How to Choose the Perfect Raw Food Diet.

*Disclaimer - my post title is totally tongue in cheek. Don't start pelting me with rotten fruit...yet. Wait til you get to the end, that will at least give me a few minutes to put on my protective gear.

For those starting out on the raw food diet or just starting to learn and get a little curious about it, have you ever felt confused and overwhelmed by the plethora of approaches and information out there about it?

I sure have. I was all over the map when I first started looking into this lifestyle. There were many different sources out there who each promoted their own different way of doing things.

Here are some gurus and organizations I checked out, in the order that they popped into my head:
Gabriel Cousens, Ann Wigmore, The Garden Diet, The Hallelujah Diet, David Wolfe, Paul Nison, Alissa Cohen and Doug Graham, among others. And it seems to me, that there are more raw food leaders bursting out of the watermelon patch every day.

I did all this because, well, I can be a bit nerdy and obsessive about research when I'm interested in something. I'm like a greedy little collector, I mine the internet and library for preciousssss bits of information and I hoard them in my MacBook a dark, secret cave and sit there with my beady eyes gleaming in the dark, sifting the treasure through my fingers and mulling over it for all eternity. Gollum.

And what did all this research do for me? To be frank, it frustrated me and mostly, it scared the bejeebers out of me.

I was scared because I wanted to do this healthfully. There were so many warnings out there about people who failed to thrive on the raw food diet. I did not want to be one of them and I certainly did not want to drag my family into a possible mess.

Every raw food leader appeared confident that their approach was the best one. Yet many of them were saying vastly different things about health creation. Can you imagine how terrifying this was? If you can/have been there, raise your hand virtually!

As I continued processing everything I'd learned, I eventually figured out something really helpful in my journey. And I'm gonna share it here today.

Despite the different nuances in each raw food leader's approach, there are only two major ways that one can do the raw food diet.
When I scrutinized the finer details of the diets that all these leaders recommended, I began to see an emerging pattern, regardless of what they said or which foods they promoted. I began to see that all of these diets seemed to fall into one of two camps:

Approach No. 1 - High Fruit
A high fruit approach would mean that you're getting the bulk of your caloric intake from fruit.

Approach No. 2 - High Fat
A high fat approach would mean that you're getting the bulk of your caloric intake from fat.

But does it have to be one or the other? Is there a middle ground?
Okay, here's my personal take on the how's and why's. Think about the foods available in the raw food world. We have our fruit, greens/veggies and nuts/seeds.

Fruit has potential to be a fuel, because it contains a good amount of calories, esp when you're eating enough of it. Most fruit calories come from carbohydrates.

Nuts and seeds have no shortage of calories either. However, most of those calories come from fat.

Greens and vegetables on the other hand are quite low in calories. 1 whole pound of romaine lettuce has only 77 calories. You'd have to eat many heads of greens in a day to get you enough fuel to sustain yourself, if you truly weren't eating any or many calories from fruit or fat along with it.

So hopefully you can see that IF you're eating enough food to sustain you in the long term, that you will have to choose between fruit and fat as your main source of fuel.

I often hear people say that their diet consists mostly of greens. My gut feeling about that is that they eat so much greens (volume wise) that it can't help but look like they're getting their calories from that.

But I think that many people who eat mostly greens and little fruit, end up putting a lot of fat calories on their salads. Avocados, nuts, seeds and oils. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In my early days (before '07) as I was still figuring all this out, I LOVED a particular salad that I made. In fact, I loved it so much, that I sometimes ate it for lunch and dinner. There were times I felt that I could remain raw forever if I could just have this salad every day. For breakfast, I'd have a very small, light meal of watermelon or something.

Here's what went in my salad: 2 or more hearts of romaine lettuce, lots of tomatoes and cucumbers and 1-2 avocados, drowned in a goodly amount of my absolute favorite salad dressing made from tahini (I could use 1/3 - 1/2 a jar in one meal), lemon juice, garlic and salt.

As you can see, I personally thought I was eating a high greens diet, but in reality I was getting most of my calories from the tahini (sesame seed butter) and avocados.

I suppose that you could try to go down the middle road with this and eat equal amounts of fruit and fat, but I think that is difficult in the long term for a couple of reasons.

For one, you'd really have to measure what you're eating, and for lazy people like me that's not cool. Fruit has more volume, so it's easy for someone to think that they're eating more fruit than fat because they ate 3 apples that day and only 1 avocado, when in reality, 1 avocado contains over 100 more calories than 3 apples.

For two, my experience is that fats feel emotionally addictive, unlike fruit. The fats would always pull me back in until I realized that I was eating mostly fat again. For three, this has the potential to wreak havoc with your digestion as fats and fruit do not digest well together.

It's a choice.
Also, I think that in the end, we all have to decide which source of fuel we think we run best on - carbs or fat. The middle of the road approach could make our travels a little bumpy.

In the post I wrote a few days ago about carbohydrates, I mentioned that I feel that carbohydrates is the best source of fuel for humans. So personally, I choose fruit as my main fuel of choice and it has worked well for me. I will say that I have had periods of going back to fats as a main fuel, and even a week of doing that leaves me feeling so sick and sluggish that I always end up going back to fruit.

I do not think there is a right or wrong approach here. But I do believe that every choice we make comes with a consequence. And I did not like the consequences that came with eating a high fat raw diet in the long term.

Do you agree? Disagree? What is your approach right now, and have you changed it from something different in the past? Should I be running for cover right now? And where did I put that protective gear? :)