Sacha I know you will have the most incredible blissful time dancing this weekend. You are one of our most cherished lifetime friends and we will be there with you in spirit.

Love and dancing hugs,
Sheryl & Piers

Giving away the clothes is a beautiful generous thing to do! They are gorgeous too! You have a real sense of style.

Cheers,
Sheryl (opps I am logged in as Piers)

An oldie but a goodie... well... An oldie at the very least!

Two carrots are riding in a car and they get into a terrible accident. One carrot has only scrapes and bruises, but the other carrot is rushed to be examined for further injury. Hours later the healer comes out and says to the first carrot, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that your friend is going to live. The bad news is that he's going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life.

Umm... What's your source on that Harley? The science I've seen says that high folate levels hide B₁₂ deficiencies, not B₁₂ itself.

From Wikipedia:

High folate masks B₁₂ problems. If there's a deficient level of B₁₂ showing even with a high folate diet (which most raw diets are), then chances are B₁₂ levels are likely very, *very* low... not to say the meat eaters / dietician looked too healthy... 



₁ Wikipedia entry on b12 with the above quotation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B12

₂ Article: "Folate fortification may mask B12 deficiency"
 http://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=25457-folate-fortification-may

₃ Article on PubMed showing that folate *deficiency* raises MMA (the most common indicator of b12 deficiency) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17597277

We're enjoying loads of kale at the moment being so cold!

1. I love my passion for helping people reconnect with nature
2. I love my creative approach to finding the best from life (and laughing as I go )
3. I love my commitment to the power of Truth and honesty. See http://www.thepoweroftruth.com to see what I'm talking about. Gary is an amazing speaker we've had the good fortune to meet.. (Link posted with moderator approval)

OK, I probably shouldn't be letting "the cat out of the bag" here, but the "revised" (rewritten, really) 12 Steps by Victoria Boutenko will be available very, very soon as will some other books people have been wanting here (that's all I can say ) and I have to say I'm really impressed by it. If you can imagine the difference between her first version of 12 Steps and then Green For Life, and then think of it taken further. Very cool. We'll have some news on this any day now, but for the moment we've still been chatting with our "good friends" over at quarantine/customs.

Personally I'd recommend Sunfood Diet Success System and Green For Life (you can find either by using the search box up the top left corner). Alissa Cohen's Living on Live Food is a good starter place too. It's over 500 pages and covers a whole range of things (sprouting, meal planning, loads of recipes etc). If you take a browse through the book sections you can also see what everyone else has already rated books as well.

Spinach!

Clothes or Naked?

You need to have good digestion to handle any food, but particularly food with a lot of fiber (as most raw foods have). Ironically a lot of the nutrition needed for good digestion mainly comes from raw food, particularly greens.

Most people who juice greens improve quite quickly. Then they can take on softer stuff like fruit, cucumbers etc and work their way up eventually to some of the tougher ones like cauliflower / broccoli / cabbage.

There's something similar about this in VB's Green For Life.

I've seen this experienced by a number of people now. It's not uncommon, but fortunately it's pretty easy to take care of.

I'd also make sure you're getting enough to eat. When you're changing your body over to a new energy source often it takes a while of eating a lot more before your body gets the hang of it. A lot of people do well to actually eat more when they start out, and then usually taper off from there.

Remember, unlike a diet, where you try and "cut back" eating more (raw) food is *good*!  Later you'll figure out how much you can still be satisfied on for your bodies needs on an ongoing basis.

Mmmmm... I think I'm having one right now....

1. Nature (especially  Sunshine  )
2. The beauty of people (even when they don't know they have it)
3. Being alive in the most fascinating period of all time. Heck, even "just" being ALIVE!
4. Love & Laughter
5. The choice to learn from the past, grow towards the future and contribute to the greater good now.

It's an interesting concept "simple" and one that seems to be brought up all over the place meaning different things by different people. Here's a few questions for anyone interested in thinking:

• Is an almond any less simple than a mangosteen?
• Is a goji berry any less simple than a fasting retreat in Costa Rica?
• Is a wild seed less simple than the produce of a fruit tree genetically altered by 1000's of generations of selective agribusiness breeding?
• Is a dish of greens and avocado really less simple than guzzling 30 bananas, one after the other in a single day?

Don't get me wrong, this is not a "so and so is either a saint or a demon" post. Doug IMHO does a lot of things right. The wholistic balance of exercise, sunshine, a lot of his fasting stuff I would say seem right on the money and with a natural precedent.

I do wonder what's going on though when he blasts Victoria Boutenko for "just trying to sell something" on Vegsource when she puts out a book about eating fruit and greens, yet charges thousands of dollars US for courses saying the same thing.

I also wonder whats going on when he uses humans instinct for sugar to prove that fruit is good, but then turns around and says that we should ignore our even stronger instinct for fats and salts.

I also wonder why he usually sticks to soundbytes (1/2 sentance answers that sound good on the surface, at the expense of a more detailed understanding) even where the issue is clearly more subtle, such as in the issue of hybridisation.

At Rawstock someone asked him about the health impacts of hybridisation (the process of genes being altered in a plant/animal by repeated breeding and selection over generations). His answer: "We're all hybrids. You're a hybrid of your mother and father." This is true on the surface. It's a catchy soundbyte so no doubt some people will be repeating it unthinkingly word for word. Soundbytes are effective like that. It doesn't take a genius though, to guess that nature's limited, wild selection of traits by strength, adaptability, virility and lifeforce (ability to live) is not the same as multinational agribusinesses using hybridisation to raise select sugars 20 times higher than nature, increase adictiveness by removing key nutrients, balloon size and create sterility (what use is a seedless grape to a grapevine?*) The soundbyte is simple and catchy, and fits in with Doug's philosophy, but in my mind is incomplete. The second part though seems conveniently overlooked.

Here's the thing though. At the end of the day, I can equally find things to disagree with, with pretty much any speaker... and I can also find things that seem completely in alignment with my thinking and with nature. It's the purpose, result and willingness to be openminded to the ideas of others that count in my book. Try listening to Doug talk about "other raw food speakers" and make up your own mind here.

If someone's into trying to oversimplify things, this post will probably just be read as "Piers says Doug is bad." Remember though that we've been to Doug's events, we're the sole importer of many of Doug's products and just gave large amounts of money to him to distribute 811 in Australia in the next couple of weeks. We do this because we know he has a lot of good to teach and we're putting our money where our mouth is.

I would just ask people to look beyond what is "simple" to what is natural. The beautiful thing here is that no one person's opinion is gospel here (nay, not even mine  ). We can pick and choose which bits sound reasonable and then test them with some time in nature to see how they compare.

Who knows, we may even learn something worth sharing ourselves... 

Just wondering...

Are any of you getting this error when you *haven't* copied and pasted something into your post? I'm thinking it may be some kind of special character being miscopied causing the forum to reject the whole thing.

If any of you are getting it with a post didn't have any copy & paste please let me know by posting here.

Cheers

1. Often the same questions are asked more than once, so first up use the search function in the top left corner of this page to see if your question has already been answered.

2. If someone's mentioned it before, reply to their post so we know how many people are affected. If not start a new post in this forum ("Forum Assistance").

3. If your problem has to do with logging in or logging out, usually you just need to "clear your browsers cookies". If you don't know what this means you can find other posts explaining it by searching for "clear browser cookies" (without the quotation marks).

4. If your problem is something else, there's some information we need to know, specifically:

        a) What browser and version are you using? (EG Internet Explorer 6? 7? Safari? Firefox?)
            On a PC you can find this out by clicking on the "Help" menu at the top of your browser
            window and choosing the "About" menu item (EG "About Internet Explorer" or "About
            firefox"). That will give you a name and a number (EG "Internet Explorer 6.00.1.2")

       b) What type of computer are you using? (EG Linux, Windows, Apple Mac)? If there's a start
           button in the bottom left corner it's most likely windows, if there's a small apple up the
           top left it's probably an Apple Mac.

       c) When does the problem happen? If it's only some times (for example just in the
           forum) please let us know this. If it's only on some specific pages it would be a huge help if
           you copy the address /URL from the address bar in your browser. The address part is where
           would type www.Raw-Pleasure.com.au to come here.

       d) What is the problem? What's actually happening that doesn't look right? Is there an error
           message? If so, please include that. If not, a description is fine.

5. Now just create a new post here with a title that clearly includes the problem and you're done!
We'll help you out as quickly as we can.

Cheers

Piers