Sickening. I can’t watch.

First, an official announcement: tonight’s BBC broadcast will be on twenty minutes earlier than normal to make way for the tennis. Like we don’t have enough problems in this world, without complicating everything with tennis.

And while we’re at it: a second announcement. More of a press release really. I don’t eat dairy, so I never buy Ben & Jerry’s, but today, for once, I’m tempted. They’ve introduced a new flavor (or rather, renamed an old one), Hubby Hubby, in support of gay marriage in Vermont. Yay. That’s so wonderful. In fact, even though they’re owned by corporate leviathan Unilever, I feel so warm towards them right now, I could melt their entire product line. Check it out HERE.

Having said that, d’you want to see something truly ghastly? Something I myself cannot watch?

It’s tricky. I’m in the unusual position of posting a video on my blog that I am completely unable to sit through and never will. It shows thousands of chicks being fed into a grinder. Apparently, the footage was shot undercover and is being spread around the internet by Mercy for Animals, an animal rights group campaigning for, if not an end to this brutality, at least a warning message on egg-boxes informing customers that “Male chicks are ground-up alive by the egg industry.”

Oh sure, that’s going to happen.

In the video, if you can bear to watch it – and I repeat, I’ve not seen this – I’m told there are examples of what’s called “spontaneous euthanasia.” Which is billed as the most instantaneous way to kill chicks. And that’s all matters, of course: killing things instantaneously. I’m appalled.    

Today is Day 57 of my raw food diet. Back in early July I converted from eating dead, unnutritious food to a diet of only living food packed with enzymes. Bar one or two necessary lapses and a couple of adjustments to make sure the entire world didn’t drop out of my bottom – which seemed like it might happen at one point – it’s turned out to be a magnificent way of going about things. Not only healthy, but thoroughly humane. And that’s why I’m posting this video.

Last week I had lunch with a producer who worked on my TV show. She ordered a burger and fries and I chose a salad. We got talking about the raw food diet and she, in defense of her lifestyle, launched into a rhapsody about how succulent white meat chicken is, cooing, “I know it’s cruel, but it’s so tasty!”

I could see by her expression that she didn’t get what she’d just said.

Caring for animals, being kind to them, and respecting other lifeforms on the planet rather than killing them en masse simply for our pleasure simply didn’t compute. Not when compared to the scrumptious yumminess of white meat chicken cooked in a marinade.

On the way back to the parking lot, she also, by the way, merrily launched into a neat justification of why it’s okay for TV executives to steal a writer’s program idea and not pay him for it. “Otherwise the network doesn’t make as much money. If they take an original idea and adapt it as their own, changing it just enough so that it becomes different and the writer can’t sue, then that saves them a lot of money down the line.”

“Er….sure,” I argued, speaking as one who’s had several great ideas pilfered by networks over the years, “but they wouldn’t be making any money in the first place without the writer, would they? So why can’t they just be fair about it? Then everyone gets rich.”

Well, I swear, she didn’t see this at all. Why should “everyone get rich”, was her response, delivered in an incredulous voice, when there was a chance that, by stealing material, the rich could become even richer? Wasn’t that what business was all about? And she promptly took an idea for a panel game I tossed at her over lunch and told me, “I’ll develop this.”

I’ve never heard from her since.

With a similar baffling lack of logic, critics of my diet have said to me, “But surely veganism is cruel too. If your food is alive, the way you say it is, then you’re killing cucumbers and carrots. It’s vegetable cruelty.”

I’m serious. I’ve been told this more than once. Which only goes to show that, as surveys suggest, there really are some very stupid people in the world. 

Anyhow, here’s the video. BE WARNED: It shows chicks in pain and being ground up alive in a factory. Only watch it if you need a lesson on why you should at the very least be vegetarian.

Background material to this appears HERE on the Huffington Post.

www.cashpeters.com

Man boobs. This time it’s personal.

 Raw food update.

(I realize how many of you will read that first line, groan, and immediately leave the blog, but it’s important. To me anyway. Plus, since a few readers saw what I was doing and began a similar regime themselves, it’s important to them too.)

I’ve been on the raw food diet now for…I lost count somewhere along the way, but I believe it’s over three weeks, almost four. During that time, the following happened:

1. I lost ten pounds. Not ten pounds I could afford to lose, I was already thin, but ten pounds nonetheless.  My neck is thinner, my shirts are hanging off me, I look good in a bikini again. Also, people are starting to comment adversely. “God, you’re so skinny!”
2. My feet started aching. It’s painful to walk now, for some reason, though of course all the organs in the body have nerve endings in the feet, so it’s obviously related. Maybe my insides are screaming for help. Yes, that’s probably it.
3. I started to feel really alive. Focused, athletic, strong, determined.
4. My skin is fantastic. I had one or two minor break-outs while I was detoxing, and I got an ulcer on my tongue that was reeeeally painful. Otherwise, I’m developing a bit of a glow. And in a world looking for alternative sources of energy, that can’t be a bad thing.
5. My food allergies have subsided. I put this down to the fact that I’m not eating the foods I’m allergic to. Duh.
6. My man-boobs (I’m a B-cup), which developed years ago after I drank way too many lattes (containing hormones) and ate way too much acidic food (which does something to encourage estrogen, I believe) suddenly look even more ridiculous than they did before. [UPDATE: August 25th 2011]. The answer to man-boobs, I’m now discovering, is to cut out wheat initially, then do push-ups to tighten the skin. Lots and lots of push-ups. I started 10 days ago, doing 3 a day (which is all I could manage), then gradually increasing the number each morning. Already I’m doing 18 a day. And two people have commented that my moobs look significant smaller, as the muscles tighten, causing the skin to be pulled taut. Oh yes. But the core issue is about wheat. If you haven’t read the book Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis, you should. He puts enlarged breasts in men mainly down to the crap that’s in modern-day wheat.
7. My senses are heightened. My sense of smell, for instance, is through the roof. Unfortunately, this makes normal food smell even better and more enticing than it really is, and I want some. NOW!
8. Friends are avoiding me. In droves. The telephone never rings any more.  Apparently, I’m considered a real bore because I’m so enthusiastic about nutrition and they’re not, and every time I eat something live and raw and healthy it reminds them that what they’re eating is dead and slowly killing them. So? What’s wrong with that?
9. I’m not being invited out to dinner or to dinner parties. People are anticipating that I’ll be an awkward guest and start picking and choosing what I’ll eat (and they’re not wrong), which ruins it for everyone. Our neighbors called up last night and invited my partner out to dinner. My name didn’t even come up.
10. My partner makes his own food without consulting me and sits eating it, reading a magazine, hoping silently that I don’t bring up the subject of raw food, because if I mention one more time that what he’s putting in his mouth is dead he may lash out.
11. I paid for an internet course on how to reduce the size of my moobs. The trick seems to be to increase the alkalinity of your diet and do weights to tighten the chest. I begin that next week. (MANBOOB UPDATE: Discovered that man boobs are caused by the consumption of wheat. Didn’t know that. It’s in a NY Times bestselling book called ‘Wheat Belly,’ which I wholewheatedly recommend.)
12. Salads I used to eat in local restaurants now taste vile. This is because they use vegetables sprayed with pesticides and for the first time I can actually taste them.
13. The food cravings won’t go away. Cake especially. But I’ve managed to talk some sense into myself before eating them, and avoided lapsing. However, cake, being sacred, will definitely be a part of my diet again in the future. It is the law.
14. Most of the food I used to eat holds no allure or appeal any more. Pasta may smell good, but I have no desire whatsoever to put it in my mouth. And chicken….yeuw.
15. 15. Except for the soles of my feet, which hurt like hell, I feel terrific. My body has adapted quickly.
16. 16. I’ve learned to “cook” raw meals at home that are really very exciting and delicious. Raw is not as dismal or eccentric as it at first sounds.
17. Raw restaurants make better raw food than I could ever make myself. I should have learned that by now.
18. I eat so much less food than I used to. When the food is raw, or in juice form, it is almost all nutrition, so you need less of it. Dead food, because it contains barely any nutrients at all, has to be consumed in bulk for the body to benefit. Afterwards, you’re soon hungry again and eating more. That’s why people put on weight. Eat healthy food and the pounds fall off you. Though not, I’m discovering, off your man-boobs, which obstinately remain the same size.
19. L.A. has some fabulous raw food places, and the health food stores here have whole aisles dedicated to raw food. Only in California.
20. I’m developing “raw food eyes”, according to some friends. This is the intense, glaring, pop-eyed expression that people on high nutrition diets get after a while. I promised I wouldn’t, but it’s unavoidable, apparently. Damn.
21. I sometimes feel entirely separate from my physical body. Floaty, distant, totally at peace within. It’s like I’m just a high frequency spirit trapped inside a low frequency physical form. Oh, wait, that’s exactly what I am!
22. I’m impatient and bad-tempered sometimes now. This is because raw food sharpens your nerve endings to a point and you can’t stand to be around fools any more. Clearly, I was extremely attractive to fools previously.
23. Raw food is  Oh-my-god-Level expensive. I don’t know how much I’ve spent on food and ingredients for meals these past three or four weeks, but it’s still a small fortune. I’m out of pocket by hundreds of dollars. And that doesn’t even include the cost of the course on how to reduce my man-boobs.
24. I stopped counting the days about a week ago. But since beginning this piece, I’ve now done a calculation of how long I’ve been raw, and it’s only 24 days. 76 left to go. Yike.

So there you go. The work continues. Sorry if that’s boring for the rest of you, but I’m genuinely shocked at what a worthwhile experiment this is. Clearly, we’re eating all the wrong stuff and our bodies hate it. We’re just not listening to what they’re telling us. Same way my partner and most of my friends no longer listen to me.

Raw Food Further Update

Completed 100-day raw food challenge mid-October. Lost 14lbs total, feel fantastic – beyond fantastic: calm, focused, present, centered; skin is translucent and clear.

On the downside: I look very skinny, have lost my ass completely; am considered a pain in other people’s asses at dinner parties where I actually can barely eat anything they serve; get ill if I try.

It’s very difficult after 100 days to reverse the good that’s been done to the body. Eat cooked food and you get stomach ache. What’s more, things you used to love eating you now can’t get down. Or at least you can get them down, but you can’t keep them down. Pasta looks disgusting, fries are unappealing, chocolate cake tastes like warmed-up snot; bacon smells of diarrhea; and chicken is positively the worst thing ever in the history of the world. No exaggeration.

All in all, extremely happy, then. It all came good. There were brief lapses, and I did have tea occasionally. Plus, I had to eat bread or crackers now and then as binder, otherwise, what with all the fruit and veg, I was developing BIG problems “downstairs”.  But that’s all. And therefore I declare this a massive, life-changing success.

Thank you and goodnight.

www.cashpeters.com

 Everything you read above, by the way, came about because Cash was researching a book about health and healing. After heading  down to Brazil on a meditation retreat, he came across groups of people living the raw food life and recovering from all kinds of diseases and physical ailments. That convinced him.

It’s available here.

Weak as a kitten, but no vomiting yet.

Forgive me if I don’t blog today, but I have no energy. Only three days into my 100 day raw food challenge, blazing a trail towards wellness, and already my whole body is weak and aches, my arms will barely move, I have a sharp pain in my foot,  it takes both hands to lift a glass of water, and I think I may be developing restless leg syndrome.

So everything’s going according to plan.

The books, of course, warn you about the side-effects of switching from dead food to live food. It’s a jarring transition after so many years of eating rubbish and there are bound to be repercussions in the short-term, therefore I was expecting stuff to happen. A constant nasal drip perhaps. I’d even half-thought I might throw up now and again and I was braced for it. What I never could have predicted was that my body would shut down and refuse to budge. That’s a bit of a shocker.

Now I’m asking myself, is this fluey, spacey feeling part of the program, or am I simply not suited to eating raw?

After all, I use a lot of energy. Some – those who are scared of me – might even call me dynamic. So maybe I need more than this. I don’t know if it’s right for me to put only raw vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds into my stomach. I’m no doctor, God knows, but from what I can tell, my body seems to be craving something extra.

Cake, possibly.

And a Crawford’s shortbread cookie or two.

And you know what? My hunger antenna is picking up pie. Intuitively, my body seems to be indicating that it wants pie and wants it pretty badly.

Hm.

For now, though, I’ll ignore my intuition and continue to deprive myself. I have a breakfast of hemp seeds and blueberries to look forward to. I might feel different after that.

Weak or not, barely able to concentrate or not, I’ll press on with my life as though these feelings are normal and see what happens. If by next week I can only get out of bed with the help of an elaborate pulley system and trained help, or when I type this blog the bones in my fingers snap one by one, then I may have to reconsider this whole plan for eating 100% raw for 100 days.

Unlike Sarah Palin, I’m not a quitter. But like Sarah Palin, I think I know when to get out of the race to save my own skin. And that may be soon.

I’ll keep you posted.

www.cashpeters.com

Cash’s Book: Naked in Dangerous Places.

Cash’s movie: Fast and Very Loose.

Smug and preachy? You betcha, losers!

This is it. Crunch time. My final weekend of freedom. The raw food experiment begins Monday.

Before then, I have several parties and dinners to go to, where I can cram in as much of the old, flavorful, gut-packing, horrible-for-your-system dead stuff as I want (believe me, I intend to gorge like a prize hog). Then, that’s it. From next week, don’t even show me a pizza or omelette or a slice of German chocolate cake, because I don’t want to know. I’ll be in lock-down. Incarcerated for 100 days in a regime of nothing but fresh, healthy meals buzzing with enzymes. Fruits, nuts, vegetables, seeds, juices, sprouts. The food of life.

Oh good god, what the hell am I doing?

Am I really ready for this?

To prime myself, last night I dropped in on a pep rally being given at a local health store in L.A. by two ardent raw foodists and current beacons of the movement, Matt Monarch and Angela Stokes.

Both oddities in their way, they fortunately found each other and got married, so that turned out well. (He calls her Angela, she calls him Mr Monarch). Sadly, neither of them is a good public speaker. I mean, they speak – they’ve mastered that – they just don’t do it all that well in front of a group, I didn’t think, leading to lots of pauses for thought and meandering sentences that go nowhere, or, in Mr. Monarch’s case, that end abruptly with “…er…so that’s that”, followed by a swift change of topic.

They are, though, passionate about their subject and glowing examples of the raw food lifestyle, which is what counts. If I understand their message correctly – and there are no guarantees – then what they and other raw foodists are trying to tell us is this:

• The basic principle behind eating 100% raw food is that everything else is rubbish. Fact.
• Anything cooked at a heat of over 120 degrees is considered dead and is a poison to the body, regardless of how delicious it tastes or how great the picture looks on the packet.
• Raw food is living food. Living food is required to feed and sustain the cells of a living body. Yours, would be a good example. Whereas anything that’s dead when you consume it – from meat to cookies, chocolate bars to coffee to bread to burgers to the numerous packs of Ding-Dongs you eat when you’re depressed – does you no good at all, and actually leads to disease.
• 95% of disease today is caused by what we eat. As wonderful as modern cooked food may taste, the body doesn’t want it, period. Bread, for instance, puts a thick black lining around the walls of the intestines that is very difficult to get off and which leads to tumors and all manner of beastly-ghastliness. Cake’s even worse, sadly. And you know how much I love cake.
• Disease can be countered by switching to raw food. (See Everything Bad is Good.) Even a condition as serious as diabetes has been thrown into reverse by switching to a raw food diet. (See Raw For 30 Days)
• The first thing most people say when they hear about a raw food diet is, “But where do you get your protein?”
• Raw foodists are soooooo tired of being asked that.
• Stock answer: humans need a lot less protein than we think we do.
• And anyway, protein is not the issue. Your body needs protein in order to get the necessary amino acids, and amino acids can be obtained in abundance from vegetables.
• Eat a combination every day of leafy green vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and so on, and your body will start to detoxify. Eventually you’ll be disease-free, because disease is caused by…altogether now….eating the wrong food.

There’s more. Lots and lots more, but that’s the gist, and it’s enough to convince me that I’ve been doing all the wrong things since I was a child. Time to stop now and give my body a break.

Earlier in the year, I spent two weeks on the Master Cleanser. An ordeal, sure, but a monster success. (Watch my award-winning video, Fast and Very Loose.) But that, apparently, was smallfry compare to the next 100 days.

So what can I expect from my new lifestyle? Here’s what I learned:

• Expect to feel slightly ill at first. Detoxification starts at once. Symptoms can include a runny nose, headaches, pimples, all manner of things, depends how many toxins have to come out. But it’s all good.
• Expect family and friends to thnk you’re mental for doing this and to distance themselves from you. (No problem. My own family distanced themselves from me on a whim years ago, so that’s one problem already solved.) Suddenly, you’re an oddity. That guy who “don’t eat normal.” People can’t relate to you. Hm. I’m surrounded by people. They’re everywhere. So I’m not sure how this is going to pan out in the coming weeks.
• Expect to look old. Detox can really pack on the years and make you  fleshy in the face and older-seeming than you really are.
• My God – really? Nobody warned me about that!! What the hell am I going to do? I don’t want to look old and fleshy. I’m only a boy.
• Expect to counter this with a course of hydro colonics. Flushing out your colon with water is the prime and most efficient way to get toxins out, and it will counter that puffy, aged look.
• Phew.
• Luckily, I’m no stranger to having liquid pumped up my ass. Ahem. So I’ll go back to the clinic and book another course.
• Expect to become a little smug and preachy, as you start to feel  superior to anyone still eating cooked poison. Smugness, eh? Well, no problem there.
• Expect to be more alert, alive, happier, and to have visions.
• I’m sorry – what was that last one? Visions?
• Yes. There’s a spiritual side to changing your diet that can only be explained by doing it, apparently. In time, your whole system opens up and new energies flow in, energies that are blocked when your system is clogged by crap. Energies that make you super-instinctive and super-charged with consciousness.

Wow. I like the sound of that. How exciting.

However strangely daffy and Californian all this might seem when set alongside, say, normal life, I’m buying into it. From Monday, this will be my new reality. I have no clue how it’s going to go, but once again I’ve decided to film it.

In fact, my very first interviewee was Mr. Monarch, who, in close quarters, seems a little out of it, I thought. As if he’s simply too stoned right now to get his thoughts together in time to say them coherently. But apparently not so. His spaciness is just the purity of his elevated spirit shining through, all part of feeling good and being “conscious.” The man’s stoned on life. Indeed, I’m fully expecting to be like that myself by October, so don’t even think of having an intelligent conversation with me from now on, okay? I don’t wanna hear.

Afterwards, I asked him to sign a release form, giving me permission to use his sage advice in my little movie. To my surprise, he refused.

“Y’know what?” he said, handing it back, “I’m gonna pass for now.”  Uh-oh.

A trained expert would have signed it without a thought, of course. So I took this to mean that, since I guess he’s not a qualified nutritionist, he’s merely a guy who eats raw food and thinks you should too, he doesn’t want to be held accountable for what he says, in case it’s wrong and the law comes after him. Understandable. But also disturbing. How much of what he’d just told us could I trust, I wondered? It’s the first time my confidence in eating raw food sagged a little. The way my face is going to later on.

Anyway, too late! I’m committed. A long weekend of fun lies ahead, then all that I know and love about my life will be stripped away, as I launch, with a special meal in a raw food restaurant, my 100 days of vegetables, fruits, seeds, shoots, nuts, and juice.

Wish me luck, kids.

When you next see me I’ll be a different man. Thinner, healthier, more vibrant, and a little strung out, I guess. Oh, and very, very smug and preachy, let’s not forget that. Should be a good summer.

www.cashpeters.com

Follow me on Twitter @cashpeters.

Also worth reading: Steve Pavlina’s blog: 30 Days Raw.

Watch the promo for the new travel book: Naked in Dangerous Places.

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