June 7, 1996. Dr. Timothy Brantley had told me to meet him at the Santa Monica Homeopathic Pharmacy. We had spoken on the phone just the day before, and while I wasn’t sure whom I was going to be meeting, it was apparent to me from our conversation and the wealth of knowledge he had at his fingertips that he was a mature, older gentleman. Inside the store, part drugstore and part organic market, I looked around, killing time, waiting for him to arrive.
“May I help you find something?” Kimberly, the pharmacist, asked.
“Well, actually, I’m waiting for Dr. Brantley,” I told her.
“That’s fine,” she said, smiling. “Do you know him?”
“Actually, I don’t know who he is. Do you? Will you point him out to me when you see him?”
“Sure.”
A balding, gray-haired man wearing a plaid jacket entered. He looked like a doctor to me so I began to walk toward him. As I did I glanced back at Kimberly. She was shaking her head from side to side. No, he wasn’t Dr. Brantley.
A few moments later another man walked in. He was big and fat and again he looked like my family doctor. Just to make sure, I looked over at Kimberly. No, not him either, she was telling me.
Next, a youngish-looking man in a mock turtleneck and jeans with jet black hair walked through the door. He was gorgeous. Shaking my head from side to side, certain that this wasn’t my man, I looked to the clerk. She smiled. “Yes,” she seemed to be saying, “that’s your man.” I was expecting someone older, looking more like my doctor did when I was a kid. The epitome of health, Dr. Brantley was a walking advertisement for the raw-food journey I was to embark on.
Based on what I had told him the day before, Dr. Brantley was ready to assess and evaluate my health right on the spot. Then he filled my shopping basket with some necessary supplements. Afterward, we went to lunch.
We sat down and the lesson continued as he ordered for me what would be my first raw meal. Then he started to talk. “Hold on,” I said, and I ran out to the car to get my datebook. Dashing back in, I sat down and said, “Okay, go ahead.” He spoke and I started writing.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Taking notes,” I said.
“That’s interesting. You’re the first person I’ve met who actually writes this down,” he told me.
I wasn’t going to miss a word. In the half hour before lunch arrived, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could. I knew this was an important day in my life, a prayer answered. From this point onward I physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally changed. Life has never been the same.
I lost eight pounds in the first week. I probably lost most of it because I didn’t really understand yet what to eat, and I didn’t want to eat anything that wasn’t going to be good for me. But I was learning and trying and I was eating raw! The changeover that was taking place in my body was causing me to detox. My body was dumping waste at an astonishing rate. I didn’t really understand what was happening or how it was working, but one thing I knew for certain was that changes were taking place and they were good changes. I could feel my energy returning. I kept taking my prescribed supplements and I no longer became crazed if I was late eating a meal, forever riding the out-of-control hypoglycemic roller coaster. My desire to live and work came back. I could eat, and eat I did. and I didn’t feel guilty, because with raw food it’s actually beneficial to eat full servings instead of counting ounces. As each day passed I learned more about what and how to eat. I was cutting cooked food out of my diet left and right. I ate raw food with abandon. For the first time in my life, eating wasn’t something I avoided or something I did to steal a fleeting moment’s pleasure as I once used to do with brownie pie and ice cream. Eating was no longer puzzling, a source of frustration, chronic illness, and despair. Finally, now, eating and food were becoming sources of real pleasure and pure joy for me.
As if a light had been turned on, I became keenly aware of all the drinking that was going on around me. And even though I had only been drinking my one scotch and coffee, it was freeing to no longer need my combination of alcohol and caffeine to start my day.
Within a matter of days after starting to eat raw, my headaches disappeared, my allergies started to clear up, and my stomach stopped hurting. I gave up my Tums, NyQuil, 222s, and Afrin. I have not had a sinus infection since. And at this point I was only eating 70 percent raw and working my way up.
I remember how six months after I began to eat raw, people who had known me but hadn’t seen me in a while came up to me with an astonished look on their faces. My friend Paulie greeted me at Ago, the restaurant in West Hollywood, and said, “Carol, you look amazing, truly amazing. What have you done?,” thinking it might have been “work” (plastic surgery). People were outwardly gushing. My mother, who is usually my most honest critic and notices everything, said to me, “You used to have all those fine lines and wrinkles. What happened?” I used to get sick with cold or flu after every film, once the filming was done. Eating raw, this wasn’t happening.
As I think back on my life one of my biggest problems was that my thinking was all wrong. I had an explanation for everything that was starting to go wrong with me. It went something like this: If you work hard, you’ll be tired, right? Of course, the reason I’m always so tired is that I work so hard, so I need coffee to get up. If you’re under stress, you get headaches and upset stomach because you have a lot to think about and decisions to make. So, of course, I have headaches and stomachaches. It never occurred to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I thought my weight gain was simply due to the “natural process of getting older.” It never occurred to me that my health and happiness could be directly affected, and even destroyed, by something we all take for granted—the food I was putting into my body. The cooked food I was putting in my body and not because I was getting older! Now in my forties, I no longer have any of the problems I had at 34.
When I started eating raw I had no idea that even for those who aren’t sick like I was, and who don’t feel bad the way I did, the cooked food they consume may be doing them more harm than good—or, at very least, that changing over to eating things raw is the key to food doing immediate and lasting good rather than causing long-term harm. I think eating cooked food is like playing Russian roulette with your health.
We assume that the food we eat will be cooked. Our assumption is based on our experience. What we need is a totally different education and way of thinking about food, one that sets aside the assumption that cooking is necessary, because it’s not. But to change that assumption, we need to understand how food works in our bodies. To learn a bit about what happens to cooked food and raw food when you eat them and how completely different they are, read the next chapter from Dr. Gonzalez.