As I am dealing with rather a lot of change at the moment, physically and mentally, I decided to take a quick look around the raw foodies on youtube today.
The last time I bothered to look was some years ago, around the time that Patenaude and Gianni were telling everyone that none of the ‘leaders’ were actually raw. This was when FullyRawChristina (apologies if the name is wrong) seemed to be becoming immensely popular.
I stopped looking at any raw food material around 2012 or so, due to my failure to communicate with Wolfe about the original book. It was just too depressing. Now I am looking at videos that are even more depressing, for a different reason. Fresh faced young things complaining that they were ‘sold’ an impossible lifestyle, that they expected all their problems to be solved with positive thinking, that they felt guilty about having feelings at all, that their periods stopped etc etc.
Even Freelea is punting a non-raw diet. Who decided that it all had to be so defined?
Liferegenerator seems to have moved from his stance on 801010 to more of a Monarch-style rawness. He also seems to be making some rather Wolfe like videos on keeping his hair, whilst losing it.
If I was a nastier person, I would laugh at this, but really I have never seen so many people cut off their noses at once.
From the standpoint of somebody who had always had problems with food and positivity generally (see previous post on positive thinking) a few things were obvious the minute I even considered being raw.
- an attitude of gratitude and feeling positive every day ain’t gonna happen. This is a sales pitch mentality, originally created before any of us were born by a vitamin salesman who trained Jim Rohn. Being healthy does not solve all or even any of your other problems. It did not help that Mr Charisma, David Wolfe, did not like emotional confrontation, and a lot of people got suckered into that, including me very briefly. After that moment, I confronted until I was blue in the face, to no avail.
- 100% raw, whilst I gave it a damn good try, was not sustainable long term because you spend most of your day thinking about, preparing or finding the correct food. It was also quite expensive in some cases.
- Ignoring your B12 requirement is insanity. (801010)
- Inserting the word vegan into anything makes it a niche product, and cuts your audience by about 80%.
The strengths of the raw ‘culture’ on the other hand were as follows:
- adopting a fairly anti-social lifestyle in terms of food altered adoptee’s personal relationships, in terms of prioritising themselves over whatever their former friends were doing.
- feeling better meant making slightly better decisions short term.
- looking good is always nice.
- learning to take partial advice is supposed to make you more capable of leadership and less inclined to follow ‘leaders’ in the first place. It is not supposed to turn you into a Patenaude-like whiner.
As I said many years ago about the 801010 Wolfe-haters back then (who were far less embittered than the more recent ones that contacted me) You take up the information that you need and you explore further. You do not cling to every mistake and bit of bad behaviour in order to discredit both them and yourself for listening in the first place. It is a bit like considering suicide. Utterly pointless and self-defeating.
As the scene seems to have kind of imploded, perhaps now is the time for some sense to enter the world of raw food. The fact is that 100% was never going to work for everyone. On a macrobiotic basis alone, expecting people from all over the world to eat the same thing made no sense at all. Cold countries tend to have been meat eating, and tropical countries less so for a start. There are ways around this if you are really determined, but the learning curve was too high for most people. Arguing over which diet was best did not help. I believe I mentioned this several years ago.
From a personal perspective, my hop, skip and jump into raw food has not only saved my life, but also my 90 year old mother’s, simply because it is a very clean way of setting a base for natural medicine. My learning curve was not as unassailable as most people’s, because of my father and my intense scrutiny of anything I do, but even I double check everything. I certainly don’t fall hook, line and sinker behind any so called leader, no matter what my personal feelings may or may not be. We are not vegan or even vegetarian, but the fact is that raw foodism comprises 90% of our diet for very good health reasons.
If anyone in the raw food line of work had any sense, they would restart their thinking process along the lines of actual nutrition. The WHO say that 9-15 portions of fruit and vegetables should be the basis for anyone’s diet, not five as people are told. If you start from there, you can create a much more stable basis for your raw foodism argument. Why arsing about is necessary instead of actually helping people I do not know. Nobody cares if Freelee hates Durianriders. Nobody. Get your acts together.
https://youtu.be/fQWkitvfncc