Starting a raw food diet

In this article, Phillip McClusky shares how to start a raw food diet. Phillip McClusky, lost 200 lbs. and found health and happiness in a raw food lifestyle.

Kevin: So you’re reading “Raw Family”, you’re sitting on the couch and you decide to go raw, how was the first three days, the first week? How did all that turn out for you?

Philip: Well, I had tried so many things before in the past and what happened was that some of them were very confusing. Some of them were you had to buy this plan and you had to buy this pack at the store and you had to write down how many calories and you had to move the cards from one slot to another and all these different little colors and programs and all these different things with which all these diets were found. So I knew none of them were successful and basically confusing and not something you want to do every day. I really didn’t want to look at every calorie or every box I picked up. So when I switched to this raw lifestyle, what I had decided was that the only way I was going to be consistent and be able to do this was if I kept it simple and stuck to a very easy program.

So at first I didn’t even focus on the exercise. And it’s not that I recommend it, but it worked for me. I knew I had to do the food right. I had literally devoured raw food books. I was reading a book a day and was very excited about everything. But I realized that each body had a different opinion on raw food. So someone would say, “You have to do a lot of juicing.” The next person would say, “Juices are no good, you have to make smoothies.” The next person would say, “You have to have 50 percent of your diet as superfoods.” And then the next person would say, “You have to do one meal or do natural hygiene.” I read all of that and what I decided to do was take all the information and then do what felt right to me.

So the first three days for me were pretty simple. I was used to eating big meals, so I thought, “I’m going to keep eating big meals and switch to salads.” So in the morning I ate fruit and for lunch and dinner I ate giant salads. I always think of it like this, when you go to an Italian restaurant or a family-style restaurant and you have six or eight people around the table and they bring out a big plate of salad for everyone at the table, that’s nice. much what I did for my lunch and for my dinner. I didn’t worry about the amount. Some people would say, “You can’t eat more than three avocados a week.” Well, I was eating three avocados a day, or four avocados a day. Some people would say, “It’s a good idea not to eat more than a handful of nuts a day.” Well, I was eating like ten handfuls of nuts a day. I was making these giant salads that were really satisfying and kept me pretty much the same as far as quantity, the food that I was eating. I pretty much stuck with it for the next three days. Little did I know that my body would intuitively make changes and that it would diminish over time.

Kevin: What would decrease?

Philip: The size, the amount of food he was actually eating.

Kevin: I have you. Why don’t you talk a little bit about… there’s a lot of things I want to talk about, but since we’re talking about what you started eating, let’s talk a little bit about what that transition has been like in the last two years? maybe give us a snapshot every six months so far. So six months from there, then six months-

Philip: Sure. Big question. So here I am, making these big, gigantic meals and just enjoying and loving them. The weight is literally flying off of me. Even without exercising at the time, the weight would just slip away from me, just from changing the way I ate. And it surprised me. I mean, I remember the first time I got on the scale and I realized I had lost like 45 or 50 pounds or something, I just couldn’t believe it. It was a great feeling.

Then, over the course of maybe the next three or four months, I noticed something I’d never noticed before, I was eating this giant salad and I noticed about 25 percent of the salad was left over. And I thought to myself, “Well, that’s weird. I’ve never finished a meal before.” So what he had to do was reassessed. And I said, “Well, I guess I’m filling up faster.” So I would make my salad a little bit smaller. Then for the next two months the same thing happened, I had a bit of the salad left over, about 25 percent. So I was making it smaller and smaller until I finally started to notice it shrinking back to a normal size. It was quite an interesting experience because I didn’t need so much mass, this large amount of food that I was used to eating.

So I wondered how I could change other things. I was having fun and I was experimenting and there were times when I made some of the gourmet raw foods. I went out and bought a Cuisinart food processor, a dehydrator, a blender, and the like. Sometimes I had fun making some of the raw dishes and the pizzas and things like that, but it wasn’t my normal food. My normal food was just fruit in the morning and this salad for lunch and dinner.

So after a while, I started to really make green smoothies or green smoothies and literally just put a whole head of maybe spinach or lettuce or anything green, rotate my vegetables, with a little bit of fruit and water. And I would make this giant half-gallon milkshake. I started drinking that in the morning instead of just eating the fruit. It was a good way for me to get my veggies and fiber and a lot of water, being a half gallon container. I noted that it would take me until 2 PM. Then she could eat a little and then she would have dinner later.

Then I started noticing that it would take me until 3 in the morning. I just wasn’t hungry until then. Then at 4 o’clock, and then at 5 o’clock. Then one day, I was sitting down and realized that I hadn’t had lunch anymore and I was totally fine. My body felt energized and excited and I was losing weight and feeling great. Literally this half-gallon shake, which is a lot of liquid, that I was making in the morning was leading me right into dinner. So I switched from a three-meal way of eating to this two-meal way of eating essentially within probably eight months to a year, maybe around the year mark. So I would just have a very moderate salad for dinner.

I was really thinking about the dynamic of how everything had worked and how things had happened and what made me feel so good was that I didn’t necessarily have to listen to anyone’s rules per say, I took in what everyone was talking about and if one day I felt like to make juice, it would make juice. If the next day I was in the mood for smoothies, I would. If I were eating oranges and only wanted to have citrus, I would make a unique meal of oranges. So I incorporated a little bit of what everyone was talking about. But more than anything, I really started to start, for the first time in my life, eating intuitively and just eating what felt right to me. There might be a day when I’d eat mangoes and they tasted fantastic and maybe I’d eat four in a row because there was something inside that my body really craved, but then a couple of weeks later I’d go eat the same thing. mango and might not be that tasty to me. So I thought to myself that maybe my body already got what it needed. So intuitive eating became a very important part of the way I started living. Some days I felt a little overwhelmed and could have juice that day. I was totally fine with that. And vice versa, some other days I might feel like I want to be a little more grounded, so I might do a little more avocado, nuts and whatnot.

But this process was pretty gradual until I got to the point where I am today. Eating intuitively and really listening to your body and breathing through the whole process and just being present to what I was putting in my mouth was probably the biggest source of change for me and I felt the best for my body.

So maybe after a year I started to figure out what the next option would be for me and things just got lighter and lighter until about a year and a half or a year and six, seven months. I decided to make a quick juice. Basically what it was was drinking only juice for 92 days. It was something totally new for me, I had not done any kind of long-term fasting for so long. And I felt that it was the right thing to do, it was my moment and I jumped right in. I ended up extending and did it for 100 days. For 100 days I only drank fruit and vegetable juice. So that had changed my diet drastically. But it was a new experience and I wanted to really experience what human potential was and what my body could really do and how much resolve and determination I had to stick with it. So I did, and I experienced incredible changes in my life, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later. I experienced such amazing changes.

Then after the juice party period, I’m making a slow transition, which ended about three or four months ago, and I’m slowly going back to my old way of eating, having smoothies in the morning, eating salads. I do a lot of fruits and vegetables that are high in water: cucumbers, celery, tomato and things like that. Lately I’ve been moving away from nuts a lot and sticking with some plain seeds, like chia or flax or sunflower seeds and stuff like that. But I tend to do a lot of high water content. I usually have at least one head of some type of green (lettuce, bok choy, chard) per day. And I keep it simple. People ask me if I’m bored and I say, “Fresh fruits and vegetables is what my body craves.”