“Everyone knows that eating sugar, white flour, MSG, alcohol, and over-processed lifeless food eventually results in degenerative diseases like diabetes.”

So instead, I tend to focus on how people end up with those habits, and what it is about their psychological makeup that compels them to do so.

In honor of the newly released film, Simply Raw, in which 6 people set out to cure their diabetes in 30 days using only raw food, emotional processing, and light exercise, today I’m going to talk about food.

We are what we eat

The concept for the film isn’t complex: they brought six people together, all with type II or type I diabetes, and had them eat a diet of nothing but raw, organic living food for one month. The results are profound: by the end, everyone who followed the program had their diabetes reversed, including those with type I diabetes. (Click Here to see the Simply Raw trailer)

The challenge with raw food is that it’s so different from the way most people eat. (They include a raw food cookbook and other useful supportive info with the DVD)

To help anyone who wants to try out raw food, I’ll share with you what works for me when I want to go raw for a while. It’s not difficult, it just requires a willingness to be aware of how your body feels.

It’s a 3-5 day process, you need the following:

• A juicer. Preferably a twin gear low rpm juice extractor.
• A variety of organic vegetables, mushrooms, nuts and berries; especially ones you think you hate, or haven’t tried. Get a little of everything, and get more vegetables than everything else combined, because that’s what we want our body to like. I don’t recommend fruits,  because the benefit of cutting them out is that most people will see a reduction in insulin tolerance.
• If you have an herb garden, or a friend with an herb garden, get some fresh herbs as well.
• A bag of organic dark red beats.

After this, you should feel light and full of vitality!

Once you have your materials:

• Day 1-2: I start by eating vegan for a couple of days. It’s not necessary, but it helps me adjust.
• Until I started doing what I’m about to share, I honestly didn’t like the taste of vegetables at all. Now I eat vegetables more than anything else, not just because they’re healthy, but because I like them. So if I didn’t like the taste of vegetables, how did I start eating them? With a cleanse:
• Day 3: This is the hardest day… And probably the most important. It’s best to stay home all day for this one; your energy may be low, and you will go through detox. Start the day with a beat juice cleanse. It’s not complicated, just drink water, and fresh squeezed, organic, dark red beat juice all day long, and nothing else. Usually, it’s good to stop drinking the juice at lunch, because it gets a little intense. Doing this is like hitting the reset button on your digestive system. Right before bed, have 7 pine nuts or almonds– no more, or the efforts of the day were a waste.
• Day 4: This is when things start to get much, much better. Take out all of the different goodies that you have, and chop them into bite sized pieces and put them on a large platter. Don’t add anything to them, no salt, pepper, oil, dressing, nothing at all. Whenever you feel the desire for food, go to the platter, and start picking things up and sniffing them. When you like the way something smells, eat that. If you smell something you don’t like the smell of, have a little nibble of it, just to be sure. At the end of the day, notice what you did and didn’t like.
• You can also do the platter “on the go”. Just take the food with you in a container.
• Day 5: Eat more of the things you liked! If you’re feeling hungry, have more nuts or avocado. The oil in them will tell your body that you’re full, by triggering a hormone called leptin. For some people, day 5 never ends, they just switch to raw. For me, I eat the raw foods that I like for a couple of days, and then I usually start having vegan stir fries. After that, I just eat what ever I want, and I always discover that most of what I want to eat is vegetables! It’s a great practice to do at the beginning and end of winter, because for most people they will want more vegetables and less garbage during holiday meals. You could think of it as reprogramming your stomach!

In my next post, we dive deep into the psychology of disease and identity!