Does anyone have any experience with the Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine diet which Gabriel Cousens has written about?

Phase 1 consists of Nuts and Seeds. Most Raw Veggies (unless high glycemic), sea veggies, Lemon/Lime, Vegetable Fruits (avocados, tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash, red bell pepper), Oils, Coconut pulp.

I have been trying for 3 days now, and have already gained a pound, my face has broke out in acne, and I miss the high of drinking my OJ.

I am trying this diet, because Gabriel Cousens recommends it, and that I should have noticeably more energy etc... within three months.

I have been raw since May 10th, 2006. I have tried fasting on coconut water (3days), fasting on Orange Juice (14 days), and fruitarian.

I know it takes time, but I sometimes get disheartened. It seems like I am constantly detoxing. I've had fevers, skin break outs, diarrhea, phleghm... all are fairly reoccuring. It feels as though I detox more than I was ever sick in my cooked food paste.

Today I saw myself in the mirror on my lunch break at work... keep in mind I live in Canada, in an air conditioned office. My eyes were sunken, with dark purple circles underneath, my lips were BLUE... honestly that terrified me the most. I huddle in a ball and shake trying to stay warm, while those all around me are dressed less warmly and are fine. Perhaps this is due to a 15 lb weight loss over the last 6 months or so. I am deffinitly the smallest one there.

I have not cheated once since the day I started raw 7.5 months ago. For the most part I don't want to. I am committed to healing my body and gaining that endless energy everyone boasts about. I do exercise right now. Weights and cardio. I also jump rope and use a rebounder.

Have been vegetarian for 15 years, and vegan for 10. I am 27 years old.

Anyways, I'm beginning another voyage seeking my ultimate health levels, and back to my original question... Does anyone have any input on the Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine diet?

Many thanks in advance,



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/21/2006 01:52AM by RawSun.

Has your acne cleared up on this diet? If not, I would drop it and try 80/10/10. The Cousens stuff is a decent transitional raw diet, but his recipes are very high fat in Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine. Using recipes in that book, you will continue to have detox symptoms until you decide to give up the high fat recipes.

If you are looking for the ultimate healthy raw diet, check out the testimonials on the 80/10/10 book at foodnsport.com. The book has a bunch of seasonal sample menus. When you start 80/10/10, you might have some detox at first (a few weeks), but it will go away and you energy will rise and your skin will clear up. If you go to vegsource.com you can read about how people are doing on 80/10/10 on Dr Graham's forum.

RawSun,

Uma shared some of her experiences on the Cousen's program in an earlier post.

I second the 80 10 10. Dr. Graham has very good advice, and remember simplicity is always the way to go!

yep. The hardest way always seems to be the truth. That's why so many people just don't bother going in for it. 80/10/10 looks hard and so does veganism and vegetarianism for some but in the end I think people will be thankful they can't abuse foods for pleasure anymore.

I recommend sticking with the Cousens' program, and make the green juice every day. Make it twice a day if you can. The green juice recipe is on page two of this page:

[www.treeoflife.nu]

I had a bad experience doing 80-10-10 and did not do well on a high sweet fruit diet.

Rainbow green is a low to moderate fat diet. You must keep your fat intake between 15% to a maximum of 25%

Also read Brian Clement's book 'Living Foods for Optimum Health'

Here is some audio by Gabriel Cousens:

[www.worldtalkradio.com]

His Sept. 22 show is good, he talks about how people heal themselves of diabetes in two weeks on Rainbow Green.

This site has some great audio interviews with raw food experts:
[www.patricktimpone.com]

Audio of Brian Clement:
[www.hippocratesinst.org]

Mike

Yeah, judging from the list of allowable foods, you'd pretty much have to have gallons of green juice every day to avoid going over 25% fat.

I'd really miss my sweet fruit! Don't think I could adhere to a phase I plan. Life is too short to torture oneself.

But I guess by the same token, if it is torture to omit sweet fruit, maybe we shouldn't.

On the other hand, I don't know how much sweet fruit is optimal. It may be different for different people. It troubles me sometimes how much fructose I get in my diet and when I don't take care to keep protein above a certain level, my protein intake seems to naturally go down.

I do like the taste of fruit. I am a grapeaholic, a strawberryaholic, a blueberryaholic, and orangeaholic, an appleaholic. I am an addict.

I wasn't always much of a fruit eater. There was a time when I looked at the nutrient profile and mostly dismissed it-- it had only a minor role in my diet. Instead, I concentrated instead of things like kale, brown rice, and cooked beans.

Boy, have I changed.

Mike,

You are always changing what the Cousen's fat recommendation is. At one point you said it was 15%. Now you are saying 25% is OK. Still, his typical recipes at Tree of Life and in the RGLFC are much higher fat contents, most of them being 50%+. I've heard the fat percentage at the TOL restaurant is 70%. Why doesn't his restaurant and his recipes reflect the 15% number?

Take a recipe like flax seed crackers. Flax seeds are 66% fat (according to NutritionData.com). 1 cup is 897 calories, or 593 calories of fat. His recipes call for 2 to 6 cups of seeds. All the other ingredient amount to a negligible number of calories since veggies don't have many calories. Plus, some of those recipes add oil too.

Given that sweet fruit are not allowed, or allowed in small quantities, where do the calories come from other than fat?

Bottom line for Cousens is the predominant source of calories is fat. For Clements, the predominant source of calories come from cooked starches, like rice, bread, and other grains. Or raw fat.

Anyone not eating predominantly fruit is eating either a cooked transitional diet, or a high fat (and I would say transitional) diet. Transitional diets are fine, I started there. But long term, people who stay on the transitional diets end up getting (or remaining) sick.

Not eating predominantly fruits does not necessarily mean you eat high fat or cooked. You can eat sprouted grains.

Thank you to everyone for all of your input and suggestions (=

Bryan - I only get acne when I eat high fat... another reason why this is not working for me!! The clearest my skin ever was however, was when I was only eating Orange Juice!

Cousens book advocates no fruit for three months, in order for one's body to stop being a composting ground. Apparently everyone at the TOL restaurant (the staff), switched to this diet, and all felt significant rises in their energy level within 3 months. That seemed like a quick solution to me versus the 2 + years that most people mention.

Perhaps I've been doing it wrong, and should be having more green juice and less receipies as they are mostly fat.

I am deffinitly going to go do some research on the 80-10-10. Thanks again for all of the replies and information!

Rawsun, yes, think in terms of 10-20 lbs or more of produce per day, you will need A LOT of it to keep the kcals up if you also with to keep the fat down. It sounds like you are not getting enough energy. It will be a very expensive "fruitless" 3 months.

And there will be lots of glucose and fructose, too, when the fat is down, because the veggies are good sources of glucose and fructose, especially when they are juiced. Fiberless sources of sugar generally are not so good.

So I really don't get this plan. If it is fat reduced (say, 10-25% of total kcals), it is in fact a high sugar plan.

Rainbow Green is how I started on raw and I LOVED it. For me it really worked. But at that time the sweetness of fruit grossed me out - just the thought of eating a banana made me cringe. I think I just needed to mineralize & alkalinize my body, my pH must've been way off - I ate tons and tons of dark green things, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers - those were the things I craved.

I would suggest listen to your body. If you're craving sweet fruit (as I do now - I had 3 bananas for breakfast yesterday), then you probably don't need to do Rainbow Green. But if you try the raw diet eating alot of fruit & it's not working for you somehow, then try Rainbow Green.

I didn't do any of the recipes btw - too much work. I just made up my own food combinations based on his recommendations & what I craved.

Bryan, I gave you the quote from Rainbow Green last month.

He writes that some people do better with 15% fat, others do better at 20%, and some do better at 25% fat. He writes that we should not eat more than 25% fat.

Why is it so difficult for you to understand this? I showed you the page in Rainbow Green where this is written.

Phase 1 is temporary and is used to heal from disease. Brian Clement and Gabriel Cousens found that people heal the fastest on Phase 1.

The recipes in Rainbow Green are for special occasions and not to be used for every meal. Some are high fat, others are low fat.

Medical Doctors say diabetes is un-curable. They say there is no cure for diabetes. Yet it is 100% cured after only two weeks on Phase 1. This applies to almost any disease.

Rainbow green has photos of cancerous tumors in people that disappear after a short time on Phase 1.

People visit Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida and they are so sick they cannot walk. They are in wheel chairs. Two weeks later they are completely healed and are walking / running around. It is miraculous.

Brian Clement says that if symptoms of disease are present, the person must eat 100% vegan raw and living foods. If a person is healthy with no disease symptoms, then they can get away with eating 80% living foods, and 20% healthy cooked foods. Cooked foods are not allowed on the Hippocrates healing program.

I have done phase 1 and loved it. I did not find it difficult. I was never hungry and found that I had more energy and vitality.

The calorie paradigm is old and outdated. Calories are for cooked fooders. We get our energy from living foods, not from calories. The calorie theory is from the 19th century, we are now in the 21st century. The living foods theory has replaced the calorie theory.

Mike

I like that calorie explanation, Mike - very clear!

I'm going to say it just like that to people when they ask about my diet.

You don't have to believe in kcals but they believe it you. If you take in too many of them, you will gain weight. If you don't take in enough, you will waste away.

Re: Calories

What about people like Hira Ratan Manek and David Jubb, who eat very low calories and are thriving.

Sunlight contains every frequency of light. (Frequency is also color.) Plants absorb the sunlight energy and store it. We eat the plants and absorb the sunlight through them. Sunlight energy is more important than calories.

Calorie is a unit of measurement when a food is burned. We don't burn our living foods so we don't need calories to measure it.

Hira Manek has learned how to get his energy directly from the sun and eats very little food. David Jubb has gone long periods of time without eating any food. They are not wasting away!

Check out the interviews with David Jubb at
[www.patricktimpone.com]

He talks about his extremely low calorie lifestyle.

Mike

I def eat alot less food when I'm out in the sun - I love the sun, it recharges my batteries.

Mike,

Why do you believe this kind of stuff?

David Jubb has been known to raid people's refrigerators at night while claiming during the day that he does not eat.

Lock these people who claim to eat so little in a metabolic ward and we shall see what really happens.

People lie all the time. Or misremember. Or stretch the truth.

This is the truth of what happens when people don't get enough kcals. It is well-documented. It is repeatable. It is not anecdotal.
[jn.nutrition.org]

a figure from the text above

RawSun, I heard numerous bad experiences about people trying Cousen's approach, you are just the most recent of them. The main problem with this diet are restrictions that defy natural body instincts. I strongly recommend that you listen to your body. If soemthing does not feel good, then it is not good. Don't force anything on yourself for the sake of intelectual arguments. Your body is the best guide.

My personal experience has been that I gradually progressed from a lower-in-fruit and higher-in-fat to a fruit-based raw diet. And, I feel better than ever. The transition to raw is a path of gradual improvements, which come when you are ready for them. And, you know that you are ready, when you are sensitive enough to hear your body signals.

Eat foods you love and enjoy the journey!

Sincerely,
Gosia.


RawGosia channel
RawGosia streams

Mike Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Sunlight contains every frequency of light.
> (Frequency is also color.) Plants absorb the
> sunlight energy and store it.

Not really, there are several frequencies of light the sun does not produce (you can see this with a prism, spread the sun's light into the spectrum and look for the dark bands. As for plant, they only really absorbe blue and red light, which is kind of useful since the sun mainly puts out blue and red light.

> We eat the plants
> and absorb the sunlight through them. Sunlight
> energy is more important than calories.

A Calorie is a unit of energy. 1 kcal = 4184 joules. I think the plant energy is important, we are not solar powered, fortunately our food is.

> Calorie is a unit of measurement when a food is
> burned. We don't burn our living foods so we don't
> need calories to measure it.

I do. I pretty much ignore calories, until I'm planning a camping trip, then calories come in useful for making I'm taking enough food and have enough extra if I get suck out longer than planned.

Cheers,
Ian.

What does it mean to ignore calories? Does it mean to not watch how many you ingest, and just to trust the body to tell you the right amount? Or does it mean to ignore how much fat your ingest, and just trust your body to tell you the right amount?

While I am a big fan of listening and trusting the body, here are some things that may (or may not) be outside of your experience that can be interfering with the messages from the body. They all have to do with what one adds to one's foods to make them more interesting to eat.

The first is the use of flavorings to deceive your body. Obviously the most often used flavoring in the SAD world is refined sugar. With refined sugar or any sweetener for that matter, one can take a food that is unhealthy and deceive the body into believing that it is a good food. In your raw diet, are you adding any of the following to make your foods taste better: raw honey, agave nectar, stevia, dates, etc?

The next set of flavorings are like sweeteners in that they make foods taste better. The ones that most of us can agree are not so great are MSG, refined table salt, cooked ketchup, cooked sauces in general, refined vinegar, soy sauce, etc. But what about the raw equivalents: celtic sea salt, himalayan salt, miso, nama shoyu, apple cider vinegar, organic raw spices, etc? While the raw versions of the condiments may have less adverse effects than the cooked versions (and this is very debatable), they still have the ability to deceive the body and make foods that are otherwise inedible or uninteresting taste edible and interesting. Again, the ability to listen to the body has been circumvented because these external flavorings excite our much over stimulated senses, and in fact people can get to a state where foods just don't taste good unless they contain these spices and condiments.

So if you are adding these flavorings to your foods to make them interesting, what would happen if you quit adding these flavorings to your foods, and just relied on your sense of taste to tell you which foods to eat? Well, I'm not going to tell you the answer to this question, I leave it to the reader to have their own experience.

Thanks again everyone for your input and support.

Gosia -- thank you for your advice. I checked out your website and found it inspiring.

Bryan -- In answer to your question, if I quit using these 'sweeteners' and flavorings I would only eat fruit. Thank you for asking that, it really makes sense and hit home. I don't even think I would want as many vegetables without seasons in the salad dressing.

On weekdays when I avoid complicated receipies I always have fruit all day, and by dinner crave salad. On weekends one 'raw' receipe leads me off track and away from the simplicity of my weekdays.

I am going to give this a go. Only things in their natural state - without added flavorings and sweetners, and see if this is the difference my body's been searching for.

I did phase 1 for three months, I was overweight and moody and everyone at the tree of life always was arguing and fighting

I have tried the RGLFC plan. It was very interesting. I love the fresh feeling one gets in the mouth from that way of eating. I think its due to all the minerals.

I direct a question to anyone who wishes to respond. I often find it confusing how much differing advice there is on the ideal raw food diet. It ranges from fruit only, (sometimes even single fruit diets for months at a time)a mixed vegan diet, including complex recipes with a dozen or more ingredients, mono-meal eating, high fat, low-fat, high sugar, low sugar, starch? actually where does anyone find raw starch?

There seems to be as much advice in the raw food diets as there are on diets in general, adkins, pritikin, south beach etc... etc... The western world must be very blessed in at least one sense, we have enough time and resources to overthink what to eat! Most of the world for most of history has had the question, "is there ANYTHING to eat?"

Why is there so many conflicting ideas?

RawSun: "Apparently everyone at the TOL restaurant (the staff), switched to this diet, and all felt significant rises in their energy level within 3 months."

It's hard to say whether this was because of a change in diet, or because of all the stimulating pills they were most likely popping as part of the Cousens pill-popping program.

Mike: "People visit Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida and they are so sick they cannot walk. They are in wheel chairs. Two weeks later they are completely healed and are walking / running around. It is miraculous."

Yes and I've also heard of cases where people didn't keep up the program at home and the disease came back. I spent 3 weeks at Hippocrates, was flying high and feeling great afterwards, and did the program for a few months. But something did not feel right, as in order to maintain that level of energy i would have agreed to become forever prisoner to my juicer. Juicing a couple times a day, every day, sprouting till sprouts are growing out of my ears, downing wheatgrass till all i see is green -- it's maintenance, it's survival, it's not FREEDOM.

I do appreciate what Hippocrates is doing, it was a step in the right direction for me after Cousens because they are into food combining, reasonable amounts of fat, and only very minimal supplement use. But both programs have in common: COMPLEXITY and HIGH MAINTENANCE, and SWEET FRUIT IS EVIL. What about the freedom of SIMPLICITY? Must we spend hours and hours arranging our piles of supplements or rinsing our Green Star juicers? It's a lot easier to grab some fruit.

"Brian Clement says that if symptoms of disease are present, the person must eat 100% vegan raw and living foods. If a person is healthy with no disease symptoms, then they can get away with eating 80% living foods, and 20% healthy cooked foods. Cooked foods are not allowed on the Hippocrates healing program."

Mike, were you there? I spent 3 weeks there a few years ago, and almost everyone there ate some cooked food as part of their diet. They only suggested 100% raw for those with greater health challenges -- not for anyone with symptoms at all. In fact, they insisted that those with blood sugar issues such as diabetes, have some cooked millet for breakfast. I was feeling like crap and they told me i didn't necessarily have to go all the way, but being an obsessive perfectionist I insisted on doing 100%!

Thanks Bryan for pointing to the post describing my Tree of Life experience.

Why are there so many conflicting ideas? Maybe it's to make it all the more rewarding on our journeys when we finally remove the veil and see that truth is _simple_. It's WE who think the solutions must be complicated!!! LOL.

Love,
Uma

Interesting study there arugla.

I am a fruitarian. I only eat bananas and oranges. I have been eating this way for 10 years. I don't like supplements, and I don't like sneaky snake oil salesmen

Joe

Mike,

It hadn't dawned on me that you could be jimmyjoe

Sweet fruit is not evil. I am so tired of the carbohydrate bashers. I thought it had gone out of fashion. Fruit lowers LDL (the "bad" cholesterol) and has benefits for antioxidant status in the plasma.

Nutrition. 2006 Jun;22(6):593-9.

A role for fruit content in energy-restricted diets in improving antioxidant status in obese women during weight loss.

* Crujeiras AB,
* Parra MD,
* Rodriguez MC,
* Martinez de Morentin BE,
* Martinez JA.

Department of Physiology and Nutrition, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the present work was to estimate the ability of two hypocaloric diets with different fruit contents to improve antioxidant biomarkers related to lipid peroxidation in obese women.

METHODS: Fifteen obese women (age 32 +/- 6 y, body mass index 34.9 +/- 2.9 kg/m2) were assigned to two different dietary treatments for 8 wk. The subjects received a hypocaloric diet (600 kcal/d restriction from the measured individual energy expenditure) containing 5% (n = 8) or 15% (n = 7) energy supplied by fructose from fruits. Anthropometric measurements, blood lipid profile, plasma oxidative markers, total antioxidant capacity, and malondialdehyde (MDA) were evaluated before and after the nutritional intervention in addition to some relations among them.

RESULTS: No differences in weight loss were observed between diets (5% energy from fructose in the low fruit diet -6.9 +/- 2% versus 15% energy from fructose in the high fruit diet -6.6 +/- 2%; P = 0.781). Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels significantly decreased (P = 0.048) in obese women who followed the high fruit diet, which was accompanied by a statistical (P = 0.046) diet-related decrease (-30%) in the ratio of MDA to antioxidant capacity. There was a positive association between MDA diet-related change and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (r = 0.665, P = 0.003), with antioxidant capacity directly proportional to the fiber plus fructose content associated with fruit consumption (r = 0.697, P = 0.025).

CONCLUSION: A fruit-enriched hypocaloric diet appears to be more effective against oxidative stress. Consumption of antioxidant substances contained in fruit could be a useful strategy in the design of hypocaloric diets that, with the weight reduction, could increase the improvement of cardiovascular risk factors related to obesity.

PMID: 16704952 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

RawSun:

What you are experiencing is detoxification. Either you continue through it for about 7-10 days, depending on how internally unwell you are, or you go Bryan's route. I have done GC's diet for many years and suffered through all the detox, only always to come out on the other side IN A STATE OF BLISS. & MY HEALTH HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER!

My clients do the Phase 1 for about 3 weeks, after which they transition to next phase and onward, unless disease is present. ALL WHO STAY THE ROAD HAVE DRAMATICALLY WONDERFUL EXPERIENCES. Only those who lose faith, patience and commitment, get what one always gets when one gives up - no too much.

My thoughts for you.

Blissed be, Annie

Anne Kaspar
BodyByBliss.com
bodybybliss@gmail.com
505.690.0169