More Learnings from Dr. Graham

Well, I started reading "The 80/10/10 Diet" again (doesn't the cover make you just want to grab a couple of peaches?), and I think the edition that I bought at his lecture that we attended last month in Miami has some additional sections added compared with the edition that I read last year. This one has two extra appendices: one is a section full of testimonials, and the other is an FAQ. I started browsing through them, and learned all kinds of new things that I don't remember reading before. The questions in the FAQ were very simple, and very chronological in the sense that if someone wanted to start living this lifestyle, these are the questions they might have, and in this order. Like one of the first ones is "Can I really eat all this fruit?", followed by "What about dried fruit?", "What about vinegar?", etc.

So as I read, I realized that I agreed with some of these teachings, and I disagreed to a certain extent with others. I want to make changes in my lifestyle and adjust according to what I was learning and feeling, so I started making two lists to help me "move in that direction," as Dr. Graham is so fond of suggesting. He says that if you don't make this transition overnight, the best that you can do is "move in that direction."

Here are my lists:

Foods that I want to start eliminating from my diet:

• Dehydrated foods, including dried fruits (they are not a whole food if they don't have the water that originally came with them!)
• Vinegar (I think I'm actually already there, but I didn't really know why. This is actually a poison! In chemistry class, they mix vinegar and water together to make acetic acid. Yeah. That is one of the ones that has the skull and crossbones on the outside. Vinegar is just dilluted even more, but a poison is still a poison.)
• Sea Salt (Not that foods like celery that have sodium are bad, but EXTRACTED salt)
• Condiments. Think of it this way: anything that can’t be eaten by itself as a meal shouldn’t be eaten at all. Time will tell how I can handle this one. I have always liked salts, spices, and things to make the food taste “better,” but I think I just need to start thinking of WHOLE FOODS that can create the same effect. Example: jalapeño instead of chili powder.

Foods that I want to eat very sparingly, or at least acknowledge when I do eat them that they are not the best things for me to eat. If I eat foods from this list, I want to start thinking of it as a compromise for me:

• Seaweed and algae. Dr. Graham says that these should not be considered vegan since they contain creatures. He also says that we are only meant to eat things that appeal to us in their natural state, and you would gag if you were to eat seaweed or saltwater right out of the ocean.
• Frozen Foods. I learned from a lecturer named Tanya Zavasta at a recent raw meet-up that when a food is frozen, the cells expand (which we all already know). For foods, this expansion causes the cell walls inside the foods to burst, and we don’t have a lot of research to tell us what this does to the nutrition provided by the food. Dr. Graham says they should not be eliminated (since this is one of the best food-preservation methods available), but that we should be aware that it is a potential compromise with the value that the food is providing us.

One thing that I am still pondering, particularly when it comes to Dr. Graham’s reasoning on consuming things like vinegar and sea salt: yes, these things will kill you in their concentrated form, but it is actually true that ANY substance is toxic at a certain concentration, even water! So the idea that these things are diluted poisons has got me thinking, but not necessarily in total agreement. One point, however, that does resonate with me is how something shouldn’t be considered a food unless you can make a meal out of it by itself. If you can’t do that then it should not be considerred a food that can be eaten at all.

I am enjoying reading the book again, and I highly recommend that it be read by you. I am also enjoying listening to his DVD series “Making Friends With Your Food,” with Professor Rozalind Gruben also lecturing.

This ain't no commercial, but for more information on Dr. Graham's program, including how to get a copy of "The 80/10/10 Diet," please visit http://foodnsport.com/. You can also get it on amazon.com. I think it is fascinating what Dr. Graham is able to do with athletes on a raw food diet. As he said in the lecture that we attended last month, if someone needs more fuel (calories) for an athletic lifestyle, it doesn't mean they need different kinds of calories, it just means they need more of them.

Low-fat Lunch

I just have to share a picture of the colorful lunch that I had at work today. The best part? It was tasty AND low-fat, which supports the direction my family and I are trying to go in keeping with the theory of the 80/10/10 diet (see "80-10-10" tag below).



The lunch consisted of some spring mix, apple slices, orange wedges, raisins, and sliced banana. No dressing needed!

Now of course I like raw salad dressings. I got to try a new type of guacamole this weekend--one that conisted simply of mushed-up avocado and grapefruit juice. It was so wonderful. And I absolutely love the ranch dressings that we've come up with, especially the caesar ranch!

Fruit dressings are great too though. They give you tons of energy and don't bog you down like some of the nut-based dressings that can make your diet more like 10/10/80 (80% or more fat), if you catch my drift. With this "fruit salad dressing," as I like to call it, no nuts are needed!

In case you are interested in the caloronutrient distribution, the meal was // calories from carbs/fat/protein. Here are the details:

Total calories: 578
% Calories from carbs/fat/protein: 92/3/5

The lettuce is about 12-13% calories from fat, but it is a low amount of calories in the overall meal (19!).

I got my information from http://www.nutridiary.com, which is a great place to keep a log of your meals and calories, or if you just want to look at the calorie distribution. It is really cool--you can create an account and save meals that you enter so that you don't have to enter them all over again later. If you have any questions, just ask!

Raw Power

Raw Power

The following entry contains a lot of information, but I want to help! Some of it is touchy, but I wanted to put it all in one place so that I can refer people to my findings.

Here goes!

The diet that Alicia and I are on can be called the Raw Vegan diet or the Living Foods diet. Just eat any raw fruits, vegetables (including lots of sprouts), nuts, or seeds! The important thing is not to cook any foods, as cooking any food destroys the enzymes needed to give life and health to your body and also to digest the food. Let me repeat that, because it is very important. Not only are cooked foods hard to digest in the first place, they also have been stripped of the enzymes that are naturally in them before they are cooked (the enzymes die when they are heated to a temperature of 118 degrees F), so they are DOUBLY harder to digest. Raw foods are easier to digest because they aren't hard for your body to process, and the enzymes in them help you to digest them too! I'm sure you've heard how long it takes to digest meat and other foods (1-3 days). Conversely, it only takes your body 2-1/2 hours to digest a raw meal, and only 15 minutes to digest a raw juice. If you eat three cooked meals a day, your body is constantly trying to digest the enzyme-depleted food, and by the time it gets done digesting 1 meal that you’ve consumed earlier, you've already eaten another one. It is very hard for your body to heal itself when this is going on constantly, and very EASY for your body to be susceptible to diseases. Compare that to eating raw (non-pasteurized!) juices and raw foods, and your body has a lot of time to quickly digest the food and then can move on to eliminating cancer cells or problems related to other diseases. Not only was my body able to heal itself from brain cancer (and rid itself of the toxins that the doctors gave me through chemotherapy), but Alicia was able to heal herself from being insulin-resistant (and very close to adult-onset diabetes). Since she started eating raw, her blood sugar has not once been above 100, even after a meal of only fruits! Many people do not know that high blood-sugar is actually related to fat and toxins. If your bloodstream is filled with a lot of hard-to-digest fat (including raw fat), the sugars (even good sugars) that you eat cannot be digested quickly, stay in your bloodstream, and cause problems, ranging from diabetes to cancer to candita (yeast) infections.

I know this helped us! My dream is to eventually start "The DT Foundation" to help people get this information. Raw food is going to be a lot less uncommon than it is now. It is not just a "thing" anymore. The best book that I can recommend you read is "The China Study" by Dr. Colin Campbell. In it, he relates how our health is closely related to the foods that we eat. AMAZING science behind eating a plant-based diet!

Quick tip: if you decide to go raw and someone asks you something crazy like “But where do you get your protein from?” ask them—“from where do you get YOUR protein?” Animal protein is just not meant to be consumed by humans. It is the wrong kind of protein.

Here are some web sites from the Hippocrates Health Institute. This is a place that teaches people to live a balanced life and eat a raw-foods diet:

General web site: http://www.hippocratesinst.com/
Sample Videos: http://www.hippocratesinst.org/SampleVideos.aspx
Sign up for their free magazine: http://www.hippocratesinst.com/Magazine.aspx

My wife and I, along with my Mom and Dad, went there for New Year’s this year (December 30-January 6, 2008). It is normally a 3-week detox program, but with our schedule and finances, we all decided to go for one week that time and perhaps try to do the rest later. It was an incredible experience. But I will blog about that later (hopefully).

Sorry this entry is choppy, but some of the thoughts are random. I wanted to get them all down. A friend asked me for “a list of the foods that you eat.” This sounded kind of funny to me, because I had already told him my standard answer—“fruits veggies, nuts, and seeds.” But it is a common question, so I decided to elaborate. Besides “fruits veggies, nuts, and seeds,” there is lots of raw cuisine out there. Just go to any Borders or Books-a-Million and look up their raw cookbooks (uncookbooks?). You shoul be pleasantly surprised!

Here are some web sites of raw food restaurants and recipes. The first one (The Present Moment—our favorite!... just by default though, because it is the only one in Northeast Florida) is in St. Augustine. The rest are in New York City. Another dream of mine (and Alicia’s) is to open up a raw restaurant in Jacksonville. It’s gonna happen, so keep an eye out for it.
Here are the sites:

http://www.thepresentmomentcafe.com/
http://www.rawsoul.com/restaurant.htm
http://www.rawsoul.com/recipes.htm
http://www.raw-q.com/

Most of the foods at these types of restaurants are indulgences for Alicia and I, as even raw-fooders can get too much fat (from nuts, avocados, seeds, oils, etc.). Our diet really is simple! We have a shot of 1-2 ounces of wheatgrass (Google: wheatgrass if you don't know what that is) and fruit for breakfast, and then usually salad for lunch, with a fruit topping, a home-made raw salad dressing, or guacamole and salsa (my favorite). Then for dinner we'll eat fruits, raw soups, and/or something else of the like. There is not much to it! Some of our friends have even started modifying their diets to increase the percentage of raw food that they eat, and to me that is awesome! I think they are seeing the benefits when they really stick to it…

For more info on needing to keep the fat level down, see Dr. Doug Graham's book and philosophy, "The 80/10/10 Diet." (http://www.foodnsport.com/811/index.html). In it, he explains the ratio of caloronutrients that humans should be eating, and why. 80/10/10 refers to 80% calories from carbohydrates, 10% from fats, and 10% from protein. This relates strongly with what I was saying earlier about carb sugars being "stuck" in the bloodstream and causing health problems. See the book excerpt on that very site. Not just for raw eaters! Whether you are eating 5%, 50%, 80%, or 100% raw, vegan or non-vegan, you should follow these ratios as close as possible.

I cannot stress that this thing that we have found is not just to lose weight. It is the way that God, in his infinite wisdom, has designed us to live. It is a way to live the way we were meant to live. Happy. Disease-free. Full of energy and life. It is being with our family for a LONG time. This is important for me, and I hope it is important for you. Please let me know if you have any questions.