Raw Food Diet

March 2009 Overview

My Concerns When I Started

My main concern when I started this diet was related to my intensive work out schedule. I have been training to a high level in martial arts for over twenty years and continue to make demands on my body that most people my age (I’m 37) are not making. For a long time I have followed what can be considered a typical diet that an athlete would follow, which is high in protein especially. My daily intake has always been essentially healthy, apart from a few binges while on vacation or something, and I would only drink alcohol socially, almost never at home. I was worried that with less protein intake my energy level and muscle mass would decline and this was something I wanted to monitor.

A more minor concern was simply hunger. Burning as many calories as I do each day through training I formerly needed a high intake of food to use as fuel to burn. I didn’t really want to get into a situation where I was having to eat constantly throughout the day to provide myself with that fuel.

In both cases these fears were unfounded and I will discuss the results as they pertain to these issues in more detail below.

What I Wanted To Get Out Of The Diet

I was principally motivated to follow a raw food diet not so much for the health benefits but because of the inspiration provided to me in a book I read recently called Left In The Dark. The book has as its central theme the thesis that left hemisphere dominance is an unhealthy result of a change in our diet that happened several thousand years ago when we left the forests we used to dwell in and became hunter-gatherers. Over time, generation by generation, our right hemisphere, the side of our brain that is more intuitive and non-conceptual, has for most of us fallen into increasing disuse to the point that many of the things that our right hemisphere could accomplish and much of the insight that our right hemisphere could offer can only be reached through such activities intensive meditative discipline or prolonged sleep deprivation. This is where my interest was tweaked. I see Japanese martial arts as a method of ‘meditation in motion’ and one way to experience satori (realization) which I would now recognize as a momentary flash of right hemisphere dominance. I experienced this at the age of 21. More formally, I wrote my MA thesis on the subject of how art forms in Japan that have been influenced by Zen (such as the tea ceremony or flower arranging, as well as the martial arts) can be used as a means to gain satori. Reading Left In The Dark gave me a fresh perspective into the achievement of satori, namely the possible importance our diet plays in allowing us greater freedom to access our right hemisphere.

This then is why I decided to not only go raw but to go almost completely raw. That is, to follow a diet as closely as I can stand that our ancestors would have experienced in a tropical rain forest: the bulk of food being fruits, along with vegetables and nuts. As you will see from my recorded experience below, I have been able to keep this up for almost three months now.

To make it clear though to anyone new to a raw food diet: What I am doing would be considered extreme by even raw foodists and there is no need to follow this to the extreme that I have. I have read online that a 60% raw diet will offer you tremendous health benefits and for anyone considering going raw it is probably better to start off by setting a target of, say, 50-60% raw food. I was already following a healthy diet before I went raw and was eating a lot of vegetables and nuts in particular (and some fruit).

My Daily Routine

My daily routine is fairly well established during the week. I rise at 6am and, previously, would nap for an hour in the afternoon and sleep again at around 2 or 3am. I was therefore getting 4-5 hours of sleep a day. I train at night, after my children are asleep and this covers a wide variety of different exercise types, all of which are to enhance my performance as a martial artist. So, aside from actually practicing martial arts (primarily karate) I also lift weights, walk or jog, and do some simple yoga or Taoist Immortality rituals (breathing exercises). I eat twice a day. My first meal is usually around 8am and I eat again at night, at around 9 or 10. These habits were already more or less established prior to me going raw and I was very comfortable with my lifestyle and had no particular interest in changing it. I was eating later in the morning earlier but changes in my schedule have forced me to eat at an earlier time. I wasn’t looking for the raw food diet to impact my routine.

My Raw Food Diet

My raw food diet is a little different to what most people are following when eating raw (at least, as far as I can tell from information that I have come across on the internet). I live in Japan and the Japanese diet, whether raw or not, has impacted me tremendously while I have been here. There are a few simple rules that we follow in our household and I mention them here because I believe they will benefit your health overall whether or not you make any decision to go raw. These rules are followed by innumerable people in Japan and are the kind of household wisdom that gets handed down from generation to generation regardless of science.

1) Eat twice as many vegetables as your do meat or fish. Obviously this isn’t really applicable to a raw food diet unless you are also eating raw fish and/or raw meat (both of which are very popular in Japan) but I’m mentioning it here for the sake of completeness.

2) Eat as much variety in skin color of foods. This means that everyday you should try and eat something red, orange, green, yellow and so on. The different colored skins indicate different nutrients in the food (and as much as possible you should also eat the skins).

3) Try to eat at least 30 different food types during the course of a day. This means that rather than have a small variety of food in large quantities as is typical in Western cuisine, the Japanese prefer to eat smaller portions of food but with much greater variety. I have to admit that when I first came to Japan I struggled with this a little but now I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So there are the basic dietary ‘rules’ that I have been following for several years here in Japan. As you will see, I have applied rules two and three to my raw food diet and this seems to be a radical departure from what I come understand other raw foodists are doing. I appreciate that for many reading this, these ideas may seem a little alien to you. If you need a greater endorsement than this blog, please refer to Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s article in Success magazine (December 2008), entitled ‘Chasing Life; Cheating Death’. Dr. Gupta notes that he tries to eat seven different colored foods throughout the day. He notes further that "I have two daughters (and a third child on the way). If you were to look at what they eat on any given night you’d see small plates with tons of different, little portions of food. This is not hard to do and is effective for helping achieve healthy eating patterns." Whether or not Dr. Gupta has been influenced here by the Japanese diet I don’t know, but he clearly considers the same advice to be relevant and healthy.

This then is a list of the food I have been eating on a daily basis throughout most of January and up until now. As you will see, there is a great deal of variety and as many different colors as I can find.