Former Rugby Player Richard Blackman on the Benefits of Fruitarianism

Saturday, May 10, 2008 by: Kevin Gianni
Tags: fruitarianism, health news, Natural News

(NewsTarget) This is Kevin Gianni and I'd like to welcome you to another very special Raw Summit Teleseminar, which can be found online at (http://www.rawsummitarchives.com) . The purpose of the Raw Summit is to pass along cutting edge information about health and living food technologies for you to reach optimal health, wellness, and success. Today I have a very awesome guest on the line. He is a fruitarian and a fitness expert, and today, we're going to talk about his dramatic change from eating "garbage" to becoming a fruitarian and the benefits he attributes to this dramatic change.

Raw Summit Excerpt with Richard Blackman, former Rugby player, fitness expert and fruitarian.

Kevin: I'm excited to talk about this very interesting topic. So let's start by telling everyone a little bit about yourself and were you always into fitness?

Richard: Yes, I was always into fitness. Even in my family, my mother was a school sprinting champion. My uncle was a British welterweight champion and a boxing champion. So yes, sports always ran in the family and when I was in my cooked food days, I was actually a rugby league player.

Kevin: Okay.

Richard: I went on to turning pro at the age of 19 after playing for Great Britain as an amateur and in about 1997, I had a bad neck injury and I had to quit. So when I stopped actually exercising, I could really feel it and it was then I started to think about my body changes, and how my stomach was digesting food. It was around about that time, I started to go into raw foods and fruitarianism.

Kevin: What were some of the things that you were feeling then? I mean, it's common that athletes get off their exercise plans and their shape just deteriorates. Did that happen to you?

Richard: Yes, pretty much. While I was playing it, all we did was train. We ran long distance stuff, we did sprints, we're always training, there was skill work and as soon as we stopped, I kind of made a vow to never run again. So my digestion slowed right down and in looking back, I could actually see that the only reason why I maintained my health was due to intense speed of exercise, because I ate garbage. There is a whole thing. When you play a sport like rugby, which is like American football over here, the whole thing is to eat big, to get big, so you have a situation where you're just chugging down food relentlessly. You can manipulate all that water, in fact, to make it look like you've got some mass about you.

Kevin: Yes.

Richard: So pretty much that's what was happening to me, I was still eating the same junk, I wasn't working out, I wasn't manipulating it anywhere and basically I wasn't cleaning out my glands through exercise, I wasn't getting anything circulated. I wasn't helping myself out and I was paying the price for it.

Kevin: So how do you go from one of the toughest sports around, rugby, into being a fruitarian? What was the motivation and then we'll just get into the whole fruitarian thing.

Richard: Okay well, this is one of those things I really can't explain because up until then, it wasn't even on rare occasions I ate fruit. I just never ate fruits.

Kevin: Yes.

Richard: Like I said, I just ate garbage. Eating healthy was like having a cheese sandwich for me.

Kevin: Wow.

Richard: With maybe some lettuce in it, that for me was the extent of eating healthy. I came from a relatively old inner city British West Indian Family. We weren't rich. My mother brought me up by herself, so we ate cheap fruits, we had overcooked foods. We didn't know any better. We just
ate what we knew. So basically, what got me from that, onto fruitarianism, I really don't know. I just know that when I stopped, it was like my body or my instincts took over. All of a sudden eating cooked foods didn't feel right.

All of a sudden, I started to sense being sick a whole lot more. I was more sensitive to feeling indigested food. I was more sensitive to feeling how it was getting harder to breath. I was getting more sensitive to feeling all the mucous in my nose or the mucous in the back of my throat or the mucous in my chest, you know. And even when I tried to get more active, like I used to cycle, it was getting harder to move myself. It was getting harder to motivate myself to even get up on a bike. And then one day, it suddenly dawned on me that, and don't ask me how because I don't know, I just knew I had to go out and get some food. I didn't want to eat cooked food. I knew cooked food was a problem.

Kevin: Yes.

Richard: Okay and I just could not take another bite of cooked food. I couldn't do it. I felt that if I did, then I will just break down because it just felt like I was ageing actively and that my body was giving me the message that if I carried on this way, I was going to break down and I would end up in the hospital and follow the same cycle as everybody else does.

Kevin: Right.

Richard: So it took about two to three days for it to sink in and for me to say to myself, "Well, you know what, something's happening here, I'm getting the message, I'm going to act on it." Okay, so I got on my bike, I went down to the... back in England where I was living, there was plenty of old Indian stores. They sell fruits from different countries like India, Jamaica, West India because there is a big West Indian population over there and you can get a lot of exotic fruits. And I went and I got some beautiful fruits. I got some mangoes. I got a couple of honeydew melons. I got some grapes and I remember this so well because this was a real turning point for me and I even got some non-dried natural dates.

Kevin: Wow, okay.

Richard: And I've never tasted those before. The only dates I've seen is dried.

Kevin: Yes.

Richard: So I packed them in my little satchel and I put some in my basket on my bike and I got home. It was amazing because I was so excited. I just gave into these mangoes and it was like heaven. It was such a relief. It was like my whole system just sighed with relief and just said, "Thank God for that."

Kevin: Wow!

Richard: You know, I didn't know anything about fruitarianism. I didn't know anything about raw foods. I just went with my instincts. It really paid off and it was like all clean and good and so I carried on. And the next day, I did exactly the same thing.

Kevin: Okay.

Richard: Anything I looked at that appealed to me, I went out and bought and I tried it. And if I didn't like it, I didn't like it. If I liked it, I bought it again.

Kevin: Right.

Richard: So I went totally off my instincts, and that lasted for about a couple of weeks. And I was in heaven, for those two weeks and then, my detox set in and then everything just went haywire --the completeness.

Kevin: Yes. So let's talk about being a fruitarian.

Richard: Okay.

Kevin: It's a segment of the raw food world that we haven't covered in this Summit. So I want to really get into it and talk about what it means to be a fruitarian.

Richard: Well actually it's a very personal thing. One of my things is that we must all do what we feel in our hearts that we should do. Each person will have to go through his own experience, and I try and get people to encompass that instead of asking other people, perfect strangers, a million and one questions about what to eat, what they should eat, what they shouldn't eat and get a million and one different answers back, and they get even more confused. So being a fruitarian really is your own experience, doing what works for you. For me personally, being a fruitarian is all about going back to nature.

Kevin: Okay.

Richard: Okay. I don't eat anything that I can't pick from a tree or pick from a bush and eat as it is, okay? That's what being a fruitarian is. I'm passionately against the raw gourmet stuff and how the raw community is going right now. They're not transitioning the whole way through. They're getting caught up in all these raw gourmet recipes -- the oily, fatty, nutty, chocolaty, raw - gourmet recipes are just replicas of the very foods that they're trying to stop eating. The raw pizzas, the raw ice creams, the raw lasagnas... when I talk to people, I try and find out what their goals are, whether they want to go 100% fruitarian, whether they want to go strict because essentially, going strict fruitarian regardless of your experience is really going A to B, okay; because you will not get the benefits otherwise.

Kevin: What are some of the benefits of fruitarianism?

Richard: Top benefits basically is the clearance of debris of cooked food waste, if you do it the right way, okay? If you don't overeat, if you don't get caught on the raw gourmet stuff, you will clean out and clean out enough for your body to work as it's supposed to work. The benefits I have seen are much clearer skin, fresher insides and healthier mouth. Basically, the whole works because the whole body goes for a total overhaul, so from your head down to your toes, your hair, your nails, your smell, everything.

I'm not going to tell you that you turn sheepish because you won't. You'll still be the same person as you were before but you'll be cleaner. Your thinking will be more positive. You'll be more motivated for getting active and then some people will say, "They're more spiritual." Some people say, "They're more psychic." Some people say, "They're more euphoric." That's all personal stuff to each individual. But for me, those were what I found among many things because I can do stuff now that I couldn't do on cooked food... If I was on cooked food, then I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing, I wouldn't be exercising anywhere near the extent I am. And I know that for a fact because my motivation -- even when I was playing rugby, it was hard to motivate myself to get out there and do what I was supposed to be doing to the extent I was supposed to be doing. I can definitely say to other fruitarians, I can do so much more and plus I'm a lot older now. I'm 37 years old. So I'm at that age where on a cooked food diet, I should be slowing down. So, yes, that's one of the huge benefits for me. It's being more active and having the mindset -- being able to fulfill your mindset if you think something, now I could go out and do it; whereas, with cooked food, I'd be like, "Well I wish I could go hiking. I wish I could go out somewhere." Now, I go out and do it.

Kevin: Yes.

Richard: No messing around and it's great. It's so liberating.

To read the rest of this transcript as well as access 14 different raw food experts just like Richard Blackman, please visit (http://www.RawSummitArchives.com) .

About the author

Kevin Gianni is a health advocate, author and speaker. He has helped thousands of people in over 85 countries learn how to take control of their health--and keep it. To view his popular internet TV Show "The Renegade Health Show" (and get a free gift!) with commentary on natural health issues, vegan and raw food diets, holistic nutrition and more click here.


His book, "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution," is a step-by-step guide to optimum health for the time and energy-strapped. To find out more about abundance, optimum health and self motivation click here... or you're interested in the vegan and raw food diet and cutting edge holistic nutrition click here. For access to free interviews, downloads and a complete bodyweight exercise archive visit www.LiveAwesome.com.