Its common sense, to know that all buffalo eat the same diet, no one looks at one buffalo and says ‘ok, that buffalo eats meat and that buffalo to its right eats grass and the other buffalo, behind the meat eating buffalo, eats fruit’.
There is a reason biological classifications exist, both for grouping select species together and to understand the nature of each species hence the classification of dietary requirements and adaptations under ‘herbivore, omnivore, carnivore’. When it comes to humans, we tend to think the complete opposite and believe that each human has radically different requirements and therefore is different to other humans.
All cows naturally graze and eat grass, well that was the case until humans entered the equation, domesticated them and began to manipulate their diets and lifestyles. Domesticated and farmed cows are fed a radically different diet to their initial nature intended diet. Farmed cows have been documented to eat diets consisting of grains, boiled blood, leftovers from dead cows, meat from other species and even candied sweets. All livestock has been documented to eat leftovers of their same species and meat from other species, ultimately rendering cows, pigs and chickens from herbivores to omnivores and cannibals. There is an assumption that, if you eat the wrong foods, you will die or be affected immediately or within a short time frame. This is not the case, as any animal (like domesticated livestock) can be lead way off their nature intended diets, yet still be living and breeding for years. This is essentially why the topics of dietary options are so wide and varying, because the effects of diet take years possibly even decades or generations to occur. A primary indicator for the effectiveness of dietary choices is not judged by the amount of death due to eating, but instead by the amount of disease spread among the eaters.
Life, all the way to a single cellular level has one objective and that is to live, a cell extracted from any creature will do whatever it can to remain alive. It seems that life is built for one purpose and that is to live. This can be said for humans as a species too, the desire to live is what makes us so successful, we can go through incredible hardships and challenges, yet still endure. Despite this innate ability to live, what brings about our biggest downfall is our minds. Our minds can literally kill us and will literally override our desire to ‘survive’. If the mind and body work together with the utmost desire to live and survive, it essentially creates the most resilient human and life form.
So, knowing that life’s main priority is to live, it therefore provides the answer of how an animal or human can undergo massive trauma, poisoning or a prolonged toxic diet yet still remain alive. A toxic diet and lifestyle, doesn’t result in instant death or immediate affects, instead a consistently toxic diet and lifestyle drives the body into a gradual turmoil as each cell does its utmost to live but eventually the natural order of cells is defeated due to an internally engulfing toxic environment. The results of toxic diets is not death, it is disease. Disease is just a way of telling the body that it is ‘broken’, ‘unhealthy’ or ‘harmed’, namely autoimmune diseases. Irrespective of the diseases name (cancers, arthritis, diabetes, heart attacks etc.), disease will continue to be present, as the root cause for disease is not being dealt with – namely the state of the internal environment caused by the diet and lifestyle.
Due to our advancements in medicine we are able to keep certain disease symptoms at bay, essentially we live with the disease but have medicine to ‘dilute’ the symptoms. Disease is a common malady in Westernised society, everyone seems to have some sort of disease and a resulting medication to combat the disease effects. Our medicines allow us to live longer, but they don’t make us healthier, instead we become more diseased as species and more advanced with our medicines. This is profitable for industry, but ineffective for human health. I would rather be disease free and possess health, then be diseased and dependent on medicines.
Health is being free of disease and sickness; you can’t be healthy and have a disease or be sick. We assume that being physical fit or appearing to ‘look’ healthy equates to being healthy – this is not true and is the reason how a very fit human can still get testicular cancer and no longer be able to ride his bicycle. Fitness and physical capability are not directly linked to health. Physical capabilities and fitness are due to conditioning of the body, where as health is the state of the body and how efficiently and effectively it works in digestion, assimilation, excretion, disease prevention and regulation. A healthy person doesn’t get sick; we have an immune system to prevent disease, not to only start working when disease has taken over.
Poor diets don’t kill you directly, instead they create an internal environment for diseases to proliferate, which can and will kill you. The biggest cause of death in Westernised society is not war, famine, violence or trauma – it is disease. Disease kills, not diet. This is key to remember because it illustrates that wholefoods can’t kill you (unless they are processed or poisoned). You cannot overdose on meat, fruit or vegetables, no matter how much you attempted to consume and therefore you cannot blame the direct ingestion of wholefoods for making you sick. Whilst wholefoods can’t kill you, that doesn’t mean that what you eat can’t affect you.
What you eat, breathe, drink and absorb through your skin is what ultimately becomes the fuel source for which your body operates. If your sources of fuel are toxic (not understood by the body), what will result is a build up of internal ‘waste’.
An analogy – imagine inside your body is a living, thriving jungle. Your gut flora, cells and bacteria are the living creatures of the jungle. What you consume, absorb, breathe and drink provides the air, the water and the nourishment for your internal jungle ‘organisms’ to live. The state of your health is directly dependent on the state of your internal environment.
If, for arguments sake, you ingest something other than water, like coffee, this has an impact on your internal jungles environment and will undoubtedly affect your internal living ‘organisms’. Your consumption essentially pollutes or restores the living system within you, but like all cells and anything that holds ‘life’, regardless of how toxic you may pollute your internal jungle – the life living in it will do whatever it can to survive. They will adapt to the pollutants, just as all living species do whatever they can to adapt to their environments. If the pollution becomes excessive and causes the internal living organisms to reach a tipping point where their will to live is overturned by an unavoidable and overbearing toxic environment, ‘death’ and/or ‘extreme adaptations’ of the cells, and bacteria will result.
If ‘death’ occurs, some of your internal organisms, namely bacteria, start dying and allow room for other bacteria to proliferate, essentially causing an imbalance within the internal ‘biodiversity’ (infection). If ‘extreme adaptations’ occur, what we start to see are other forms of disease either, ordinary cells are transformed into destructive life forms that attack the body rather than defend it (auto-immune disease) or internal bacteria becomes more resilient and proliferates to form a disease (immune disease).
When ‘we are different’ is used as an explanation, what is to be understood that we as a species are not different and our biology is not different, but what is different is our internal state and current biochemistry. Our biochemistry has changed based on the internal environment we have created. This is the reason how bodies can develop immunities to medicines. This is known in the medical industry and it is why dosages are increased over long-term periods, because the body slowly develops biochemical immunities to the effects of the drugs. It is also the reason how a drug addict can undergo severe forms of sickness due to withdrawal symptoms from being weaned off a known toxic substance, the addicts internal organisms have adapted to living in a toxic environment.
Withdrawal symptoms are the adverse affects of causing a severe change to what the internal ‘organisms’ have adapted to live. Ultimately, withdrawal symptoms are the processes of the body cleaning and restoring itself to return to a base platform for where the internal organisms can work at their most effective – in essence it is a return to health. This is understood regarding addiction and withdrawal, but it is not understood within dietary habits.
When the body ‘cleans’ up inside, it essentially has to recycle and eliminate all the internal waste. In order to expel the waste, it goes through a process of re-digestion. Re-digesting the waste will cause symptoms, regardless of what the body is ingesting. Headaches, sweats, heart palpitations, vomiting, diarrhea are symptoms of the body cleaning itself. This is also common experience when fasting.
When abstaining from food, it allows the body to essentially ‘clean house’. Through out our lives, we will have undoubtedly been adding waste to the body through diet and lifestyle. There are two forms of waste to the body – exogenous waste (waste provided from outside the body mercury, alcohol, caffeine etc.) and endogenous waste (waste created by the body – CO2, urea, dead cells etc.) The body dislikes waste more than anything, so once waste is ingested, the bodies’ first order is to get rid of it and it does so, through breathing, mucus, excretion, lymph, sweating, defecating and urinating. The body has systems to deal with waste, however if the body is inundated with waste, meaning it is receiving more than it can expel, it will start to ‘hide’ and ‘store’ it, with a priority of getting waste as far away as possible from its vital organs. The body starts to store waste in fat tissue, joint connections and anywhere else it can find, keeping waste from coming into contact with organs and the circulatory system. When a fast takes place, the body removes its focus from digesting food (as there is no food being eaten) onto ‘cleaning’ the body. It starts by eliminating stored waste, targeting fat and anywhere else waste has been stored. In order to eliminate the waste, the fat holding the waste has to be re-digested and when it is re-digested it undoubtedly causes symptoms associated to the waste the fat holds. The symptoms of a fast can be noted as the ‘withdrawals’ from the waste accumulated by a toxic diet and lifestyle.
After this ‘withdrawal process’ the body then moves to ‘fixing’ existing problems, such as issues caused by old forms of trauma or disease. Fasting has been noted to cure a wide range of disease and physical injuries. Essentially after ‘cleaning and fixing’, the body returns to a ‘purer’ form where its works more effectively in digestion, assimilation, excretion, function and overall efficiency.
Every person’s body is at a different state, induced by the internal environment they have created and how their internal organisms have been affected. Essentially we are all at different points of degradation, we all have different tolerances and we all have different immunities due to the internal environments that we have created.
Raw, whole, plant-based foods are noted as being ‘clean foods’ meaning they possess little to no toxins or waste that the body doesn’t understand. The body and internal organisms have evolved over thousands of years to eat whole, plant-based foods. This is why animals in the wild are not as diseased as us, as they have a diet that they are adapted to eat with foods that have little to no waste or toxins present.
By eating whole, raw, plant-based foods you allow the body to gradually shift focus from storing ingested (exogenous) toxins, to focusing on digestion (this is why after eating whole, raw food for a few days, people realize they had been suffering from constipation without even knowing it). The body also begins to eliminate waste and thus starts re-digesting and cleaning out the ‘stored waste’, which inadvertently results in symptoms. As the body begins self regulating, one goes through symptoms ranging from headaches, fatigue, dizziness, fevers, low blood pressure, nausea, vomiting etc. When consuming raw, whole plant-based foods what essentially happens is similar to a fast only the process of ‘cleaning’, ‘fixing’ and ‘regulating’ is more gradual.
These symptoms can occur periodically for a sustained period, months or even a year – it all depends on how long it took the individual to create the internal environment and how adversely the internal organism were affected. If you have been eating ‘waste’ for 40 years or 20 years, the internal environment is going to be at different stages of degradation.
Often people shift to a raw, wholefood, plant based diet and experience these symptoms and assume that the food is making them sick and therefore arrive at the conclusion, that plants are inferior in nutrition and the we are all different and therefore we all need to eat differently. Our differences are our states, which we individually created and nurtured, it is not the foods fault nor is it your biology of being a human, instead it is the differences of internal environments, adaptations of internal organisms and resulting biochemical changes. The good thing is that the internal environment and internal organisms can be altered as can individual biochemistry. Internal environments, internal organisms and biochemistry are not deciding factors of the body, they are depending factors – meaning they are not the decisive forces for life of the body, but rather they are dependent on many external and internal factors, which include food, water, air, thoughts and what is put on the skin. Simply put, what you put into your body, your body will do its utmost to adapt – when you make a change, your body will adapt, as the body’s primary focus is to sustain life. Life wants to live.
I experienced a series of health issues when I changed diets. Changing from Westernised to vegan, I experienced lethargy, weight-loss, nausea, a fever and light-headedness all within the first month of going plant based. At that point I was told it was because humans are not meant to eat a plant-based diet, fortunately I endured the process and after a month and half I felt good and felt good for 5 years, experiencing no other health related issues. Then I transitioned to raw, but before I went raw, I did a 2 day fast, broke the fast one day then followed up with a 10 day fast. For the first 5 days I didn’t feel great at all, tired, nauseas, headaches and felt very weak. By day 7 I felt great and then started a 100% raw diet on day 10 and haven’t looked back for the last 1.5 years. I knew that the symptoms I was experiencing were not due to the food I was eating or not eating, instead it was due to the process of my body regulating through ‘cleaning’. I had read enough and understood the processes I was to go through and when I experienced what I assumed were negative processes of adopting changed diet, I knew it was not because of the food I was eating then, it was because if the food and lifestyle I been supporting and living for the past 20 years of my life.
We are all the same and have the ability to change our internal states and eat a raw, whole, plant based diet – this is being done all over the world by different people, of different ages, with different blood types, different beliefs, different races, different genomes, different external environments and different mentalities. That’s not to say that changing a diet is without its challenges.
This write up serves a resource of information to explain that we may be ‘unique’ based on our mentality but out inherent biology is the same and we can therefore adapt to similar lifestyles and diets, yet experience different symptoms. One diet working for one and not working for another, is not because we are different biological species, it is because of our different internal states of degradation, that will ultimately provide more challenging ‘withdrawal’ symptoms based on the more years that have been dedicated to toxic living.
Remember, its not the foods fault nor is it because of biological differences, its your internal state that has ultimately been nurtured by you through eating processed foods, applying lotions and cosmetics, eating cooked, denatured food, choosing to live in a mentally stressed or anxious state and for eating animal products – all of which our primitive digestive systems and bodies don’t understand and therefore contain exogenous waste that effects our internal environment. Anyone can thrive on a plant-based diet – if you can adapt to eating toxic, processed and cooked foods, there is no reason why you can’t regulate back to eating clean, nature intended foods.
Written By : Davey Du Plessis
www.liferetreat.co.za | info@liferetreat.co.za | (087) 1950 629
