Fred's Story!

When I was 23, I was traveling in Africa and contracted a blood parasite. I was misdiagnosed and mistreated and at times, pretty sure I was going to die. Sick and sweaty in a dirty hotel bed, I dreamed about feeling healthy. I dreamed about running and feeling strong. I thought about all of the Cokes and chips and fast foods I had eaten. I thought about all of the televisions I had watched from sofas smoking cigarettes.

Hospitals add certain poignancy to your day-to-day thoughts and one afternoon in the Dar es Salaam Public Clinic, I decided, ‘If I ever get out of this (or whatever this is gets out of me) I’m going to cherish my body. I’ll never smoke again; I’ll exercise every day; I’m going to be as healthy as possible.

Whatever was in me did finally get vanquished and when I returned to life in South Beach, I started it fresh. I started doing Yoga several days a week and made some changes to my diet: no more fast food or red meat or junk food. A few weeks into my new routine, I noticed a difference in the way that I felt physically and emotionally.

At the beginning, Yoga was a struggle. I was far from flexible and most of the poses seemed very foreign to me. I stuck with it though and started to become comfortable with a particular Yoga series that moves you from one pose to the next in a way that sustains a high heart rate while working every part of the body. As I became more flexible and familiar with the poses I was able to do them deeper and hold them longer. The practice actually got more challenging as I improved. I would feel so worked, so pleasantly exhausted I rarely felt the need for other types of exercise. I upped my practice to six days a week and felt so great I would just as soon stick myself in the eye as eat junky food. I started to become very aware of what foods made me feel good and what foods made me feel bad and what foods made me feel horrible.

A friend of mine told me about a lecture by Dr. Douglas Graham about a Raw Food Diet. So, no cooked food. I assure you that I was at least as skeptical of the idea as you are now. Despite my doubts, I sat and listened to the lecture with an open mind and really it made a lot of sense. The premise is simple:,when you heat something, chemical bonds are broken, molecular changes occur, things are released and destroyed. It is the same when you cook your food. In its natural state, food has more nutrients, more complete protein structures, more enzymes. When it is cooked, a lot of what you need is destroyed and you ar left with something far less nutritious and in a lot of cases detrimental to your body.

So I tried it. I wasn’t able to go all raw immediately, but I began to limit the amount of cooked food I ate and replace it with raw nuts and fruits, especially avocados. A few weeks into the routine and I was shocked at how great I felt. It was unbelievable. My entire disposition changed. Meanwhile, my Yoga practice exploded. I was doing the poses that seemed impossible just weeks ago. I began to realize a whole realm of mental benefits to a deep regular practice that rivaled the physical benefits I had already been enjoying.

Soon I didn’t even recognize cooked food as edible. It seemed so crazy to me to eat something with all of the nutrients cooked out of it. Eating an animal seemed absolutely outrageous.

Raw food and Yoga transformed me. I noticed a completely different person waking up every morning. A person who was for the first time, truly healthy: positive, energetic and absolutely delighted with life. That’s the way I woke up this morning.

Read my book. Whether or not you stop eating cooked food or start doing Yoga every day, I am sure it will – in some way improve your life. Enjoy the pages that follow. Adopt the practices in this book at a pace that feels right to you and see how you feel. And it is never too late, regardless of your age and current physical conditioning, because practicing what you will learn in this book is certain to make a difference in your life.