The Desire to Become Beautiful —is the Natural Instinct Steering us onto the Correct Path.

Dear Tonya,
I am just so thrilled with your new book, ‘Quantum Eating’! Not only do I praise your magnificent achievement, but I also have to give myself a little pat on the back for intuitively knowing that this book was going to be a brilliant and revolutionary work that I simply had to buy. Mind you—I have not bought a new raw food book in over 20 years! I had gotten a little bored with the usual ‘natural-hygiene/low-fat/looking to the traditions of the past' approach of all too many books on raw food. So when I heard a little bit about your book, my inner guidance knocked loudly and said ‘Psst!... HEY!!! Get that book!'

First, about me: I’m 58 years old and I’ve been on the raw food diet since the 1980s. Like you, I had a physical problem that caused me to want to be attractive: one of my eyes turned inward and I had to wear a patch on my eye and wear glasses. When I was 8 I got a very bad eye infection and was eventually given a long course of chemotherapy to save my vision: cortisone and testosterone. My mom (a nurse) gave me shots twice a week for several weeks. Eventually I was ‘healed’ and there was no more fear that I’d go blind, but now I was chubby and unattractive and suddenly had very hairy legs.

Sometimes what people consider ‘vanity’—the desire to become beautiful and fit—is simply the natural evolutionary instinct steering us onto the correct path. By the time I was in my mid-20s I was already steering my own course and investigating raw food—this was in the 1970s when raw food was limited to books by Arnold Ehret and a few other people.

From the very beginning of my quest for health and beauty I ‘got it’ that fasting and cleansing were really important. (I was given a lot of very toxic medicines as a kid; I was a real mess even in my 20s, with candida and hypoglycemia and weight problems.) In recent years, now that I’ve become healthy and fit, I’ve been naturally drawn more and more to study things like Taoist longevity, bigu, intermittent fasting and all the varieties of fasting. I’ve done a 40 day juice fast, a 28 day juice fast, a 17 day water fast, 14 day water fast, and countless shorter fasts.

Your book is a godsend. I had recently been in a rut, trying to do a lot of intermittent water fasting but getting hungry and screwing up! Now that I’m doing dry fasting, everything has changed. I no longer eat in the evening (that was when my eating habits were getting disarranged) and I quit eating somewhere between 2 and 5 almost every day. It’s so easy! I cannot thank you enough. The book is just full of all the things I was beginning to look into—the cold water baths/showers, benefits of Bikram yoga. I’m now re-reading the book and highlighting important paragraphs; it’s a book I know I’ll return to again and again for inspiration.