Hello,
I've been vegetarian since Thanksgiving '93, and vegan for close to 13 of these years (continuously vegan since March 2004). I worked for Feeling Fit For Life (yes the company that bought the right to the name of the book). It was also known as Life Science Institute. The old Natural Hygiene crowd will know of it and its history.
I have gone through the typical progression of self-awareness. At first, in 1984, I came across the book, "There IS a Cure for Arthritis." I was two months from starting my senior in high school and looking for something to do at the house, and the book happened to be laying about. There are mistakes in the Naturopathy approach to better health, but it was the trigger point that made me realize that I needed to start watching what I was doing and its impact on my health as a consequence.
It wasn't until about early 1993 that I was recommended the book Fit For Life. I read it once, didn't understand it, and then I got it when I read it again months later, while being chained to the bathroom because of digestive problems and mild weight gain. Up to this point, I had done things like not take medicine, eat better quality meats, cheeses, etc. like you would buy from a 80s-90s small-health-food-store place until I learned about Whole Foods Market in the next city over. Reading that book was another flash point. Prior to this, I had been working for a company not related to Fit For Life for several years, and there was a vegetarian in my department. My last meat meal 18 years ago was venison for T-Day, at my Dad's house. I went vegetarian after this day.
I read the book a few more times and discovered that Life Science Institute was listed in it. I contacted them about their Natural Hygiene Course, made a visit there in Austin, and a few months later, while I was studying it, I quit my job at Lockheed and moved to Austin to work for them. I was certified by them as a Natural Hygiene educator in January 1995. Around that time, I went vegan the first time. I had tried for 15 months to go vegan, BUT the killer was cheese. I remember the days when I would stop by Cici's on the way home or for lunch and just DEVOUR the buffet. I was able to avoid the meat options, but I COULD NOT let go of the dairy. It was HARD. The second time, after falling off, took me near five years to go vegan again. Anyway, the company didn't last because of mismanagement and falling off the intended path. I went to grad school nearly a year before it failed.
So, I have been continuously vegan since 2004, as I mentioned, BUT I was starting to experience some of the common problems that older vegetarians experience, like a vision problem made worse, and aching in my elbows. I've had to go back to my readings on my Natural Hygiene to realize that yes, I know I shouldn't be doing salt, sugar, oils, etc. It's like a favorite salad dressing I was using on my salads in the day. Whenever I ate large amounts of it on my salads, I would get the aching in my elbows. When I dropped the dressing and found something else to eat, it would go away, so I repeated this several times as part of my life-long experiment to understand things. Sure enough, that's what it was. I experienced similar results with corn and wheat products.
A few years ago, I reconnected with some of the old Natural Hygiene people online (instead of through snail mail) and found another group I had never been in contact with, a very small group even within just the vegan group. It's very small because the vast majority of this already-small group of vegans are Low-Fat-Cooked-Vegan or High-Protein-Cooked-Vegan.
The group I'm referring to is Low-Fat-Raw-Vegan. What is LFRV? Well, it's basically no animal products, no cooked foods, seasonings, supplements. Simply put, it is mainly fruit (90%), some veggies (~7%), and some fat (~3%, normally what is found in fruits and veggies, with few meals in overts like avocados, nuts, and seeds). Some also do the 8-1-1 angle on this. The point is, no cooked foods. But to do it right means mainly organic produce, and a lot of it.
What I'm trying to share here is the progression from waking up to the fact that there is a problem with the medical system, to trying to eat more healthfully (though misguided), to going vegetarian and finding substitutes for animal products (again, misguided), to going vegan but still cooked foods (again misguided), and learning that my problems go away when I go LFRV. LFRV is viewed by this group as the end-stage of the progression of awareness as your body continues to reject more strenuously smaller and smaller amounts of processed foods until finally you're getting closer to a more natural dietary. The foods and recipes being suggested here are merely transitional foods; i.e., eventually, you'll have to stop eating them as you continue to develop health problems because you share some common characteristics with SAD eaters (Standard American Diet). These characteristics are salt, oils, refined sugars, the act of cooking and its deranging effects on food, and foods that are not appropriate to the human dietary. These characteristics just slow down your rate of damage to the body relative to SAD rates.
It is extremely hard for me to do LFRV for long periods (the longest I have gone is 59 days) because of stress factors - I work at a difficult job, and it just makes me want to eat my feelings, like starving vampires trapped in Alaska during the summer (the sun, dammit, the sun!). I have been learning, along with the LFRV crowd, that we are very emotional eaters because of our addictions and how our feelings are tangled up in what we eat.
For example, when I think of mexican food, I think of the friends back home, living with my Dad (who passed away in 2000), the old ways of friendship that I don't see anymore. Italian food - I think of my Mom's spaghetti dinners with medium-rare meat balls (Mom passed away in '98). Snacks - I think of fun things I did as a teenager without the clutter of responsibility in my mind today. Buttered flour tortillas warmed over the stove or grilled cheese sandwiches - I think of the loneliness I felt in grade school when I couldn't see Mom living two hours away and dealing with a rough relationship with my stepmother. What we have come to understand is that we have to learn to handle our emotions that cause us to be driven to eat such foods even though we know perfectly well they are not good for us and cause us health problems. These days, I swing back and forth between Low-Fat-Cooked Vegan and LFRV as I continue on working out the emotions in my life.
This is the original source of Natural Hygiene that I learned from -
Raw Food Living|Raw Food Diet & Recipes|Organic Raw Foods - the original books spanned I think 15-17 volumes running at least 1,300 pages. This is a LONG read. To get back to the table of contents, remember to click on Site Map.
What is wrong with cooking oils or salad oils - keep in mind that there is an animal product slant to this article, but just look at what is up with refined vegetable oils and the poison it really is -
The Oiling of America
And, if you want to interact directly with people learning about LFRV, I suggest going here -
Raw Natural Hygiene - most of the active forum discussions are happening in the Chatter Box.
Now, here is a real cool article about archaeology being applied to health studies. It explains the fact that "modern diseases" are not really all that modern. Have fun with it -
McDougall Newsletter: May 2011 - The Egyptian Mummy Paradox
Barbaro that is very interesting...