So you’ve got this friend who won’t shut up about her raw food detox.
She’s always been kind of flakey, and she’s always on some fad diet, so you’re used to hearing this kind of thing from her… and ignoring it.
But if you aren’t mistaken, her skin is looking fantastic this time. And if she isn’t exactly happy, she certainly is manic. Usually her diets make her depressed and cranky.
But lately she’s been bouncing off the walls with energy, and it doesn’t seem.
Is it worth your while to follow her down the raw food rabbit hole?
Well, that depends on what you mean by “worth your while.”
It also depends on what you mean by “follow her.”
Raw food gurus promise a lot of things. But their big promise, front and center, is usually weight loss.
This is indeed possible.
But not probable.
Particularly if you’re at all, you know, prone to actually doing things.
All a “raw vegan diet” means, technically, is that you eat nothing that comes from an animal, and nothing that’s heated above some magical temperature that raw foodists say kills the “enzymes” in the food.
These mystical enzymes are what’s missing from cooked food—and they’ll do everything from making you shed pounds magically to cleaning your living room, if you listen to the extremists.
But the real reason some people lose massive amounts of weight on raw food isn’t so mystical: they were eating really badly to begin with.
Changing from the “standard American diet” (hourly shovels-ful of hamburgers and junk food) to anything involving any vitamins or fiber will naturally induce weight loss.
Nothing in the world of weight loss is magic, even if it sometimes seems mysterious.
For those who are already eating healthy, weight-loss results won’t be so dramatic…unless you really go overboard on the greens and fiber.
See, on a practical basis, raw foodists wind up getting their calories from some fairly dense sources of fat and sugar: nuts and sprouted grains, plus avocados and other, more sugar-packed fruits.
Gurus quietly advise th at you go easy on these calorie-dense sources and try to fill up on greens (while swearing out of the other side of their mouths that nuts are magic, too).
But surviving on minerals and fiber will drive most people insane with hunger. So they wind up binging on nuts, mangoes, and avocados, because they’re starved for protein.
And it’s easy to justify binging, because you’re still eating “virtuously” by not consuming any of that nasty, poisonous cooked food.