Interview with David Wolfe, author of the groundbreaking new book on success and diet The Sunfood Diet Success System.
JEAA: You have just finished writing a new book called The Sunfood Diet Success System. Can you tell our readers how the idea of writing that book came about, and what is the general message behind it?David Wolfe: This book project actually began in 1993 when I made the commitment to write a book on veganism and the Laws of Nature. Parts of that original project ended up in the Nature's First Law: The Raw-Food Diet book, other parts carried through to this project. This new book represents the culmination of years of experimenting with different types of raw plant-food diets. It represents all the knowledge I have acquired from being at ground zero of the worldwide raw-food movement. It represents the precise distinctions necessary to maintain and stay balanced on a 100% raw plant-food diet. I explain in detail how to use different foods to achieve different results, such as eating to: gain weight, lose weight, detoxify, increase spirituality, increase mental clarity, overcome hypoglycemia, overcome candida, etc.
JEAA: The most amazing thing I see in your book is the way you mix the field of diet with self-development technology. Any purpose in doing that?
David Wolfe: In my new book, I mention a quote by James Allen from his wonderful book As You Think. He wrote (and I'm roughly paraphrasing here): "A change of diet will little help a man who is not willing to change his thoughts." Life change comes from the inside out. It all begins in the mind. The human mind is the most powerful computer in the universe. The challenge is, it has no instruction manual! The purpose of weaving self-development information into my book has been to provide instructions on how to use the mind and then to act on those instructions in order to produce results such as a change in diet and lifestyle.
JEAA: Concerning the raw food diet, the big insight or revelation I got from your book is "The Sunfood Triangle" diagram. Can you tell us what this "triangle" is all about and how you came up with it?
David Wolfe: The Raw-Food Diet has finally come of age. I have been able to communicate with so many raw-foodists via e-mail, telephone, in person, in consultations, etc. that I finally discerned the essential factors of The Raw-Food Diet. I discovered that three food classes are essential to stay balanced on raw foods. These three classes of foods form the natural dietary character of the human body, which is represented in my book as The Sunfood Triangle. The Sunfood Triangle demystifies The Raw-Food Diet and provides the basic understanding necessary to achieve and stay balanced on a 100% raw-vegan diet. These three food classes are: 1. Green-leafy vegetables. 2. Sweet fruits. 3. Fats (such avocados, young coconuts, nuts, seeds, etc.) If any of these three food classes is missing in the diet for a long enough period of time, the person will be thrown off balance and experience less than optimal health. Each of these food classes represents a point on the triangle. The idea is to remain at the center of the triangle by balancing these three food classes against each other in the diet.
JEAA: What I find interesting in your book is that you explain how to use those 3 food classes for different issues or problems that raw-foodists face along the way. For example, if I want to gain weight and get bigger, what should I be eating according to your triangle?
David Wolfe: First, gaining weight and strength on the raw-food diet should not be your first priority unless you have been eating 100% raw foods for at least 1.5 years. The first step must be detoxification. To use the triangle to gain weight, you would move the center of the triangle more towards green-leaf vegetables and fats and away from sweet fruits. If you eat fats and green-leafed vegetables together and eat less sweet fruit, you will gain weight.
JEAA: You also talk in your book about the Karma of food. Are you really serious when you say that some foods have a positive Karma and some foods have a negative Karma?
David Wolfe: Definitely. Karma is energy. Some foods are positively charged (such as avocados, cherimoyas, and hot peppers), some foods are negatively charged (such as roots, fish, and meat). Every choice we make counts. Every choice either creates a karmic debt or adds to a karmic surplus. This universe is governed by laws of karma: what we send out comes back, multiplied!
JEAA: I have heard you say that we can learn how to succeed on the raw-food diet by observing people who are successfully thriving on it.
David Wolfe: Truth relies not only on the understanding of success, but also on the understanding of failure. I have learned just as much from the people who failed with the raw-vegan diet as I learned from those who have succeeded with it.
JEAA: You talk a lot in your book about the "evolutionary" diets and their shortcomings. Why did you insist on that, is it really that much of an issue?
David Wolfe: The time has come to take this information to a massive audience. Therefore all details must be covered in my book. I have seen "evolutionary" raw animal-food diets go awry and in my book I explain exactly why. The book is totally comprehensive and covers every facet of eating raw foods.
Question: You refer a lot in your book and in your lectures to the importance of eating wild foods and the dangers of hybrid foods. Can you explain what you mean by "hybrid" and why it is that much of a problem?
Answer: Hybridized foods are genetically altered foods. They are foods which will not survive in nature without human protection. They are strains of foods which have been artificially bred together to appeal to the numb tastebuds of cooked-food eaters. For example, beets in the natural state are 4% sugar. Beets in the supermarket are 17% sugar. The same holds true for carrots. Most fruits and vegetables, even if organic, are genetically altered to some degree. The best guideline is to avoid seedless fruits of any kind. Also, in terms of vegetables: carrots, beets, and potatoes should be avoided. Nearly all legumes are weak hybrid strains and should be avoided.
JEAA: So carrot juice is not okay?
David Wolfe: The big orange carrots found in stores, even if organic, are unnatural, artificial creations. Those carrots will not grow in nature. If you plant one of those carrots in your backyard, the bugs, insects, worms, and bacteria will have a field day and chomp that carrot up in about 3 days. Juicing those carrots and drinking them releases so much hybridized sugar into your digestive system at once that the body doesn't know how to handle it! You will feel a sugar high, then the pancreas will insulinize the blood to remove the sugar, you will feel drowsy, and then you will urinate away whatever of that sugar is left in the blood.
JEAA: I was surprised to learn that a baked potato has one of the highest glycemic indexes. So Natural Hygienists are really wrong when they condemn fruit sugar and recommend potatoes?
David Wolfe: Baked potatoes are not healthy. They are not, never have been, and never will be a health food. A potato is an extremely hybridized food loaded with starch, which turns into pure sugar when it is cooked. The sugar is not of a type the liver and pancreas can recognize, it is a hybridized sugar which comes into the blood at a glycemic index of anywhere from 75 to 95! Consider that watermelon enters the blood at 70 and a mango at 50! I detail exactly why starchy diets cause sugar imbalances in my Sunfood Diet book.
JEAA: You insist a lot about the importance of raw plant fats, why is that?
David Wolfe: Raw plant fats are an essential component of a balanced raw-food diet. Every raw-foodist knows the magic of the avocado! I have even dedicated a chapter to avocados in my new book! Dietary fats are incorporated into the walls of each and every cell in the body. Fats protect us from pollution, they are antioxidants. Fats fill us up and give us that satiated feeling, so they are an excellent bridge from cooked foods to raw foods. Cooked fats, of both plant and animal origin, have exactly the opposite properties of raw plant fats. Cooked fats interfere with cell respiration, cause red blood cell clumping, and produce free radicals.
JEAA: So what are the best sources of fats? It seems like they contain amazing nutrients.
David Wolfe: The best source of fat comes from fatty fruits. They are the easiest to digest and assimilate. The best fatty fruits are: avocados, durians, and olives. Olives are an amazing fruit! They are the highest fruit in minerals and calcium. But almost nobody knows how to eat them! They do not have to be salted or cured! I describe in my book exactly how to harvest and eat Sun-ripened olives!
JEAA: David, there is so much new information in your book it's almost impossible to absorb it all at once. How do you feel that your book is going to change the raw-food movement and the future of the raw-food diet?
David Wolfe: Well, I have been at ground zero of the worldwide raw-food movement for about three years now. I distribute nearly every book ever written on the subject. I talk to raw-foodists every day in person or on the phone. I know where the gaps are in the knowledge. I know exactly where people run into challenges and I know how to solve those challenges. This new book captures all that information in one place! It provides a step-by-step method whereby ANYONE can adopt and be successful with a 100% raw-vegan diet! We are bringing this book into the mainstream and it is designed to be successful there without compromising one bit of the message.
JEAA: Do you think putting this book into the mainstream will really bring mainstream people into raw-foodism?
David Wolfe : Absolutely! Many people just need to be exposed to the truth and before long, they're living it. The Sunfood Diet success System will help people who are in the mainstream get out of it and into the exiting, pristine river of the raw truth!
JEAA: Thank you so much David for your time and we wish you the best luck with your book and your future as the foremost expert on diet in the world!
David "Avocado" Wolfe is the author of The Sunfood Diet Success System, the definitive book in the field of raw food nutrition and lifestyle.The book gives you the exact picture how to adopt, maintain, and stay centred on an 80, 90, or 100% raw-food diet. David Wolfe’s innovative Sunfood Triangle will help you to balance different types of foods. You will succeed with this system by following day-by-day menu plans, using delicious recipes and the best information available on detoxification, fasting, mineralization and success technology that all neatly bundled into this book. In this interview David is taking about his works.
David Wolfe On Future Plans, Sungazing, And Elements For Life
Lenette: So what does the rest of 2009 hold for David Wolfe, personally or professionally?
David: Oh, it’s going to be a big year. It’s going to be a big year. I start out in South Florida on April 6th and I’m going to be on the road…this is after I come back from Peru, so the whole month of March I’ll be in Peru. April 6th I’ll be in South Florida and I’ll come up the entire East Coast of the United States, fly over to Los Angeles, go up the entire West Coast of the United States, come back down again and do a couple of jaunts around…I might even make it to Salt Lake City and possibly even Chicago by the summer?
Lenette: Possibly?
David: Yeah, I know. I’d like to get there sooner but it’s just a busy schedule. But we’re looking at, already, 100 events booked for the whole year, but it could potentially go to like 150 or even 200 events this year. It’s possible.
Lenette: And these events are all in the name of the book, like a book tour or what else are these events going to be about?
David: They’re pretty much about everything. It’s about "Save your town now!" [laughing] When we used to drive around in our bus, we would have these conversations at the end of the event and it was like, "What are we doing here?" We’re in this little town, wherever it was, some place in Kansas and basically we’re having a town hall meeting on how to save yourself and save your town. That’s the fundamental message. That’s pretty much what we’re talking about. What is the technology that’s out there that you can access immediately to save yourself and save your town? Superfoods and raw foods is one of the easiest buttons to push to get there.
Lenette: What percentage of your diet is comprised of superfoods now?
David: It’s probably 75%.
Lenette: Is there a ceiling limit that you would recommend for people?
David: That would be completely absurd for me to try to even guess. I don’t know. This is what I believe that everyone should explore. That is, raw foods, all of them, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, seaweed, sprouts, grasses, herbs and superfoods and, of course, fermented foods…explore all of that in-depth. Do the 60-day juice fast. Do the water fast. Do the things you need to do including eating copious amounts of vegetables on these giant salads. And you’re going, "How come I’m not full? I’m eating massive amounts of vegetables and all this food but I’m still not full." Go through all of that process and start to refine your diet down by volume by increasing the amount of superfoods that are in your diet from, say, one superfood smoothie a day to two and then eventually to three. When I first did that I actually did the three-month liquid blended fast on just cacao drinks and that was totally, totally amazing. That was years ago. I had already been a raw foodist for ten years at that point maybe.
Lenette: That’s awesome. It just puts some new ideas in my head. I always like trying out new things with the diet.
Lenette: Thank you so much, David. This has been awesome. Is there anything else you want to share with us?
David: I just hope that everybody out there is having the best day ever. I wanted to share a little bit about sungazing because this has been in the field now for quite some time, probably eight to ten years in the raw food world. I’ve been doing something up here at my house that I haven’t been able to do. I wasn’t able to really calibrate it very well. I’ve been sungazing outside on the snow barefoot and I have been calibrating what that’s all about and what the effectiveness of it is. It’s pretty darn powerful, I have to say. Sungazing barefoot on the snow at the end of the day. It’s something to do with this idea that if you’re out on wet grass and you’re sungazing, the energy that comes in through your eyes is pulled right through you through the wet of the grass and it goes right back into the Earth. I always wanted to sungaze on a dry surface like stone, and when I sungaze on snow, once I melt into the snow and I’m totally solid on my feet, then there’s a similar effect to being on stone. That’s something I’ve been playing around with and it’s really been interesting. I’ve been trying to calibrate what the limits of sungazing are and apparently in any condition, even in the snow, it’s totally perfect.
Lenette: Yeah, I gotta find a way [to do this in Chicago]. Maybe I could get on my roof. I just want to say I’m really grateful to be on the same team that you’re on and all the joys. I usually like telling people I’m working on a national project with David Wolfe and that seems like the most fun way to say it. I don’t think I would have gotten this opportunity if it hadn’t been for being in Elements for Life. I can’t say that if this opportunity is calling you that you will get a chance to talk to David Wolfe one-on-one but if you work this business hard and hold it in your vision to hang out with David Wolfe and hang out with all the Elements for Life leaders and go to retreats with us, that could happen. That possibility is there. David, I remember you saying so many people have asked you, "How can I work for you? How can I work with you?" and you’ve had to turn everyone down saying, "There’s only so many people I can hire, guys!" and this is the only channel now for anybody to work alongside you and to meet you.
David: It’s such a gift. You know, I’ve been involved in Elements for Life for five or six years. It’s been a long time. Finally, it’s got a whole thing going. It’s got a lot of traction, a lot of momentum and it solves that issue at every event that I do where there are people in the audience where they go, "This whole angle of nutrition makes sense to me. This is what I want to do for my career. I want to turn all my people onto it." Elements for Life is that opportunity that delivers those people to what their goal is. It’s totally amazing to have that in the cornucopia of what is being offered every night at an event. A lot of times five or more people come to me and say, "How do I get these things to my massage therapist friends? How do I get this to my chiropractor friends? I want to get in this as a business." Now I can go, "Here. Here’s how you do it." Turnkey. And Elements for Life has provided that opportunity. It’s awesome.
By: Lenette Nakauchi
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com
Lenette Nakauchi is a raw foodist living in Chicago who loves teaching, coaching and demonstrating to others how to go and stay raw a fun, healthy, sustainable way. To listen to the entire audio interview and learn more about Elements for Life, please visit Go Raw, Have Fun! andwww.eatsuperfoods.com.
The book is available by calling 1-800-205-2350 or online at: http://www.rawfood.com Read more!
