80/10/10 Story · The 80/10/10 Community

80/10/10 Story

Hi friends,

This month marks about 10 years that I have been fruit based raw vegan. I feel like I am not as active in the raw vegan world as I would like to be, and although I don't consider myself a raw vegan "expert" by any means, I guess I have a good amount of experience under my belt now that I could share. I don't know if my experience as a raw vegan will be of any interest to anyone here, but I figure if I can help or inspire just 1 person it's worth it for me to share.

I was raised eating a largely whole foods vegetarian diet, but I did eat a lot of dairy. I first became aware of raw foods when I went to university in Montreal and lived for 2 years with a professional chef at Montreal's biggest raw food restaurant. He wasn't raw or vegan himself but he did have lots of books about raw foods in the apartment. At this point I had already been struggling with anorexia for about 6 years but for the first couple years of my degree I managed to maintain a healthy weight and overall good level of health. When I went to live with Barry the raw food chef ,it coincided with me slipping back into a relapse, and I was very preoccupied with my body and calories and losing weight. These books ( don't worry Doug, your's wasn't one of them) unfortunately only exacerated my downward spiral by planting seeds in my head about "detox" and cleansing my body. I started dabbling with raw food meals but my weight was simultaneously decreasing very quickly because I was drastically undereating and when I flew back home for Christmas I narrowly avoided hospitalization by agreeing to let my Mom take charge of my food intake. Despite her good intentions, this involved a "refeeding" diet consisting of lots of cheese and eggs, nuts, starches and many other high calorie but hard to digest foods. I slowly gained weight and was allowed to return to university with supervision, meaning I had to move out of Barry's place and rent a flat with Mom, therefor continuing with the high fat, high protein vegetarian diet. I felt horrible but distracted myself with my studies and the belief that I was doing the right thing. One day I was watching some video on youtube about something totally unrelated and vegan activist Gary Yourofsky's "best speech you'll ever hear" pops up in my "recommended " sidebar. For those who don't know what I'm talking about this is a well known speech about the realities of how animals are treated in animal ag. I clicked on it of course and watched the whole thing start to finish in one go. By the end I was in tears and told my Mom I have to go vegan. After the initial shock she watched the video too and couldn't help but agree, so we started researching" how to gain weight on vegan diet". And of course what we found was "eat lots of nuts", "eat lots of grains, legumes, tofu, peanut butter!" ...

So, that's what we did, and (surprise, surprise) I continued to feel like s**t. I also started developing acid reflux every day, which was actually painful and got to the point of being quite debilitating a lot of the time. Now we were stuck, I still had weight to gain but something needed to change diet-wise. Then I remembered the raw food books from Barry and I started thinking, "what if that could be the answer?"

Back to the internet and it didn't take long for me to stumble across some videos of Doug Graham, as well as some other fruit based advocates like Fred Patenaude who are not really active anymore. I was immediately intrigued by this idea of basing the diet on fruit, after all I had always loved fruit, and I made up my mind immediately to go all in and give it a try. Well, let's just say the difference was night and day. My acid reflux and digestive issues dissappeared basically overnight and instead I had a level of energy and enthusiasm for life that I hadn't felt since I was a kid! It was great! Soon after I picked up a copy of Doug's book The 80/10/10 diet which really helped me understand why the high fat, high protein approach I had been doing previously had been giving me so many problems and affirmed to me that this was without a doubt the way I wanted to eat-and live, forever!

For the next 5 years (2013-2018) I followed a predominantly raw, 100% vegan, 80/10/10 fruit based diet, with a great deal of hiccups and stumbling blocks along the way, and then after a 3 year hiatus (a story for another time), I came back to it in 2021, and have been following a 100% (with few exceptions) fruit based raw vegan diet for the last 5 years. Although it has not always been easy, I always come back to fruit, because it really is the only food that truly loves me back.

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