Can You Gain Weight on a Raw Food Diet?

Raw food authors promote the idea that you can "eat what you want, when you want" as long as it's raw, and all of your unwanted pounds will melt away. At first glance, most of us would agree. Eating fresh fruit, salads and a few nuts and seeds seems like a nutritious way trim down! Then why has my husband been steadily gaining since Monday? Of course, this could be due to all sorts of things, but certainly the number on the scale is not going in the intended direction. (Most chemo patients get really sick and lose lots of weight during treatment, but although my husband initially lost about 15 lbs., one of his medications actually caused him gain it back and then add another 15 lbs. His doctor was not overjoyed and encouraged him to work on taking it off now that he's done with chemo.)

So we have to reevaluate. Up to this point, our "plan" has been a combination of three authors: James Simmons who wrote Original Fast Foods; Dr. Lorraine Day, M.D., the doctor who cured herself of breast cancer using a vegan diet and lots of carrot juice with some barley green powder thrown in; and Kris Carr who did a documentary on her fight with cancer and was able to stabilize it with a daily shot of wheatgrass juice, a mostly raw food diet and some other interesting practices.

Everyday has seemed like a race to get the wheatgrass juiced, the one pound of greens and two pounds of solid veggies ingested and the six glasses of carrot juice swallowed. My husband has done a great job keeping up with all of this drinking and eating and munching of very healthy food. But I am starting to wonder if it is just too much!

So I went to the USDA's nutrition site where you can get nutrition stats on almost any food. This is a very helpful tool.
http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=7783

I found out that 6 cups of carrot juice have 566 calories and 55 grams of sugar!

Besides the carrot juice, I usually make him a large green smoothie with orange juice, banana and blueberries or cherries and fresh spinach. That probably has another 300 calories at least and plenty more sugar. During the morning, he may also snack on two or three other pieces of fresh fruit. So, I think he may be topping out on the sugar. People who are overweight often develop insulin resistance which adds to the problem of losing weight and added sugar in the diet only makes this worse.

So, our next tactic is to switch from carrot juice to "green drinks" which will include leafy greens, celery, cucumber, zucchini, parsley and maybe some lemon and ginger. Jennifer Cornbleet shows how to make this green drink in her DVD. I am even thinking of investing in a better juicer for this purpose--a GreenStar Juicer. I am also cutting out the OJ in the green smoothie.

Anyway, we are trying to take this all in stride. My husband laughed (dare I say giggled?) in surprise when he got on the scale this morning. This past week he's ramped up his exercise and been consuming mass quantities of salad and he didn't expect to gain weight! At least that should calm anyone's fears that you might dwindle down to nothing on a raw diet! :-)