My food journey began when I was playing water polo at UC Berkeley in 2001. No longer eating home prepared meals with my family (dinner: salad with oil dressing, veggies with butter, bread with butter, meat, and some kind of starch; lunch: carrots, celery, sandwich, apple, crackers, cookies, fruit juice; breakfast: large bowl of cereal with 2% milk, banana) and faced with an all-you-can-eat buffet situation in the dorms, coupled with very intense workouts at practice, led me to eat quite a bit of food to have the energy to be on the water polo team. I was eating a whole bunch of dairy in the form of cheese and egg omelettes, self serve soft serve frozen yogurt (and we're talking about a cone piled a foot high), mixed with sugary cereals. (I also was drinking glass after glass after glass of fruit juice.) Another favorite of mine was make a bowl of 3 parts rice, mix in 2 parts cheese and .5 part onions from the salad bar, microwave til melted, add hot sauce. (At this point I was still an omnivore, I just didn't trust the cafeteria meat.) As you can probably see, my diet consisted largely in fat. But it wasn't affecting my body very much because the workouts were so intense.
After having a knee injury, I stopped being so active. My eating habits started catching up to me. I made regular (almost daily) trips to the training room for rehab, stim pads and ice. While spending time there, I noticed there was a nutritionist on staff and it would be free for me to have a consultation. As an athlete, I was interested in what the ideal diet would be to keep me at ideal weight, fitness, and ultimately at the highest performance. I remember she had me keep a food journal of everything I ate, and tested my body fat %. After reviewing my diet, she told me to cut out dairy completely. I did, and this made a difference in my body fat %. I can't remember the numbers now, but I do recall that my body fat % was higher than ideal before cutting dairy, and still a little high afterward.
The next year I moved out of the dorms. My knee was better again, so stopped having to worry about what I ate to stay fit. I never thought about my visits with the nutritionist again (until today really). I bought most of my food at Costco, including many frozen taquitos and burritos, 5# bags of tortilla chips and hella grated cheese. My housemates never did their dishes and I was sick of it, so I got a little fridge and a microwave in my room, which I did most of my cooking in. Often it was taquitos beneath a huge pile of chips and cheese, and of course tapatio. (Gosh that's alot of fat and sodium current Dave says to past Dave.)
Student-Athlete life went on as usual until I started playing music in a band. It was really hard to be in a band playing shows late at night, and then be at morning practice ready to swim at six am. I had come to a fork in the road, and I chose music. After quitting water polo (and pretty much exercising altogether) cold turkey, I continued eating as if I was still an athlete. At this point I was living in a 150 person housing co-op, which pretty much meant unlimited food and I got to prepare it myself. Over the course of two years I had gained about 25 pounds (up from 215 to 240lb).
Towards the end of 2005, I had a vegan friend who I wanted to make food for, so I made my specialty at the time: chilaquilles, except vegan. This included soy cheese instead of cheese-cheese, and silken tofu instead of eggs. It turned out pretty good! I was inspired to give veganism a try. After a month of being vegan after 23 years of omnivore-hood, I felt really good. I remembered a friend back at the co-op I lived at who had been experimenting with raw food-ism, and told me about some amazing changes in his body. So I gave him a call, found out he was still on the raw foods tip and asked for recommendations on what to eat and what book I should read. I read Sunfood Diet Success System and got hyped up on the idea of a "raw food diet"*. For 7 months I ate strictly "raw"* and lost 50 pounds (from 240 to 190lb)((*I put raw in quotations here because while technically raw, its not how I currently use the word, including dehydrated food, oils, algae, salt)). I thought this was great. Of course my family was scared for my health and thinking I was wasting away. In this diet, which I readily admit was better than my previous diet, it still wasn't ideal... it was still really high in fat. I lost weight but I also lost fitness. I was eating a big smoothie with apples, kale, spirulina, and flax oil for breakfast; collard green and nut pate rolls for lunch, and a huge salad with lettuce, onions, spicy peppers, hemp seeds, olive oil and lemon for dinner. Also making lots of raw chocolates, and other treats using nuts, oils, and agave nectar. After a while I went back to veganism, eating loads of lentils, rice, bread. At this point I was working at a gourmet "raw food" restaurant. Then I slipped back into eating cheese and butter. While working at the restaurant, a co-worker told me about what she called her favorite and most sensible raw food book: The 80/10/10 Diet by Dr. Douglas Graham. She said that the author broke raw foods down scientifically, which really appealed to me after reading Sunfood Diet Success System which was written in a much more mystical tone, and tended to avoid the bigger questions and leave people guessing much of the time. The 80/10/10 Diet was what I wanted to read about the raw food diet all along, a straight up approach on what the best foods to eat are. There seems to be many opposing views, and much money to be made, on fad diets and people's dissatisfaction with their bodies. Dougy Fresh seems to tell it like it is, and sells only his information, not crazy supplements. Also there are many followers of his who are very fit, making athletic achievements, look very happy and even-tempered... so basically I am believing right now that this is the ultimate diet to be on. For three years I've been mostly on the diet, and have been improving in many ways physically: started running a year and a half ago; joined a circus arts gym where I'm working on my aerial skills, handstands, and other fun stuff; participated in my first triathlon (Olympic length) last September; go hiking all the time; bike everywhere I go (unless its raining- I'm still a sissy for wet bike rides). I've been feeling great when I stick to the diet, but when I go off its sometimes a downward spiral unless I have alot of ripe fruit around. Now that I work for an organic fruit farm, its easier, but also harder because at the farmer's market, the vendors trade with each other and its tough to turn down "free" food for me. But I am sensitive enough to now really feel a difference in the food I eat- if its heavy, I can feel myself becoming slower and lethargic and unlikely to want to have fun exercising.
This challenge was something I was vaguely thinking about on January 11th 2011, then someone on 30bananasaday.com posted a blog saying the specifics, someone else saw the blog and posted a discussion asking others to join, I saw that and here we all are keeping it fresh, ripe, whole, raw, and organic for 100 days.
Here are pictures of me, taken before my 100 day of 100% 811lfrv. I now weigh 210 pounds, at 6'4".
