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  #1   ^
Old Sat, May-02-15, 15:04
WereBear's Avatar
WereBear WereBear is offline
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Default Recovering from fruitarianism: one man's account

This is not a recent article, but it's the best I've ever read about the goals and motivations of those who embrace raw food and fruitarianism:

Tom's Fruitarian Journey

offered here because a) they call us "extreme!" and b) it's a vivid tale of how a diet without animal products of any kind is really rather dangerous.

Quote:
By the end of 1971, I was a practicing fruitarian; my diet was 75+% raw fruit. I lived in Florida at the time, and had year-round access to a wide variety of locally grown fruit (most unsprayed, some organic)...

Those who have read some of the idealistic fruitarian writings will recognize from the above that I was living in near-ideal circumstances to practice fruitarianism. Despite the advantages of this near-ideal situation (and food supply), my overall experience with the diet was a mixture of both good and bad, with bad predominating over the long-term.

My initial experience (1972 through early 1973) with 100% raw fruitarianism, after I got past the first major cleansing stages, was very positive indeed: my physical health improved, the need for sleep decreased, I had lots of energy (some of the time), and I had a pleasant "light" or "euphoric" mental feeling that I thought was a spiritual feeling at the time. Things went well for a while, and my spirituality seemed to grow as well. However, there were trouble signs, even in 1972--emaciation, constant hunger, frequent weakness, and intermittent fatigue.


Let me state that it sounds heavenly. I could probably go for eating nothing but a couple dozen varieties of tasty fruit. However, I think I would last three days before the nausea, blood sugar swings, and fainting spells would get me dragged into a steak house before I collapsed.

He stuck with it until his "quest for purity" led him to fasting, which collapsed a fragile system.

Quote:
The honeymoon period came to an abrupt end when my work took me overseas to a cold-climate location, where fresh fruit was expensive and of poor quality. (I was overseas about 20-25% of the time in the 1973-1978 period.) On one trip, I lived on a mono-diet of mandarin oranges for one month. Since then, I have steadfastly refused to eat mandarin oranges for any reason.

On one stressful, cold winter trip (at the end of the honeymoon period), the heat was not working in the place we were staying; consequently I had to freeze (and nearly starve) for 3 weeks. I returned to Florida, weighing only 95 pounds (43 kg)--my second crash. Fortunately, avocados were in season, and I was able to quickly regain weight by eating a diet that was mostly avocados. Anyone try avocados for breakfast? It's really not bad when you are emaciated and trying to gain weight.


This was similar to what happened to me in my months long attempts at both vegetarianism and a raw food diet; I would eat so much in an attempt to get the nutrients I needed that the results were nothing anyone would want.

Quote:
Additional problems during the post-honeymoon period included: severe muscle cramps--usually leg muscles, which may have been due to a calcium deficiency (most fruit is low in calcium); dental problems consisting of severe erosion of tooth enamel from acidic fruit consumption (enamel hypoplasia) and gum disease that required surgery (my consumption of excess sugar in the form of fruit may have been a factor in that); acid reflux (from eating too many dates); as well as the usual symptoms of excess sugar consumption (fatigue, sugar highs/blues, excess urination, constant thirst, etc.). As a "model fruitarian," my giving in to cravings was done in secret, as it seemed shameful to go off the "perfect, ideal" fruit diet. The only times I ate candy was on my foreign trips (and then only occasionally). In other words, I was engaging in the classic eating disorder behavior of binges and eating in secret. (I should mention that the amount and frequency of binge-eating was rather low.)


I think this is what distinguishes most of us from any accusations of disordered eating. This board is full of encouragement to tweak low carbing to suit us, to discuss its many variations, and support for those who are experimenting with dairy, artificial sweeteners, or other personal choices.

Whereas the "perfect ideal" kinds of eaters like to outdo each other with their Purity, their strictness, and their cleanses and fasts.

Quote:
Having achieved and experienced very high levels of physical "purity" with the associated "light" mental feeling, I can assure you that the real experience of physical purity is not as positive as others advertise it to be. When you are very "pure," you become very physically sensitive. On the fruitarian diet, your sense of smell is sharpened considerably. The disadvantage of this is that it makes normal life very difficult, as follows.
Sitting in a room with a smoker (even if he/she is not smoking) may be painful--you cannot stand the smell.
The smell of garlic cooking can be nearly as painful as tear gas.
When you step on a bus or train, you gag because of the smell of the people on board.
You meet an attractive person who also seems attracted to you, but you cannot get near them because of the smell.


Yikes! In the hands of the questing dieter, I imagine such experiences feed into a sense of superiority (which is the hidden motivations of many fanatical vegans I have met) and reinforce their determination not to "weaken."

Health problems led him to add raw dairy to his diet:

Quote:
Adding dairy to my diet has helped me in many ways:

Increased my strength and stamina.
Effectively eliminated physical cravings; milk and yogurt are comfort foods and anti-craving.
Increased body weight, and the weight is staying on, rather than melting off.
Increased hydration (many raw vegans are dehydrated--I was, before adding dairy to my diet).
Increased sense of well-being; in other words, I feel better.
Helped with my health problems, and also helped balance me, in Ayurvedic terms. There is another benefit of using dairy: it helped free me from the negative mindset of vegan anti-dairy propaganda. Finally, I could appreciate the gentle nature of Mother cow, and her generosity in sharing her milk with us. That is a far cry from the hateful rhetoric about dairy that one often hears from so-called "compassionate" vegans, e.g., "liquid meat," "cow mucus," "sexual harassment," and so on. [P.S. Pardon the sarcasm, but it would not surprise me if the preceding remarks motivate some "compassionate" vegans to send me "compassionate" hate mail.]


Even this relatively small source of animal products and protein seems to have done wonders for him, even though he was supplementing with B12. I was intrigued by him now characterizing his extreme periods as a form of eating disorder.

Quote:
Over and above the eating disorder behaviors so common in fruitarianism, I can now say (in 1997) that in my opinion, the biggest criticism of fruitarianism is that it is dishonest in so many ways:
Extremists promoting the diet as "ideal" and/or "natural" when it is neither--such claims are based on a false model of nature, and fallacious rhetoric, e.g., "apes are fruitarians," "humans evolved as fruitarians." Meanwhile, in reality, all the great apes deliberately eat some animal foods, because that is their natural diet, and the fossil record provides overwhelming evidence that the evolutionary diet of humans included animal foods.
The experts/role models who claim to strictly follow the diet (100% raw and 75+% fruit), but who binge-eat, eat in secret, and generally cheat on the diet.
The extremists who proclaim themselves as perfectly healthy, when they are so emotionally unhealthy that they cannot respond to criticism of their ideal diet in a civil, rational manner. (Unfortunately, I have encountered many such extremists in the past.)


This is so different from the many success stories seen on low carb, Paleo, and Wheat Belly sites.
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  #2   ^
Old Sat, May-02-15, 15:24
teaser's Avatar
teaser teaser is offline
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I did almost nothing but bananas for three days, once. That was interesting. When I went to work out, it was all that I could do to keep my eyes open. Chronically nap-time. Also, my diet pop started tasting way too sweet. I actually expected it to go the other way, and for sweet taste to be downregulated.

I think these people are sugar addicts, plain and simple, and have found a way to wrap their vice in a cloak of purity. I just don't see how anybody could halfway adhere to that diet for very long any other way.
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  #3   ^
Old Sat, May-02-15, 16:22
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bkloots bkloots is offline
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Interesting read. When I first heard about "Fruitarians" I thought it was a joke. Well, in the movie, it WAS a joke: "I only eat fruit that has dropped from the tree, and is therefore already dead." The ultimate purity: harm no living thing.

I'm glad this forum is a generous place, where many dietary variations can be explored, resources shared, results celebrated. Low in fanatics.

Best wishes.
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  #4   ^
Old Sun, May-03-15, 08:20
M Levac M Levac is offline
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Quote:
30 years of transitions: from fruitarian to living foods to lacto-vegetarian

Can't wait for the next 30 years of transition.
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  #5   ^
Old Sun, May-03-15, 11:00
GRB5111's Avatar
GRB5111 GRB5111 is offline
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The point hammered home so many times on this forum is that constructing a WOE that works for you is really the ultimate objective for paving the way to good health. While there are radical forms of eating embraced by many, it's essential to understand the human digestive system. We are omnivores with a carnivore digestive system. This means that in the process of constructing our personal WOE, we have great flexibility in determining our best sources of dietary health. To radically limit sources of nutrition (certain whole foods including animals) goes against human physiology and the ability to maintain good health. Thanks for the post WereBear, it serves to confirm that some can really twist themselves around unfounded and uninformed beliefs.
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  #6   ^
Old Sun, May-03-15, 13:22
WereBear's Avatar
WereBear WereBear is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GRB5111
Thanks for the post WereBear, it serves to confirm that some can really twist themselves around unfounded and uninformed beliefs.


You are welcome. As a Taoist, I believe in figuring out how reality works, and then adapting myself to it.

These folks who come up with elaborate rationales, and torment themselves because it should work, cause a lot of totally ridiculous suffering.
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  #7   ^
Old Sun, May-03-15, 14:50
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gonwtwindo gonwtwindo is offline
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"...the biggest criticism of fruitarianism is that it is dishonest in so many ways:"

Thank you for this concept. I feel 100% this way about my dietician who prescribed this 'healthy vegan diet' for me, a diabetic.
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  #8   ^
Old Sun, May-03-15, 20:41
bkloots's Avatar
bkloots bkloots is offline
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Plan: LC--Atkins
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Quote:
torment themselves because it should work, cause a lot of totally ridiculous suffering.
Yes, like my endless years of calorie-counting!
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  #9   ^
Old Mon, May-04-15, 00:20
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CMCM CMCM is offline
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Steve Jobs went through a fruitarian phase. Look how he ended up, doesn't look like it benefited his health.
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  #10   ^
Old Mon, May-04-15, 00:42
M Levac M Levac is offline
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I really don't want to go all ad hominem on this guy, but I think I should point out that I can't rely on any of his interpretations of the facts. It reads like one giant sequence of big mistakes and it seems he just couldn't get away from some form of idealism. We've all read other stories of going from a bad diet to one that actually works (Peter Attia, the Eades', Atkins, pretty much everybody on this forum, Taubes, Denise Minger, and a slew of other reasonable folks), but this one isn't that, it's going from one bad diet to another bad diet to end up with yet another bad diet. The guy just isn't reasonable. I don't mean he went to extremes, I mean he never tried to reason it out.

I'm trying to say this ain't really a lesson in diet, it's a lesson in brains. Let me put it differently. How many ways are there to fail with the premise of CICO? Obviously we haven't reached the end of it. We still find new ways to fail CICO. And so if we do not abandon CICO, we keep looking for the thing that finally makes CICO work as we believe it should, we continue to fail cuz it ain't the thing that fails, it's CICO (or rather, our belief in CICO). Well, that's what I see in the guy's story. He kept looking at the next absurd diet cuz they all have some ideal in common and it's the idealism he was looking for, not food. He's been trying to obey his belief when instead he should have been trying to obey his physiology (that's ironic cuz he said stuff about Ayurveda).

It's like what WereBear said, figure out reality, then adapt to it. Well, that guy did it wrong. Several times in a row. In a big way. So I guess that's the lesson I get from this guy's story.
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  #11   ^
Old Mon, May-04-15, 07:59
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Nancy LC Nancy LC is offline
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If a diet makes you feel spiritual, then you probably weren't well grounded in reality to start out.
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  #12   ^
Old Mon, May-04-15, 11:19
jem51 jem51 is offline
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There's a lot of that article that I could've written.

I remember being at one spiritual/raw weekend with all the greats, David Wolff, Gabriel Cousens, Viktoras Kulvinskas (sp), etc.
I distinctly remember that this is the exact time when I crossed over into real, gnawing hunger....and this was raw vegies and fruits including some fats!

I had some great times before that; I hitchhiked from WA to Ukiah which included a 13 mile hike into Laytonville hills. It was easy!!

I realized later that the 'high' was simply blood sugar swings.
David Wolff was talking about sitting in a melon field having breakfast and feeling high. At that moment, I saw it!

Adding in yogurt was a life saver and settled the intestinal hypermotility.
Ultimately, I added meat which was paleo before paleo was cool.

There are several cultures with longevity that rely on dairy but if he's still eating a lot of sweet fruit, it may not help that much. But, no matter what, he's made improvements.
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  #13   ^
Old Tue, May-05-15, 15:11
rightnow's Avatar
rightnow rightnow is offline
Every moment is NOW.
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There are buddhists who barf up their rice after eating it having removed the energy from it, so they harm none. I call them rice-barfing-buddhists. I vehemently disagree with this particular philosophy but hey, to each their own, and apparently it works for them.

I used to fast a lot and I agree about the smell thing. I remember standing on bleachers in a church choir practice once, and suddenly I was HIT with the smell of something I wasn't sure about but smelled kind of like apricot brandy. I said, "It smells like apricot brandy!" and the pianist, who was well out of my line of vision behind and not even close to me in a big room, said, "I only bit into this apricot like 4 seconds before you said that!"

I wasn't grossed out by people smells though. Just very sensitive to subtle smells.

Quote:
The extremists who proclaim themselves as perfectly healthy, when they are so emotionally unhealthy that they cannot respond to criticism of their ideal diet in a civil, rational manner.

This. Whenever I see someone online who, in the process of exampling why their dietary choices are healthy, sounds like they want to kill you before leaping out a window, I wonder what on earth makes them think that diet is "working" for them if they are that hormonally messed up by it.

PJ
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  #14   ^
Old Tue, May-05-15, 15:15
rightnow's Avatar
rightnow rightnow is offline
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Plan: LC (ketogenic)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by M Levac
He kept looking at the next absurd diet cuz they all have some ideal in common and it's the idealism he was looking for, not food. He's been trying to obey his belief when instead he should have been trying to obey his physiology

Great point, as usual Martin.

PJ
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  #15   ^
Old Tue, May-05-15, 17:10
WereBear's Avatar
WereBear WereBear is offline
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Plan: EpiPaleo/Primal/LowOx
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rightnow
Whenever I see someone online who, in the process of exampling why their dietary choices are healthy, sounds like they want to kill you before leaping out a window, I wonder what on earth makes them think that diet is "working" for them if they are that hormonally messed up by it.

PJ


I tell myself "They are short of B12." Because they probably are!
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