Although I’m wildly interested in science and the mechanics of nutrition, I also believe that—at the individual level—personal experience trumps theory. My diet is an ongoing n=1 experiment, based more on the results I achieve than on scientific rationale. So this isn’t a “diet I think is optimal” post; it’s a “diet that works for Denise right now” post.

The gist of my eating plan, which has been roughly the same for the past seven years:

Basically, I eat a sort of raw food, plant-based, paleo-ish, Weston-A-Price style fusion. The stuff I eat the most of (from the biggest proportion of my diet to the smallest):

• raw fruit
• raw vegetables
• seafood (oysters, mussels, clams, salmon, or tuna; the fish typically raw), a few times per week
• raw eggs, a few times per week
• coconut meat and coconut water
• fermented vegetables
• vegetable juice
• occasional organ meats (raw or lightly cooked; once or twice per month)
• seaweeds
• very rarely, root vegetables like sweet potato or jicama

That’s pretty much what I stick to when I’m home making food for myself. If I’m out to eat or at someone’s house, I’m more flexible about whether things are raw or cooked and will eat other meats, but I stick to the same basic food groups (meat/eggs, fruit, and vegetables).

At some point during my raw vegan daze, salt and spices lost their appeal, so I rarely add those things to food.

Why raw?

Although I believe at least some portion of raw foods are valuable in a person’s diet (not just fruits and vegetables, but also raw fats and lacto-fermented “living” foods), from a scientific standpoint, I have no reason to believe a 100% raw diet is superior to a well-planned mixed cooked/raw diet. I choose raw for myself based on personal experience and eight years of self-guinea-pigging: Compared to a cooked diet based on the same foods, a raw diet offers more physical and mental benefits (reduced need for sleep, strong desire to move and exercise, clearer eyes, better complexion, a steadier emotional keel, mental clarity,  overall feel-goodness, and other little perks that make the social hassles worth it).

I’m also kind of accident prone, so it’s probably for the best that I’m not near hot stovetops.

Supplements:

I’m a strong believer in getting nutrition from food rather than pills. That said, there are three things I take religiously and that I believe the majority of people can benefit from (whether vegan or omnivore): vitamin K2, vitamin D3, and cod liver oil. This is a particularly fantastic trio for anyone trying to recover from dental issues. (A few folks have asked which brand of K2 to use. I’ve had great success using Carlson Labs, and get the big bottle for the best value. Green Pasture also makes an awesome fermented cod liver oil. Decent vitamin D is easier to find, but make sure the brand uses D3 and not D2.)

Exercise:

I guess this doesn’t really qualify as diet, but a few people have asked and I don’t know where else to stick it. I engage in regular strength training and bodyweight exercises—usually at kiddie playgrounds, where I end up hijacking the monkeybars to do pull-ups. I also do yoga, some gymnastics, and (weather and geography permitting) outdoorsy things like hiking and mountain biking. I favor high intensity interval training (HIIT) over sustained cardio like running, but I do trail run sometimes during the summer. I also walk or bike at least a few miles every day because I don’t have a car. I figure I ought to be in good fighting shape in case PETA ever tracks down my address.

After a year of experimenting with varying amounts and types of raw dairy—including goat, sheep, cow, and buffalo—I finally accepted the fact that it was doing me more harm than good. I did feel physically stronger and my hair stopped shedding, but my face looked like an oil slick, I was breaking out nonstop, my digestion was crummy, I felt constantly bloated, and the congestion—oh, the congestion. I had to tote around wads of kleenex wherever I went.

I trimmed dairy out of my diet again; my complexion improved within days and any sign of congestion disappeared. Out of curiosity, I tested dairy one more time a few months later—a small amount of raw cheddar shredded on a salad—and wham, the congestion was back. I no longer buy any milk products, raw or otherwise.

I’ve spoken to a growing number of former raw vegans who now supplement their diets with dairy. And recently, it seems a few leaders in the raw community are doing the same—emerging from the woodwork amid the the boos and hisses of the crowd, asserting that raw dairy has bolstered their health.

Even though my experience wasn’t positive, I can understand why some people initially benefit from this food—especially when coming from a raw diet that’s consistently low on calories. Dairy is designed to nourish. It’s a concentrated energy source. It provides the building blocks for physical development, strength, and growth. And raw foodists who chronically undereat are going to be low on protein (more on this touchy subject later), making dairy particularly satisfying on a physiological level.

However, I also feel the benefits of raw dairy are overhyped. It’s not a miracle food, and not everyone will respond well to it. Like its pasteurized counterpart, raw milk contains opioid peptides—chemicals that bind to opioid receptors in your body, creating feelings of euphoria, helping you relax, and ultimately inducing a mild addiction. It’s the same stuff found in morphine. This addictive quality is great for young animals, since it ensures they’ll want to nurse frequently and thus receive plenty of nutrition. But dairy’s opioids can easily tamper with natural hunger signals in adults, making it woefully easy to overeat. Ever try to stop at just one nibble of cheese?

In the raw food community, we’re just starting to see raw dairy shed its “taboo” status and gain some publicized acceptance—at least among those who aren’t vegan for ethical reasons. After seeing some raw folks rave about dairy after consuming it for a period of weeks or months, I’m curious to see what happens in the long run—years down the road, when the potential problems of dairy have time to manifest. Maybe some people will continue thriving on it. Maybe others will experience mucus-related problems like sinus trouble, congestion, and respiratory issues. Maybe others yet will become bona fide cheese-a-holics like I was. Only time will tell.

Regardless, I encourage others to experiment for themselves before blindly trusting the experiences of anyone else. If you have a raw dairy experience to share, please leave a comment below or e-mail me; I’m very interested in hearing more “case studies” on this subject.

Gravitating away from high fat.

Even with dairy out of the equation, eating a raw fat-packed diet—full of flaxseed crackers, coconut meat and oil, avocados, almond butter, hempseed products, and salads dowsed in oil—wasn’t bringing the vibrancy and energy I’d experienced when I first went raw. The only time I felt like exercising was first thing in the morning before I ate, because as soon as I’d put food in my mouth, lethargy and fatigue would take reign.

At the time, I’d been influenced by several fruit-limiting raw authors, including Gabriel Cousens and Brian Clement. On message boards, other raw foodists were embracing low-sugar diets and warning about how fruit had made them too skinny, caused dental problems, fed their candida, and contributed to a laundry list of other health crises. Out of fear, my fruit consumption was limited to berries and an occasional green apple picked from my neighbor’s tree (usually without his permission—shhh). Nothing “high glycemic,” so to speak. I clung to the belief that sugar is sugar is sugar.

Somewhere near the end of 2004, I started feeling disillusioned with raw food and my ceaseless lack of energy. My mini-library of raw books was more disappointing than helpful; everything I read seemed contradictory, unscientific, speculative, dogmatic, or just plain illogical. Online wasn’t much better: I was witnessing people getting banned en masse from raw food forums for questioning the diet or talking about animal products; censorship was rife; folks who were struggling often had their posts deleted instead of receiving honest answers.

It was then that I realized a scary reality. I was responsible for my own health. No one else knew my body. No one else had the answers. No one else had the “truth.”

In desperation, I went into a self-inflicted Raw Food Hermit Phase. I took an extended hiatus—five years, it became—from raw communities, both online and in person, in order to focus on conducting my own research and realigning with my personal intuition. It was time to figure out my own path instead of letting myself become swayed by the beliefs of others.

Without fear-mongering voices influencing my diet, I quickly gravitated back to a cuisine high in fruit. I wanted nothing but simple or mono-style meals. I also started experimenting with non-dairy raw animal products, including egg yolks, fish, and—just once—raw beef. I found that egg yolks and fish digested beautifully for me and tasted good, although the beef did not. A few attempts at eating steamed vegetables resulted in nausea and hot flashes (I thought I was too young for that!). I cut out salt completely; food flavors emerged with greater depth and intensity as a result. I upped my greens intake. I spontaneously moved away from so many raw fats, finding that meals of fruit gave me more energy.

Pretty soon, I formed on personally-tailored diet that finally had me looking and feeling healthier and more energetic than ever before.

I think the bitter warring has died down in recent years, but back in time (2003-ish), fruit versus fat was the most vicious raw debate around. You were either in the fruit camp or the fat camp (sometimes called the “green camp”), never in any sort of grey zone between. For the sugar-avoiders, fruit was a hybrid, unnatural dietary monster; for the fat-avoiders, oils and other raw lipids were the culprits behind candida, deficiency, and every other health woe imaginable.

I jumped the fruit ship and landed in a sea of coconut butter.

In my search for the “right” raw diet, I started reading up on low-sugar approaches to raw. “High greens” sounded more appealing than “high fat,” but I found it impossible to slay my hunger without resorting to more calorie-dense sources—either fruit or fat. I loaded up on avocados and raw almond butter and fresh coconut meat.

I wasn’t a big fan of oils, but after reading The Coconut Oil Miracle by Bruce Fife, I became convinced of the health-enhancing virtues of this delicious-smelling oil. It quickly became a staple in my diet. And by staple, I mean I was eating probably 8 – 10 tablespoons a day. No joke.

At some point during this phase, I started talking privately with a girl my age who had attempted a fruitarian diet, felt her health suffering, and adopted a diet espoused by the Weston A. Price Foundation. If you aren’t familiar with Weston A. Price, he was a dentist who traveled the world in the early 20th century, examining the health and dental development of “primitive” civilizations untouched by Western culture and diet. He found, unequivocally, that peoples eating traditional diets—whole, unprocessed foods, fermented products, raw animal foods, and specially-prepared grains—had beautiful and flawless facial development, whereas cultures infiltrated by processed and refined foods suffered from crowded dental arches and cavities. He published his findings in the book Nutrition and Physical Generation, which you can read online for free:

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

I think this is a wonderful book—especially the photos—that clearly shows how much a Western diet can degrade your health. However, the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) has taken the information in this book one step further, and uses Price’s work to validate a diet high in raw dairy, saturated fat, animal products, and other items considered “taboo” by mainstream nutrition. Although I now see many holes in the Foundation’s claims (along with some still-sparkling gems of wisdom), back then, I became thoroughly convinced that they were infallible.

Baaa! I'm udderly delicious.

Enter: raw dairy phase.

Having been a vegetarian since age 7, I wasn’t keen on going back to meat like the WAPF advised, but dairy was something I could do. After soaking up books and articles and websites delineating the benefits of raw—not pasteurized or homogenized—dairy, I started thinking my earlier reactions to milk products were due to eating cooked dairy. Perhaps I was just reacting to the altered proteins and denatured lactase enzymes in pasteurized milk. After all, if cooking plant matter creates undesirable compounds, wouldn’t heating dairy do the same?

The more I researched, the more I became convinced that raw goat dairy, in particular, was the best way to go. Due to its smaller-sized fat globules, goat dairy is tolerated by some people who react adversely to cow dairy. It has a slightly more similar structure to human milk.

I never cared for the taste of milk as a beverage, but I sure had loved cheese for most of my life. So I hopped over to the local health food store and bought a giant chunk of raw goat cheddar.

I took one bite and then inhaled half the block. Having been salt-free and low fat for some time, the rich flavor and saltiness was almost drug-like in its potency.

My taste buds were happy, but the rest of my body was not. I spent the night hacking and coughing and battling some gnarly post-nasal drip. Although the congestion wasn’t quite as bad as regular cow dairy used to give me, it was still there and it was still a nuisance.

Maybe most logical people would have decided, after that first day of unpleasantness, to nix the goat dairy. Not me. The mind is a powerful force, and I had thoroughly convinced myself—from the literature and anecdotes I had read—that raw dairy contained something magically healing, something vital, something necessary for health. For the next year or so, I consumed up to half my daily calories from raw goat dairy products such as cheese, unpasteurized yogurt, and a special fermented beverage called “probiogurt” I ordered bulk from a farm in Texas.

In the beginning, I gleaned the bulk of my raw information from Doug Graham’s message board on Vegsource.com. I am a “lazy in the kitchen” type person, so the simplicity of the “811″ eating style—lots of fruit, minimal fat, and no gourmet recipes or superfoods—seemed enormously appealing. I read briefly about other raw dietary approaches, but they all seem too complicated and supplement-heavy.

So, still living under my parents’ roof, I loaded up on fruit and started on my merry raw way. I was already accustomed to eating a large salad most nights for dinner and snacking on loads of fruit, so the transition was fairly painless—the toughest part was giving up salty, crunchy items like chips. Prior to going deliberately raw, I was probably averaging 60% raw per day, simply because I was allergic to nearly everything else.

About a week after eating 100% raw, I ate some rye bread with roasted almond butter for breakfast instead of my usual fruit. It sat in my stomach like a brick. The drop in energy was immediate and horrible. It was almost a full year before I touched any cooked food again.

Epic Failure #1: high-fruit undereating.

My first year as a fruity raw girl was a mixed bag. I’d managed to graduate high school two years early (more due to stubborn determination than to genius-ness), and thanks to a flexible college schedule, I could go home every day for lunch and avoid gobsmacked stares as I inhaled huge meals of fruit. I embraced mono meals, learned about food combining, and reveled in the explosive, mind-boggling energy I suddenly had. For the first time in life, I wanted to move and run and jump and exercise. I needed less sleep and bounced out of bed each morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The depression I’d always ascribed to teenagehood was completely and utterly gone. Life was as sweet and juicy as my fruit.

There was just one problem. Even though I was eating even more calories raw than I had been on a cooked diet, I was shedding weight like crazy. Not in a good way. At one point, I got down to less than 95 pounds on a 5’5″ frame. I’m sure everyone thought I was anorexic. I wasn’t happy looking like Skeletor, but I felt so good that I didn’t care too much.

Slowly but surely, other unpleasantries started cropping up: hair loss, lightheadedness, insomnia, hoards of dental cavities and gum recession. I stopped feeling quite as energetic as I had in the beginning. I became incredibly spacey and absent-minded—I left my purse in classrooms on multiple occasions, I lost at least three different jackets on the bus, I misplaced my keys, and concentrating on schoolwork felt nearly impossible. Brain-fog mania!

After returning from a family vacation that year, my mom hauled me off to the doc.

I wound up with a naturopath who was more knowledgeable about nutrition than most physicians, but not too keen on raw—she was trained in Chinese Medicine, which is heavily pro-cooking. A blood test revealed a few deficiencies: B12, iron, and potassium—the latter of which made no sense at the time (hello, bananas!). The B12 levels were so low, in fact, that the doctor said I was probably facing neurological damage.

Indeed, I was not eating nearly enough, even though it seemed like so much. Confronted by worried family and persuaded by anti-fruit folks on other message boards, I ditched the high-fruit diet and looked elsewhere for answers.

I spent my middle and high school years in mediocre health. The wheat allergy drama was over, but I was still getting sick at least once a month—especially with sinus problems and chronic congestion. At some point during my freshman year of high school, my parents pointed out that I’d start clearing my throat constantly (and probably annoyingly) every time I ate yogurt. After lamenting over my much-loved milk products, I snipped dairy out of my diet. Boom! No more sniffles.

Then, in the summer of my 15th year on earth, I ran into Mystery Health Problem Number Two. It happened one night when my grandparents were visiting from the Midwest. We ordered Chinese takeout, and I got my usual: stir-fried veggies with fried tofu blocks.

About an hour after eating, while we were all lounging in the living room watching the movie “Contact,” I suddenly got dizzy and felt like I couldn’t breathe. I stumbled into the other room and opened the front door, desperate for fresh air. Didn’t help. I started tingling all over and feeling like I was going to pass out.

This lasted for a month straight.

To this day, I don’t know what the diddly was wrong with me. Weird case of food poisoning? Maybe. Psychosomatic illness? Maybe. Prolonged anxiety attack? Maybe. Whatever it was, I spent a month barely eating, glued to the couch, nearly blacking out every time I stood up. It got so intense one evening that I went to the ER. They found nothing wrong.

Eventually, I regained some sense of normalcy—just in time for school to start. The dizziness went away, but I vowed never to eat Chinese food again; I somehow felt it was responsible for the experience.

Shortly after this, my interest in nutrition surged through the roof. I can’t remember exactly why. I felt fragile, precarious, and desperate for a better way of eating. As I was already fairly slender, I didn’t have an interest in weight loss so much as health improvement.

And that’s when I found…

Raw.

Read, peruse, or skip over this at your leisure.

The Early Years

 Growing up, I wasn’t exactly a robust kid. I was a colicky baby, an ear-infection-prone infant, and a chronically sick elementary schooler who racked up a hefty stack of absences. My immune system was rubbish. I was never diagnosed with asthma, but I always had difficulty breathing when I tried to run or exercise vigorously—something I later pinned down to dairy. I dreaded PE with every fiber of my little-girl being.

At age 7, I stopped eating meat. It wasn’t for ethical or health reasons; the taste and texture simply became repulsive to me.

When I was 11, my health hit rock bottom. I caught what I thought was a nasty case of the flu—except it lasted for a year straight. For months on end, I felt stuck in a half-awake lethargic daze, massively congested, sore-throated, losing frightening amounts of weight, hauling around a box of Kleenex, unable to sleep because I couldn’t breathe when I laid down. In pictures—which I may try to post eventually—I looked like walking death: dark circles under my eyes, gaunt, stringy-haired, sleepy, barely living.

I remember almost nothing about 5th grade except being shuttled from doctor to doctor, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I visited over a dozen. Each one was baffled. They all tried their favorite Western medicine remedies. A few rounds of antibiotics, daily Claritin pills, medication galore—none of it helped. They pricked my arm to test for allergies; nada. They put me under the knife and took out my adenoids; no help.

Somewhere around the eight month point, I went to an ear, nose, and throat specialist who said, “You must just have a cold that won’t go away.” Really, doc? An eight-month cold? 

Finally, my mother—who I imagine was in as much pain from the whole ordeal as I was—took me to a naturopathic doctor, a warm and intuitive woman working at a clinic in Seattle. This doctor took one look at me and said “food allergy”—something no other doctor had surmised.

An elimination diet pinpointed the culprit: wheat. I was severely, doubtlessly allergic to wheat. Within weeks of avoiding the bread, pasta, crackers, pretzels, and cookies I’d once lived on, I felt completely back to normal and could breathe easily for the first time in a year.

From that moment on, the diet/health connection was permanently fused into my consciousness.