As promised, here's another question I'd like to openly address here instead of via Wendi's email system. This one also comes up from time to time, and I told this person to watch out for my two cents on this issue. So, here it is. The reader asks:

... During your transtioning to a raw food diet & the loss of so much weight, what if any exercising were you doing along the way

Okay, well first let me point out that this is a different question than the one I posed in the title of this article and in the banner graphic, above. But, the two are related. Let me tackle the reader's question first:

When Wendi first went raw, she was not actively exercising. I do believe that, from time to time, she was exercising along with some exercise videos. But, I don't believe it was to the level of what you'd call regular workouts.? (I'll let her address her specific history of exercise in another blog post when she returns.)? However, only when she went raw did her weight start to noticeably decrease.

On the other hand, during this time (before I went raw), I was running like a madman. This is back when I was on heart meds (having peaked out at 235+ pounds and with a BP and pulse rate that had me on track as a cardiac arrest patient any day), and desperately trying to get back into shape. Only, guess what ? I wasn't losing the weight. Three miles per day, and very little weight loss!

Now, let's not interpret that the wrong way. I'm not saying that exercise is bad, or unnecessary. In fact, I think it's critical in the long-term. However, what Wendi and I had in common was a basic state of non-health. Now, for many people, doing some exercise or making some basic dietary improvements could indeed lead you back to that sought-after, healthy equilibrium. For us, it did not. Her veganism was roughly as effective as my own die-hard athleticism; they both tanked.

They both tanked for the same reason, though; our bodies were not genetically predisposed to being able to function properly on suboptimal nutrition. In other words, we needed to be raw in order to be healthy. I suspect that quite a lot of our readers are in the same boat. How many of you find yourself overweight or struggling with some chronic illness, even when it seems like you're eating either the same kinds of things others are, or maybe even better foods than others around you ? I bet it's a LOT of people!

When you think of it, what are the chances that anyone alive could actually discover this amazing piece of information (that by simply eating a diet high in uncooked, living foods, your health could be restored) ? Even though it's now obvious -- humans being the only species that cooks its food, and the only species as universally sick as we are! -- we still could never put two and two together until Wendi cracked the code, as it were, back in 2006.? It's so painfully obvious to us now, though, that we're dedicating our lives to spreading the word about it. So, consider yourself amazingly fortunate to know the big secret!

So, even though humans have relatively similar dietary needs and relatively similar needs for physical exercise, my subjective theory is that, while you are sick (meaning morbidly overweight or facing a chronic health challenge), exercise may not be as critical as diet.

This is a 180-degree shift in opinion from what I maintained before going raw.My former mantra was, "exercise is key"!? I thought that, if I was fat, it simply meant that I wasn't running enough. This is a common view, perpetuated by high-profile "fitness" stories of athletes fueled by 12,000 "pizza and pasta" calories per day. The message is: "What you eat doesn't really matter that much; what matters is your effort. A calorie from a potato chip is the same as a calorie from a carrot." Well, that's total BS!

Okay, so if my short-term answer is:? "No, you need to focus on healing, not so much on running 10Ks," then what is my long-term answer ? Well, I think it's critical to long-term health. I think a sick body can heal on raw foods, and then become a healthy body. And I think that healthy body naturally wants to move and run around and dance. So, in a way, mother nature has taken care of this issue herself. It's built into our genes; we just can't feel it when we're sick (and that's built into our genes, too, because when we're sick, we need to rest and to heal).

So, the ultimate question, I suppose, is not "Must we exercise " It's "How can we get ourselves into a place where we want to exercise " And the answer to that is: Eat living foods. If you do that, you'll regain your health, and you'll naturally become vibrantly active!