My husband, our two youngest children and I have been practicing raw food since January 1994, over 13 years. We switched to this radical diet out of sheer desperation when the doctors gave us no chance for a cure.
My husband, Igor, had been sick constantly since he was a young child. By his teenage years, he had already undergone 9 surgeries. Suffering from progressive thyroid disease (hyperthyroidism) and chronic rheumatic arthritis, at age 38 he felt like a complete wreck. Igor's pulse was usually over 140. On sunny days, his eyes would water and his hands would often shake in a way that was hard to miss. Igor slept poorly, suffered from chronic fatigue, and his arthritis-ravaged spine would not bend. He felt fatigued all the time, and he was in pain most of the time. The doctor who observed him said Igor would die before two months unless he agreed to have his thyroid gland removed. The rheumatologist warned him to be prepared to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
In 1993, I was diagnosed with arrhythmia (a disorder of the normal rhythm of the heart). This disease took my father's life. My legs were constantly swollen with edema, I weighed 120 pounds, and the weight was continuously increasing. My left arm often went numb at night, I thought I was going to die and my children would be orphaned. I felt tired and depressed all the time.
Our daughter Valya was born with asthma and allergies and often coughed heavily all night long. To top it all off, our son Sergei was diagnosed with diabetes.
Then, after crying all night, I decided that if we wanted to change the situation, we had to change our lives dramatically. At that time we started to try different healing methods and eventually came to the decision to become raw foodists. At the time, we knew nothing about the possibility of making raw gourmet dishes such as nut pate, sesame cheese, or apple cake. We hadn't even heard of flax seed crackers cooked in a special dryer.
Nevertheless, by turning off the gas stove for good and giving up cooking with heat processing, we managed to get rid of all our "incurable" and life-threatening diseases. I regained my normal weight of 70 pounds. Vali never had an asthmatic cough again. Each of us was full of energy. Our health improved so quickly that three and a half months after the switch to raw food, the four of us participated in a 10-kilometer race with thousands of other runners in Boulder, Colorado.
Even Sergey's blood sugar had stabilized because of his new diet and regular jogging. Since he started eating raw food, he has never had any symptoms of diabetes. We were very surprised not only at how quickly our health returned to normal, but also that we felt better than we had ever felt before.
What was our amazement when, after several years of raw eating, everyone in our family began to feel that they had reached a certain point where the healing process had stopped and even reversed a bit.
After about 7 years of complete raw eating, we began to feel worse from time to time, more and more often. The nutritional program was no longer satisfying us.
For example, I started to feel a heaviness in my stomach after eating any raw food, especially salads with oil. Because of this, I had to eat less greens and more fruits and nuts. As a consequence, I started to gain weight. My husband got a lot of gray hair. Seryozha and Valya began to complain periodically about lethargy and lack of appetite. We were discouraged, thinking that our diet had stopped working, and often wondered: "What are we going to eat now?".
At times we were hungry, but we wanted to eat absolutely nothing from the whole raw food diet: fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, or dried fruit. Salads with dressings tasted great, but induced a state of fatigue and sleepiness. We felt trapped. I remember Igor looking in the refrigerator and saying over and over again, "I wish I wanted some of what we had." We attributed this effect to overeating and whetted his appetite with therapeutic fasting, exercise, hiking, or working long hours without a break. Everyone in our family was firmly convinced that raw food was the best eating program, and so we tried our best to stick to it, inventing new tricks. Many of my friends, who are also raw eaters, told me that they went through a similar stage and then they just broke down and started adding fire-cooked food to their diet.
I found myself thinking more and more each day about what we were missing. The answer was the same: "No, nothing could be better than such a natural diet." And yet signs of non-ideal health (however slight), small but alarming symptoms continued to appear from time to time, raising doubts about the validity of raw foodism in its existing form. Finally, when my children began complaining of tooth sensitivity, I fell into a state where I could no longer think of anything but solving this charade. I irritated everyone around me with my constant speculation about what might be wrong.
I started collecting data on every single food. As my grandmother used to say, "Seek and you shall find." After many wrong assumptions, I finally found the right answer. According to published nutritional calculations, only one category of food - plant greens - contained all the nutrients humans needed. The bitter truth was that we weren't consuming enough greens. What's more, we didn't really love it. We were sure that greens were an important part of the diet, but we never knew exactly how much of them we needed. All we heard was a vague recommendation to eat as much green vegetables as possible. To figure out how much greens to eat, I decided to study the diet of primates, particularly chimpanzees, as they are the closest "relatives" of humans.
