Fred Busch Interview with Italian Press in 2008

Interviewer: So on June 25, 07. I just kind of got a little inspiration from your Web site and your book that you did brought. And I just wanted to know to start what is your background because this book show the miracle how you transform your life to food to lifestyle to job or to location and stuff. And I just wanna know first of all how did it happen, this change, and what inspire you to change? And when did it happen?

Fred Busch: Yeah. That was the main catalyst for me. I was spiritually aware when I was a kid. I don’t know how, but even when I was 15 and 14, I was reading Lao Tse and Zen Buddhism and things about enlightenment, Taoism. In high school, I was attracted to that stuff.

And then I went and I studied wildlife and all that, and I traveled around the world and kept learning as much as I could about how the world works and all that. And then I got deathly sick?

Interviewer: What it was age when you started to get sick?

Fred Busch: 22. 23. 1998. And that’s how I came very close to dying, and I got very lucky to be saved to speak, as fast as I was, so I basically got very lucky even though I got very sick. I had a very powerful realization about how valuable life is and how precious it is and how sacred it is, and I never forgot that vision because it’s burned into my brain, and I dreamed about being physically fit, and I dreamed about – this is while I was in bed, sweating and wondering whether I was going to survive or not.

I was dreaming about running through the grass; and I was dreaming about what it would be like to be healthy again. I could just feel how lucky I would be if I could get all that back. So although I was treated successfully in Africa, I came back to the States to recover.

And I was very weak, and that’s when I found yoga.

Interviewer: This was ’98 still?

Fred Busch: Yeah. Uh-huh. And as soon as I started doing yoga, I realized how valuable it was, and I started doing it basically every day right away. I wasn’t like a once a week kind of person for a couple of years. It never happened with me. Once I started, I started directly.

And then the yoga brought in the awareness of my body, which I went to a school for healing and massage therapy, and I studied all about the body and anatomy and the science behind the body. And I also studied food and nutrition and what is human food and what is not human food. And I studied all of that very extensively during this time in 98 and 99.

And I put it all into practice because everything I studied made sense to me, the idea of eating food that wasn’t cooked made a lot of sense to me, cause I studied wildlife, and I’ve seen how the world works out in the wild, so everything was common sense to eat food that wasn’t destroyed. So I ate well.

So for seven straight years, I did yoga every single day and ate 100% raw food. And basically, I used myself as the science experiment for what is this gonna do? And every single day I got stronger, and every single day I felt better. And to this day, I feel like I’m getting stronger every single day.

Interviewer: Are you still eating the raw food?

Fred Busch: No.

Interviewer: A little bit –

Fred Busch: Oh, a lot. I’m still eat –

Interviewer: Vegetarian.

Fred Busch: I still eat very very well by average standards, but compared to the 100% raw food, I’ve eased off that only because it was easier in my lifestyle to ease off of it. I can’t pretend that it wasn’t. It’s a little bit more fun to eat some toast once in a while.




Interviewer: But you still don’t touch animal, which is the most important.

Fred Busch: Oh no. No way. Nothing from an animal.