Why Was I Sick and Fat?
Why Was I Sick and Fat?
I really began to study nutrition with a specific purpose in mind when my wife Diane was diagnosed with cancer in 1997. Before then I believed all food (except junk food) was nutritious. I basically thought all food was equal. I believed all food produced life. I loved to cook, and I used to prepare vegetable soup or chili for friends and family, with added grains, herbs and spices and proclaim to them how healthy my food was, even after I had boiled it on a hot stove for a couple of hours. I didn’t realize until I was in my 40s that you can cook the life out of food. That’s right. You can kill the life force in food with heat. Once you heat anything above 115 degrees you kill the enzymes or the life giving property of that food. It is essentially a dead food after it is cooked. That’s why many health practitioners recommend you lightly steam your vegetables so you don’t destroy all the enzymes.
Our bodies actually run on electrical current. We have a body electric. To be energetic, the body has to have electrical power. The body needs energy to operate effectively. Therefore it needs electron-rich foods or foods that have energy in them. The closer a food is to its living state, the more energy it has. Raw fruits and vegetables are electron-rich or loaded with energy. Cooked food has virtually no energy because it is dead and, consequently, is acidic. To maintain powerful electrical energy, our bodies must be alkaline. I’ve watched a video clip of biologist and author Dr. Robert O. Young using the electrical energy from a raw cucumber to power a light bulb. It is impossible to do that with cooked food because – you guessed it – there is no life or energy left in that food. It also takes a significant amount of energy to digest certain foods. If you eat mostly acidic food that has no energy in it, you are going to suffer from chronic fatigue, initially, as I did and ultimately from degenerative disease. We actually make a deposit or withdrawal on our energy level every time we put something in our mouth. If the food is living and alkaline, we make an energy deposit once we eat it. If the substance is acidic or dead, we are withdrawing energy from our body by consuming it. Acidic substances drain energy from the body. Every time you eat raw electron-rich food, you are adding deposits into your energy bank.
Dr. Mary Ruth Swope, who has studied, researched and taught in the fields of foods and nutrition mostly at the university level and from a Christian perspective, stated:
“Life can only come from life. ‘Dead food’ makes dead people.”
In his book “The Biblical Basis for Science,” the late Dr. Henry Morris, an American young earth creationist, Christian apologist and one of the founders of the Creation Research Society and Institute for Creation Research (from Wikipedia), declared that biologist and chemist Louis Pasteur demonstrated that:
“Life only comes from life. We did not evolve from nonliving substances. Life can only come from life.” “Life requires a special act of creation and it is therefore impossible that nonliving chemicals could ever evolve into living animals.”
Morris further stated:
“God first created matter (the earth unformed), next ‘the dust of the earth’ (the basic elements), then formed man’s body of these elements. Plants were created specifically to provide a continually replenishable food supply for men and animals.”
If you destroy the life in the food you eat by cooking or processing, it will not provide you with energy and will not sustain life. However, if you eat food that contains life-giving energy, you will become energetic and healthy. You are, in effect, transferring the life and energy of the food to your body.
People who saw my diet during the last ten years would have called me a health nut. On the surface, that’s how healthy my diet looked. For awhile, I hosted a talk radio program and I knew of the therapies and had read the testimonies of Rev. George Malkmus, Brenda Cobb, Dr. Mary Lou Sackett and Don Haughey, who each had healed some form of cancer in their body by eating raw and living foods. Raw foods are foods that haven’t been cooked, while sprouted seeds and nuts are considered living food. I interviewed each of them for the radio program. Malkmus developed The Hallelujah Diet & Lifestyle based on the Genesis 1:29 guideline on what to eat. Marilyn Polk, a health minister trained at Hallelujah Acres, healed her body of a severe case of fibromyalgia with the Hallelujah Diet. As I interviewed her for my radio program, she said she actually was contemplating her funeral when she learned of the Hallelujah Acres nutritional program. She and her husband Doug reversed all medical conditions each had in just a very short time with the Hallelujah Diet. They became so passionate about helping others they studied nutrition and became health ministers of the Hallelujah Acres program. Doug even gave up a 30- year career as a music minister and earned a doctor of naturopathy degree. Today they have a health ministry in Jackson, Tennessee, called Alpha Omega Food, where they teach others how to heal their bodies naturally. Their web-site address is www.aphaomegafood.com Cobb, Sackett and Haughey were, for the most part, students of the Ann Wigmore Natural Health Institute program, and ate, almost exclusively, raw fruits and vegetables. They are raw foodists, promoting the consumption of un-cooked, un-processed and often organic foods as a large percentage of the diet.
Malkmus, who was healed from colon cancer that began in 1976, can be found online at www.hacres.com. He and his wife, Rhonda, started Hallelujah Acres Ministry in 1992 in Rogersville, Tenn., where “we served carrot juice and other vegetarian fare, as well as shared my health message with all who would listen,” he said.
Cobb, founder and director of Living Foods Institute, was healed from breast and cervical cancer without the use of drugs or surgery by following the simple principles of detoxification and nutrition. She can be found online at www.livingfoodsinstitute.com.
Sackett, a retired chiropractor who founded Back to Basics Naturally in 2006, was healed from breast cancer after being diagnosed with the disease in 2003. Refusing chemotherapy, radiation and mastectomy, she learned to make some major changes in her lifestyle, resulting in losing more than 50 pounds of excess weight. She is located online at www.backtobasicsnaturally.com.
I learned from Dr. Jim Carey, the “Raw Doctor,” dedicated raw fooder and Ann Wigmore follower, and Victoria Boutenko, an author and raw foodist, about Green Smoothies. I’d interviewed Carey, the former director of the Creative Health Institute, for my radio program and I had read Boutenko’s book, “Green for Life.” Both had utilized raw foods to rid their bodies of disease. Boutenko was born in Russia and migrated as an adult to the United States with her husband and two children. The entire Boutenko family was suffering from different sorts of chronic illnesses until they spent some time at the Creative Health Institute in Michigan and learned the Ann Wigmore protocol of healing their bodies with raw and living foods. They all are extremely healthy now and are well known advocates of the raw food lifestyle.
I knew the value of eating raw foods and I already was eating a high percentage of raw electron-rich foods in my diet. Since I was fat and didn’t like the way I looked or felt, I tried to implement as much of these programs into my life as I could. I drank rich, living, sweet, green smoothies nearly every day. On several occasions, I even tried to become a raw foodist, but until I experimented and found the right nutritional program for me I never was able to satiate my hunger by eating a totally raw fruit and vegetable diet. I’d always gravitate back to cooked food. However, after experiencing several plateaus where I couldn’t lose any weight for weeks, I utilized a raw food diet and had incredible results.
“Ideally you’ll want to eat as many foods as possible in their unprocessed state; typically organic, biodynamic foods that have been grown locally, and are therefore in season.
But the challenge is, even when you chose the best foods available you can destroy most of the nutrition if you cook them. I believe it’s really wise to strive to get as much raw food in your diet as possible. I personally try to eat about 85 percent of my food raw, including raw eggs and meats.”
— Dr. Joseph Mercola, mercola.com newsletter Aug. 11, 2009
Even though I believe a totally raw plant based nutritional diet is the healthiest way for humans to eat, most people want cooked food and meat in their diet. Therefore, we have listed several plant based diets and a meat-based diet program for weight loss in the book
Studies suggest our standard American diet is composed of about 80% cooked acidic food, with the other 20% being raw alkaline food. But I’ve observed what Americans eat and many Americans have a diet comprised of 90 to 95% cooked acidic foods with a piece of lettuce thrown in here and a slice of tomato thrown in there. No wonder we are so sick.
In the past, I’d tried everything and nothing worked. Something was wrong and I felt hopeless. I tried to exercise, but because of my diet I had very little energy and couldn’t do enough to make any progress. I was headed in the wrong direction, hopeless and helpless I thought. Then while lying in bed one night and reading Boutenko’s book “Green for Life,” something I had read and seen again and again just popped off of the page and it was like I was reading it for the very first time. When I read the following statement, I had an epiphany of sorts. Instantly I realized why I was sick, tired and fat.
“Fats as the main contributor to weight gain is a popular delusion among dieters. This misconception leads to massive confusion and explains why so many overweight people are not succeeding in losing weight. I am sure many people would be shocked to find out that we gain weight from eating, say, cheese, not only because it is rich in fat, but mostly due to its high acidic level. In response to high pH acid, the body creates fat cells to store the acid.”
Wow! For the first time in my life, I realized I was fat, sick and tired because of the acid-producing food I was eating. The problem was “acid” or the acidic foods I was consuming. Consequently, my body had become acidic, also.
“Over acidification of body fluids and tissues underlines all disease, and general ‘dis-ease’as well. For one thing, it is only when it is acidic that the body is vulnerable to germs-in healthy base balance, germs can’t get a foothold. Furthermore, acids are the expression of all sickness and disease
— Dr. Robert O. Young, biologist and author of “The PH Miracle”
Knowing that most raw foods are alkalizing, I had tried to live off of a totally raw food diet and was unable to sustain it because of hunger. I also read supermodel Carol Alt’s book, “Living in the Raw.” Alt is a raw food proponent. However, she eats raw animal protein sources which still contain enzymes since they haven’t been cooked. According to her book, she eats raw milk, raw milk cheeses, raw tuna and lightly seared beef, in addition to raw fruits and vegetables.
I tried to go the Carol Alt route with my diet. I absolutely loved the raw milk cheese I purchased at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s grocery stores, and the raw goat’s milk I purchased from local farmers. However, I couldn’t acquire a taste for raw fish or beef.
So I returned to the standard American diet but added what I thought were very healthy alternatives to sugar and processed foods. I started to drink green smoothies with banana, apple and grapes in them. I would fill our Vitamix blender full of greens like chard, kale or spinach. I would blend that down to a liquid and then add one banana, one apple and a handful of grapes. When I was finished, I had a quart of delicious, nutritious breakfast food that was filled with electron-rich nutrients to energize my body. For lunch, I would eat a protein source of chicken, turkey or fish with a salad and possibly a baked potato with butter. Whenever I was hungry, I would snack on dried figs or dates and raw milk cheese. In the evening I also would eat protein and a cooked vegetable or two.
This diet sounds very healthy, doesn’t it? Here’s the problem. The dried fruit, cheese, protein and the cooked foods in my diet were all very acidic, and my body had become acidic as well. I didn’t lose any weight eating this way and my health was getting worse. I was suffering from acidosis and the symptoms I knew of were that I was fat, had chronic fatigue syndrome, allergies, aches and pains and high blood pressure. My body was producing fat cells to store the fat so that it wouldn’t harm my organs, cells and tissue. It was holding onto the fat stored around my waist, face and buttocks, and it wouldn’t let go of it. The acidic food was keeping me fat, sick and tired. It was the acid food I was eating, not the fat that was harming me.