The Raw Vacation-No Taste Like Home
Eating My Own Words
The Raw Truth About Conscious Nutrition on the Road
"I am on a live foods diet again—Day 1. Feels good. Life in a glass. A garden in a cup. Mainlining nutrition to heal and feel RAWesome."
The quality of your life is the quality of your communication. Health is that conversation you are constantly having with your body, mind, and soul. After years of cruise ship living and location independence, I've learned that conscious eating isn't just about what you put in your body—it's about what you're willing to put down.
It is easier to change a man's religion than his diet. What if your diet was your religion? What if your body was not a dumpster but a temple? What if you worshiped it? What if everybody and every body became their own personal savior, their own nutritional Jesus? Their own what? Their own no-body. Experience your own deliverance through Extreme Eating.
📱 From the Archives: My 2008 Tweets
• "Juicing" is the wrong word. Let's call it Liver Desludging and Overall Life Enhancing Turbo Charging Liquid—The Juicy Stuff! Oct 04, 2008
• Ed is on a raw fruit and vegetable juicing bender Oct 04, 2008
🥬 The Philosophy of Extreme Eating
What is extreme eating? It's based on consuming unprocessed, preferably organic, whole plant-based foods—at least 75 percent of which should be uncooked. It involves juicing, blending, and chopping: fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, grains, legumes, dried fruits, seaweeds, sun-dried fruits, and other organic or natural foods which have not been processed.
🚢 The Cruise Ship Reality Check
I am back on the living foods diet. I just bought another juicer and fresh fruits and vegetables to do a liver/gallbladder detox. It's all about conscious eating, something I can easily stray from when on the ships. Living at sea means navigating the tension between convenience and consciousness, between buffet abundance and nutritional intelligence.
The art of conscious eating is all about the water content, all about the food value. When you eat it raw, you get both higher levels of water content and greater food value. It's not just nutrition—it's hydration and information combined into one powerful delivery system.
The Cellular Conversation
Are you ready to turn on your metabolism to burn body fat and build lean muscle mass? This isn't about dieting—it's about upgrading your operating system. Every bite is a vote for the future you want to inhabit. Every juice is a message to your cells: We're optimizing, not just surviving.
🌱 The Raw Revolution: Benefits Beyond the Physical
By going raw, you are not just stopping from cooking your food, but changing the amounts, types, and proportions of foods and nutrients in a profound way. Near or total avoidance of certain potential "problem" foods becomes a natural byproduct of this lifestyle.
The Ed Reif Raw Food Framework
Mental Clarity Revolution
Create true quantum leaps in your personal self-awareness. Dramatically increased mental clarity, attention span, and creativity. Even colors get brighter.
Energy & Vitality
Vastly increased energy, decreased need for sleep, and better sleep quality. Your body becomes a high-performance machine rather than a maintenance project.
Emotional Intelligence
Remarkable improvements in mental and emotional health. Decreased anxiety, increased patience and sense of calm, diminished unhealthy cravings.
Physical Transformation
Glowing skin, stronger and leaner body, more delicious natural body smell/taste. A far more delicious, yet less compulsive, sexuality.
Grains, which were not a part of the human diet for its 2-million-year history until the last 10,000 years, and can be tolerated raw only with difficulty, are avoided or minimized by raw-fooders. We're essentially hacking our way back to our ancestral operating system.
🥤 The Juicing Manifesto: Liquid Wisdom
Freshly made fruit and vegetable juices, purified water (not tap), milk from a young coconut—these aren't just beverages, they're concentrated life force. Juicing allows you to consume more nutrients than you could possibly eat in solid form, while giving your digestive system a vacation.
Cantaloupe Magic
Pure cantaloupe juice - nature's electrolyte replacement and kidney cleanser
Watermelon Wonder
Hydration and circulation booster - summer in a glass
Carrot-Lemon Boost
Beta-carotene meets vitamin C - immune system activation
Apple-Garlic Power
Antioxidants meet antibiotics - the warrior's blend
The Deeper Game: Food as Information
Every meal is a download. Every juice is a software update. When you consume living foods, you're not just feeding your body—you're upgrading your consciousness. The question isn't whether you can afford to eat this way; it's whether you can afford not to.
This becomes especially critical for location-independent professionals. When your office is everywhere and nowhere, when your schedule spans time zones, when your stress levels fluctuate with Wi-Fi signals—your nutrition becomes your anchor. Raw foods provide the stable foundation that allows everything else to be fluid.
🌊 The Nomad's Nutritional Challenge
Living the cruise ship life, bouncing between ports, working remotely from different continents—it's easy to fall into the convenience trap. Fast food, processed meals, whatever's available when you're rushing to catch the next connection. But here's what I've learned: your nutrition is your competitive advantage.
Significantly lower your stress levels and harmful brain chemicals related to stress. Intensely heightened senses. The combination of raw foods and location independence creates a feedback loop of clarity and energy that transforms not just how you feel, but how you think and create.
🎯 The Raw Truth Manifesto
Your body is not a garbage disposal for the food industry's experiments.
Your energy is not negotiable.
Your clarity is your currency.
Your health is your wealth.
When you take radical responsibility for what goes into your body, you take radical control of what comes out of your mind. Raw foods aren't just about nutrition—they're about rebellion against a culture that profits from your exhaustion.
⚓ Practical Wisdom for the Traveling Conscious Eater
Here's the real challenge: maintaining this level of nutritional consciousness while living a life of geographic freedom. It requires strategy, preparation, and a willingness to be the person who brings their own food to the party.
- Portable Juicing: Invest in a quality travel juicer. Yes, it takes up luggage space. No, you won't regret it.
- Local Market Intelligence: First thing in any new city—find the farmers market. This becomes your anchor point.
- Hotel Room Setup: Turn any space into a raw food preparation station with the right tools.
- Cruise Ship Strategy: Even on ships, fresh fruit is abundant. Focus on what's available rather than what's not.
- Social Navigation: Learn to eat consciously without making others unconscious about their choices.
The goal isn't perfection—it's consciousness. It's making intentional choices rather than default ones. It's treating your body like the temple it is, even when you're living like a nomad.
🌱 Join the Raw Revolution
This journey from processed to conscious, from convenient to intentional, from surviving to thriving—it's not just about food. It's about taking responsibility for your energy, your clarity, and your capacity to create the life you actually want.
What's your experience? Share your own conscious eating adventures, raw food experiments, and strategies for maintaining nutrition while living location-independently. How has changing your diet changed your life?