Raw Food Models

We all need heroes, role models. Plato was a follower of Pythagoras. Hemingway was influenced by Mark Twain. Olympic winners learn competition skills and practice techniques by watching their heroes again and again, repeating how they executed every move. This works for musicians, writers, athletes, ballet dancers, and just about everyone who's ever achieved excellence in any endeavor.

People never improve unless they look to some standard or example higher and better than themselves. --Tryon Edwards

I have my own role models too, both current and from long ago. It's much easier to succeed when you learn from your predecessors, those who have already succeeded at what you're aiming to accomplish. It's like reverse engineering, taking apart some mechanism to see how it works.

If you try to learn all there is to know about the raw food lifestyle, you'll be overwhelmed. Instead of trying to absorb everything about raw foods all at once, chew on one raw food writer at a time, one successful practitioner, and one role model. Study that person's work in detail. 

Then work outward. Find three people whom that practitioner loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Do this, and you'll soon have your own "family tree" of mentors. Then it may be time to start your own branch.

How Creativity Happens

No matter how you try, you'll not be able to imitate, to copy exactly what your role model did, because you have a different body, different family, different surroundings, different pressures and responsibilities. You'll be forced to adjust, to be creative and that is how you'll discover who you are and find yourway.

What if you have less time, less money, and more physical problems to overcome than the author of the raw food book you're reading? Good. Nothing is more paralyzing than to have all the money in the world, all the free time you desire, and every possible ability to do anything. Given all that, most people would do nothing. 

It's the limitations placed upon you that force you to be creative. For example, having a shorter leg for most of my life made me very creative when it came to clothes. My need to hide my limp gave me a certain ingenuity in making attractive, fashionable clothes to detract attention from what I used to perceive as an offensive part of my body. Having numerous physical problems in my younger years has forced me to be very innovative when it came to achieving superior health in my fifties.

Life is contradictory. It is limitation that gives freedom to creativity, gives it wings. 

Raw foods lifestyles are no different. It's where and how we depart from our role models that will make us unique. That is how you will find your own path and add to the universal raw food story.

Don't have time? Then you'll have to find some tricks for simpler raw food recipes. If you face a particular health issue, it will force you to stick with raw foods, experimenting to find a way to uproot the source of the problem. It's constraint that fuels your creativity. 

In emulating our role models, often what we seek is to internalize their way of looking at the world. You don't want to copy what they see and do, but you do want to find the method they used to search.

The most important single influence in the life of a person is another person ... who is worthy of emulation. -Paul D. Shafer

My Raw Food Role Models

She just returned from Hollywood, California where she taped "The Doctors Television Show" and she wrote us this note in answer to my question: 

My comment on the B12 issue is that after all these years without any negative incidents where B12 is concerned, I am not personally worried about it. The problem is not that people don't get enough of it; the problem is that the body doesn't absorb it properly because so many people are eating foods that prevent proper assimilation. 

There are more role models for you to choose from. Check out the interviews with ten remarkable women who successfully went raw and changed their lives, in my second book, Beautiful on Raw: Uncooked Creations.

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing. -Albert Schweitzer 

We can learn by their example and see what is possible when so much of the world is telling us it can't be done. 

Most of the time you find in people who are successful over the long term that there are common threads that run through their lifestyles such as some form of calorie restriction, vigorous exercise and being in tune with their bodies; listening to and heeding their messages. My role models have done just that, and that is what I'm planning on doing: to sail into my senior years with the figure of a teenager and the complexion of a woman in her twenties.

Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don't know how far we can go. -Bernard Malamud