David Wolfe, Sunfood Diet Success and Me

I love David Wolfe. I don’t care who knows it. He’s been my inspiration, teacher, invisible friend and raw crush. I’ve even dreamed about him. If anyone out there doesn’t know who he is, they should find out. Because, in a word, the man is ‘awesome’.

I see him everywhere, too. It seems like whenever there’s a film made about plant-based eating or preserving the environment, David Wolfe is the go-to guy. He talks the talk and he walks the walk. Usually in a poncho. He’s got the whole thing down.

Nature! Get It Off Of Me!

I took my raw food nutritionist certification through a program at Integrative Nutrition. David Wolfe was my teacher. When I discovered the course, my partner, Alisa, who was familiar with all the royalty in the Raw Food Kingdom, said, “oh yeah, you’re going to like him; he’s like you: digging and planting and foraging around in the forest. He’s all about nature.” Now Alisa is all about raw food but nature is another story; we actually had this running joke about her complete inability to ‘pee in the woods’.

“What happens when you go camping?”, I inquired.

To which she regarded me matter of factly, “I use the facilities”. Apparently all the campgrounds have them. I wouldn’t know. I’m a ‘pee in the woods’ type of gal.

“Well, what happens if you wake up in the middle of the night and you need to pee really badly? Are you going to run all the way to the facilities?”

“They better be close.”

She admited to not being much of a camper and laughingly stated that if there were ever an apocalypse she was going to hang out with someone a lot more resourceful than herself. Seems I was nominated. Hate to say it but if there was an apocalyptic event she’d have to get over that “not peeing in the woods” really fast or the next apocalyptic event would be her exploding.

A Natural Kind of Guy

Alisa met David Wolfe years ago when she was studying the raw culinary arts at Living Light.

“He’s very charismatic”, she told me, sort of shaking her head. You can tell that she’d basically resigned herself to liking him. Despite the fact that there’s less than a million in one chance that she would ever be the kind of woman who would voluntarily elect to go foraging for fungi. In the woods, no less.

A Good Witch or A Bad Witch…?

Now, when I said that David Wolfe was my teacher, what I didn’t say was that he was my virtual teacher. No, I’ve never met this man. I took my course online and every lesson consisted of a video of David Wolfe; David Wolfe creating raw concoctions in a humble kitchen, David Wolfe tending to his garden, David Wolfe scouring the woods for wild mushrooms and edible plants. Now, neither of my children exactly embraced my affair with raw food. They feared for me and themselves, imagining that I would morph into some ‘hippy chick’, braid my armpit hair and start dancing naked under the stars, chanting.

“I think you have ‘raw’ confused with Wicca”, I would say. To which my son retorted,

“Right Mom, but when you start weaving your own clothes out of wheat, I’m out of here”.

David Wolfe turned that all around for me.

Making Raw Cool

My daughter was just entering into her teenage years at the time and she would watch the lessons with me. On more than one occasion she allowed herself to experience a kind of awe, “Wow, Mom. This guy is actually pretty cool”. From a teenager, high praise, indeed. Also, like a teenager, she thought he had ‘great hair’. Truth is, she had been subject to watching a lot of raw food experts at that time, thanks to my nutritional pursuits – and some of those people even verged on the scary. Not so with David Wolfe. He’s the picture of health. Nothing skeletal or scary about him. And he’s a virtual font of knowledge. About everything. Now, he’d be the companion for an apocalypse.

The Sunfood Diet Success System

Although I have read most of his books, it’s not until recently that I delved into the opus known as “The Sunfood Diet Success System”. It’s not like any book about raw food that I’ve ever read. And maybe you could say that about every raw diet book ever written because they really are all over the place; everyone seems to have a different perspective. And I have to admit I’ve gotten something of value, however seemingly insignificant, out of each one. But this book is different for other reasons. Mainly because it doesn’t focus on the diet aspect, as much as it does on a philosophy about living and eating. It’s motivational as much as informational, integrating proven success strategies and an understanding of natural law into the pursuit of total health.

“The Sunfood Diet Success System” only has a handful of recipes. David Wolfe is not really about recipes. He’s about self-realization. Yes, the book talks about superfoods and vitamin B12 and where to get healthy protein on a raw vegan diet and all that typical stuff. But that’s surrounded with chapters on the whole gamut from Life Transformation to Food and Karma to Breathing to Tapping Infinite Intelligence. Honestly. Infinite Intelligence. What about that? As far as I can tell, there’s something in there for everyone. Maybe even extraterrestrials.

On that note, I start to think… wouldn’t it be fun to go through this book again – all 613 pages about Everything – and do all the exercises and visit this incredible tome with purpose. Break open the books recommended, down the touted superfoods, maybe do some mushroom hunting of my own… it’s been awhile. And wouldn’t that be fun? A little dangerous, maybe… but fun.

Come Up With A Better Story

I heard somewhere that we all tell ourselves stories. And then we choose to believe these stories whether they are true or not. We all have the imagination and opportunity to come up with a better story for ourselves than some of the old, tired ones we’ve already rehashed a million times but somehow adhere to. Or some of the messed up stories that other people tell us about ourselves that we somehow choose to believe. So why don’t we do it? Maybe because the devil you know seems better than the devil you don’t know . Or, are we just all – on some level – masochists?

David Wolfe begins “The Sunfood Diet Success System with the same idea, “Everything around you is only a reflection of what is going on inside of you. If you want the world to change, you have to change.” You have to amend your story.

Anyway, David Wolfe strikes again. He sure got me thinking.

Maybe it’s time to start weaving a wheat skirt about now.