By Dr. Bob McCauley
You cannot tell people how to eat. If you try to it will likely backfire on you and you’ll end up with exactly what you don’t want to happen. If you want your children to be vegetarian, the last thing you want to do is tell them that they can’t eat meat. They will rebel at some point, I assure you. I will NEVER try to tell someone what to eat. It is an exercise in futility and actually counterproductive to what you want to accomplish.
We are all in love with poison of some kind, whether it is steak, pizza, potato chips, soft 
drinks, chocolate or fast foods. It is all poison and once we recognize these substances for what they are and what they do to the body, we can admit our addiction to them and begin to deal with it appropriately. But if we continue to believe they will not damage our health and are merely a “guilty pleasure” we will continue to be a slave to them, no different than any drug addict or alcoholic is a slave to those deadly substances. Drugs and alcohol destroy health quickly because they attack the mind and leave us unable to function adequately in society or interact with others in a constructive way. Extreme food addictions, such as bingeing, can destroy relationships, but when we “look healthy” to our friends and loved ones, any diet goes. We grin more than frown at others who have a junk food addiction.
Cooked-food addiction destroys us in a much more subtle way because it allows us to continue functioning in society without the penalty of it ruining relationships and careers the way mind-altering substance addictions can. There is not even the stigma associated with cooked-food addiction that there is with someone who smokes, for instance. We frown more on the addictions of others that affect us directly than those that don’t. Cooked-food addiction doesn’t affect us directly. Cooked foods are so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that the assumption is that they are healthy. Often this continues even after we have learned they are not.
It is quite difficult to remove an addiction from our life. Addictions are things that are 
harmful to our health, yet we cannot stop doing them. All addictions are physical, psychological and/or emotional and therefore are worldly in nature. Thus, removing worldly addictions from our lives is a spiritual event that raises us higher and improves our inner-being. Faith in God has been shown to help drug addicts recover from their addiction. Forgiveness breaks the addiction we have to grudges, seeking revenge and negative emotions of all kinds. Faith and forgiveness are important components of health.
We all have certain foods that we like and have a hard time avoiding. With me, those foods are pizza, coffee and chocolate. But I find that the more I stay away from them, the easier they are to avoid. Like anything else that we are addicted to, we must completely stay away from those substances because the chance of going back to them is too risky.
Some people can jump into the raw food life with both feet, end their cooked-food addiction cold turkey and never go back. But that person is the exception. Most of us need to transition slowly into the raw food lifestyle. It took me five years to become a 99% raw foodist and even now I struggle against eating some of the poisons that I love. Each day I struggle not to eat cooked foods, as does everyone addicted to anything. Therefore, I consider myself a recovering cooked foodist.
We spend our childhood being conditioned to eat cooked foods. Raw foods are all but shunned by most families. Even in the womb we receive nutrients in a diminished capacity from our mother’s body, that of cooked, denatured foods. Therefore it can be said that the natural healthy state of the body is never realized and that we live our lives in a body that is completely different from the body that nature intended us to have. It exists in a condition that nature did not intend for it to exist, deformed, fattened, weakened and diseased.
