Raw Food Author Shares on Matt Monarch Shares on Going Raw, Relationships, Cleansing and Detoxification.

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Rawkathon, which can be found at http://www.Rawkathon.com. In this excerpt, Matt Monarch shares on going raw and relationships as well as his thoughts on cleansing and detoxification.

Rawkathon with Matt Monarch. Matt Monarch has been living a raw food lifestyle for nine years now. He is the author of Raw Spirit and Raw Success.

Kevin: So, Matt. I want to welcome you to this program.

Matt: Thank you for having me I appreciate it.

Kevin: So, we've done a lot of interviews. So I want to make this one a little bit different.

Matt: Oh, great.

Kevin: So, let's first start, we always have to give an introduction for those people who don't know who you are let‘s give a quick introduction.

Matt: My name is Matt Monarch, I am author of a couple of raw food books, “Raw Spirit” and “Raw Success.” I've been on a 100% raw food diet for nine years, now. My fiancée is Angela Stokes. Many people know of her. She used to be 300 pounds, and now she's less than half of that. Can't give away her weight or I'll get in trouble. I'm 33, feeling great, doing good.

Kevin: Great. What got you into raw?

Matt: I didn't even know a raw food diet existed. Someone handed me a book called, “Become Younger,” by Dr. Norman Walker. And, this book actually educated me what certain foods were doing to my body and actually how it damaged me. And I didn't even know that that was happening. So just the realization of that, there was no doubt in my mind, I just went 100% raw, the next day after I closed that book.

Kevin: And then the process from point A to point B, it's been nine years now. Explain that.

Matt: What it's been like to just be raw for nine years? Wow. When I went 100% raw, I read a lot books. And I didn't know what was going to happen to me. I started realizing I had digestive issues. I wasn't used to that full feeling anymore, it was an empty stomach. And something huge happened to me also, which was a very positive thing. This spiritual vibration just started down- pouring on me and that was just the most amazing thing. And that's like the number one reason why I stayed raw. There's no variation, varying from that.

Kevin: Right. You had mentioned to me before that you were president of your fraternity.

Matt: I was president of my fraternity, yeah.

Kevin: And probably a partier.

Matt: Yeah, definitely a partier.

Kevin: What did your friends think.

Matt: My friends thought I was absolutely nuts, obviously.

Kevin: Did they think you were nuts before?

Matt: Well, I was always the guy who was extreme and went to the group table of girls and started talking, and they would follow. I just would do crazy things like that. I've always been an extremist. So they probably just thought, oh god.

Kevin: Just like, he's doing it again. Although, you've stuck with it for nine years. So, probably longer than some of the other things you've stuck with.

Matt: Yeah, definitely. And at the beginning my family and friends they kind of drifted apart from me. And that was pretty hard, I didn't realize how harsh that was on me, until I was explaining it in a lecture one time and a tear started coming down my eye. It was pretty intense. And I was like, whoa. You know, for four years I didn't really have a life. I just went and got my own place in Ojai.
I worked on the computer non-stop and I created a successful business. I did a lot of meditating at that time. It was pretty crazy.

Kevin: How did you reconnect?

Matt: Well, my friends are always there. A lot of people, they look up to me, and I try to help them. But a lot of people aren't willing to do that. My family's just accepting, and I think they're pretty impressed. I mean, my mom and my close family, they have complete 100% faith in me. But, for example, you know how 20/20 just came out with this TV show where they kind of made raw foods look really bad.

Kevin: You want to explain that a little, because we haven't talked about that at all. How did you reconnect?

Matt: Sure. My family, they just accepted. And, you know I'm not there, often, anymore. So it's kind of like it's really cool to see me when I come home. But it's not...I mean it's the same, in the sense that there’s that bond, but it's not like every day... and then my friends. I'll always have those friends, but we're completely different. A lot of them are still doing drugs and drinking alcohol a lot, and it's just not my thing. And now I have a beautiful fiancée now, I've got all new friends. There's so much exciting things happening. I'm successful. Successful friends. It's really cool.

Kevin: Now, those first four years, when you were kind of holed up. What was your purpose? What was the passion to sit in front of a computer and build a business based around raw? It's pretty intense. What was the goal?

Matt: At the time I was very introverted, and I didn't really, I seriously was alone for probably the first four or five years when I went raw. I didn't even really date women that much because I was just in my house doing this, taking walks around the block or whatever. I didn't know what I was doing. Once I wrote my first book, not even wrote it, when I first saw it, I began to see the other possibilities. I wasn't ever trying to become a guru or becoming famous. I always thought I knew the information was valid in what I was saying but I wasn't interested in taking it to that next level. And to be honest with you, at the beginning, I just wanted to be successful in the business and I wanted money. I'm not so crazy about that anymore. But, that was a big drive of mine too.

Kevin: But it was a passion for spreading the word, obviously, otherwise why would you stick behind it.

Matt: Definitely.

Kevin: All right. So let's talk about detoxification a little bit. And talk about some of the detox symptoms and some of the things you've seen. Because you see a lot of people while you're touring. What's the difference between detox and, what do you think is the difference between detox and regular, maybe sickness.?

Matt: OK. I feel like all disease is the same, which is this waste building up in the body and then it tries to leave in certain areas. For example someone who has psoriasis it's trying to come though the skin, someone with acne it comes through the face, cold sores, all these different things. And what people do is they take antibiotics, suppress it, and then it is roaring in the system and it comes out in a worse form later in the future, and it could be a serious degenerative disease such as some sort of cancer or something, God willing, hopefully not. So the key is to like get this stuff out.

I feel like detoxification is the most misunderstood concept in the entire health food movement. The more you leave out of your diet, the more food you eliminate, the more damaging food you eliminate from your diet, the more you're going to cleanse on a cellular level. For example, the most cleansing thing that anybody can do is go on a water fast. Because you're eliminating everything from your diet except for water and you're going to cleanse and cleanse and cleanse.
Now when you go on a 100% raw food diet, you're eliminating everything from your diet but the most water rich foods that are not damaging to you and are not that harsh on the digestive system or the body. And in this light you can consider the 100% raw food diet like going on a life- long fast. And the confusion lies here that you're going to detox the rest of your life in my opinion.

What happens is a lot of people that I know who are in the raw foods movement or at the festivals we go to, they are aspiring to be raw. They are not 100% raw. One of the reasons that I feel like this is they don't understand it. It's almost like a heroin addict. Have you even seen them when they throw them in the hospital and they are forced to abstain from their drug and they go absolutely crazy? It's kind of a similar thing. It's like detoxification. It is not so extreme, but it is detoxification of these foods. What happens is the confusion sets in because when people start to eat the old foods they used to eat when they are trying to aspire to be raw or something, it actually stops the harsh, harsh detoxification and they feel great. Not only that, those foods not only stop the detoxification but it actually stimulates them. So it is euphoria and they think the raw diet is not right and they are feeling extremely good on this. Don't get me wrong. You are going to detoxify in my opinion for the rest of your life, but you have ups, really high ups and, you know, you have downs.

I have found the best way to aid this detoxification is do a cleansing of the colon, colon hydrotherapy with enemas or whatever. Nothing is as powerful as detoxing the body as that. There's not one thing you can do, in my opinion.

Kevin: And you've gotten that from Bernard Jensen, from Fred Bisci, that principle, the colon cleansing.

Matt: Yes, and from my own experience, I could sense it. I have seen where people--where Fred introduced them just to a very--he slightly improved their diet, and they were willing to do the colon hydrotherapy on a periodic basis and they healed from degenerative disease just based off of that. That's how powerful it is. Some people, they refuse to do it. Some guy might be overweight and he goes on a raw food diet, feels great, has all of this energy, loses 50 pounds. But, as the year goes, they are going three times a day, but they are clogged on a cellular level with the gases. What happens is their faces, they start to lose that energy, and their faces start to grow older. For someone like this I would rather either see them cleanse the colon and take it to the next level or get off the cleansing, cleansing, raw food diet.

Kevin: Oh, OK. Interesting. Fred Bisci talks about intermediary diet.

Matt: Sure.

Kevin: Do you feel the same way about that?

Matt: Definitely. You don't have to be 100% raw to be healthy. You can be very healthy without taking it to such an extreme.