’s a triple whammy.
I realised that it can take a day or so to get all the excess fat through your system. I was just coming out of my fast and thought that I should be relatively ‘clean’ of fat so I’ll give it a go. The worst that could happen is that I’d get fatigue & diarrhoea again and I’d be back to square one. I really wasn’t expecting this to work. I apprehensively pretty much ate nothing but fruit and some big salads from then on. I made a real effort to keep off anything with a high fat content as a proportion of calories such as; nuts, seeds, oils and avocados.
I was totally stunned and I still am! I had the most incredible surge in energy as soon as I started consuming lots of fruit. I’ve had energy almost every day since. Not only that. The diarrhoea stopped overnight and has not come back. I now exit the bathroom rejoicing! My body is digesting food properly. Even the occasional cooked food doesn’t effect me like it used to. I can eat foods that I was previously intolerant to, like tomatoes.
I’m off the fats, off the supplements, have no need for super food AND I can eat lots and lots of fruit! Most days I have boundless energy. Severe candida symptoms disappeared almost overnight. Recurring fatigue and depression is a thing of the past. I have been having the most incredible sense of joy that I’ve not experienced in a long long time. I’ve had the most amazing desire to exercise again and I’ve been doing lots of upper body conditioning. I feel much stronger and have much more stamina. I can sprint up stairs without thinking about it, whereas previously it was often an effort to get out of my chair and then haul myself up.
My diet now consists of mainly whole fruits, some massive salads and a very occasional sprinkling of seeds (maybe a tablespoon full every other day). Plus I still occasionally have a cooked meal, typically once a week. I’m working towards eliminating cooked food altogether as my friends and relatives come to accept me and this new lifestyle. Regardless of what I eat I really try to keep off anything fatty.
I hardly have to prepare food anymore. A typical day for me might consist of: A bunch of celery, a honeydew melon and a lemon all blended into a smoothie for breakfast; For lunch I might have the breakfast leftovers plus 10 bananas and a few oranges; Dinner might be a massive salad plus another plate full of whatever fruit I fancy, maybe mangoes, tomatoes etc. It’s awesome, it’s easy, it’s scrumptious but it costs me about £80 a week! Although quite expensive, considering the huge improvements in my health, it is an excellent investment.
