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Trapped for five hours on Friday with my mom in St George’s Hospital, in a tiny doctor’s examination room barely bigger than the bed, you can imagine my stress levels when I got out.

I’m on a short fuse when it comes to hospitals and doctor’s waiting rooms, especially as I’m there for my mother, not for me. So I sit and fume for hours, “Why am I paying for her sins? She chose to eat chicken or fish every day. She chose the flesh foods that led to her colostomy and multiple mini-strokes.”

The human heart and colon are not designed for the saturated fat of flesh, nor its excessively high protein. Please get the RAVE diet book and DVD

True forgiveness, I heard on Oprah, is when you can say to someone, “Thank you for giving me that experience.”

I arrived home Friday evening in a right angry mood. “I’m not going to frail care all weekend.” Frail care is a mini-hospital where my mom is resting this week, in her retirement village. “My nieces can damn well see to her needs!” That’s my mom’s three grand-daughters, aged 22 to 36.

“Why am *I* the one every time who has to sit around for hours in doctor’s rooms and hospitals?” This time it was her colon that had fallen out into her colostomy bag. Last time it was stitches in her face, hand and leg when she fell. Previous to that it was the colostomy op. Time before it was a broken leg when she fell. All in the past year. Not to mention the numerous times I was called to take her down to frail care.

Saturday morning I woke up and, thank God/dess, I remembered the Gratitude. I began to think of all that my mom had done for me when she was 30 (my birth), 40, 50, 60, 70 and even 80. She always gave me so much, so selflessly.

Then I remembered the forgiveness words: “thank you for giving me that experience.” And you know why I was truly thankful? Because something amazing happened on my way home.

Still in my car, my head was filled with visions of a big glass of fresh orange juice and a bowl of raw apple sauce I’d enjoy as soon as I got home. I blend 4-6 apples with fresh ginger to make instant sauce. I stopped at the supermarket and bought a pocket of oranges and 2 bags of apples.

What’s amazing in that, you may ask? Because prior to last Friday every single time I got emotionally stressed in my life, I’d respond with “black-out.” In my youth, that was the disease of black-out, alcoholism. But for the past 20 years it’s been Sugar and TV.

In June my friend’s 21-year-old daughter died of cancer. The funeral was on Friday 22nd June. Straight from the funeral, in the middle of the day, I stocked up with chocolate, muffins (all white sugar where I live) and videos, shut my curtains on the world, and spent the entire weekend with Sugar and TV.

When my emotions were too huge to handle, I did not care if I lived or died. Angelique’s death was so pointless – your 20’s are the most care-free days of your life. Why did she have to die then?

Now, just two months later, for the first time in my entire life, I did not react with black-out. Plus I realized that June’s sugar binge was my brain and central nervous system clamoring for more glucose under stress.

On Friday the oranges and apples were a clear call for glucose. But for the first time in my life, it was a healthy call, to which I gave a healthy response. Perfectly naturally. I did not plan a moment of it. My body-mind has finally reached a healthy balance – after 15 years of evolving into whole plant foods, mostly raw.

Actually in life it’s never a “final.” It’s always an evolving balance. And rightly so, when a living organism interacts with its changing environment. Each time you reach a new level of balance, you see the milestones.

This time the most stressful of situations did not unbalance me. I understand that my real anger is that my mom is dying and I am helpless. The milestone is that I learned over the past two months to eat more calories in the form of fruit and lightly cooked starchy vegetables. When the crunch came, my body-mind was ready. It wanted only more of the same.

Saturday morning I picked out the sweetest strawberries, took them to my mom, made sure she had everything she needed in frail care, gave her a kiss, brightened her day and mine. I’ve no doubt I was thinking so positively, and feeling so good, because of that lovely fruit the night before.

Thank you to Oprah for teaching me how to forgive. Simply say thank you to the person you feel has wronged you. Thank you for giving me that experience. And thank you to raw whole plant foods for liberating me from self-mutilation.

If you are under stress, eat LOTS of glucose in the form of fresh fruit juices and blended fruits. Take it to work with you. Your nervous system will be grateful. Your neurons have to fire more rapidly and more often. Glucose gives them the energy to sparkle.

Blended greens give your neurons the minerals and amino acids they need for their electro-chemical signals. And soaked seed milks (or seed yoghurt) provide the essential fatty acids to build neurons.

Glucose is the quick fix. It’s what you need most under duress. It’s like a cool glass of water for the builders, on a boiling hot day. Then greens and seeds will do the building job.

White sugar will drain minerals from your nerve cells, so they’re unable to fire effectively. Chocolate, muffins, soda and alcohol will depress you even more. Trust me, I know.

Next time I hope to be ready. I’ll think, feel + do: “thank you for giving me this experience” while I am sitting there, not the next morning! My mom will feel the comfort of such an aura.

I’m so inspired by the Raw Food World Summit, it’s a life-transforming event for me. You can still get a free ticket at:

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All the world’s top rawfood authors giving us their experience and inspiration!

I tend to be a loner, but two companions I’d love to live with for the rest of my life are the sweet Bird of Youth and the Spring of Joy.

Youth is fleeting. We can’t keep it, and there’s no pill for old age.

But happiness? Ah, joy we can experience until our last breath. Is there a source of happiness? Somewhere we can drink and never thirst again?

One thing I noticed as a teenage bibliophile is that everyone thinks they’ve found the source. Whatever book I was reading, the author sincerely believed THIS IS IT. My revelation came when reading Herman Wouk’s book on Judaism. I realized he was as passionate about his religion as Protestants and Muslims, Catholics and Hindus are of theirs.

Whatever I read in my youth, they told me they were The Secret, The Absolute Truth. Encounter groups (Here Comes Everybody by William Schutz), primal screaming (Arthur Janov) – you name it, it was the answer.

The raw food movement does the same. There are high priests who dedicate themselves full-time to the religion and preach the word that if you don’t go 100% raw, you’ll never be happy. Heaven is in raw foods.

At first I bought into it – just as I did the day I stepped through AA’s doors, I bought into their religion, that if I did not attend meetings for the rest of my life, I’d go out and drink again. It took me a year to realize it was a lie (for me).

Balanced Biochemistry, that’s what it’s all about – whether you’re recovering from alcohol addiction or junk food slavery.

If you love 100% raw, good for you! But don’t guilt-trip yourself into a *must.* ALL-raw is not the entire source of Healthy and Happy.

It does NOT take 100% raw foods to balance your biochemistry. Yes, it DOES take green juices. It DOES take blended greens, with a focus on LIVING greens. It DOES take forcing yourself to go on fasts where you eat vegan whole foods only, or all-raw, for a day, 3 days, 10 days, a month, 6 months. So your cells have a chance to cleanse and rebuild, to gain the strength to stand up to whatever oddities you eat.

The problem is PACKAGED food, machine-processed food – not home-cooked food. Machines mangle the molecules into shapes our enzymes can’t lock onto. So we can’t digest or assimilate them. They end up as toxins in our tissues.

Buy plenty of raw plant foods, eat in a salad, and blend, juice, or cook them on low heat – to convert the starch to glucose and extract the nutrients from the fiber (cellulose). This is called the WAVE diet – Wholefood And Vegan Eating.

There are SO MANY doctors healing with the WAVE diet, and have been for decades. Modern humans are 70,000 years old and have clearly thrived on WAVE up to the advent of machines in the 1700’s. All humans untouched by The Machine, still thrive on WAVE today – raw fruits + vegetables with cooked starches, and the occasional animal (but in our society, we treat birds and animals too cruelly to eat them).

To preach “all cooked food is poison” is to fly in the face of epidemiological evidence – the actual experience of happily living human beings.

WAVE is called the RAVE diet too, which is a negative way of saying the same thing – NO Refined foods, NO Animal products, NO Vegetable oils heated, NO Exceptions – R-A-V-E. The ravediet.com DVD is the best for lending out – doctors supporting a plant-centered diet.

Even leading rawfood preacher Doug Graham writes in his book, The 80/10/10 Diet that if you can’t eat the 80% sweet fruits he advises, then it’s better to eat cooked vegetables + grains, than to eat raw nuts + dried fruits. His actual words are:

 “If high-fat raw or low-fat cooked seem your only options, choose the low-fat option every time.”

Personally I don’t have time or cash to shop for so much fruit. And my teeth don’t enjoy it. Today it’s winter in South Africa. One lightly cooked butternut (or equal quantity pumpkin or squash) fills me up in the evening, together with a packet of raw greens – baby spinach is my favorite. To get the same satisfied feeling (glucose) from fruit that my butternut gives, I’d need to eat 5-6 fruits, say 2 papaya (SA’s winter fruit) and 3 bananas. That’s five times more shopping. As for cost, one papaya at a $1 costs 10 times more than one butternut at a dime.

I love to simmer sliced butternut for a few minutes, switch it off, add onion and sweet red pepper sliced, then leave it to soften together 5 or 10 minutes while I make the animals their food. Then I may enjoy it whole with vegetable salt, or blend it with raw hot red pepper for one fiery soup. It’s tasty and quicker to make than any rawfood meal!

I myself experience the most energy and balance when I eat 80% raw in winter, and 95% in summer. I evolved into that over ten years or so. I eat party food when I need to party. It can be as simple as taking my 89-year-old mom out for tea. She orders scone with jam + cream, I order apple strudel. Once you’re free of the addiction, sugar no longer controls you. You’re free to choose your actions.

All that’s needed is to reach a certain level of biochemical balance. You know you’ve reached balance when you have no binge reaction the day after. All you want is your fresh fruit + greens. That omnipotent demon (imbalanced biochemistry) that once picked you up by the scruff of your neck and made you buy junk food or liquor, is gone.

When I force myself to do 100% raw when I don’t want raw, then I get crochety and uptight. Because it is a religion. And it’s a religion that doesn’t fit into my social world. None of my friends or family are vegetarian even, let alone rawfooders! Personally I don’t enjoy the hours in a kitchen that all-raw takes. Food must serve me. I don’t want to be its slave.

I’m wary of religions. CONSCIOUSNESS is the purpose of human life. We measure our existence between two doors – the entry door and the departure door. Yet there is another door for humans – the door of self-discovery.

We create religions to give us eternal life. But that LIFE is discovered step-by-step one day at a time, when we walk the path of self-discovery.

The more we open up to releasing our true selves, at our pace in our unique way in multi-faceted ways, the happier we grow. Raw food is a sparkling part of that growth. But it’s not the be-all and end-all.

Life is an ocean of love and peace when you’re gentle with yourself. You float on waves of love.

More about the sources of happiness in my next blog…