Raw Foodist Shares on Surviving the Transition to Raw Food, Energy Soup and Green Juicing

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Rawkathon, which can be found at http://www.Rawkathon.com. In this excerpt, Nomi Shannon shares on energy soup, green juicing and surviving the transition to raw food.

Rawkathon with Nomi Shannon. Nomi Shannon is raw foodist who has worked at the Hippocrates Health Institute and is the author some amazing books on raw food preparation including “The Raw Food Gourmet” and “Raw Food Celebrations.”

Kevin: Can you explain, for some people who might not know, what’s an energy soup?

Nomi: If you Google energy soup, you’ll come up with 500 recipes, but the original energy soup was made by a woman named Anne Wigmore, who actually started all of this whole raw food movement. She’s the lady who researched different grasses and had a scientist evaluate them and came up with growing wheatgrass and juicing it. I mean to my knowledge no one has ever done this before. We are not going back to the first century where people made wheatgrass or even when they chewed it and swallowed it and spat out the pulp. It’s actually a new creation and the reason for it is that even back when she did this, which is in the late 50s early 60s, the soils were very depleted. They‘re triply so now. Even the very food we were eating, the spinach we eat today, is nothing in its nutritional breakdown, the amount of iron in it; ro the spinach that grandpa ate in the 1900. It’s shocking the difference because of the depleted soils.

So she came up with the wheatgrass concept as an ultra extreme nutritional concept and also the growing of the sprouts. She came up with the energy soup because juicing is very, very expensive, you are buying a huge amount of produce. So she came up with energy soup also for economical reasons, and that’s to blend it. It was something like a whole bunch of sunflower
sprouts, a whole bunch of buckwheat sprouts, maybe a quarter to half of an apple for sweetness, a little bit of lemon juice, I don’t know, a couple of other things maybe and it would be blended up. I got to tell you it tasted like mud.

So now there are a gazillion energy soup recipes, some of them people start making with oranges, yams, carrots, that isn’t really energy anymore, it’s soup. An energy soup is very, very green. And it’s still greater to use sprouts or mixed greens because you’re getting a big hit of green. And then, very recently, the green smoothie craze started and that’s similar to an energy soup but has way more fruit in it and it’s very palatable. For people who are OK with eating a bunch of fruit, it’s great. My green smoothie has 12 cups of greens in it. It’s a different kind of green. It could be sprouts, mescaline, mixed greens, a little bit of orange juice maybe and some frozen banana. There are some people who aren’t able to eat fruit for a while, whether they have a candida or even cancer. People feel sugar feeds cancer. So they might be eating more of the energy soups
than the green smoothies. And there’s a lot of juicing, too. Juicing is the most sublime way to get a fast hit of nutrition into your body without the body having to work very fast and very hard.

Kevin: Can we talk about patience and how important it is in any sort of transition?

Nomi: You mean they give up too soon?

Kevin: Yeah. Have you seen that and what have you used to help people get through it?

Nomi: There are reasons people give up. I don’t know whether they don’t love themselves enough or believe that this will help them enough. Another transition is the transition from “Tell me what to do,” asking a medical professional to tell them what to do, and taking the responsibility themselves. It can be very frightening. I’m not anti-doctor, but it is hard to find a medical person or physician who understands and agrees that a therapeutic, raw program will help someone. They know so little and have so little training with any kind of nutrition, they don’t know that even if a person is undergoing chemo or radiation, this can really help them get through that. This is the choice of what to do. They don’t get a lot of support in that. So it’s very frightening. They feel very alone.

Also another issue is your palate changes so you’re used to highly seasoned salted meat, things like that and when you first come into a very simple program like this, even the most gourmet food, you may not like the taste of it, but if you stick with it, a lot of things change for you. Your palate, your taste buds get used to it, and eventually the day will come when you go I have just got to have a green salad and then you know you’re there. Because people don’t normally go “Oh I have to have a green salad,” you know out in the real world, it’s sort of like a little dish that’s additional to what they eat. When you’ve been doing this for maybe just a few weeks suddenly your body is getting used to getting the wonderful nourishment and is telling you what to eat.

Cravings, especially for someone who is coming off of the SAD diet, which is the Standard American Diet. “Oh I just got to have a pizza.” Now that’s a craving where your body isn’t telling you the right thing to do, and that can continue for a long, long time. People say trust your body. Well it takes a long time and you have to go through a lot of cleansing. Getting rid of literally toxins that are stored in your tissues, before your body starts saying “Got to have a green smoothie, dying for an energy soup, really want a big green salad.“ It does happen. You can’t listen to your body when it’s saying, “Go and get a fudgesical.”

There are lots of reasons people leave being raw. One of them is they get a sense of failure. If we’re talking about a well person, there’s a huge difference between someone, like a lot of people who went to Hippocrates who have a serious health issue and actually really needed to stay totally on a very strict program for quite some time in order to live.

Kevin: Right.

Nomi: And another person, say a young person who says, “I want to live a lifestyle so that I may have a long and healthy life.” I don’t personally believe that we have control essentially over how long we may live, but I do believe we have complete control over how well we will live within that time we’re given. I think the feeling of failure is the biggest. In other words, you go along, you’re doing great, you’re eating lots of rough food, you’re having a green smoothie, you’re having a salad, you take it to work with you – that kind of thing -- and then x amount of time into it you go out and have a steak dinner. Whatever it is that is the big thing you think is terrible. A lot of people right there go, “Oh, I blew it.”

This is the diet syndrome, any kind of diet...I think of raw food lifestyle as a lifestyle, but a lot of people especially in the beginning think, “This is my new diet.” I say to people, “You know, it’s only your food.” I’m not talking about people who have a life-threatening thing. I’m talking about you and me. We just want to be healthy and make the most of our life, be so alert and feel so physically well that we can do what we want to do. Whether it’s our job, serving God, being the best soldier, best politician, best medical doctor because we’re clear and we feel great and our bodies are healthy and we’re not bogged down.

What happens to so many, many people—it doesn’t matter, it could be a Jenny Craig diet—they “fall off the wagon” so to speak and they eat a bad meal and they throw the whole program out. You know what? It’s what you do most of the time that really, really counts. If you go have something you think of as bad, whatever it is, a fish meal or quick food, a fried meal, whatever it is, so what? The next day, the next meal, just eat your good food again. It’s your food. It’s not your religion. That, I think is the biggest cause of dropping out.

No one likes to feel like a failure. If you keep giving yourself the thought that you’re a failure and you’re less than, you’ll eventually going to stop doing whatever gives you that feeling. If you’re going to be more comfortable saying, “Look I’m not going to do that anymore. I used to do that,” and start eating at McDonald’s again. And you don’t give yourself that feeling because you’re not on the program anymore. It’s an unfortunate psychological thing with any kind of regime, like working out. You’ve been an exercise physiologist for years. I’m sure you’ve seen that with people, right?

Kevin: Yeah.

Nomi: It’s a human nature kind of thing. It’s really important to go easy on yourself. With your food, it’s what you do most of the time. Say you go on a one-week vacation and you just do all kinds of stuff that you don’t think is optimal. Maybe it’s just a question of forgiveness. I’m lucky in a funny, perverse way. If I eat a lot of cooked foods, after a couple days, it happens when I travel sometimes, I don’t feel very well.

Kevin: Yeah.

Nomi: And I don’t like this feeling. I’m spaced out; I can’t think as well. My body’s a little sluggish. So I just go right back to it.

Kevin: You can correct me if I’m wrong, but the good news about it is just that, isn’t it?

Nomi: Yes.

Kevin: Is that once you get far enough into this, when you do go back, which I advocate doing sometimes, it’s like trying to see if things still work with you, you’ll be reminded that...

Nomi: I’m very lucky... that five days of traveling with lots of cooked food, even really good cooked food, I don’t want to feel like that.

Kevin: It’s a great way to be.