Raw Food and Sports Performance Debate
The problem with the raw diet for athletics is that it takes a long time for the body to heal itself. If you've been eating cooked foods and other toxins for 30 + years then it can take a while to get the consistent great results on a raw diet.

It sounds to me like your body was healing itself. Maybe you just need to rest more. Trust me it takes time. I've had things improve and then go away and then come back again many times.

I think that if you are only on the diet for athletic performance you will give it up. The much more important element is your health. Your body could care less about your athletic performance. It wants to be healthy first.

This may require it to shift energy away from sports and to healing. So if you are on the raw diet and you are committed to it for the long haul you will eventually heal and adapt.

I can tell you it definitely has improved my athletic and mental performance in several ways. Some of these improvements have gone and then returned. Part of it was eating incorrectly. For instance eating too much fatty foods really messed me up.

Or just eating too much in general isn't good either. I know this guy Wilson in Florida who has been 100% raw for about 5 years. He jogs 20 miles on the beach every single day. He doesn't eat anything until after his run. Previously when he lived in NYC he would run about 14 miles every day.

The point is that I don't think he eats that much. Anyway, there are many factors. But if sports is your only concern that may not be enough to keep you eating a low fat raw food diet.

Roger

"Can relate to your posts, I'm a long distance cyclist and to make a long story short, I tried RAW (80-10-10) for about 10 months, and lost alot of weight (way too much, was already lean) and initially felt great but that soon changed, started feeling weak and tired during and after workouts (all the time), my 100 mile times suffered badly, I just didnt have the energy I had before, so I figured it was the protein and fats I had cut back on, guess what I was right!"

RH~
I understand your viewpoint. You may want to look at the previous post I made to understand why you lost energy.

It's also quite possible that your energy returned because your body immediately will stop detoxing when you feed it food that is too toxic. It can nolonger handle the excess toxic load and therefore works on storing the toxins in your fat cells instead of healing your body. Now you have energy and you falsely blame it on a raw food diet. I made the same mistake myself many times. Now I've gone beyond that point and know what is going on.

Whenever someone is on a raw diet and they are having problems they always feel better after eating cooked or toxic food. This doesn't mean this food was the answer. It means that a raw food diet allows your body to heal and that takes energy. The body has a higher priority on healing than on helping you reach a sports performance goal.

Of course your going to lose weight. The leanest people on the planet are the longest lived and have the least diseases in general. As long as you aren't below about 4% body fat you should be fine. Just put on more muscles. The raw diet takes time because your body has to undo years of damage.

"After going Paleo and adding quality protein and sufficient good fats my performance has skyrocketed. For me the protein and fats make a big difference.. My muscles started growing again, and I definitly feel MUCH stronger than I was raw.. I was in a raw food hangout a while ago and thought I was in a hospital or something, those people did not look healthy at all, they looked like they were starving themselves and several of them looked like their hair was falling out, one RAW side effect I have read about, but they all claim its just detox, LOL!.. "

RH~
I think a raw diet is common sense. Eating meat and high fat isn't our design. However some people have damaged themselves to a degree where they may no longer be able to thrive on only raw foods. But by design we are no different than any other animal and we should eat the foods that we are designed to eat. Our DNA is 99.8% the same as the Bonobo chimpanzees. They eat 96% of their calories from fruit. They are our closest relative.

If you fed the bonobos cooked food for hundreds of generations and then made them transition back to raw fruits it might take them quite a while to get back to normal. Just think about this.

Roger


- posted by Roger Haeske @ 2:43 PM