Tennis Legend Venus Williams Goes Raw
Tennis Legend Serena Williams - Goes Raw
Have you heard the news that pro tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams made it their new year's resolution to go on a Raw Food Vegetarian Diet?
I congratulate them whole heartedly on their decision to go for optimal health and radiant happiness. Plus they'll bring extra exposure to the general and tennis playing public about the Raw Food Diet.
Venus decided to go raw as a way of improving her health and possibly improving or healing her Sjögren's Syndrome. And Serena being the great sister that she is decided to support Venus and go raw as well as part of their 2012 New Years Resolutions.
As a former tournament level tennis player and teaching pro for twenty years I feel I can relate to much of what they are going through in adapting to a Raw Food Diet. In fact, my first book which you may not be aware of was about the mental side of the game of tennis "Infinite Tennis."
There are going to be a number of powerful OPPONENTS Venus and Serena will face that'll severely challenge their ability to succeed with the Raw Food Diet. I'll list them in a minute.
Keep in mind, I struggled for five years in trying to going back and forth between raw and cooked food. Many of my problems had to do with sports and tennis in general. If they don't manage to do the diet correctly and especially to get proper coaching then it will be next to impossible for them to succeed long term.
Unfortunatley the road to raw food success is riddled with potholes.
Just as it's next to impossible to get to being the number one tennis player in the world without a coach or at least lots of formal coaching at some point in a career, so is it also quite difficult to succeed on the raw diet without coaching or mentoring.
From my experience it seems that 98 out of 100 people could never succeed on their own or even just by reading books.
And it's not because the diet is so inherently hard to do. It's super easy for instance for young children who've eaten nothing but raw foods their whole lives.
It's because we have a lifetime of layer upon layer of nutritonal disinformation to get out of our heads. And we won't understand the many detoxification and adaptation symptoms that can and usually do occur when switching from decades of eating toxic cooked food.
We literally have to relearn how to eat and how to think about nutrition. There are many fallacies that can hold people back.
Especially important are the false symptoms attributed to some lack in the Raw Food Diet. But it's almost always a lack of real understanding of what's going on raw nutrition wise.
Even reading books is not enough because they can't answer your questions when an emergency comes up. And the advice in one raw food book often is completely opposite in another raw food book.
Which book(s) to believe?
It can be EXTREMELY confusing.
Personally, I was not able to succeed with the Raw Food Diet longterm until I got myself an experienced Raw Food Mentor who understood the best way to eat raw for sports and health. I struggled for five years reading all sorts of raw books and not being able to stay 100% raw more than 2 or 3 months at a time.
Here are the Top 5 Opponents Venus Williams and Serena Williams are likely to face.
* Top 5 Opponents to Staying Raw and Thriving *
5. Getting Too Thin:
While I think this will be a blessing for Serena it could be appear to be a problem for Venus who is already quite thin to begin with. Many an athlete has tried going raw only to find themselves getting thinner and thinner.
They don't like how this looks.
And they often feel that they're also losing muscle tone. But this is rarely the case. They're really just losing excess fat, water weight and of course toxins.
Most of us have so much fat on our bodies that we mistake it for muscle. It's an under the skin fat or subcutaneous layer of fat that goes over the muscles and makes them look bigger than they really are.
Most people on a cooked food diet are overly fat and under-muscled. This is why they look so skinny when going raw.
Underneath their fat they have little in the way of muscles. Even super models can be excessively fat in terms of body fat percentage if they have little muscle tone.
This getting thinner due to eating raw is actually a good sign. A sign of improving health.
And this is exactly what happened to me in my early attempts at going raw. I started thinking I wasn't getting enough protein. I had no idea about how much fat I actually had under my skin. These days I have more muscle than I ever did in my cooked food days. But I had to earn it by doing exercises that build muscle.
But our self images are easily affected, especially if we thought we were thin to begin with.
I can assure them however that most of that fat was not needed and in fact is quite damaging to health. And what often happens is after having been raw for a long while the body starts to put more fat back on.
This is all part of the healing and adaptation process when switching to a Raw Food Diet.
4. Influence of Family and Friends who actually don't want you to go raw:
Unlike giving up drugs or smoking, you often don't have the support of your family and friends when switching to raw eating.
A. They may think it's dangerous or nutritionally incomplete.
B. They want to continue eating their favorite cooked foods with you and so you going raw might threaten their social and family lives.
C. If they cook food for you, they want to continue cooking their favorites. That'll be impossible if you only eat raw foods.
The answer to this is you have to be a leader. Eventually your family adapts.
And if they see an improvement in your health they're likely to add more raw foods into their diet. This is exactly what happened to my family and friends. Virtually all of them added more raw foods into their lives.
3. Lack of Energy:
While going raw for many people increases energy levels for some it will decrease for a number of reasons.
A. Most people going raw simply don't eat enough calories. If you're used to eating 2,500 calories a day but on your raw diet you only eat 1,500 calories per day, then soon enough you're going to start getting weaker.
This happened to me in the late 1990's when I was attempting to go 100% raw. Even though I was eating a ton of fruit I never realized that I still was not eating nearly as many calories as I used to eat in my cooked food days.
Raw foods are rich in water, fiber and nutrients and so get as many calories you're used to eating you have to learn to stretch your stomach a bit. And it's wise to eat more raw foods that are more densely packed with calories.
Back then I literally felt like I had only about 80% of my normal energy levels. Once I started incorporating cooked food back into my life I got my full energy back again. This lead me to believe (falsely I might add) that the reason for the lack of energy was that I was not eating complex carbohydrates from starchy foods like bread and pasta.
Yet these days I have endless energy while eating 100% raw for over 10 years.
But the complex carbs belief was another myth I later found out. For the body can NEVER even use complex carbohydrates. They must always be broken down into simple sugars anyway before we can derive the fuel out of them.
So to have enough energy you simply need enough calories and especially enough carbohydrates which are the most efficient fuel source for sports by far.
B. Another reason for a lack of energy is the incredible healing the body goes through when switching to raw foods. Finally the body can rebuild itself with strong new building materials.
Lots of healing goes on when the body for the first time in it's life is given proper building materials and lower toxic loads and that healing can take a lot of energy. You may need to sleep extra long in the early days of going 100% raw. The more you sleep the more you'll be able to heal and build up your energy levels.
2. Fearing Nutritional Incompleteness:
After a lifetime of being brainwashed by the mainstream media, school system and so on, people's first question often is.
"Where do you get your protein?"
After all on a Raw Food Diet we are not eating any foods at all that we used to associate with protein like meat, fish, dairy or even tofu or tempeh. Therefore most people falsely believe there's not enough protein on a Raw Food Diet.
I thought the same thing at first. Little did I know that the whole protein issue was created by the meat and dairy industries because that is one of the very few areas where they 'seem' to have a nutritional advantage compared to fruits and vegetables.
Yet most people don't realize that human mother's milk is only 6% of total calories coming from protein. There's much more fat and carbohydrates than their is protein in mother's milk.
My daughter Rainbow doubled her weight in just 56 days (less than 2 months) on mother's milk from her mommy Karmyn who was eating only raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds as the source of her calories.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O42G0X5Rq5o
She's close to turning 5 months old now and is only about a pound away from actually tripling her weight. This is incredibly fast growth even for baby standards and yet it's all happening strictly on milk from a raw vegetarian mother.
So if Rainbow can double in size in 56 days at around 6% protein then why would even body building athletes need more protein than her?
Turns out a diet based on raw fruis and vegetables easily delivers 5 to 8% of it's calories as protein or amino acids.
Protein is a non issue on any whole foods diet that contains enough calories.
There are many other nutritional issues that could come up. But it is these things they'll think about if they feel any problem or symptom of distress.
If in those times they don't have an experienced raw coach or mentor to talk to. They may soon find themselves on their way back to eating cooked food or cooked matter as I like to call it.
1. Cooked Food Addiction:
And finally this is probably the number 1 issue of why people have a hard time sticking to the Raw Food Diet.
They're addicted to cooked food just as much as a cigarette smoker is addicted to cigarettes. And because society doesn't officially recognize cooked food as unhealthy then they can get little to no support from family or friends in helping them to break their addiction to cooked food.
I mean, "Why be different?"
Luckily there are many solutions to breaking cooked food addiction. I have a number of books and programs along those lines.
I'd highly recommend that Venus and Serena Williams start making themselves Savory Veggie Stews.
http://SavoryVeggieStews.com
This is the best solution I've found to beating the dinnertime cooked food cravings that virtually all new raw foodists experience.
Another resource I highly recommend Venus and Serena consider is joining my Raw Food Coaching website.
http://HowToGoRaw.com
Or they can contact me at support ( at ) superbeing ( dot ) com to set up a coaching session or package.
Over the last 10 years of me helping people to succeed with 100% raw I've encountered hundreds of reasons why people don't think they can go raw. You name the reason, I've seen it come up over and over again.
What I've listed here in this article is only the tip of the iceburg.
All of these false ideas have to be taken out by the root so that the person can gain what I call the "100% Raw Mindset".
Once you have that mindset it's easy and actually effortless to stay 100% raw.
Our family of four has that mindset, so we can enjoy staying raw and gaining the incredible health and athletic benefits that only a natural diet can bring.
Any diet that involves cooked food cannot bring the health, fitness and happiness results that an Optimal Raw Food Diet can bring. For cooking destroys and derranges the food. But that's a subject for another day.
On a tennis note…
I wanted to congratulate the Venus and Serena for revolutionizing women's tennis. They did things on the tennis court that no other women players were doing at the time when they first came up.
And of course, that is one of the reasons they dominated tennis for a number of years.
By going raw 'properly' both Venus and Serena Williams can extend their careers by another 5 to 10 years or more if they so choose. They'll have many advantages over their tennis opponents including feeling much cooler on the blistering hot tennis court.
This cooler body temperature is a huge advantage for pro tennis players.
Personally for me I felt about 7 degrees cooler than I used to in the summertime while I was on a cooked food diet. Now I enjoy 90 degree temperatures and up.
It really feels like built in air conditioning. Eating certain kinds of fruits can magnify this effect even more.
Another benefit is getting of less injuries and faster healing as well. Of course, there are several other advantages you'll gain including increased endurance and deeper breathing.
Your lungs will expell all sorts of mucus that has been lodged in there for years and all of a sudden normal everyday breathing will give you a natural high. And of course this leads to increased endurance.
Anyways, that's it for today.
I invite Venus and or Serena to contact me, I think I can give them some ideas that'll take their health, happiness and tennis games to new highs.
To Your Radiant Health, Happiness, Fitness and Infinite Power,
Roger Haeske
The 44-Year Old Teenager
P.S. Can you do me a favor and please make a comment on Venus and Serena's Facebook Fanpages about this article?
http://www.facebook.com/VenusWilliams?sk=wall
http://www.facebook.com/SerenaWilliams?sk=wall
Hopefully they'll get a chance to read it.
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