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Raw Food Roundup

Ok, I officially LOVE raw food. I started eating raw about five weeks ago, and have been 99% raw since (my trespasses? a tiny brownie, a few sprouted grain english muffins, and a stupid eggplant pizza). Let's do the math on this baby :

First I ate 100% of whatever I wanted. I loved fried foods, desserts, and pizza. Thanks to miraculous metabolism, I never gained too much weight. Then I read Fantastic Voyage : Live Long Enough to Live Forever, hacked away at my diet, and cut out probably 70% of the foods I used to eat. Later I researched more and cut out 90% of those foods, leaving me eating about 7% of what I initially ate. I wrote a book called The Skinny Snob about that. Going raw eliminated at least 70% of those foods, so now I'm down to about 2-3% of the foods I ate a year ago. Based on my daily diet I would consider that wholly accurate.

Now... that is a wild change. Especially coming from me. I would constantly mock anyone trying to go on a diet and explain that you should just eat whatever you wanted. No amount of logic would get me to change. What did get me to change was my inclination to try things for 7 or 30 days, and the accompanying drastic results.

What's Wrong with Raw Food?

I gave raw food a try a while back for somewhere around forty five days. I bought a dehydrator, made a lot of my own foods, and bought the rest from the Whole Foods raw bar. In the end, I didn't stick with it. Here's why:

Despite all of those reasons, I always had it in the back of my head that I would become raw later. The dogma just sounds so good, and it's hard to argue against eating anything as raw and unprocessed as possible. Once I could afford to hire a chef or eat every meal out, I'd do it, I thought. But recently I learned something that changed my opinion. Barring any overturning evidence, I will never be primarily raw.

As it turns out, we've been eating cooked food for TWO MILLION YEARS. Two million! While we haven't had time to evolve to a refined grain diet, we have certainly evolved to eat cooked foods.