…Well more accurately the fruit diet I refer to is called a low fat raw vegan diet or 811

just took this one now...

Exercise yesterday: 8km hilly jog, 40kms on the bike…

I have many peeps particularly ladies sharing with me their weight-loss struggles, this has inspired me to share the following intimate details of my own struggles in an effort to help peeps understand the complexity of problems that we bring to the LFRV lifestyle and how it greatly impacts our weight in the early healing stages…

My first contact with the rawfood lifestyle was in 2001, when I bought an Oscar Vital Max Juicer which came with a fascinating rawfood recipe book. I was very excited as I thought ‘hmmm I bet I will lose a lot of weight if I only eat rawfood….’ admittedly this was my main motivation at the time…coming a close second was my pimply skin, chronic digestive problems, depression, candida and chronic fatigue.

fluctuating weight was the norm..

So I tried my version of a rawfood diet, loosely guided by the recipe book and nothing else, I lasted about 2 weeks then fell heavily back into cooked food…why? I simply wasn’t eating enough calories from sweet juicy fruits but I had no one to tell me this at the time. I decided to pack the raw thing in and accept my cooked path of ill health, disease and weight fluctuations, afterall everyone else was on the same program…must be alright then?

Over the years I continued to struggle with my weight, yo-yoing back and forth, never finding stable ground. One day I would be subscribing to anorexic mentality, eating a couple of items of food a day and looking up advice from bulimic websites on how to puke effectively… whereas other days I would be stuffing in over 5000 calories of cooked junk food a day in a frantic binge…I always had a love of fruit but I was afraid the fruit sugar would make me fat, I would later discover its NEVER the fruit’s fault at all.

before LFRV

I was lost, lonely, hungry, depressed but worst of all – FEARFUL OF FOOD!

Food became like the enemy, afterall it was responsible for making me fat right?…Was there anything worse than being fat?!? No way not for me.

By night I was hooked on recreational drugs, ecstasy, cocaine, speed and pot. I needed these stimulants to keep me going! I would dance and dance till I was drenched in a cold sweat…my brain screamed ‘keep dancing!!’ while my body pleaded with me to ’sleep now pleeeease!!…’ I found myself caught up in this cycle for many years, hanging around peeps who were as misguided as myself…I lost many kilograms and looked like a girl on crack… well I was afterall, luckily I enjoyed exercise and random bouts of ‘healthy eating’ which I believe kept me alive through the toughest times.

A rainbow of hope appeared when I joined the Gym World in 2003, Having always been into sport and activity I felt right at home there, my clients were great and my colleagues became like family, I was happy. The only thing I found a little disconcerting about the Gym lifestyle was the superficiality that came with it… I had always had a slightly distorted view of myself from years of ‘hollywood conditioning’ but this opened up a whole new world of ‘opportunities’ in that area…

I thought ‘ yes now I’m a trainer I will NEVER get fat..har,ha..!’.. . ofcourse this wasn’t my only motivation for being a trainer but it definitely was a regular focus…I met a few guys who introduced me to the seemingly wonderful world of ‘legal’ stimulants and fat loss drugs…I was on my way to a lean physique forever…or so i thought! I didn’t understand the concept of ‘everything we do to the body has a consequence..’ or that the digestive system was not some ‘pleasure tube’ and so I naively stepped into the realm of weight loss drugs.. I had given up the recreational drugs by this stage now I was a ‘legal’ user.

From the advice of a well-meaning ex-boyfriend I started to take thyroid accelerating drugs and finally started to get ‘control’ over my weight problems…I was getting leaner, therefore I must’ve been healthier right?…wrong but ofcourse you couldn’t tell me that, in my conditioned mind lean = healthy and if I was lean life was great…doesn’t matter how i got there.

My stimulant-junkie existence would start with my routine cappuccino first thing, a few ‘fat-burner’ tablets throughout the day, the occasional ECA stack (ephedrine,caffeine and Asprin in a pill) to get me through my weights session, sometimes Clembuterol to speed up my run and later that night get sloshed with liquid poison (until my 25th that is when i quit)…all fuelled on a meek 1500calories or so of stimulant-filled food, its little wonder that I would binge-out on 5000calories of junk food several times a week. I was overtraining like a crazy woman but didn’t know it because I was propped up on stimulants… I was running on adrenaline almost 24/7, I had never escaped my stimulant-junkie past like I thought, I had jumped from one drug to another…from ecstasy to fatloss drugs, I was still hooked…all underpinned by cooked food.

At times I looked great… on the outside but peeps didn’t see me behind closed doors, a depressed, tired, lonely, hungry, fearful girl who was surviving from stimulant to binge to stimulant. Fortunately I didn’t go down the anti-depressant route, I had always had knowledge in this area but I felt so bad sometimes that I sure as hell felt like making the ‘investment’!

Looking ok on the outside but different story within

When I rediscovered rawfood I felt like I’d found GOD, the resonation was incredible, I thought I had uncovered the answer to eternal health and happiness and in some ways I had. I was a ‘banged up’ mess as far as health goes and was teetering on the edge of some very serious dis-ease in my body. My adrenal glands were shot, my digestive system could barely process the smallest of morsels, my skin looked like the latest topping at Pizza Hut, my hands were always red, swelled and blistered, my weight was fluctuating a good 10kgs often and my state of mind was fragile to the point of suicidal….not many peeps would know of the pain i suffered, I hid it well, I was too proud to show my ‘weakness’..

So when I threw myself into raw life, I was consuming any foods that were labelled ‘raw’, I was so excited as I could still eat chocolate, cakes, slices, lasagne and burgers but now they were raw…After dabbling for long enough I soon discovered this food didn’t make me feel good at all and finally found Dr D’s 811 approach. By the time I found the raw lifestyle I was carrying with me a truckfull of issues which ofcourse all have a massive impact on how my body behaved once it had the chance to relax and finally detoxify…

I started my LFRV journey at 148 lbs, in the first 3months that crept up to 154 lbs as my body ‘relaxed’ after the years of drug/stimulant/cooked food abuse and calorie restriction. After a few months I was at 125lbs, that’s where I’m at today. My weight has fluctuated a few lbs up and down within that period, like i said depending on my training regime (slightly heavier in the off-season) and food sensitivities,,eg tomatoes and some varieties of durian cause me to retain fluid which = an extra few pounds.

When I came to the low fat raw vegan lifestyle I thought that fruit would cure all my problems straight away without any ‘recoil’ from my past assaults on my bodymind, ofcourse this is not how the universe works, for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction…

“…no debt in the universe ever goes
unpaid. There is a perfect accounting
system in this universe, and everything
is a constant `to and fro’ exchange of
energy.”

- Deepak Chopra

to be continued…

Fresh-faced Freelee

A recent body shot

hellooo..