Full Circle

I started 80/10/10 about a month or so ago. Actually, when I first began the raw vegan path, it was a lot closer to that philosophy than what it later became. In the early 1980’s, having been influenced by the books, Fit for Life and Gandhi’s Autobiography, my idea of the raw diet was fruitarianism.

Actually, going back even before that, when I was 9 years old, I told my mother that I was going to stop eating junk and just eat fruit.

After reading Fit for Life and Gandhi’s Autobiography, I had read Viktoras Kulvinskas and then later, Arnold Ehret. I was still convinced that fruit was the purest of all foods, but by the time that I started being influenced by Ehret, I had already started to eat more green leaves after reading The Essene Gospel of Peace Book I.

It wasn’t until around 2004 when I actually realized that there even was a “raw food movement” that I started to allow myself to become corrupted. It was then that I read Sunfood Diet Success System by David Wolfe. I must say that after I read the part where Wolfe condoned the eating of 4 or 5 avocados in a day I nearly threw the book out. I should have thrown it out.

Then I’d heard so much about Gabriel Cousens. I thought that his ideas about eating fruit were ludicrous. I couldn’t imagine that there could be any problem with fruit whatsoever, considering my absolute success with it as long as it was eaten correctly, meaning alone and certainly not for dessert.

Some months after reading David Wolfe’s book, I happened to discover gourmet raw vegan cuisine. How I could ever have thought that this might be better than eating a baked potato or steamed vegetables, I just don’t know because this stuff digested like a brick! This was on the heals of mastering Arnold Ehret’s mucousless diet as outlined his book where my bowel movements were clean and easy requiring little or no toilet paper. Can’t say the same in the very least for gourmet raw or even avocados for that matter which our friend David was condoning the extreme indulgence of, how absolutely clogging these things are, and very high in fat.

Be that as it may, I started to allow myself to become indoctrinated into this raw cult having completely rejected that mentality before and began to take on the same foolish philosophy that “if it is raw, it is OK” even though I knew it to be wrong! It’s amazing what conditioning can do. Even in my vegan days, when I did eat a small percentage of cooked food, I never allowed the philosophy that if it was vegan it was OK because it simply is not. The only cooked food that I was eating in those days was steamed or baked vegetables and maybe on a rare occasion, some millet.

That, coupled with the fact that I started to give Wolfe and Cousens the benefit of the doubt, I actually allowed myself to be influenced by these people, even though my knowledge, wisdom and experience warned me against that in the beginning!

However, having said all that, I am very happy to say that thanks to Doug Graham and his book, 80/10/10, I have come full circle and have begun to eat a diet largely of fresh fruit again. It’s not that this practice or philosophy is really anything new having adopted such a diet in the past and having read Natural Hygiene books as far back as the early 1990’s. But now, after having had difficult experience with some of the other “raw” paths, it means a lot more now than it has ever done.

It certainly is good to come back home!