Extreme diets

Eating insects, worms and Co.

Most of you will say: "No way! Insects are just soooo disgusting!" But the reasons for this aversion are purely cultural. We have always been told that insects are dirty, creepy and cannot be given any value. Wrong!
Actually, most of us love shrimps. Eating a small crevette or a fried cricket is just about the same. In Spain, up to 1000 € are paid per kilo of angulas - baby eels - which look just like white and grey intestinal parasites!


Many cultures include insects in their everyday diet. Insects are highly nutritious, very rich in proteins and very cheap to produce. So eating insects is actually a good way to be more sustainable!
In most Western countries, insects are only eaten as a rare delikatessen or their consumption is considered a weird fashion. I remember the insect trend of the 1990s - lollipops with worms, fried crickets or living worm spaghettis for the brave.

In Colombia "hormigas culonas", that would translate "big-assed ants" can be bought once a year. They are quite expensive and taste like a salty snack. The chocolate-covered version can be bought online here.





Raw food diet / living food diet (mostly vegetarian)

Raw and Living Foodists eat all fruits, vegetables, sprouts, nuts, seeds, grains, sea vegetables and other organic/natural food that have not been processed.
Living foods are foods that contain enzymes. Cooking destroys the enzymes and alters the molecular structure of food and renders it toxic, Raw Foodists say.
As you can imagine, eating raw fruits and vegetables only is quite exasperating. To eat nuts or grain such as rice, Living Foodists have to be very creative to be able to prepare their food in a way that goes with their ideology. Nuts and seeds have to be soaked and sprouted before consumed. Find some recipes here.
Imagine how difficult it must be to become a Raw Foodist if the people that surround you are not. In most countries it's hard to find vegetarian food so imagine how difficult it must be to find living food for a quick takeaway! And some people's eating habits are even more extreme:

Sproutarians feed mainly or only on sprouts (sprouted legumes, grains or seeds). How can anybody live exclusively on sprouts???? Judith Wade is one of them. They say that sprouts is the most nutritious, vibrant and alive food, second only to ethereal prana (see "pranic feeding" below). Even though I'm not a chocolate lover I have to admit that sometimes I would just kill for some sweet food - how do they get their sugar??
Raw fruitarians believe that their diet should not cause the death of any living plant. They can only eat food than can be harvested without destroying the plant, such as fruits, seeds or nuts. Eating lettuce, broccoli or potato (the root of the plant) would be too cruel.
Juicearians basically feed on juices made of fruits, vegetables and wheat grass.

Of course, many of the raw food extremists choose to live in communities as to minimize the problems of coexisting with people living on a standard diet. So, their whole live is actually just about how to eat "correctly", following the rules of their extreme diet. The guy on the video talks about the healthy properties of green vegetables. Of course they are healthy, but feeding mainly on spinach?????? I love spinach, but I don't think I would enjoy to live with spinach as may main companion in life.



Example of what a Raw Foodist may eat in one day (meanwhile you read this, I'll get a nice piece of chocolate cake...):

• Breakfast: fresh fruit, coconut water, flax meal (banana, apple, flax seeds, almond milk and cinnamon) topped with germinated nuts
• Smoothie made of Super foods, spinach and herbal tea, wheat grass (yes, as if we were cows), home-made sunflower seed cheese or pate on cucumber, coleslaw with avocado
• Dinner: avocado/carrot soup (cold), thai lettuce wraps, green juice
• Drink: pure water, fruit juices, almond milk, coconut water, smoothies

Freaky eaters

The fruitarian's best friend? Definitively not someone who lives only on chocolate. Yes, only chocolate. Some people suffer from an eating disorder that means that there are only one or two types of food they can get down them without choking. And normally, they don't live exclusively on apples, but rather on chocolate, sausages, bred or cheese crackers.
The healthy looking girl on the photo is 30-year-old Eva Verissimo. Eva was diagnosed with Achalasia-a condition affecting the muscle of the oesophagus which carries food to her stomach-12 years ago.

Almost the only thing she eats is chocolate. A Bounty for breakfast, a Snickers for lunch, a Cadbury's Flake for dinner and a Cadbury's Cream Egg as a late night-snack. She says she's tired of not being able to eat a proper meal.
In the photo, a deep fried Mars bar - probably Scotland's worst food invention ...

Many other people share Eva's eating habits. The BBC series "Freaky eaters" tries to help those people with bizarre monotonous diets. Most of the times, the condition is a result of a psychological childhood trauma. They eat only one kind of food because they know they like it and feel secure with it. Some of the people that appeared in the show had to vomit when seeing vegetables at a market stand. They want to try new foods but are not able to eat them. One girl has been eating only potatoes for years: chips and mum's potatoe mash (other mashs she can't eat). Every day. Another one lives on just one type of sausages, the more burnt the better.
In the video: Adrian, who mainly eats Spaghetti Hoops (a brand of instant noodles) and toast. Exceptions may be fries, sodas and chocolate.




Prana feeding

Feeding on prana ("life-energy" in Sanskrit, Qi in Chinese) means feeding on sunlight and fresh air. The perfect breatharians are supposed to achieve the ability to unhook themselves from the need to take physical food. But of course, only a few cases of people practicing pranic feeding over months have been reported, and most scientists are skeptic even though some of these Gurus have been monitored for days by medical research teams.
The idea of inedia is that through a specific meditation, the cell metabolism can be reprogrammed to obtain energy directly from prana (sunlight and pure air are necessary) instead of fueling nutrients in order to produce it. It is not the same as extreme fasting or extreme anorexia, as the body of a breatharian should work perfectly and does not show any symptoms of starvation.

I can imagine angels or other superior spiritual beings sitting together and enjoying some nice tapas of prana. But the average non-ethereal human has not yet achieved the ability to go beyond the limits of his physical body. But it seems that some Gurus such as Hiran Ratan Manek, Prahlad Jani (in the photo), the monk Sahajmuniji or Jashmuseen, can. Even though scientists are skeptic, these highly spiritual people definitively are able to subsist on much much less food than the rest of the mortals.

What I think can be a good option for anyone is partial prana feeding. In the video below, Jashmuseen proposes a meditation technique to obtain direct energetic nourishment and reduce food intake. Imagine the positive consequences for the World's resources! And think about the reduction of expenses for food! I'd start every month on day 15 to be able to eat one meal less during the last week of the month, when it comes to living on a shoestring.
Attention: the video seems to be the typical new-age-kitsch, but is actually highly hypnotic!

It is said that some types of vampires (specially the psychic vampires) feed on prana.




Paleolithic diet and raw animal food diets

If vegans or breatharians do their best to raise their consciousness and evolute spiritually, followers of paleolithic diets return to the roots of mankind. The paleolithic diet attempts to simulate the ancestral diet consumed during the Paleolithic - a period that ended about 10 000 years ago with the development of agriculture. They tend to reject "neolithic" or domesticated foods. If using the commonly available modern foods, the diet basically consists of meat, fish, vegetables and fruits, nuts and roots. Grains, legumes, salt, dairy product, refined sugar and processed foods (even oil) are excluded. A fundamentalist paleolithic would also exclude cultivated fruits and vegetables, as they are domesticated foods. In the paleolithic, humans lived in communities of hunters-gatherers, so vegetables others than the wild growing were not included in their diet.
The Primal diet consists of fatty meats, organ meats, dairy, honey, minimal fruit and vegetable juices and coconut cream, all raw. The diet was founded by Aajonus Vonderplanitz (in California, of course) and simulates the diet of some actual tribes, such as the Siberian Inuits.
This diet is definitively not healthy for a non-Inuit who is not living in the Siberian tundras. Humans have adopted different eating habits depending on their habitat. I think it's just stupid to start an extreme diet just because some ancestral tribes living under completely different conditions (and dying young, by the way) follow it. To me, this seems just like another of these Californian fashion diets (fad diets); and it doesn't even make you lose weight!
Another type of ancestral diet is the raw animal food diet, which permits all kind of raw food of animal origen: raw, unprocessed meats and organ-meats, raw eggs, raw dairy and aged, raw animal foods such as century eggs, fermenting meat/fish/shellfish/kefir; nuts, sprouts, plants and fruits are allowed to a lesser extent. Raw grains and beans are excluded because paleolists believe that the human body is not prepared to deal with these products due to their poor digestibility and their toxicity.

The following video shows two extreme Raw Foodist: a woman living on nothing butraw fruits and vegetables and a man eating mainly raw meat (I have to admit that he looks much healthier than her...)


And to finish, just one wonderful example of a miracle "diet" to lose weight: The tapeworm diet. In Mexico you can get microscopically identified beef tapeworm cysts. The worm will interfere with your digestion, actually "eating" (absorbing") part of your food intake. So in reality you eat less. Once the weight loss is reached, an antibiotic is given, the tapeworm is killed so it can be expelled.... great idea! :-)

Forum post I found:

"I am 13 y.o., and i want to become a breatharian. I wonder if i am going to continue growing while living on air alone, or if I am going to stay the same height like now, I am just 153cm.
i also wonder if I am going to get my cyclus while I am breatharian? Do breatharians drink water? What about drinking tea? If i don't drink water, can I have my menstruation? Can breatharians become pregnant and have kids?
Can breatharians sweat? I heard that people sweat when they make love. What happens to our intestines, if we stop eating for many years? If we don't drink, do we urinate?
What if a 7 year old child becomes a breatharian, will he continue growing? (my brother).
Thanks, Rachel"

LINKS:
Bay Area Bug Eating Society (BABES)
Insect recipes
Tapworm diet
BBC Freaky Eaters
Raw Food Planet
Primal diet
Breatharianism
Breatharian forum