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I’ve had a very long journey learning to find ease in living with food.

By the time I was 14, I’d become deeply entrenched in eating disorders, and subsequently struggled for many years with the pain and self-loathing that accompanies any kind of food addiction. Back then, it was the 70s, and eating disorders weren’t the commonplace subject it is today. Knowledgeable help just wasn’t accessible to me. So, from an early age I embarked upon a solo journey to figure out how such a thing could be healed… permanently.

For years I lived in near-constant angst over food. My illness, both acute and chronic, was like a constant dark shadow I couldn’t seem to escape, no matter how resolutely I tried. The thing about food is, you can’t fix the problem by removing it from your life, as an alcoholic or drug-abuser can. You’ve got to live with food and find a way to make that relationship harmonious.

Today, I live an entirely stress-free life around food. How did I get to this place from such a painful beginning? Non-resistance. 

The Magic of Non-Resistance

A turning point occurred for me while I was still a teen-ager. I was at my utter wit’s end and reaching both deep and high for a new understanding that would deliver me to safe ground. The thought occurred to me, “What if I just stop fighting this so hard? What if – just for this moment – I accept that, for whatever reason, this is who I am right now? And it’s okay…”

And with that one seemingly counter-intuitive but courageous thought, I had my first experience of the healing power of nonresistance. I felt an enormous sense of relief. I experienced self-acceptance. Choosing a stance of non-resistance enabled me to set down – if even for just a moment – a truly heavy burden I’d been carrying. I was able to give my spirit a rest, and honor myself in a way I had refused to recognize.

Over time, this pattern of choosing non-resistance and creating the space to honor myself rather than fight with myself is what led to eventually healing from the patterns that gripped me. It sounds backwards, but there is definite logic to such an approach. In fact… there is simply no other way to truly heal.

Most of us have heard the saying “What we resist, persists.” And this is indeed true, on the most practical of levels. Mustering our force of will to control, conquer, or dominate something in our life conveys the assumption that what we want to control has great power over us… otherwise we wouldn’t need to take such a tough stance. It makes us hard and hyper-vigilant. It creates profound stress, and obscures any sense of ease.

And when it comes to food, we are a culture that is anything but “at ease”. 

A Culture At War With Food

As a society, we struggle epidemically with food. I see it everywhere. I know every nuance of that struggle because I lived it.

It doesn’t take someone to be crippled by anorexia or bulimia to be held in the strange-hold of food addiction or an eating disorder. If compulsive eating, punishing “exercise atonement”, obsession over food quantity, or the stressful adherence to strict dietary rules takes over one’s life and obscures an experience of joy and ease on a daily basis, then one is engaged in a personally undermining struggle with food. And I bet you’d quickly run out of fingers if you started counting the people in your life (perhaps yourself included) who fall into one of these categories.

Living with food is not meant to be so hard. Food is intended to be a source of strength, support, and true enjoyment. It’s meant to serve and enliven us so we can go about the business of being massively creative and joyful humans carving out wonderfully fulfilling lives. But somehow, we’ve turned this around and have gotten lost in a highly dysfunctional relationship with food, at a societal level.

Our Denatured Diet Creates Food Addiction

Since those painful early years, I’ve come a long way in my understanding of what I went through and what contributed to the enslavement I experienced. And one fascinating clarification came only after I started exploring a lifestyle “jacked up” with raw foods, and began to experience what it’s like to live in a body that is fueled primarily by whole, completely unadulterated living foods. That contrast (and subsequent fluctuations between consuming a “high-raw” diet and a diet comprised of mostly cooked foods) showed me without a doubt that whole, un-denatured foods create balance in the body, while processed, denatured foods set up a pattern of cravings and stress that lead to imbalance.

“Denatured “foods (as I’m using the term) are foods that the body no longer recognizes as a natural, whole food. Cooking begins the denaturing process, further chemical and refining processing takes the journey further away from a whole-food state, and the inclusion of non-food additives flags “denatured in the extreme” to our systems the moment such foods are consumed.

When we eat whole, undenatured foods, the body remains relaxed and in a state of ease, because it is consuming food with nutrients that are maximally bio-available, the way nature intended.  But when we eat denatured foods – and the more denatured those foods tend to be – the more we trigger cravings and imbalance in our systems.

It’s my theory that, when our body goes to digest and assimilate denatured foods, it perceives that code in the DNA or molecular structure of that food has either been compromised or gone completely missing, and it sets off to go find the missing components. This initiates stress in the body, the restlessness of cravings, and – ultimately, if continued habitually over time – degeneration into disease (dis-ease).

So just the very foods we choose to eat can initiate food addiction, without a psychological component. And since our current culture is richly laden with denatured foods as part of our everyday culture (so much so that we generally don’t even recognize that most of our diet is wildly denatured — we just call it “food”), food addiction has also become a normal part of our society.

If, in the course of fighting against the negative path down which our food addictions take us, we then acquire obsession or psychological stress, that is the point where an eating disorder might evolve.

The Healing Power of Living Foods for Food Addictions and Eating Disorders

The beauty of radically increasing the raw and living foods in one’s diet (and I mean anyone’s diet… meat-eater, junk-food eater, vegetarian, or vegan) is that raw and living foods enable nonresistance. All you have to do is add the good stuff, and your experience of being in balance will increase while your feelings of stress will decrease. The more you add, the better you’ll feel, and the easier your relationship with food can become because you need not focus on controlling your diet or your cravings any longer.

This nonresistant approach is at the very heart of the approach I teach to my clients who want to “jack up the raw”in their diet. I want them to focus only on adding as much raw, living, high-water-content, nutrient-dense foods to their diet as they can (especially using the power of Live Green Smoothies), and to not worry about the rest. The rest… it takes care of itself, gradually, over time, at the speed of gentle evolution.

I’ve found in my own life, beyond even dealing with food issues, that the most potent path to healing and wellness is ironically the gentlest one, the one that is most self-honoring and self-nurturing rather than an approach exercised with brutal will and rigid discipline. 

And, having found peace and the freedom of a stress-free way of living with food after much heartache and struggle, it’s very much my mission, purpose, and profound pleasure to help others find the same.

The “Four LGS Pillars” of Jacking Up The Raw

From personal experience looking for the easiest way to increase the amount of high-water-content, nutrient-packed raw and living foods in my diet — without making it too complicated or stressful from trying to make too much change too quickly — I assembled the following four basic principles that comprise the “Jack Up The Raw” program.

If you follow these four simple principles in the way that works best for you, you will radically increase the raw and living foods in your diet… without stress, without guilt, without frustration, and without too much effort.

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This is the approach that worked for me.

This is exactly the approach I followed to take myself from a 225-lb. size 20 body to a size 6 just seven months later. And while I was achieving that change in my life, I was not “perfect” with my diet. I had brownies. I had spaghetti with meat sauce. I even had pizza. I never apologized for it or tried to hide it, and I don’t try to hide these things now if I should ever have them.

Because see… we’re talking about a radical change here. And true radical change takes time to really integrate comfortably. So let’s just acknowledge that from the beginning and instead of taking a forceful approach, let’s take the gentle path. I promise you… it works.

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Dietary Change and CULTURAL Change

This change is not just a change in diet, it’s a change in culture. By switching from an orientation toward primarily cooked food to one that is oriented toward living foods, you’re actually inventing a new culture for yourself, a new way of feeding yourself and deriving nourishment, comfort, and pleasure from food!

Your emotions are affected by this change. And your sense of inner safety can be triggered by going too long without something you may have associated with stability and comfort your entire life. If you make a change that’s radical, and don’t provide an occasional “escape valve” of sorts when you need it, to allow yourself to adjust to the pressure of that change, at some point it’s highly likely that you will become frustrated with yourself and your inability to conform to the ideal that others have painted as being so wonderful.

Some people make a change to 100% overnight and stay with it forever, no problem. But this program is designed to be flexible enough for EVERYONE, for the regular guy and regular gal who wants to jack things up but isn’t yet ready for an extreme immersion. And if that’s you… and you try to make too extreme of a change… you will become frustrated.

Who can live for long with that level of frustration? Most people will give up. But if instead one digs in and tries to force oneself to “be perfect”, does that really lead to a state of health?

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Doing Away With Food Obsession And Complex, Stressful Rules

We live in a culture that can be seriously obsessed with food and with dietary rules. From a young age, I struggled with eating disorders and thus know the intense frustration and self-loathing that can be invoked by attempting to adhere to overly rigorous dietary rules.

Personally, I regard stress and obsession over food as more toxic than the unwanted food itself. “Food” is intended to be the very thing that nourishes you and gives you a foundation of strength and calm energy. So let’s approach our food and our diet from that perspective.

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The Easy Road to Raw… or Rawish… Whatever Is Best For You

These four principles make living with food and jacking up the raw so easy, all you have to do is focus on adding as much of the good stuff as you possibly can, and the rest… the rest you don’t have to worry about. It will sort itself out as you continue to adjust to the changes you are growing into.

I hope these principles help you as much as they have helped me, and that they introduce a stress-free, guilt-free, enjoyable journey for you into a more vital lifestyle.

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The “Four LGS Pillars” of Jacking Up The Raw

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The First 15 Minutes

In the first 15 minutes, we’ll go through the items in the following questionnaire, to get some quick and very helpful insight into:

• Why you’re doing the program
• What you hope to achieve
• And what the realities of your life are like so we can best adapt the principles of the program to work for YOU.

Take a few minutes to read through the questions and perhaps make some notes on some of the points you’d especially like to highlight with me. That way we’ll be able to really make the best of the time we have available to us, so that I can get to know you as quickly as possible.

I’ve included an area for notes in each section, so you can just print out this page and keep it for your records, if you like. I will be taking my own notes, and keeping a folder of our work together throughout the six-week program.

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The Second 15 Minutes

The next 15 minutes of our call, I’ll go over the simple principles we’ll be working with to keep your approach as simple and “user-friendly” as possible.

I call these principles “The Four LGS Pillars of Jacking Up The Raw“, and you can read about them here.

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The Last 15 Minutes

And the last part of our phone consultation will be all about the practicalities of making the LGS Pillars work for you, in in the unique way that works best for your life.

One of these strategies is to become aware of how to add as many “Rawish” meals to your day when a full-out “raw” meal isn’t practical, convenient, or… just something you’re going to be able to do without feeling like you’ll go crazy for the comfort and “grounding” of something cooked.

Learning how to “jack up the raw” with Rawish meals is an extremely valuable approach that anybody can use to start increasing the amount of living, high-water-content foods in their diet, without necessarily going to the extreme level that many raw food enthusiasts aim for.

You can read more about “Living A Rawish Life” here. (This is coming out later today – I’ll add the link when it’s up.)

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Happy reading!

I can’t wait to talk with you one-on-one on our first call! This is SO exciting. It just rocks my world to know we’re gonna rawk yours, together.

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