Blogdate 4/3/06

Who am I. I ask myself this as I look closely in the mirror searching for any signs of aging. Time is a restless foe. At 57 I see non of the obvious signs of aging such as wrinkles around the eyes or deep lines forming. I don't see any evidence of sagging muscles or pockets of fat forming. My skin is still smooth and soft. But something insidious is marking the passage of time. Something that I can't quite put my finger on. As of this writing I have no chronic conditions of any kind. I can still run, swim, ride a bike without any noticeable loss of energy or performance. But I don't recognize the eyes of the face that looks back at me from the mirror.

Maybe the eyes record all of our experiences as we journey through life and no matter how much we are able to retain the appearance of youth it is still a fleeting bird. And with the passage of time there is this quality of sorrow. Much like summer passing into fall and then into winter. Even so I think that if we must grow old and it happens to us all if we stick around long enough would it not be great if we could somehow slow the process down. I don't think that we are supposed to reach the age of 40 or 50 and start to rot from the inside out. Which is just what happens to us when we have a diet that is not compatible with our body's design.

So here is my challenge. I'm now 57 years old. I have taken stock of myself in the harsh light of self examination. I can see the little telltale signs of erosions that time is working upon me and I want to gather my forces and fight back with all my heart and soul. To fight the ravages of time. I kind of like that phrase. Even though in the end I know that time will win because "The wheels of time grind very fine."

When I ask myself what are the differences between me now at 57 and me at 22 I can see subtle little changes that time makes. For one thing I can't just start off the day in full motion without some kind of warm up. If I do I'm more likely to pull a muscle or receive some other type of injury. But if I start the day off with a series of layered workout patterns then I can function at top speed much the same way that I did when I was in my thirties. I say thirties because I think it sounds better than saying that I'm still functioning at the same level that I did in my twenties. But there was very little change in my level of energy between my twenties and thirties. I'm still the same size that I was in my twenties I still have the same fat to lean ratio the only difference being that if I eat the wrong foods (even though it is raw vegan food) then I start to put on fat, but in my twenties I could eat anything and not gain one once of fat.

When I run it takes me longer to get a second wind than I remember in my twenties. But here is the pivotal point that might apply to all of us who are fighting a similar battle. At 57 I'm running a small corporation. I'm taking care of four children and I have a huge work-load of things that I have to do each day. When I was in my twenties I didn't even have a car. I only had a bicycle. I was riding over a hundred miles a day and I was only taking care of myself. Now I spend hours in front of a computer everyday. I drive just about everywhere and I doubt if I ride a hundred miles a week. So has my body aged or did I through my lifestyle changes bring about the changes.

The next question is what if I reversed the lifestyle changes that just about all of us go through when we leave college and start our families and careers. Is there any reason why I can't achieve a high level of conditioning or maybe even reach an all time peak.

This is the challenge that I have set for myself. To see if by adding a much more developed level of working out and integrating it into my work flow if I can in fact reach a level of conditioning that is close to or better than what I have experienced in my twenties and thirties.

In my thirties and forties I was competing with college students and winning. I was captain of a fencing team and I was on a rowing team for years. I didn't go to college until I was thirty five and I stayed in college for over 15 years. But now at 57 my work load won't allow me the time to go to college and train with and compete with students. I think that it is really important to work-out and compete in order to push yourself to the limit. So what I have done is joined a Kung Fu studio where they do a lot of sparring and fighting. This will give me a lot of different age groups to train with and compete against. I plan on filming a lot of the results and using them in this blog as I document my journey further turning back the hands of time using the raw vegan diet and exercise as a way of maintaining and regenerating my body on a cellular level.

I think that a lot of this battle is mental. It is like a form of catch 22. We start to slow down because we aren't doing as much, And then because we aren't doing as much we start to slow down. But the first thing that happens is that we make a mental decision to slow down. Especially if we have a diet that is full of what I call sludge. Sludge is cooked inorganic foods that contains a lot of toxins that just don't break down and pass through our system. This results in accumulation of toxins that prevent the cells from either absorbing nutrients or expelling waste materials. When this happens then we age. When we eat raw organic vegan foods a lot of this accelerated aging process is avoided altogether and we are then able to regenerate cells on a level that most people only do in their youth.

It has been years since I actually trained and fought on the level of tournament Kung Fu so I know that I will lose some fights as I come back into it. But I'm thinking that if I train hard I will be able to reach a peak level in about three to four months.

One of the purposes of this blog will be to document the complete diet, training, and results of this process. I have in fact already started training and I will train for about one month on my own before I go into the Studio because I feel that you must be at a certain level of training in order to avoid injuries when training on the level that a Kung Fu studio demands.

Right now the layered workout consists of a series of stretching poses that is a cross between Yoga and Kung Fu. I go into these poses holding them for two or three hundred deep breaths and totally relaxing. This allows the muscles, ligaments, and tendons to stretch without injury. After I have worked every muscle group in this fashion I then move into repetitions using my own body weight . 500 sit ups or crunches, two hundred push ups, 21 chin ups both front and back grip, five minutes on the rowing machine, and then a series of free weight exercises. All of the work that I do with the free weights is light weights with lots of reps. This helps to build a fast quick muscle that is not muscle bound like you see in a lot of major bodybuilders. Then the final level of workout that I do is totally circular. This involves the jump rope, biking, rowing, working out with three different kinds of sticks, speed bag, and heavy bag, as well as a kicking bag. This workout usually takes about 1 hour to 2 hours. What I do is get up a little earlier than I used to so my work day still starts at the same time.

Energy on demand

When I first started doing this level of working out I didn't have the energy but over time I found that I was able to do the workouts easier because of the concept of energy on demand. If we don't demand anything of our body then there is no reason for it to produce it so over time we just become slower and slower until we really do start on the down slope of life. In fact what I think happens is that nature starts to recycle us before we are dead, and this is a long slow painful process. In a way this is almost permission based in that we have to give up for this process to start to take place.

I have heard it said that Modern Science can find no reason for the human body to ever die. I don't know if this is really true or not but I like to think that it is. Because if it is so then there must be some inner decision reached within our selves that gives up the race and lets the process begin. Maybe we just don't have the endurance for eternity.

I feel that we are in the pivotal point of our collective conciseness in being able to take our health and the destiny of our planet into our own hands as individuals. The concept of Raw Vegan Food is a simple one in that if there is a food group that is truly designed for the human body and we can unravel the layers of myths surrounding it. If in fact we can focus on a common sense 100 percent natural diet that really works then I think that we will take a huge step in being able to fight the onslaught of debilitating chronic diseases that now plague us.

Such a simple concept has started a huge raging debate. Parents have had their children taken away. Many doctors and scientist deny the healthy benefits of eating a raw vegan diet and some go so far as to say that it is dangerous for kids to be raised on this diet. I'm no crusader I must admit that Jinjee deserves almost all of the credit. For many years I was in the closet with my diet. To say that you only eat raw food in 1972 was to invite instant attack not only from friends and strangers but also from family members.

After Jinjee was able to reverse a lump growing in her breast with raw food, a lump that returned after she started eating cooked food again and then vanished when she returned back to the raw vegan diet, she announced that she was going to build a website telling people about the benefits of raw food. I tried to convince her that people would try to take our kids away if we did that. But based upon the huge effect that the raw vegan diet had had upon her Jinjee was adamant in making a stand. I was scared then and I'm still scared.

I like comparing it to the Lord of the Rings opening poem. One ring for the Elves under their elfin skies. One ring for the Dwarves in their halls of stone. One ring to find them and one ring to bind them and one ring for the Dark Lord in the land of Mordor the region where the shadow lies.

I wanted to try and sneak past the sleeping dragon least his baleful glaring eye fall upon me. But Jinjee chose to step right up to the sleeping beast and scream at him at the top of her voice. This really started in 1998 and every time someone comes to one of our retreats or in some other way questions the current paradigm of the way we eat then I feel a lightening of the footprint that we all leave on the earth collectively.

It is our sincere hope that by presenting our lifestyle in a simple format in a kind of day to day fashion that we will be able to at least destroy the myth that the raw vegan diet does not work. And maybe a little further down the line we can with the help of doctors and scientists present the reason why certain raw foods have such a powerful healing effect on our bodies.

So once again I want to thank you who visit and support our website. We are starting to have a huge ground swell of support from people all over the world, and it is my hope that it might in some small way make a difference in how we eat and feed our children.

After doing raw vegan retreats and maintaining this website for over five years we have in the process gathered many very interesting stories. It is my intention to use this space to share some of those stories with you. I don't think of myself as a healer; I feel that many of the people who came to our retreats where sick because of the way that they ate. And when they stopped eating that way then a lot of the chronic conditions that they were suffering from reversed and they were able to recover. When this happens then I feel that they deserve the credit for having healed themselves by changing their diets, for the concept is such a simple one that I can take no credit for it.

Most of the stories and situations that I'm going to relate in this blog will be one or two paragraphs and the chronological order will jump around. Sometimes I will use video footage or photos to illustrate a point. And in some rare cases I will contact a person in question and ask them if it is all right if I use their name and Email address. I will do this when someone has reversed a really serious chronic condition and maybe others can benefit by having a direct exchange with this person. This whole blog will be free and to get to the pictures and videos just follow the links embedded in the text. I will try to add to it regularly. I will post in the Daily Raw Inspiration newsletter every time I add onto the Blog. If you have any questions about any aspect of the Blog you can email me at stormblog@thegardendiet.com and I will try and answer your questions as best I can.

The raw food retreat that stills stands out most in my mind is the first one. Jinjee and I were living on Vancouver Island in Canada on two acres of land with a stream and old growth forest. We were in the process of changing over from working for dot com start ups to creating our own music cds. We had an in-house digital video studio and we had just finished our first music CD. We were marketing it online and it was selling well. We had a beautiful five bedroom house with an indoor swimming pool in the rainforest and after a short walk through the forest we came out at the ocean. We were living in a dreamscape. I was kayaking and hiking everyday. It was around this time that Jinjee announced that she wanted to put on a raw food retreat. I did my best to try and discourage her. Then one day after a long and drawn out battle I realized that I should let her put it up on the website, because no one would come and that would be the end of it. Within two weeks not only had she sold the retreat out but she had over 30 people on a waiting list. This really blew my mind. I could not imagine anyone being interested in my crazy diet that in the past had only resulted in my being ridiculed beyond my ability to endure.

She had contacted David Wolfe, Paul Nison, Nomi Shannon, Doug Graham, Elaine Love as well as many other well known raw food teachers and speakers to come and speak at our retreat. I had never heard of any of these people. I didn't even know that there was a raw food movement.

Some of the people who signed up for our retreat had cancer and other serious diseases, such as diabetes, and Chrons Disease. Although I delivered all of my babies and had dealt with one friend who had cancer I really hadn't had to deal with anyone who was really sick.

In 1973 after I had been raw for one year a lifelong friend of my named Bubbles came down with cancer and was given less than a year to live. I had been studying about green juice and it said over and over again that it was good for the treatment of cancer. It was mentioned in just about every book that I read so I decided that I was going to heal Bubbles. I took my juicer and my tooth brush over to his house and moved in with him. I told him that I was not leaving until he was completely healed of cancer. The first thing that I did was throw out all the junk food in his house. The news spread through the neighborhood and Bubbles started calling up friends and trying to get them to sneak him junk food. But I stood my ground and kept pouring green juice into him for over a period of three months. At first he got real weak, but then the crisis passed and he started getting stronger. He finally reached a point where his cancer went into remission. No one was more surprised than I was. In fact it really scared me. People everywhere started coming up to me and asking me for advice. I really didn't have any answers for them I still don't - not really except that green juice seems to work really well on certain types of cancers. I left Detroit and moved to California.

Then one day about two years later Bubbles decided to started eating junk food again. I talked to him on the phone and he said that "what was the point of living if he couldn't eat the foods that he really loved". I think that what really happened was that he was feeling so much better that he did not feel that he had to keep eating the same diet. Within a year he was dead. A lot of people seem to feel this way about the food that they love and many chose to make a conscious choice to suffer illness rather than give up the foods they love.

Another one of the things that happened when Bubbles' cancer went into remission: The doctors said that they must have made a mistake and mis-diagnosed him. I have seen many people who were able to reverse serious chronic conditions with a change to the raw vegan diet have their doctors tell them that they were not really that sick to begin with. This does not bother me at all because the last thing that I want to be known as is a healer. I think that what is going to happen in the not too distant future is that the doctors and scientists are going to totally realize that when you switch to a raw vegan diet that a lot of the toxins which created many of the chronic conditions in the first place are now absent. And with the presence of non heat damaged building blocks the body is able to effect its own recovery.

What happened when Jinjee sold the retreat out was that our new credit card processing company refused to give us the money that we raised in two weeks. Because it was such a large amount they thought that we were doing something illegal and they wanted to investigate before they would release the money. So we had to go down to California with less than a thousand dollars. We had over a hundred and twenty people coming from all over the world and many of them had already purchased their tickets taken time off from work or other wise moved their schedules around. The owners of the Ranch we were renting wanted all of their money up front which came out to over 14,000 dollars before they would allow one retreat guest on the property. It was at this point that Jinjee said "I don't deal with this level of stress, you need to be the man and take over I have done my part, and I don't want my milk to go bad". She was nursing at the time. So after a shouting contest with the owner of the ranch we were able to come to terms and take control of the ranch. But we still had no money for food. Since it was in the spring of the year and everything was growing I decided to make it a foraging retreat and we started gathering grasses and other edible herbs and plants. For some reason Jinjee had sold out to a very upscale type of crowd - there was a sprinkling of CEOs and corporate executives in our group as well as three doctors. After three days of basically eating grass people starting forming into very well organized groups and launching well coordinated attacks.

Many of them starting losing weight and not one of them was experiencing what is known as classic detox from transitioning from the Standard American Diet to the Raw Vegan Diet. The edible weeds that grow in the Ojai Mountains actually contain 15 times more nutrients than anything that you can buy in the store. There was a time when all of us ate this way and we were much stronger. But our modern lifestyle doesn't permit us to have the same relationship to the earth so the power that comes from eating a really light highly nutrient dense diet has all but faded to a distant memory. It was the best and worst of times. And even though many of our subsequent retreats have flowed without a hitch the raw vibrant energy love and joy of that first retreat really stands out.

The highlight of the retreat came from a woman who had cancer in the form of a tumor in her leg. She came with her family and she was able to get some results with the reduction of the tumor by drinking green juice. She had had the tumor removed once and it had grown back. About three months after she left she stayed on the green juice and we got a card from her saying that the cancer was in remission. The low point of the retreat was also from a young girl who had cancer. I didn't really have enough experience with how raw foods heal cancer to be able to really reach her and even at the retreat she was sneaking cooked foods and drinking, so when she left the retreat a few months later she had an operation to remove her uterus.

There is only so much that you can do as a non doctor trying to help with the healing process via the raw vegan diet. And the moment you say one wrong thing or make one wrong move then you are actually in violation of the law for practicing medicine without a license. Or even worse someone who may have recovered gets really sick because you made a wrong call. We were really lucky in that we put on retreats for over five years without have one incident of someone becoming really ill at one of our retreats. In just about every group there would be one or two people who were really suffering from a chronic condition. But for the most part all of our retreats were geared to people who just wanted to experience The Raw Vegan Diet for anywhere from 3 days to a whole month.

I think that one of the reasons that a lot of people did really good on this diet was because of the intense hiking that we did. A lot of us do not really move at the level that we need to to maintain our health. But in a retreat setting many people were able to be active on a level that gave them incredible results.

Right now we are not doing retreats I don't know if we will ever be able to start them up again it is such an involved process unless you have a lot of help. But maybe by publishing a lot of the processes gathered from the retreats here in this blog other people will be able to find parallels and benefits.

My Links

TheGardenDiet.com - Our family website, featuring our 10 eBooks

TakeAFruitBreak.com - Our Nonprofit campaign to beat junk food advertising!

TheGardenDiet.com/gallery - My Art

BreakthroughTheDocumentary.com - Documentary about our family

PearMagazine.com - The Online Magazine of Fresh Organic Lifestyles exploring the issues of raw vegan, eco-friendly, alternative, simple, organic, innovative living!

Storm's Page - My body building photos

Storm's Before and After Page - More on my anti-aging philosophy, with photos