I was a chubby teenager. I was addicted to soda and candy. When I got sober at age 15, my journey to health and wellness began. It took me another 25 years before I was able to address my food addictions. Food addiction is the hardest type of mind and body recovery work.
My relationship with food was never quite right. I grew up with overweight family members who struggled with their diets and their happiness. Food issues were the prevailing addiction in my family of origin, beyond any other categories of dependencies. Getting on track and staying on track with food was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my life, but it’s been overwhelmingly satisfying and well worth the effort.
After years of hard exercise, binging and fasting, I found Thai Boxing. It became the first step in a successful series of efforts that I engaged in to greatly improve my physical and mental health and well-being.
In 2003, I discovered the plant-based diet, but I struggled to adhere to it. It wasn't until I had access to delicious plant-based foods such as amazing salads, juices, smoothies, and snacks, that the lifestyle became easier to tackle.
I opened Juice Press in 2010 to immerse myself in plant-based foods and fresh raw juices. I built myself the kitchen that I needed to make sure that I continually stayed on track. In the decade that followed, I voraciously consumed knowledge from my mentors regarding the diet and lifestyle that is optimal for attaining excellent long-term health and wellness.
The way I see it now is that everything that I eat is a sacrament of my life. Only the purest foods are welcomed into my body. Foods that do not cause any suffering to another will not cause suffering to me. Plant-based foods are pure foods that can sustain the body, and they have zero negative impact on my body chemistry.
I am not preaching a plant-based diet to you. I am preaching that there are fundamentals in our chemistry that we need to adhere to in order to reach our healthy lifestyle goals. We do have to reduce the amount of protein we consume, because we eat too much of it in our Western diet. In addition to that, there are a number of other “tenets” of healthier dietary practices. If you adhere to these tenets of a truly healthy diet, you will feel better in many ways and you will lose weight.
The first tenet of a healthy diet is to eliminate processed foods. Another tenet is to ensure that your primary sources of calories come from plants rather than from flesh foods. You should subsist mostly on fruits, vegetables, nuts, sprouts, and seeds to achieve optimal health. You can choose to add some animal-based foods into this plan, provided that you adhere to the 'no processed food’ rule.
The cleanest diet is the one that is the most connected to the planet. First and foremost, the plant-based diet is much more robust in terms of its ability to provide a wide range of nutrients and compounds. Scientific exploration is revealing many powerful things about certain compounds that are only available in fruits, vegetables, nuts, sprouts, and seeds.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need that much protein to maintain healthy muscle mass and bodily function. You are a carbohydrate-burning machine with a very long digestive system. Flesh that sits in your body becomes necrotic and festers quickly. Its festering causes all sorts of problems. In other words, you were designed to eat plants, not flesh foods.
Flesh foods are chicken, fish, pork, meat, eggs, and milk. These are secondary backup foods for different creatures, like humans and pigs, when plant sources are scarce.
If there was no plant food to be had, you could sustain life on these flesh foods provided that you had 50% of your digestive system surgically removed. It would also require that you have no stress in your life, that you never breathe pollution, that you are always drinking clean water, and that you catch everything you kill.
Again, I’m not trying to convert you into a vegan—I'm just telling you the truth.
Certainly, no one in the nutritional field expects people to live on supplements. You’ve got to get your nutrients from a food source. The flesh of an animal is not the cleanest nor the most optimal source for any nutrient, or any compound for that matter. Now, let’s talk about the plant kingdom.
Plants are the ultimate food for all animals because they are sourced directly from nature. Every creature gets its energy from nutrients and compounds indirectly photosynthesized from the sun. If an animal eats another animal, it gets the nutrients, secondhand, from the animal who got nutrients from eating plants. Those nutrients are less effective. Go directly to the source and you will take in more of those compounds. Go directly to the plant.
Plants want to be eaten in order to continue to proliferate and grow. The plants that do not want to be eaten tell us so with thorns, poisons, or a nasty taste.
A raw, plant-based diet can be proven as biologically perfect nutrition for the human body by strict scientific definition. The optimal diet is at least 70% from raw plant foods, including vegetables, fruits, nuts, sprouts, and seeds.
Because it might be difficult for many people to maintain a 100% raw diet, there is no need to take on an all-or-nothing mentality. Incorporating more raw, plant-based foods, and cutting back on stimulating flesh and processed foods will immediately improve a person’s chemistry.
On a primarily plant-based diet that excludes processed foods, it is still likely that you will lose weight, even if your caloric intake is higher than it would be on any restrictive diet.
Additionally, you will have a dramatic improvement in your overall chemistry. I have watched thousands make astonishing improvements after eating fruits and vegetables only for 90 days. There is nothing contentious about this statement: If a given nutrient is not available from the plant kingdom, the human body does not need it. Don’t believe it if an “expert” tells you otherwise.
All statements herein have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The products on this website were not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.