This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s The Healthiest Year of Your Life, which can be found at http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com. In this excerpt, Nomi Shannon shares her story of the benefits of transitioning to raw foods.

The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Nomi Shannon, raw gourmet, author and raw food educator.

Kevin: Why don’t you just give us a little brief history of why you’re here and then we’ll move onto the real meat.

Nomi: Okay, back in the beginning I started my raw journey, so to speak, about 20 years ago. I had just moved to California and I found myself not feeling well for the gazillionth time in my life. I had sort of a litany of issues and I remember it was around Christmas time where a big table was set up in the back room with all kinds of cakes and Christmas stuff and I subsequently, many years later, found out I really can’t eat wheat. I wasn’t feeling well and not only vague but it was sort of like an intolerance that affected my entire digestive tract and really some of the words to go along with the description would be fibromyalgia, hypoglycemia, mood swings, really severe allergic sinusitis because I had moved from the East to the West Coast where there was pollen at all times, a lot of digestive problems, acid reflux, systemic candida, blah blah blah.

I went to a holistic doctor, Dr. Barney Meltzer. He was in Del Mar, California. One of the things he said to me is I want you to eat 50% of your food raw. And I said to him, the following sentence, which I’ve since heard 5000 times: How will I get enough protein? That’s the first question and he kind of rolled his eyes and it’s all I can do to keep from rolling my eyes. Really, Kevin, it was just simple for me to go 50% raw. I’ve always been kind of a good cook. People eat raw food in their daily life. They eat coleslaw, they eat salad, even if it’s just lettuce and a slice of tomato on their McDonald burger or something. It’s not like an alien entity. I just upped it. My hypoglycemia at that time was so bad, I don’t know if this has ever happened to you but I used to fall asleep while I was driving. I could get in the car all alert and literally wink off and it’s like a miracle that I didn’t kill someone or get killed. And what I did for that is this doctor said just carry around a pocket full of almonds. Raw almonds and when you start to get that feeling, that sort of sleepy feeling, or even before that if you know it happens every hour or whatever, just chew slowly on a couple of almonds. I mean this literally almost overnight cured that situation. I’m not talking about your driving tired. I’m talking about, you think you’re fine, then you get in the car and you start nodding off. That had to do with my combination of food and eating too many carbs and stuff like that too.

So anyways, it was pretty dramatic, just the 50% change and after a year of doing 50% I went to one of the several places in the country where you can go for a three week retreat where it’s wheatgrass juice and buckwheat and sunflower sprouts, and lots of raw food, only raw food and classes and that was very profound for me. I lost some weight and everything was completely cleared up from that. Just like serendipity, within 6 months I was working at the world-renowned Hippocrates Health Institute. I’m talking 20 years ago now. I’m going to tell you, I was 44 years old when I started this journey and I just want to share with you that I’m going to be 65 years old in 2008 and I really feel like I should throw a big party and show people what 65 can look like and frankly, if I had started younger it would look even better.

Kevin: So why don’t you talk a little bit about the Hippocrates Institute and we’ll get into the meat of what raw food can do for you therapeutically.

Nomi: I’m glad you asked this Kevin because there’s a lot of buzz about raw food, a lot of books, a lot of restaurants and there’s a big stress on the gourmet, culinary aspects and I sometimes wonder if there aren’t some people out there, whether they’re chefs or whether they’re teachers who really don’t exactly understand or know that this came from a therapeutic point of view, a way to cleanse and heal yourself without necessarily having to get involved with the medical community.

And really I think my book is one of the very first books that introduced this whole kind of more gourmet and palatable subject. And there’s nothing wrong at all with all the delicious things that are happening. It’s just that I don’t want to see people forget that it’s grounded in something that’s good for you, so really raw food is on a continuum or a spectrum, all the way from therapeutic up to gourmet.

What I mean by that is you can talk about water-fasting, for example, or juice fasting where, with water fasting you are resting and it’s best to be supervised and you are literally only drinking water. What happens when you do that is, after a few days the energy that your body normally uses to digest, assimilate and eliminate is going into healing. It can be very profound. Then you can do carrot juice combinations and there’s lots of people who have stories to tell about that like Reverend George Malcolm or Dr. Lorraine Day both of whom are pretty important people in the raw food movement because they both had a really serious cancer and they feel that they were able to become well by juice fasting. Then you can get into, and this is what a lot of the retreats do, they have some juices but they also have good simple raw food. You again have that cleansing, de-toxifying factor. Then there’s your everyday raw food, somewhere in the middle between this kind of severe and simple raw food, somewhere between that and the really gourmet, multi-nuts, all kinds of sauces, is your everyday, at home, how to eat raw food because a lot of people are really committed to being anywhere from 50% to 100% raw. They do see a health difference. Really depending on who you are and where you’re coming from is where you’re going to be on that continuum. If you for example, have a cancer you want to be on the more therapeutic end of it.

Kevin: Let me ask you this. What is kind of an ideal balance, say throughout a year, of therapeutic to gourmet? I mean, is there a percentage? 50% therapeutic? 10% gourmet? The rest in between? What do you think is ideal?

Nomi: If only I could answer it because each of us is so unique. If there were one exactly right way to eat, let’s say in this case because I have a book, The Raw Gourmet and I’m considered to be an exact, if there was just one right way to eat raw food I’d be a gazilionaire. The reason there isn’t is that because each of us is so unique. Some people can eat almost all fruit with a little bit of green. Many other people, they just can’t. That’s just all there is to it. People do get confused. They go, I don’t know who to listen to, I read this book, this says that or this person they said that, and the reason for that confusion is, people kind of want to be told what to do.

I mean, we grew up in awe of the medical community and our parents before us did, and they go, well the doctor said to take this pill, the doctor said to do this, do that. And people have given away their power in terms of their health. I’m faced with people constantly asking me what should I eat and how shall I do it. Gee, I wish I could answer that for you but I’m going to have to toss that right back in your lap and you are going to have to experiment. It’s all experiential. It’s just not a religion or a philosophy. It’s what you eat. You have to do it to know. If eating a certain way works for you I can almost guarantee it’s not going to work for your wife, or your spouse or your kids or your brother. So it’s an impossible question to answer. How much plain and simple and how much really gourmet can one person take in.

One big common mistake though, so that people learn, like from the Ann Wigmore books or from going to one of the therapeutic kind of places, Hippocrates is one of them, and they’re pretty gourmet, but there’s also a place in California and a place in Texas called Optimum Health Institute. A place in Michigan called Michigan Creative Health Institute and the food is very very simple. People think that’s the way you eat forever but that’s really what they’re really presenting is the cleansing and the healing. You can’t usually eat that way forever because it’s not going to be enough calories in there for you or even enough variety. So it’s a learning process. Fortunately or unfortunately each person really has to learn for themselves. certainly help people do it, in consultations, but it isn’t an easy question.

Kevin: What do you think are some of the best ways or most efficient ways to experiment on yourself when when you’re doing this?

Nomi: I think that whatever you decide, from reading or taking a class or whatever, is what you want to do, I think you need to try it out and as the days and weeks go by, see how you feel. If you’re losing too much weight or not losing enough weight or if the initial uncomfortable feeling, which can happen when you cleansing and de-toxifying, tummy aches, head aches, aren’t going away, you need to revisit. One person can eat two avocados a day, another should only eat two a week, that kind of thing. I do think that a lot of people, my peers, who are writers and teachers in the community, have a tendency to if something works for them to then instruct that that’s how you do. But I’ve learned from long experience there simply is no one right way. I’ll give you an example. I had an employee come to my house several years ago. We each made smoothies for ourselves. Mine was — I’ll give you my favorite Green Smoothie. She used some sort of nut milk and some nuts and a few other things, some different fruits. I want to tell you I would have been sick for three days if I had made that for myself. It was just too rich, too filled with multiple nuts. This was a woman who was way thinner than I am. That’s what she needed. She knew what she needed. I would have been nauseous initially and felt ill for, so it’s really that is why people are confused. They read something, it won’t work for them. That’s the thing: there is no one guru.

- Kevin Gianni

Kitchen Equipment And Gadgets For Your Raw Food Kitchen

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s The Healthiest Year of Your Life, which can be found at http://thehealthiestyearofyour life. com. In this excerpt, Nomi Shannon shares on kitchen equipment and recipes for preparing raw foods.

The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Nomi Shannon, raw gourmet, author and raw food educator.

Nomi: People get really tired, really fast of salads. I do, but you can take the same things that you put into a salad and throw it in the blender and do it up, it’s amazing what the addition of a tomato or slice of mango or something can do to a concoction like that and you can make yourself some really delicious things really fast.

Kevin: What kind of blender do you use?

Nomi: There are only two great blenders, in my humble opinion, Kevin. One is the K-tech which is the one I do recommend for several reasons. The other is the Vita-mix. They’re both fabulous blenders. I prefer the K-tech. The main reason is it’s a whole horsepower stronger but there’s a few others.

The difference between one of these blenders and a Hamilton Beach or whatever is the difference between a Pinto and a Rolls Royce. They’ re both cars but need I say more? In my book, for example, I assumed everybody would have a regular blender. They’re not inexpensive. I would say to make this dish,grate the carrot, grate the parsnip, then put it in the blender. Well, one of these blenders, you throw the darn thing in whole. I throw two frozen, rock hard bananas, whole and 45 seconds later I’m eating whatever it is.

You can do with one of these blenders things you could never do any other way. I will take a couple of apples and cut them up and throw them in the blender with some cinnamon, I have to baby the blender a little because there’s no liquid in there, and I can turn it into applesauce in a minute or two, because people think applesauce? Raw applesauce? No, it’s completely easy and possible if you have the right equipment.

Kevin: It’s great for kids, too. I think the price comparison, you can tell me if I’m wrong or not, is if you break two or three $100 blenders, you can eventually, you kind of go for the bigger one.

Nomi: Well, I personally have taken two, probably $30 to $50 blenders, smoking,outside to finish their smoking process in the air where I tried to make a pate or something in it. They couldn’t handle it. I do understand Kevin that there are plenty of people interested in this kind of food that are never going to be able to spend $400 on a blender. I appreciate that and that’s why in my DVDs I use a regular blender. One or two hints about that, if you have an old Oster blender or you can get your hands on one and that would be like at garage sales, 40 or 50 year old blenders grab it, because they have the most amazing motor. Now, they don’t compare with the Vita-mix or the K-tech. But they’re still nice and strong. My first few years I was raw I had an old Oster.

Kevin: I think that people sometimes just think that the only thing you can make in a blender is a frozen drink or a yoghurt smoothie and you mentioned applesauce and then you just talked about pates. How versatile is a blender for making things?

Nomi: There’s a big crossover in equipment. When I make a pate I use a food processor because a blender needs a lot of liquid. The pate I like best, it’s in my book, called the Sunflower Pate, and it’s 3 cups of sprouted sunflower seeds and lemon juice, because that’s a good preservative and some tahini and then some onion and scallion and different spices. I use it in the food processor. The secret to blending is it needs liquid. Food processing is for things that are drier. The food processor could never work with as much liquid as a blender would. It would leak all over the place.

Kevin: What about Salidako. Can you explain what that is, for people who don’t know?

Nomi: It’s an odd name, it’s also called a spiral slicer and some people call it a spiralizer. Another name is garnishing machine. I finally just said, listen, I’m confusing everyone because every time the company changed the name, I changed the name. And it’s called the Salidako. It’s now made in China. It’s just a simple plastic gizmo, but what it does is really amazing. Here’s what is does that’s wonderful. It will take a vegetable, and the most commonly used vegetable is a zucchini. You put a three-inch piece of zucchini in this little thing and you turn the handle and what you get is pasta-shaped zucchini. It has this fascinating way of shredding it and you get long, long strands. I’ve had three and four feet long strands, where I’ve had to cut them in the bowl, of angel hair sized pasta made out of zucchini or carrot or beet or sweet potato or parsnip. It won’t work with anything soft. Just turn like a tomato to mush, most cucumbers to mush. It has to be a good firm vegetable and this has revolutionized sort of the palate of raw people. You just never have to eat a salad. You can sit your kids down and they can eat this spaghetti and it’s tossed in a pesto sauce, which I’m sure as you know is garlic and olive oil and lots and lots of basil and pine nuts, just no cheese and it doesn’t taste any different, and then top it off with a raw marinara and suddenly it smells like and it looks like and it tastes like Italian spaghetti. The only difference is, it’s not hot. This has, literally this little gadget has revolutionized, because you’ve got to have ways of doing food fast that’s tasty.

There’s another one I’ve just learned about from Germany and it’s called a Spiralo. If you do like a parsnip, beet, carrot, and turn it into this little skinny pasta — I’ve done this at shows and little kids have walked by and I’ve got it on the table next to the machine to show what it does, and these little three year olds will grab it and eat it. The mother or the grandmother will go, “I can’t believe it, he won’t eat any vegetables!” Something about cutting that vegetable into facets, let’s say, really brings out the sweetness like no grating or slicing ever could.

Kevin: Not only does it bring out the sweetness, I think, but it’s just so much easier to eat. You look at a carrot and you’re like, oh, a carrot. I got to chew this thing forever and when it’s in that small kind of form, you can eat it and you just keep eating it and eating it and eating it.

Nomi: When I started with raw food, I actually had a Champion juicer at the time, but it was in storage. When I started with 100% actually all I had was an everyday blender, a good sharp knife and a grater and I didn’t have any other equipment for at least for the first 6 months. So I do like to say to people when people say, “I don’t have the money to go out and buy all that stuff.” And you really don’t have to, but on the other hand, I have to say, that having some of these gadgets, the Salidako I mean is $24.95, really the ability to change these foods, their shapes, their size, pureeing or taking and turning into this little strand what suddenly is delicate and tender instead of chomping down on some hard. I would never eat a parsnip the way you might take a carrot and chew on it the way you would a carrot. I just wouldn’t, but it’s so delicious when you turn it into the pasta. It’s insane. It’s like a whole other thing.

Kevin: You talked about some of the quick things you can do, like the applesauce. What are some other real quick ideas that someone can do to maybe make a meal like in 5 minutes and go?

Nomi: Let’s not forget that almost any raw fresh raw fruit and vegetable can be eaten as it is. If you start out with a bowl on your counter filled with apples, oranges, bananas, whatever you can find seasonally, grapes papaya, mango whatever and then in your fridge you have different kinds of greens, like broccoli, cauliflower and all that there’s nothing wrong with going and sitting down and eating three apples and two bananas and a mango. I mean literally. I very often eat a red pepper like you would an apple. I found some that are so delicious and I just literally just wash the thing off and bite it and even if I get some of the seeds they’re not hot or anything like they can be. We’re so removed from going into the back yard and plucking fruit from the tree or a walnut from the tree that we literally forget, especially the younger generation, that food doesn’t really come in a box.

I’ve got a gadget called the Toss ‘n Chop. It’s such a clever gadget. You just throw everything that you want for your salad into the bowl and your dressing ingredients, everything, goes in a bowl but no cutting, no cutting board, no knife, no chopping, nothing. Then you just go at it with this thing, sort of a cross between a scissors and a tossing implement.

The other thing is, and I’m sure you already know this, is there’s just a huge craze going on with something called green smoothies, which I actually did mention in my book, suggesting you could put your sprouts and things, sneak them in smoothies. Would you like my green smoothie recipe which is my current passion and crave?

Kevin: Sure.

Nomi: Okay. I put a cup of either orange of tangerine juice in the blender and that’s taking about four tangerines at the moment. Personally I put about 8 cups of greens in, I wouldn’t start with that many because it might taste bitter to you at first. So, if there are any supplements that I’m taking, and I’m usually taking some supplements, put that in. Then if I can get my hands on papaya and I put that in. Yesterday I put a little bit of mango in instead, or a handful of blueberries and then I top it off with two frozen bananas. I like it, because I like my smoothies to be thick and cold. It gives me about 24 oz of smoothie. It’s fabulous. I have it at least once a day, every day. I vary out. You don’t want to eat the same thing every day, no matter how good you think it is for you, because you need variety.

- Kevin Gianni

Starting a Raw Food Diet

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Phillip McClusky shares on starting a raw food diet.

Renegade Water Secrets with Phillip McClusky, who lost 200 lbs. and found health and happiness in a raw food lifestyle. He is the host of www.lovingraw.com.

Kevin: So you’re reading “Raw Family” you’re sitting on the couch and you decide to go raw, what were the first three days like, the first week? How did that all pan out for you?

Phillip: Well I had tried so many things before in the past and what had happened was some of them were so confusing. Some of them were you had to buy this plan and you had to buy this package in the store and you had to write down how many calories and you had to move cards from slot to slot and all these different little colors and programs and all these different things that all these diets came across. So I knew that none of those were successful and basically they were confusing and not something that I want to do every day. I didn’t really want to look at every single calorie or every single box I picked up. So when I switched to this raw lifestyle what I had decided was the only way that I was going to be consistent and be able to do this was if I kept it simple and I stayed on a very easy program.

So in the very beginning I didn’t even concentrate on exercise. And it’s not that I recommend that but for me that’s what worked. I knew that I had to get the food right. I had literally devoured raw food books. I was reading a book a day and was really excited about everything. But I noticed that every body had a different opinion on raw foods. So somebody would say, “You have to juice so much.” The next person would say, “Juicing’s no good you have to do smoothies.” The next person would say, “You have to have 50 percent of your diet superfood.” And then the next person would say, “You have to mono-meal or do natural hygiene.” I read all that and what I decided to do was take all the information in and then do what felt right for me.

So the first three days for me were quite simple. I had been used to eating large meals so I figured, “I’m going to continue to eat large meals and I’m just going to switch them to salads.” So in the morning I had fruit and for lunch and dinner I had giant salads. I always think of it like this, when you go to maybe an Italian restaurant or a family-style restaurant and you have six or eight people around the table and they bring out a big bowl of salad that’s for everybody at the table, that’s pretty much what I made for my lunch and for my dinner. I didn’t worry about quantity. Some people would say, “You can’t have more than three avocados a week.” Well I was having three avocados a day, or four avocados a day. Some people would say, “It’s a good idea not to have more than a handful of nuts a day.” Well I was having like ten handfuls of nuts a day. I was making these giant salads that were really fulfilling and kept me pretty much at the same par as far as quantity wise, the food that I was eating. I pretty much stuck with that the next three days. Little did I know that my body would intuitively make changes and that would decrease over time.

Kevin: What would decrease?

Phillip: The size, the amount of food that I was actually eating.

Kevin: Got you. Why don’t you talk a little bit about…there’s a bunch of things I want to speak about but since we’re on what you started off eating, let’s talk a little bit about how that transition over the last two years, maybe give us a snapshot of every six months up until now. So six months from there, then six months-

Phillip: Sure. Great question. So here I am making these big, giant meals and just enjoying it and loving it. The weight is literally just flying off of me. Even without exercise at the time the weight was just flying off of me, just from changing the way I was eating. And I was shocked. I mean, I remember the first time I stepped on the scale and I realized that I had lost like 45 or 50 pounds or something like that, I just couldn’t believe it. It was a great feeling.

Then over the course of maybe the next three or four months I had noticed something that I had never noticed before, I was eating this giant, massive salad and I noticed that about 25 percent of the salad was left over. And I thought to myself, “Well that’s strange. I’ve never not finished a meal before.” So what I had to do was reevaluate. And I said, “Well, I guess I’m getting fuller quicker.” So I would make my salad a little bit smaller. Then over the next couple of months again the same thing happened, I had a little bit of the salad left over, about 25 percent. So I was making it smaller and smaller until I finally started to notice that it was kind of shrinking down to a normal size. It was quite an interesting experience because I wasn’t needing as much mass, this large amount of food that I had been used to eating.

So then I wondered how I could change other things. I was having fun and I was experimenting and there was times that I did make some of the gourmet raw foods. I went out and got a Cuisinart food processor and dehydrator and blender and stuff like that. I would have fun making some of the raw dishes and the pizzas and stuff like that sometimes, but it wasn’t my normal fare. My normal fare was usually just fruit in the morning and this salad for lunch and dinner.

So after a while I started really getting into making green smoothies or green shakes and literally just putting in an entire head of maybe spinach or lettuce or whatever green, I would rotate my greens, in with a little bit of fruit and water. And I would make this giant half-gallon smoothie. I started drinking that in the morning instead of just eating the fruit. It was a good way for me to get in my greens and fiber and a large amount of water, being a half-gallon container. I noticed that would take me until about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Then I might eat a little bit and then I would have dinner later on.

Then I started to notice that would take me until 3 o’clock. I just wasn’t hungry until that point. Then 4 o’clock, and then 5 o’clock. Then one day I was just sitting down and I realized that I hadn’t been eating lunch anymore and that I was totally fine. My body felt energized and excited and I was losing weight and I was feeling great. Literally this half-gallon smoothie, which is a lot of liquid, that I was making in the morning was taking me right to dinner. So I had switched from a three-meal way of eating to this two-meal essentially within probably eight months to a year, maybe around the year mark. Then I would just have a very moderate salad for dinner.

I was really thinking about the dynamics of how everything had worked and how things had transpired and what had felt so good was I didn’t necessarily have to listen to anybody’s rules per say, I took in what everybody was talking about and if one day I felt like just juicing, I would juice. If the next day I felt like having smoothies, I would do that. If I was eating oranges and just felt like having citrus, I would do a mono-meal of oranges. So I kind of incorporated a little bit of what everybody was talking about. But more than anything I really began to start, for the first time in my life, intuitive eating and just eating what felt right for me. There might be a day when I had mangoes and they tasted fantastic and I’d have maybe four in a row because there was something inside there that my body was really desiring, but then a couple of weeks later I would go to eat the same mango and it might not be that tasty for me. So I just figured to myself that maybe my body already got out of it what it had needed. So intuitive eating became a really big part of the way I started to live. Some days I’d feel a little bit weighed down and I might just do juice that day. I was totally fine with it. And vice versa, some other days I might just feel like I want to be a little bit more grounded so I might do a little bit more as far as avocado and nuts and such.

But this process was a fairly gradual process until I got to the point that I am at today. Really just intuitive eating and just really listening to your body and breathing throughout the process and just kind of being present to what I was putting in my mouth was probably the greatest source of change for me and felt the best for my body.

So maybe after a year I started figuring out what would be the next option for me and things just kind of got lighter and lighter until maybe about a year and a half or a year and six, seven months. I decided to do a juice fast. Basically what that was was drinking just juice for 92 days. It was something totally new for me, I hadn’t done any kind of long-term fast for anytime that long. And I just felt that it was right, it was my time and I just jumped right in to it. I ended up extending it and I did it for 100 days. For 100 days I just had fruit and vegetable juice. So that had switched my diet drastically. But it was a new experience and I wanted to really experience what the human potential was and what my body could really do and how much resolve and determination I had to really stick with this thing. So I did it and just experienced such amazing changes in my life, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later. I experienced such amazing changes.

Then after the juice feast period I’m slowly transitioning, that ended maybe about three or four months ago, and I’m just slowly transitioning back into my old way of eating, having smoothies in the morning, having salads. I do a lot of high water content fruits and vegetables – cucumbers and celery and tomato and things like that. Lately I’ve moved away from the nuts so much and just kind of keep to some simple seeds, like chia or flax or sunflower seeds and some things like that. But I tend to do a lot of high water content. I usually have at least a head of some sort of green – lettuce, bok choy, swiss chard- per day. And I keep it simple. People ask me if I get bored and I’m just like, “Fresh fruits and vegetables is what my body craves.”

- Kevin Gianni