I am including some material about raw foods and “juice feasting” as I believe an extremely healthy diet is one of the keys to success with the program. There has recently been some talk on the Google polyphasic group about coffee and Red Bull during the program. To me this is totally insane: it won’t just, in all likelihood, kill the program, it will probably kill the consciousness effects (”increased awareness / energy, sharpened senses, a feeling that the whole world is moving in slow motion and you’re not” – PureDoxyk). It defeats the ultimate purpose, which is a continuous relaxed state of alertness and higher perception, which is my primary goal as a consciousness researcher.
Note that a healthy diet change such as juice feasting can be a profoundly transformative and consciousness-altering experience by itself. Join that to polyphasic sleep and… who knows what can happen? At least this blogger (Ka Nitru) seems to think it’s a good thing.
Summarized Notes from my first article on diet and healthy attitude below:
- It’s critical to be taking really good care of oneself nutritionally and psychologically. I don’t think it would work for someone who was depressed or under psychological stress or needing to function in any capacity for the first week or two. I am also hypothesizing that having a primarily raw foods diet may be one of the keys to success and the reason for Steve Pavlina’s success. Also it’s imperative to stay away from all stimulants especially caffeine. This adds another challenge in my case, as I am totally addicted to coffee, but coffee, as pleasurable as it is, totally messes up my system, and it would be fatal to the experiment. With a week to go before starting , I haven’t yet given up the caffeine, but will need to do so very shortly as it takes at least 3 days, in my experience, to clear my system from caffeine. A primarily raw foods diet helps me enormously with caffeine and increases my tolerance for it before I go totally south, but it’s still not a good idea obviously. Caffeine is a powerful drug (read the “Caffeine Blues” book and you may never have a tea or a coffee again).
- My plan is to eat only 3 cooked meals a week during the trial and probably beyond. My primary diet during this time will be green shakes, consisting of juiced carrots and apples as primary ingredients, blended with some combination of lettuce, spinach, strawberries, watermelon, avocado, almonds, bananas, oranges and lemon. This is the formula that seems to work for me, although I am still experimenting. You need both an expeller-type juicer (for the carrots and apples) and a Vitamix or similar. Alternatively you can work it with only a Vitamix, but you need to strain the carrot and apple pulp through a nut-milk bag, which takes longer, and also a Vitamix is not great with carrots. I have the juice preparation down to an art form and it takes me now less than half an hour to make 3 quarts per day. See my juice feast article on this. I am no longer doing a pure juice feast which was not sustainable for me due to potential weight loss (I only weigh 130 pounds and I am 5 ‘ 11″), instead I am shifting towards a75% raw foods diet. The pure juice feast, incidentally, was not sustainble for Steve Pavlina either, he was going to go 3 months but gave it up after 30 days and did not function well on it. He later declared that an optimal raw foods diet for him needs to contain 40-50% calories from fat, which you can get from avocados, coconut and nuts. He says cooked fat totally doesn’t work for him, nuts need to be raw, and also that eating too many nuts (which is generally not recommended on a raw food diet as nuts are indigestible) works great for him, he can take up to 100 grams at a time without any problem. That’s a lot of calories. The point in all this is that I believe that regulating one’s mood and physical energy through diet is extremely important to success. Foods have expansive and contractive qualities and the knowledge of what foods to eat to create a desired psychological state is key to personal development in general. Read Annemarie Colbin (”Food and Healing”) as the classic textbook on this, and/or check out the Juice Feasting website and numerous raw food resources there.
- My reason for doing 3 cooked meals a week, rather than going 100% raw right away, it twofold. First of all, it takes some time to adapt to a 100% raw foods diet, and it may not be for everyone either (I am not called to it myself, nor am I called to being 100% vegan). Secondly, I am starting to cook for my housemates and to have shared meals, and this is important to me emotionally / psychologically. One always has to balance emotional factors with one’s regime. The greatest healer and the greatest energy in the Universe comes from Love. Where there is not love, no program or course of action can succeed.
Note (after reading PureDoxyk’s book): Puredoxyk had very severe insomnia and a history of depression when she started her trial, but she succeeded brilliantly along with her very close friend. 15 people who tried later all failed. I hypothesize from this that a very high degree of intrinsic motivation is essential – whether it be from desperation or from profund inspiration. In my case it’s some combination of two :-)
