Now that April has come and gone and the 30 day raw food challenge is over, it’s time for my final report.

Overview

For the entire month of April I ate only raw food. This included fresh raw produce, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and herbs. None of these foods were heated since heating food above 115F (46C) begins to destroy important nutrients and enzymes contained in whole raw foods.

For 30 days I planned not to consume:

• Meat
• Dairy
• Sugar
• Anything cooked
• Anything processed
• Drugs & alcohol, with the exception of pot, including prescriptions, caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, and anything else

The idea was to do a 30 day natural detoxification and test a new style of living. When I began the experiment I was a regular omnivore, eating whatever looked good at the time. I thought it would be a good way to test my self discipline and to encourage others to adopt a more healthy lifestyle, leading by example.

Many raw foodists proudly proclaim that the raw food diet is the healthiest most energizing diet there is. Many of them also claim to be experiencing a state of nearly constant euphoria. I wanted to put these claims to the test and find out for myself what all the hype was about.

You can find a list of the daily posts I made through this trial at the bottom of this post. Some of the posts include pictures of my meals and other details not included in this final report.

The Good… Increased energy, clarity, and positivity

The biggest thing I noticed about this diet was the increase in energy, mental clarity, and overall positive vibes. After the initial detox (which I talk about further down the page) the rest of the month went really great. I had more energy than usual and really started to learn which foods provide which kind of energy.

Since raw foods are the most clean burning fuel for the human body it should come as no surprise that I experienced a boost in energy when I started consuming a lot more of them. A lot of people thought I would be tired, weak, and lacking in energy during this trial. I’m glad to report that they were all wrong. Dead wrong. The raw food diet provides an abundance of energy as long as you keep supplying a steady source (ie. fruit). There was only 1 or 2 days where I felt as tired as I would normally feel on an average day before going raw. Throughout the rest of the trial I felt more either as energetic or more energetic than I did on the ’Standard American Diet’ (SAD).

After adjusting to the diet I started noticing that I had more mental clarity than before. I could focus more intently on things and concentrate better. I got a lot more things done in April than usual, I even wrote extra articles to be posted this month after I’m done writing about my journey into the world of raw foodism. It’s become clear to me why many of the prominent raw foodists adhere to this lifestyle – because it’s a highly effective way to live! You can get far more done in a day when you’re able to concentrate on tasks with a clear and focused mind running on ‘clean burning’ raw foods for fuel.

I now know why so many raw foodists are such successful people. Not only can they get more done because they have more mental clarity but they can use the law of attraction more effectively too. The mental states you can go into after going raw are perfect for intention manifestation. If you are experimenting with the law of attraction (also known as The Secret, and Intention Manifestation) I recommend you try going raw for a while. Take note of any increase in successful manifestations, you might surprise yourself. I’d be willing to bet that you will see more of your intentions coming to fruition than ever before. I sure did!

A wonderful feeling of positivity has taken over my being since going raw. I feel inspired like never before and find myself happy for no reason! This is something really new to me. I’ve honestly never been happier! This is the most important benefit I have noticed about the raw food diet. I wouldn’t go as far to say it’s ‘constant euphoria’ but it certainly is a great way to feel. When you wake up 2 hours before your alarm feeling energized and ready to start the day on the right foot (I had a Freudian slip when typing that.. I wrote ‘food’ instead of ‘foot’) it’s a really great feeling.

Another good thing about the raw food diet was getting to eat a lot. Basically you can eat as much as you want, and you want to eat a lot. You don’t get a whole lot of calories on this diet even if you eat several pounds of fruit. Eating several pounds of fruit is really awesome sometimes, but it can get a little excessive when you’re doing it for 30 days straight. Sometimes it feels like you are constantly eating and never full, but you get used to it. It’s a different kind of ‘full’ on a diet like this. It isn’t nearly as heavy and the full feeling doesn’t last as long as it does when you eat cooked foods.

The Bad… Expensive, boring, and time consuming

The raw food diet isn’t all butterflies and rainbows, it’s got some downsides too. It’s expensive to eat only fresh produce all of the time. The prices will vary according to the time of year and your geographical location but no matter where you are or what month it is it’s still going to be an expensive diet to follow.

I saved all of my receipts from April to track exactly how much I spent on food during the trial.

Total spent on food in 30 days = $757.73

That total does not include any supplements I was taking (chlorella, vitamin D, EnerHealth Botanicals’ green energy superfood, EnerHealth coconut milk powder).

According to a recent report in the local newspaper, a family of 4 eating a “healthy balanced diet” spends about $200 a week or $50 per person, per week. I don’t know what kind of “healthy balanced diet” they’re talking about, but I’m eating the equivalent of about 4 healthy people according to that report. I don’t feel like 4 healthy people, just one super healthy one.

Around midway into the trial I started to get really bored with raw foods. A good example of what I’m talking about can be found here -> Raw Food Diet, Day 15: The breakfast of (boring) champions.

Sometimes it would start to feel like a chore to eat so much food. Chewing all that raw food seemed to take too long and sometimes it didn’t seem to taste very good. When I started the trial I loved all the raw food, stuff I hadn’t been eating a whole lot of, but after eating it for 2 weeks straight it started to all taste the same to me. Because you have to eat so much food to get your calories, proteins, and fats, it seemed even worse than it was.

There are plenty of ways to spice up a raw food diet and keep it interesting but most of them take time, effort, and expensive equipment. I don’t have a food processor, a juicer, or a dehydrator, and all I had for a blender was a magic bullet. Don’t ever buy a magic bullet, they suck.

To make different tasty meals every day would take a lot of time and effort. It’s a lot of fruit and veggies to wash, chop, mix, and eat. It wouldn’t be so bad if you had someone to prepare the food for you but I don’t have that luxury and had to do it all myself. I opted for a more simple approach at the cost of being bored with my meals.

It also takes a lot of time doing groceries. I had to go to the grocery store every 2-3 days to eat fresh raw food all the time. The extra trips and time spent in the produce section add up to a lot of time over the course of a month and that’s time you don’t get back. You can make up for it in productivity though, thanks to the higher levels of mental clarity and focus that I mentioned above.

The Ugly… Detoxing, cheating, and pooping

The detox can’t really be considered a bad thing since it really does a body good, but it’s definitely ugly. That’s why I put it under this heading. Honestly, I expected a much worse detox process than I experienced, but there were still a few days that were pretty rough. Day 2 and Day 10 come to mind. I think a big factor in why I didn’t get more severe detox symptoms was that I had been taking chlorella and other superfoods for several months before going raw. Superfoods are great detoxifiers and I think that a lot of my detox had already happened in the months prior to the experiment.

Day 2 I was just getting going on the raw foods and my body was still adjusting to the change. I woke up that day really tired and groggy. I felt nauseous and bloated for almost the whole day. I had a tickle in my throat and a runny nose. I was mentally foggy and didn’t feel like I was ‘all there’. I also had intense cravings for all sorts of stuff. I almost called off the entire experiment on day 2 because of the way I felt, but I received some encouragement from my friend the Mdot Movie Man who checked in with me to see how the diet was going so far. I decided to pull through and I’m really glad I did.

Day 10 was by far the worst of all 30 days. I had intense periods of nausea that caused me to barf. This happened 4 times when I was trying to sleep between days 9 and 10. The nausea came on really quick and almost instantly I had to run to hug the porcelain princess. I barely made it to her in time a couple times. The nausea lasted almost the entire day. I could hardly stomach any food and felt weak for the majority of the day because of it.

Through the first 2 weeks I experienced a few milder detox side effects like dry cracking skin on my hands in the first week. It went away after putting some moisturizing cream on them for a couple days and didn’t return. I also noticed that most of the time I felt cooler than usual. Not really cold like I had the chills or anything, but a degree or two cooler than normal. As if I could put on a sweater or something. I also would go through brief phases where my upper body would get really warm to the point that I would almost break into a sweat, but I never did. These hot flashes would last only a few minutes and then would subside. It was strange but bearable.

My teeth started to feel weird during the first week and this lasted into the 3rd week of the trial. I don’t really know how to explain the feeling but they felt like they had some sort of dry coating or something. Brushing them instantly cured this problem so it was basically a non-issue. I haven’t experienced that strange sensation again since sometime in the 3rd week of the experiment.

There were a few days at the beginning of the trial where I experienced some mental fog. It was a weird kind of mental fog where I felt clear headed but at the same time like I was somewhat detached from the physical world. I was there, but I wasn’t really paying much attention. People would talk to me and I would listen but it would kind of just go in one ear and out the other. This only happened at the beginning of the trial and didn’t happen very often.

I also had a few mild headaches and bad breath for a few days. Neither of these side effects lasted very long at all, they are almost not even worth mentioning.

Some days I had some really strong cravings for foods I could not have. Most days I experienced hardly any cravings at all. On Day 15 I succumbed to the cravings and cheated on the diet. I was hungry and there was not much around for decent food and long story short, I ended up eating a burger. The burger made me really tired and a little while after eating it I ended up going to bed for several hours and wasting most of my day sleeping while the burger was digesting. I learned a lot from eating that burger. The body uses a lot of energy digesting meats, dairy, and processed foods like that. I felt drained.

If you’re going to do a 30 days raw food challenge and you’re coming off of a Standard American Diet (SAD) or even a healthy omnivore diet and you think you may end up caving to cravings like I did, you may be wise to set yourself a day to cheat ahead of time. This could help encourage you to make it to your cheat day instead of ruining the whole experiment. It can also break up your month, making it seem easier to get to the end after the cheat day. I’m sure doing this messes up the detox process a bit but it’s better than ruining the entire trial!

And now for the really ugly part. If you’re easily grossed out you might want to skip the next paragraph. It’s about poop.

While eating raw I saw a marked increase in urination and defecation. I went number one anywhere from 5-15 times a day and number two 3-7 times a day. My stools were often dark colored for the first week or two, but mostly they were light in color, ‘fluffy’, odorless, and required very little wiping. Classic ghost poops. A major change from the usual omnivore/SAD turds that I was used to. I would eat some food and shortly after it would come out the other end. Fruit and veggies don’t take long to digest at all, that’s why you should always eat fruit first before eating a cooked meal if you’re going to eat them both. That way the cooked food/meat doesn’t hold up the fruit and veggies from digesting for several hours or even days.

Getting enough protein

For the majority of the 30 days I relied on hemp seeds, spinach, broccoli, chlorella, and spirulina for protein. All of these foods are high in protein, especially the hemp seeds. I added 55g of hemp seeds to almost every salad I made for the last 3 weeks of the trial. Hemp seeds are a very good source for protein and omega’s. They contain all sorts of good stuff and are considered to be one of the healthiest things a person can eat. They taste like sunflower seeds but a bit oilier. You can add them to anything. Since my Vitamix arrived I have been adding them to smoothies and you can’t even tell they’re in there.

Almost everyone who I talked to about this diet has asked where I was planning to get my protein. A lot of people seem to be unaware that you can easily get enough high quality and easily digestible proteins from plants. It’s not hard to get enough protein, only noobs get protein deficiencies.

Natural weight loss with raw foods

I did not do the 30 days raw to lose weight but I went into it knowing that I would lose some. I said in one of the first posts that I expected to lose about 10 pounds. I started at 168lbs.

I started losing weight almost immediately even though I was eating almost constantly. I got down to 155lbs fairly quickly and I ended up staying around that for nearly a week. But in the last days of the trial I weighed in at 151lbs for a total loss of 17lbs lost in 30 days.

I didn’t do anything else any different during these 30 days to lose weight other than change the diet. I didn’t do any more exercising or join any gyms or anything like that to lose extra weight. The only significant change I made in April was dietary.

It’s interesting to note that after returning to cooked food I lost another pound and am currently at 150lbs at the time of writing this.

Environmental impact

If I had a compost bin – I’ll be getting one soon – I would have hardly had any garbage during this trial. You can buy most produce without any plastic bags now that they have all those “go green” bags at all the grocery stores to carry your groceries home in for a dollar that they will replace when they wear out for free. I reused the plastic bags that I did have to use to take food to work and reused them until they wore out.

A lot of vegans talk about the environmental impact of their diet vs. a meat diet. I don’t know a whole lot about that but I suppose it could be true. It takes a lot of land, water, farm space, attention, manpower, and fuel to get those chubby animals big enough for you to eat them.

How many pounds of grain/veggies/plant matter does it take for you to get full on a pound of beef? How many pounds of grain/veggies/plant matter does it take for you to get full on grain, veggies, and plant matter?

Might as well go straight to the source, no?

Feedback and encouragement

At the start of the trial most people thought I was crazy. Some people thought I was going to die, or that they would die if they tried it. I don’t think most people took me seriously when I first started talking about it, but after I got a couple weeks in their comments started to be more encouraging and supportive. The further into the trial I got the more supportive people were. Now that the trial is over I think the support level is at its highest.

Several people sent me recipes and suggestions and offered advice to me. Thank you to everyone who did, some of your ideas were great!

Many people have told me they have been inspired to do a 30 day raw food detox of their own. Some have already started! Good luck to everyone who tries it. If I can do it, you can too. Several other people told me they are going to spend more time in the produce section after seeing what I was eating. So this trial not only kickstarted me into a healthier lifestyle, but it also effected people around me and encouraged them to make healthier choices as well! Not to mention all the people reading this blog now and in the time to come. I’m sure hundreds of thousands of people could be inspired by these posts someday.

What I would do differently

If I were doing the 30 days over again I would definitely make sure I had more appliances suited for the raw food lifestyle. Having the appropriate appliances would make the raw food thing a lot easier and more interesting. A dehydrator is a raw foodists best friend, so is a Vitamix and a juicer. I didn’t have any of those for the trial so it made for a bit more difficult experiment. All I had for a blender during the 30 days raw food challenge was a Magic Bullet and I hate it. Don’t buy one, they suck. It worked for a bit, but it was more of a pain in the ass than anything so I pretty much just quit using it. I still use the cups though, at least they are handy. I ordered a Vitamix near the end of the trial and it arrived yesterday. I’ve been testing it out now and I’ll probably put up a review of the thing in a week or two. So far I love it!

I would probably eat more hemp seeds in the morning in green smoothies if I did the trial over again. It would be a great way to kick off the day with a bunch of quick energy and protein.

I would also learn more recipes and practice making raw food dishes before getting started to avoid running out of ideas so quickly. Eating the foods whole by themselves is not fun for very long. Knowing how to make a few deadly raw vegan dishes beforehand would have made it a lot easier.

I’d scope out some places to get raw food at around the area too incase of a raw food shortage or social gathering possibly ruining the 30 day trial. It’s really hard not to cheat sometimes when you don’t have any options for a raw meal. Locate some places that will make you raw dishes if you politely explain to them what you mean when you say that you are a raw foodist for 30 days and it will make it a lot easier for you to go out with friends and do things while doing a raw food detox.

What I learned

I learned a lot of things during the last 30 days. In short I learned the difference between cooked food and not cooked, and animal products and fresh fruit and veggies.

Before starting this diet I had never really made any raw dishes before. I didn’t know how to make a raw dip without any dairy products. I didn’t know that nuts could be used in dips and dressings the way raw foodists use them. That might sound silly to some of you vegans out there but I honestly had no idea.

I tried a lot of new foods during the 30 day raw food experiment. I hadn’t ever used avocados or made guacamole at all. I tried some new fruit that I hadn’t heard of before too. I had never eaten kale or much spinach before this trial either. I learned to incorporate new foods into my diet. I think that’s another really important benefit of doing a trial like this, learning to eat foods that you’ve never tried before is always a good thing when you’re talking about fresh plant foods.

I learned how different foods give different energy at different speeds and how the food actually digests. I also learned a lot of important information about different fruits and veggies, mostly in what nutrients they contain and how much protein, etc.

I found out that meat and processed foods actually seem to take away energy and make you tired. No wonder people who eat fast food all the time never want to do anything and get fat!

I also learned how to get rid of man boobs. Commonly known as moobs.

Most of all, I learned what it’s like to be a raw foodist for 30 days. I never tried veganism or even vegetarianism before so jumping straight to raw was a steep learning curve for me but it was a fun ride. I learned something new every day for sure, often many, many new things every day.

Returning to cooked foods

I expected to feel sick and have an upset stomach when I returned to cooked food, specifically meats, but to my surprise it hasn’t been so bad. One day I had heart burn briefly for about 20 minutes and then it went away when I ate some fruit later on. I used to get heart burn all the time and I didn’t get any heart burn at all while doing the 30 day trial. I really liked that perk too.

Since that one brief bout with heart burn I haven’t had any more problems. Even eating a bunch of greasy pizza right at the end of the diet didn’t make me feel too bad. I did find the first few slices of pizza to be really hot in my mouth. I hadn’t had anything even warm for a month so the warm sensation was almost new again.

I still like coffee. It’s great to be able to drink it again. It seems weird to drink hot drinks though. Other than coffee and fruit juice I have no cravings to drink anything other than water most of the time.

I don’t think I am even going to drink pop anymore at all. I haven’t really liked it for a while but I can’t even imagine drinking it now. yuck! The taste of processed or sweet foods is really weird to me now. I don’t really like the idea of sugary or processed junk anymore. I hope that effect lasts because I know that stuff isn’t any good and there’s no good reason to want to eat it anyway.

Final thoughts and conclusion

The raw food detox is a natural and gentle way to detoxify the body. It uses mother nature, so you can’t go wrong! Doing a raw food detox begins to form healthier lifestyle habits after the detox is done. That’s what I think is the best part of doing a 30 day raw food detox. After 30 days of eating only raw food you start to get in the habit of looking for fruit or veggies when you are hungry or have the munchies instead of eating sugary things and drinking pop. It breaks your old habits and kills the cravings for those kinds of foods. I can hardly stand to eat sugary things now that the 30 days is up. It just tastes way too sweet.

I’ll be continuing to eat a lot more raw food now that the trial is over. I plan to eat mostly raw with more relaxed rules allowing whatever I want whenever I want but preferring raw over anything else when possible. I hope to eat nearly completely raw at least 4 days a week and only eat 1 non raw meal a day on days that I’m not eating all raw.

Since I’ve now got a Vitamix it’s going to be getting used a lot. I’m going to be experimenting with all sorts of new smoothies and stuff now that I’ve added a sweet appliance like that to my arsenal. Green smoothies were going to be a big factor in my raw food diet when I first planned it, but I really hate the Magic Bullet so I didn’t make many smoothies through this trial.

If you’re going to try a raw food diet, make sure you drink lots of water. It’s easy to forget to drink water on this diet because there is so much in the food you eat. I didn’t get thirsty very often but had to remind myself to drink more water. You still have to drink water even though you’re eating fruit. Lots of water is good for you, but make sure it’s clean and fluoride free.

List of posts from the trial

Here is a complete list of the posts I made during the trial. I thought it might be handy to have them all listed here.

• Day 1 – 30 Days Raw! – Eating raw food for an entire month
• Day 2 – Not so hot
• Day 3 – Feelin’ fine
• Day 4 – Depressed and wasting away with sunken in eyes… NOT!
• Day 5 – This is easy!
• Day 6 – Tangible positive feedback
• Day 7 – 5lb raw salad with spicy dressing… yum!
• Day 8 – A bit weird
• Day 9 – Dance party went well
• Day 10 – The detox side effects arrive
• Day 11 – Almost half way
• Day 12 – Eating tons of food is awesome!
• Day 13 – Moving out and eating raw
• Day 14 – Feeling super powered
• Day 15 – The Breakfast of (boring) Champions
• Day 16 & 17 – I cheated! D’oh!
• Day 18 & 19 – Feelin’ the raw love again
• Day 20 – Hempseed salad for breakfast
• Days 21-25 – Looking for something exciting?
• Days 26-30 – That’s it, that’s all. The show’s over folks!