By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept.
But I did not know how to cry. I had no feelings as an addict. And I just stole those beautiful words from Elizabeth Smart (#ad).
You know the cry inside, don’t you? The cry for love, for happiness.
Deep inside you know you are capable of so much. Yet all you can do is go from fast food to fast food in Grand Central Station?
Donuts, fries, burgers and shakes, muffins, chips, chocolate and soda. You can never get enough.
As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous: “One is too many, 100 is not enough.”
I know that hell. The hell of addiction.
Sugar Fat Salt Drug
When I finally got sober at age 40, I simply switched to Sugar Fat Salt (SFS) as my drug of choice. I had no power to say No.
SFS Drug is everything you see in the supermarket that’s not in the fresh produce aisle. Every can, box and brightly colored wrapper. It’s all SFS. It gets you hooked, then kills you.
Some people can change their diet overnight. I took FIFTEEN YEARS to break free of SFS drug!
The one and only person on the planet who saved me, was the late Dr. Ann Wigmore. I never met her. But I bought more than a dozen of her books.
Freedom From Addiction
The Ann Wigmore way liberated me from every single addiction.
The Doctor School, like Dr. Neal Barnard, could not help me. Dr. Barnard helped Ellen & Portia DeGeneres to go vegan.
But I was too addicted to junk. I was a hopeless basket-case.
I wanted to die! Ellen & Portia wanted to live.
It’s only when I made Ann Wigmore’s Energy Soup:
- with fresh living greens,
- picked by me straight from the soil,
- growing in trays in my Brooklyn apartment,
- and fresh living bean sprouts, growing in jars in my kitchen…
that’s when Raw Food Set me Free!
Living Plants Transform Your Life
When I drank fermented sprouted-grain milks, the pain in my teeth subsided.
When I ate raw cashew yogurt crunch, my addiction to chocolate flew out the window.
When I took raw sprouted grain crackers to work (savory carrot-cake and sweet almond-currant) I stopped buying muffins, donuts, and chocolate croissants.
I got the taste I hungered for, but with living plants. Over time, that live-food drove my junk-food desires away.
Ann Wigmore proved with countless thousands of patients globally — even with starving children in India — that nothing heals as quickly and radically as LIVING plants.
What’s a living plant? It’s alive and growing in the moment you eat it. It’s a raw food that radiates with LIFE FORCE.
It’s not a raw almond. It’s a half-cup of almonds blended with water and fermented into almond cream. That ferment is alive, it’s growing.
Ann Wigmore Program Is God’s Food
Would you like to experience first-hand how Ann Wigmore can liberate YOU?
No matter how depressed you are. No matter how hopeless life is. No matter how many years you’ve been an addict.
I want you to know that God’s food is more powerful. Food that is alive and growing is a gift given by God.
Even if you do just a teeny bit of Ann Wigmore’s program, you will experience the healing power of living plants.
I must admit, I have *never* followed her program one hundred percent!
I simply ADDED living plants — her recipes — to my junk food hopelessly addicted life.
Over time, the junk slowly falls away. It begins to taste vile. For me, Dunkin Donuts went first. It tasted like plastic!
I’m giving you her program below so you get an idea of what you need to do, which is:
- Grow leafy greens in trays of soil indoors, or in your garden.
- Grow bean sprouts and grain sprouts in jars in your kitchen.
- Or grow it all in an Automatic Sprouter you can build anywhere in the world (see GoGreen Sprouter).
- Learn to Ferment vegetables into sauerkraut and kimchi (see Recipes).
- Make fermented creams and cheeses with nuts and seeds (see Recipes).
- Make dehydrated crackers with sprouted grains to give you the taste and crunch you need as an addict (see Recipes).
- Buy freshly picked organic fruits from the farmer’s market.
Eat from all 8 plant groups — leafy greens, vegetables, legumes, grains, seeds, nuts, fruits, and sea vegetables — and you will come out ON TOP.
Your fat, your addiction, your despair will be a distant memory in the mists of times past.
Dr. Ann Wigmore Program for Cleansing
I never did any of this exclusively. I added these foods one step at a time into my life.
Slowly their powerful LIFE FORCE cleaned out and rebuilt my cells.
If you’d like to go flat-out 100% into Dr. Ann’s program, then this is what she advises in her book, The Hippocrates Diet and Health Program (#ad). If you buy only one book, get this one.
Cleanse for the first 2-3 weeks. Some days you’ll feel super-high, writes Ann Wigmore. On others you’ll barely be able to drag yourself to work.
Stick the bad days out, she says, if you can. If you can’t, add some cooked vegetables to slow down the cleansing.
Try to eat three meals a day. Breakfast is green juice or fresh fruit in season.
Are you not keen on fruit? Or have no time to make juice? I ate sprouted buckwheat-quinoa porridge for breakfast (see Recipe).
Between meals drink water or Rejuvelac, and snack on veggies like baby carrots.
Rejuvelac is a high-enzyme non-alcoholic drink. It’s easy to ferment it in a jar using sprouted grains (see Recipe).
Summary of Ann Wigmore Cleansing Program
Here’s what you eat every day when cleansing:
- 2-5 pieces of Fresh Fruit in season, and watermelon all year round. Limit bananas and dried fruit to twice a week.
- 2 Large Salads with seed cheese or avocado-based dressing.
- 6 or more cups of Sprouts (alfalfa, broccoli, sunflower greens, buckwheat greens, mung, lentil, etc.) as salad, or blended into soup, or as juice. I hate the taste of sprout juice!
- 2 or more Green Juices made from 50% sprouts and leafy greens and 50% vegetables (celery, cucumber, carrot, beet, etc.).
- 8-16 ounces of Rejuvelac — that’s a big mug full.
- 1-3 ounces of fresh Wheatgrass Juice.
- 2 Tablespoons of Sea Vegetables. Cut them into small pieces and press them into a spoon. For powdered sea vegetables, like kelp powder, add 2 level teaspoons (not Tbsp) to your meals during the day. If your doctor advises against the high-iodine or high-sodium in sea veg, then reduce this amount or leave them out.
Get plenty of rest and mild exercise daily, like walking and stretching.
Dr. Ann Wigmore Program for Building & Maintenance
After 2-3 weeks, writes Dr. Ann, introduce more high-calorie and protein-rich building foods, such as:
- Sprouted Grains,
- Seeds and Nuts,
- Bananas and soaked Dried Fruits,
- Avocados.
You do everything in the Cleansing Program, plus:
- 3-8 ounces of seed cheese, seed sauce or seed yogurt made from sprouted or soaked seeds or nuts.
- At least one cup of sprouted grain daily as raw bread or cereal, or in salads.
- 1-2 green juices a day (instead of 2 or more).
- When you’re hungry (a sign that you need more calories) eat avocado, soaked nuts, soaked dried fruit, and honey.
Today, rather than nuts, we know to grind chia, flax or hemp seeds in a coffee grinder, for their brain-boosting Omega-3 fat. Soak the ground seeds in water for a few minutes, and eat as a pudding. Chia and hemp were not available in Ann Wigmore’s day.
For me, when I’m hungry — especially after body-surfing — I’ll grind whole oat groats in a coffee grinder, soak for half-hour in filtered water, then eat. I know the amount that satisfies me. I may slice up a banana in it.
However, oat groats are not normally raw. They’re steamed to prevent rancidity. One farmer who supplies raw oat groats is Jim Mumm at sprouting.com. You can sprout his oats!
Summary of Ann Wigmore Maintenance Program
Dr. Ann Wigmore suggests this for your maintenance program:
- Breakfast: sprouted wheat cereal with seed milk, or Energy Soup.
- Lunch: fresh green juice, followed by a large salad with a thick sauce, and sprouted-grain crackers.
- Dinner: Fresh juice or raw soup, sauerkraut, cauliflower loaf with salad, and sprouted grain bread.
For links to these recipes, see my Raw Food Recipes for Protein, Carbohydrates & Fat.
The Living Foods I Ate
As you can see, it’s a lot of work to eat living plants!
Here’s what I did on the days I worked in a Manhattan law office.
RAW BREAKFAST
For the first 3 years (1993-96) I made Energy Soup with home-grown micro-greens and sprouts. Store-bought sprouts are barely alive, look at their oxidized brown roots.
I’d prepare everything the night before and refrigerate it, blend it in the morning, pour it into 2 brown hydrogen peroxide bottles, eat one on the subway, refrigerate the other at work and eat it about 11 a.m.
After three years, I tired of the taste of Energy Soup. I switched to sprouted buckwheat-quinoa porridge with ground flax seed for breakfast.
I ground my flax seed in a coffee grinder, then blended it with my sprouted grains and a banana, poured it into a tub-with-lid, and ate it on the express bus into Manhattan. We moved office in 1996 which freed me from the Brooklyn subway at rush-hour.
RAW LUNCH
Lunch on a workday was:
- Home-grown baby-green sprouts like sunflower greens, buckwheat greens, alfalfa, broccoli, radish, clover, and
- Bean sprouts like lentil and mung, with
- Store-bought organic leafy greens like lettuce, kale, cabbage, and
- Organic vegetable fruits like zucchini, summer squash, sweet pepper.
- Dessert was home-made sprouted grain crackers.
I had to have the crackers, otherwise I would’ve bought an SFS-drug muffin to relieve me of the boring taste of the greens and veggies.
Plus the crackers gave me the extra carbs (calories) I needed. They satisfy your hunger, or you can eat nuts. I needed tasty crackers!
In Brooklyn I lived within a block of Flatbush Food Co-op so buying organic all year was easy.
RAW DINNER IN SUMMER
I made a seed or nut milk, followed by a crunchy veg blend I made in my food processor.
Any blend of sprouts, leafy greens & veggies tasted good to me when I added beetroot, garlic, and Bragg’s liquid aminos! Today Bragg’s tastes gross, it’s too SFS for me. I haven’t eaten it in years.
DINNER IN WINTER
For the icy-cold snowy New York winter, when I got home from work, I steamed together in one pot:
- Cooked grain,
- Sprouted starchy beans like chickpea or soya (sprouted in jars for 3 days), and
- Fibrous winter greens like kale or collard.
I needed all three — grains, beans and greens — to satisfy my hunger. If I left out one, I felt empty and hungry for more.
I polished it off with almond cream or home-made soya yogurt for dessert. I loved to add concentrated apple or berry juice to the yogurt.
I varied the grains, once I counted 9 different grains in jars in my kitchen! Today I’d advise you to leave out the bad-gluten grains which are wheat, barley and rye.
I’d cook enough grain for 2-3 days and leave it on my countertop. A macrobiotic friend taught me never to refrigerate grains.
Then I’d steam a portion of the grain, plus the bean sprouts, and the fibrous greens, all together. It took just a few minutes.
Sometimes I’d make curried lentils or split peas. It’s very quick. You simmer them on low heat for 20 minutes with a spoon or two of curry powder. It’s 1 cup peas or lentils to 3 cups water. Lentils you must soak for 4 hours. Split peas don’t need soaking.
On the days I was not working, I binged on the biggest junk, all SFS drug (SFS=Sugar Fat Salt).
Slowly over the years, the junk fell away. All I did was Reach for Raw Foods more and more each month. I began to make my own homemade ice cream with fresh fruit (see Recipe) and homemade tofu chocolate pudding.
Today I use avocado, not tofu, as the base for chocolate mousse (see Recipe). My favorite ice cream today is to blend frozen berries with a ripe banana (not frozen) and a touch of maple syrup. In New York, my favorite was frozen banana blended with fresh raspberries from Park Slope farmer’s market (grown in New Jersey).
By 2007 — fifteen years after first bringing Ann Wigmore’s living foods into my life — I was 100 percent free of the junk. I simply have no desire for it.
Friends think at a social gathering I’m so disciplined because I’m not eating the cookies. Haha, little do they know! I was a gutter alcoholic!
Actually within four years of starting Energy Soup, by 1998, my diary shows that I was free. Even pizza tasted vile, so greasy.
But then in 2000 I returned to South Africa. I discovered all the treats I loved in the USA — such as wheat-free sugar-free blueberry muffins — don’t exist here.
Either you eat fruit OR sugary donut! There’s nothing in-between. So I slipped, as they say in AA. Once again I haunted the bakery. If it had sugar, down my gullet it went.
Green juice saved me (see Recipe). When I took the time to drink my greens, my craving for SFS drug caved in. It’s amazing. Test it for yourself.
Within seven years, those baked baddies (I refuse to call them goodies) had left me again, this time for good.
Swinging Like A Pendulum
Have you read that it’s bad to swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other? I did it for years, and came out alive.
Eventually the Living foods won! They WILL win for you too.
When you want sugar, suck on dried fruit rather than candy. Your saliva rehydrates the fruit. In Manhattan I always carried dried fruits with me to snack on. My favorite was Hunza apricots.
Today I almost never eat dried fruit, except for pineapple as a digestive aid, and once a year or so out-of-the-blue my body will clamor for raisins.
I enjoy fresh medjool dates when they’re in season. I’ll munch on 2 or 3 with brazil nuts. Some people can’t digest a sugar-fat combo like nut and dried fruit. But I’m fine with it.
Fresh fruit is always best. But it’s bulky to carry round.
Grow Your Own Greens
It’s SO critical to grow your own organic greens at home.
There’s many ways to do this:
- For baby greens that take 2-3 days to grow, like broccoli, alfalfa and clover, use a Manual Sprouter (#ad).
- For microgreens that take 10 days to grow, like sunflower and pea shoots, use a Growing Tray (#ad) and fill it with organic potting soil, OR place inside it a Growing Mat (#ad) or Coconut Coir (#ad).
- For both the above, you can also use an Automatic Sprouter (#ad). Here you don’t need soil, grow mat or coir for the bigger 10-day greens. The Sprouter mists them automatically at regular intervals.
- For greens that take 6-8 weeks to grow, like lettuce and kale, you must grow them outdoors in pots of soil or in a garden. In my experience, they don’t get enough light indoors, even with a full-spectrum growing lamp.
- My favorite is this Garden Tower (#ad). In only 4 square feet, you can grow 50 different leafy green plants! There’s a compost heap down the tube in the middle of the tower, where you recycle kitchen scraps. It fits on a patio.
- Finally you can use jars. I did so for many years for the smaller 3-day-old leafy greens like broccoli, clover, radish, fenugreek and alfalfa.
- Greens do not enjoy being tossed around daily in a jar. They grow up far more beautifully when you leave them to grow up straight in a Growing Tray (#ad) with soil or a growing mat, or in a manual or automatic Sprouter (#ad).
You WILL Be Free
Are you anything like the old me, wishing you were dead? Envying those souls in the graveyard?
I promise you, you WILL break free! God’s food is more powerful than the toxic food made by psychopathic corporations.
Blended and Juiced Greens are your Ticket to Freedom!
Today I can enjoy a glass of wine at a party or a slice of chocolate cake and experience no binge reaction.
I am FREE!
God creates life. Give God a chance. She knows how to heal you. All She asks is that you eat Her food filled with LIFE FORCE.
Eat LIVING PLANTS taught by the late Dr. Ann Wigmore 🙂
Discover More
- Ann Wigmore Chart for Raw Foods & Living Foods — and Avoid Altogether foods.
- What to Eat in a Raw Food Diet — staying in balance.
- Eating Raw Links — see all info on eating high-raw.
- Site Map — see the whole feast 🙂