Philip McCluskey On Raw Food, Weight Loss, Cleansing, Detox & More

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[include file=get-in-itunes.html]	What a great interview we had with Philip McCluskey on weight loss and the raw food diet. I really like what he said about the importance of water and how emotions play a HUGE role in diet and weight loss. Man he is a cool guy. If you are dealing with being over weight or know somebody who is, you may want to pass this show onto them. Learn from people that DO things not just talk about them. He speaks from experience having lost over 215 pounds in 2 years. The first year he did no exercise at all. He just changed his diet and still lost 100 pounds that first year. Philip offers some great tips and advice in this episode! After you listen, comment below and tell us what you think! We discuss the following and so much more: The importance of high quality water for weight loss (6:40) How emotional issues play a role in losing weight 1 key concept to dramatically increase your chances of keeping the weight off over time And much more! Philip McCluskey followed his heart, rejected gastric bypass surgery and lost 215 pounds. – Click to tweet this!
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Show Date:	9/5/2012
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Show Guest:	Philip McCluskey
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Guest Info:	Philip McCluskey is a sought-after motivational speaker, author, and raw food expert who inspires and educates thousands worldwide about the raw food lifestyle, after he lost over 215 pounds naturally. After thirty failed diet attempts and the looming prospect of gastric bypass surgery, raw food saved Philip’s life, transforming him from a morbidly obese 400 pounds to a fit, energized, and glowing 185 pounds. Read More… Passionate about the vibrant health and energy he gained when he lost his poor eating habits and emotional hang-ups, Philip has made it his mission to spread hope and health to others. He has appeared as a guest speaker at the festivals, health events, CBS show The Doctors, Jack LaLanne commercials, and has also inspired over a million viewers who have followed his journey on YouTube. He is the founder of PhilipMcCluskey.com, a source of advice and inspiration about weight loss and the raw food lifestyle, and is also the author of five books, including the The Get Juicy Program. When Philip switched to a 100% raw food lifestyle in 2006, he lost over 215 pounds as well as the depression, anxiety, embarrassment, lethargy, and illness that had nagged him most of his life. In their place, he found renewed energy, vitality, and happiness – as well as his fitter, healthier self. He inspires others to begin their own healing journey and not only lose extra weight, but gain vibrant health, mental clarity, a sense of purpose, and a renewed passion for life. When he’s not making videos, speaking, or traveling, Philip enjoys spending time outdoors in the sun, hiking, exercising, and living in the moment.
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Topic:	Raw food, Cleansing, Detoxification, Weight Loss
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Guest Website:	http://www.philipmccluskey.com/ The Get Juicy Cleanse (affiliate link – helps support us) World’s Sexiest Diet (affiliate link – helps support us) Philip’s Mailing List Philip McCluskey’s Raw Food Store (Guest Social Links Below. Please Follow Them!)
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Guest Products:	Click Below To Checkout The Books While Listening! 🙂
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Items Mentioned:	Philip’s Wife Casey Lorraine http://www.findaspring.com/
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Duration/Size:	01:03:52 / 58.47 MB
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Follow Us!:	Please consider ReTweeting the following update to share this episode… Do you need to lose weight? Hear how Philip McCluskey lost 100 pounds in 1 year w/o even exercising. 215 lbs total.extremehealthradio.com/5 — Extreme Health Radio (@ehrshow) September 5, 2012
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Podcast Transcript:

Thanks you so much for joining us today everybody. This is extremehealthradio.com/5. The date today is September 5, 2012 and I just want to thank you again for joining us. If you would like, please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter if you can. That would be really appreciated on our end.

Today’s show is with Philip McCluskey, who is the raw food expert and is the owner of philipmccluskey.com I just wanted to let you know really quickly, before we get started that all of our shows are going to be transcribed about a week after they’re done, which means if you are doing any research about something in particular that a quest may have said, like whether or not you should take aspirin every day, or anything like that. You can always type that word in and see what any one of our guests has said, so that’s going to become somewhat of an online encyclopedia, which is really really cool. I just wanted to let you know about that.

Everything that a guest mentions, whether it’s their website or a book that they mentioned, or anything like that, is going to be in the show notes. So, if you’re out running or jogging or something like that and the guest mentions something you want to write down, don’t worry about it, as we listen to all the shows afterwards, take notes and put them all on the show notes page. So, that can be found at extremehealthradio.com/5.

Also, if you would like to send a question in to me, or to a guest, just email it to justin@extremehealthradio.com. Or you could call our voice mail line, which is (949) 391-7363 and we will play your question on the air. And, I just want to let you know that this show is brought to you by Mountain Rose Herbs, which is, in my opinion, one of the best places to buy bulk organic herbs online at really good prices. My wife and I bought all of our herbs there in bulk, and it’s a really good place. Anytime you buy from there, go to extremehealthradio.com/mountain and that will give us a little commission and help us to continue our work as well.

Before I introduce today’s guest, I would like to talk a little bit about our upcoming schedule. This week we have Marjorie Wildcraft, who is a person who teaches people how too turn their backyards into organic edible foods forests, which is really really awesome. We also have Markus Rothkranz, who is a powerhouse in the raw food movement. We also have Danny Roddy, who is a researcher on things like hormones, adrenal fatigue and stress and how that all effects the body. We have Susan Schenck, who is a raw food author. We also have Andrea Cox, who is a fitness leader, nutritionist and an author as well.

We also have Lucas Rockwood, who is a yoga guy and he will be talking to us about yoga and exercise. We also have Dr. Bruce Shelton coming up this month and he is a homeopathic physician in Arizona and is doing some great work, healing people from all kinds of disease. He is doing really wild things like chelation, ozone therapy and all that good stuff. We also have Christopher Wark, who beat cancer naturally. He has a great website called chrisbeatcancer.com. We have Barry Carter and Magda Havas talking about ormus and EMF frequencies and all kinds of good stuff like that.

So, with that said, check our ‘show schedule’ page to learn more about our upcoming guests. I am really excited about today’s guest, Philip McCluskey. I have know about Philip for years and have been following his blog. He has a blog called lovingraw.com and now it’s philipmccluskey.com. I will just read a couple of little snippets from his bio. He is a sought after motivational speaker, author, raw food expert and he inspires and educates thousands of people worldwide, about the raw food lifestyle. He himself lost, I think over 215 lbs naturally. From what I remember, he was a few days away from having gastric bypass surgery and decided to go 100% raw overnight, which is awesome. That something crazy, I couldn’t have done that, let me tell you. He tried over 30 diets before that too.

If you’re looking to lose weight, he is the guy to listen to. He has been on the CBS show ‘The Doctors’ as well as having worked with the late Jack LaLanne before he passed away, and he is a regular speaker at festivals all around the nation. He motivates people to clean up their diets and lifestyles, and he has just got a really great thing going on. And, he is the author of five books, and I think the most recent one is called The Get Juicy Program. There will be a link to that on this show page as well.

I think he recently got married so it will be exciting to talk about that as well. I think that’s about it Philip. Thanks for joining us today. I appreciate that.

PHILIP: Thanks for having me on the show Justin.

JUSTIN: You said you were calling in from Connecticut.

PHILIP: Yes, I’m on the east coast here, tucked away in the woods, surrounded by trees and it looks beautiful. I was born in Connecticut. I am not in the same pond, but it still has a hometown feel for me.

JUSTIN: Nice, and I think I remember you being out in California for a while, in my neck of the woods.

PHILIP: Yeah, I was about two hours south of L.A. in a place called Murietta, south of Temecula and I got to enjoy it out there. It was really beautiful with amazing weather. A little bit of different scenery of course, with the ocean versus the woods that I’m surrounded by here, but beautiful all the same.

JUSTIN: My wife and I drive by there. We go and get our spring water out at the Lake Hemet Spring. Have you been out there?

PHILIP: I haven’t been to that one. A friend told me about it and I hadn’t gone out there at the time, but next time I’m back in the area, as I have a few friends out that way, I will definitely go by and check it out.

JUSTIN: Nice, just a little tip for people who are in this area. Do you have any tips on where to get good water besides Hemet Springs?

PHILIP: Nothing that I remember that I can reference back to. I’m sure you’ve been on this site before, findaspring.com. A friend of mine, Daniel, came up with it a while back and there’s even a few around me here in Connecticut and I just kind of get used to going to the same one over and over that I don’t do tho much exploring anymore because it’s just really convenient and it’s close by and the water is amazing. And I kinda get picky when it comes to water and I find a nice source I like to stay with it and sometimes if I’m visiting other people springs up, you know that was alright but not like my water back home. Little bit of water envy, I guess.

JUSTIN: Yeah, I hear you. Do you have any tips on, I know for us we have, my wife and I go out and get, I think we have six, five or six 61/2 gallon glass containers and we try to keep them as cold as possible. What do you do with your containers to keep them cold once you get them, if it’s not winter time?

PHILIP: Sure. So I have about four or five 5 gallon glass containers and I keep them in a lowered basement area of the house so they stay pretty cold there year around as is, and the one that I am using I’ll bring up into our living room space and then I actually have a blanket that’s wrapped around it. We kind of joke around it’s like my water coat. And then I have a plastic pump that comes out the top so all I do is, when you want a glass you just walk by, pump it a couple of times, it shoots the water in the glass, it’s the perfect solution. But ideally you know keeping it in glass and keeping it in cold is key.

Recently I had gotten back from one of the springs and had all the bottles in the back of the car and we had stopped at a store and picked up some furniture and somebody was helping load it in the back of the car and took upon himself to move one of the glass jars and I was like, just as I was thinking don’t grab it all of a sudden I heard a glass shatter in the back of the car and I had 5 gallons of water floating around in the back seat.

But, you know, some of the joys of having glass, and it’s really, I just love the taste, and I know sometimes they have those plastic containers that they sell at the stores and they’re becoming more popular now and you can kinda refill them at the store, but even as a first step for a lot of people getting one of those containers and generally dumping the water out and going so can get your own spring water and having one of those is more convenient than glass but ideally if you can glass it’s key.

JUSTIN: Yeah, it’s just been huge for us. We, right now, as of this moment, we actually have to go get, pick up another bottle. We store them at my parents house up the road and it’s keeps them nice and cool in their garage and, so right now we’re kinda out of water so we went to the local store and got some distilled, and man can you taste the difference.

PHILIP: Oh yeah. And it’s funny because you know you grow up just generally not having that kind of water. You’re either having well or you’re having city water depending on where you’re living. And, you know, I remember a friend of mine came to visit from Germany and he was with his girl friend and I grabbed him a glass of water and this was before I had interest in health and I was just drinking the regular city water and she had something in German to him and I asked him later on I said, what did she say? And he said you know she said it tasted like you had gone out in the back of the house and dipped a glass in the pool and gave it to her. That’s how much chlorine she had tasted when she had tasted it and I didn’t even recognize any at the time.

And then, after you make the switch and you start to really appreciate, sometimes maybe even having real water for the first time in your life, and depending on pump and the city and just going from tap to tap and just never having the opportunity to taste real water, I mean it’s just mind boggling. I always make jokes with my wife in just how much different I feel even just when going away on travel how much different I feel from just having really clean, amazing water and feeling properly hydrated more than anything.

JUSTIN: Right. And I would imagine that drinking high quality water is going to be sort of the first thing you’d think about for weight loss, because I know a lot of your work is based on weight loss, based on what you’ve been able to accomplish, so what would you say to someone who’s thinking doing some kind of small change? How important do you think the water thing is for weight loss?

PHILIP: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s, in my opinion, one of the most important, if not the first step. You know and everybody comes at a different place to this. My wife and I were recently chatting with a client and we were just trying to figure out some small changes that she could make to improve her diet and improve her lifestyle, and she couldn’t commit to having a salad a day that was too big of an idea yet and couldn’t even commit to having a smoothie in the morning, that was too big of an idea. But the small set that we took is just having three cups of water a day, from drinking five, six coffees a day and just being in that regular routine of coffee to soda to being a person who doesn’t even drink water, we weren’t even looking to get to eight we were just okay.

Three glasses. And it’s just so amazing how often we don’t drink water as a people and you know our bodies are mainly made up of water, everything we put in our mouth’s our body’s are trying to extract some water out of, that’s why when you’re having dehydrated foods it dehydrates you. Right? And, you know, they’re fun as a snack and they’re fun to have every once in awhile but having stuff with fruits and vegetables that have a high water content, you know, your cucumbers, your celery, your greens, your fruits, I mean that’s so ideal and the body’s finally getting a chance to, you know, get some water and kind of make us feel, I just like to think of it as try to make us a bit juicy versus tired and just the mind doesn’t even work right when we’re not properly hydrated and you know one of the things I see with a lot of heavier clients, and even I noticed in myself when I hit 400 pounds was I just barely would drink water at all and so what would happen is I was continuously feeding my body five to six times a day at the time and as I was doing this everything was getting compacted, compacted, compacted and not having good bowel movements.

Nothing was flowing through as it’s supposed to, and the next thing you know, you’re just putting on weight. It wouldn’t be uncommon for me to put on 50 lbs in a year. I have friends who have worn the same pair of jeans for their adult life, and never changed once. I would then think of my fluctuations and starting to notice some differences over time. One of my best friends is a martial artist and I never see him without a gallon of water and when it’s empty, he fills it back up again.

He is continuously going after water and he’s got the rippling abs and the well-defined body and you know, one of the things I told him at one time (I know I’m rambling about this) is that he went to the rest room, this was before I was interested in health, and he took about one minute. I said ‘how do you go to the restroom and take one minute’? He said, ‘dude, I’m properly hydrated and my body works well’. I just couldn’t understand that, being a 400 lb guy at the time, and I was the type of guy who would go to the bathroom and sit down with a newspaper and think I was going to be there for 25 minutes, and I was and nothing was working. So, water is so key to weight loss.

If somebody just ups the amount of water and starts to play around with carrying a gallon bottle of water around with them, or a half-gallon bottle of water around throughout the day, and filling it up a couple of times, and just trying to change that one thing, they will notice a drop in the weight. If you are a rather larger person, or in a morbidly obese category, you can notice a fairly big drop in the weight over the course of a couple of months, just by adding water. Sometimes I have seen people lose as much as 30 lbs just by making a switch of adding water in the diet, and really just flushing things out properly.

JUSTIN: Wow, so you work with people, you have clients and people can contact you through your website and things like that?

PHILIP: Yes, I used to do a lot of it in the past, but now it has kind of created some online programs instead. I focus my time and effort into reaching larger amounts of people. My wife and I do some coaching together for past clients and then she takes on any new clients currently. But what I have done is, my two passions, one of which is of course, weight loss and the second is juicing, which I love so much and have created into online programs and communities, so that people can kind of do it themselves at home, kind of like having me in their living room, so to speak, which I try to focus my attention on now.

JUSTIN: It is interesting with water, there is a study I read a while back, a few years ago, about, I completely forget now exactly what it was saying, but it was saying that the benefits of water, I think it was something small like 20 oz water upon waking up and how that had an effect on cancer and all kinds of diseases. As far as I know, even when you’re just breathing all night, you’re losing hydration, right?

PHILIP: Absolutely. I mean, the first thing I have to have is that water in the morning now. Once it become a routine, you get used to it. I feel a little bit of a problem if I don’t have that water, and then I usually follow that up with juice after the water and then that gives me my boost for the morning.

JUSTIN: You know, what’s hard for me is that when I have my water, I usually have some in the morning as well, sometimes I forget, but my thing is that it’s difficult for me to drink so much water, as I feel like there is never really a time where I have an empty stomach. They always say to not drink water with your meals, so I will try to drink water before my meals, but if I have a little snack, like a raw granola bar or something like that, and I’m really thirsty, I will just sometimes down a ton of water and I know it’s possibly not great for hydrochloric acid and things like that. Do you go with that as well, do you have that same kind of thing?

PHILIP: Yeah, I’ve never really fully gotten onto the no water while you’re eating thing. I have gone through my stages of trying to be kind of strict with myself, but it has never really worked out, I will have to say. I like a little sip of something. There are times when I’ve drastically eliminated, like instead of having a full portion of whatever liquid, I would have 10% of it. And then I will have the rest, generally either before or after, most often it’s after. Ideally, it would be to have it before you get yourself really dehydrated and then have your meal. But, all of this time, I have been able to get in the groove, but there are tons of friends that I see do that all the time, but yeah it just hasn’t come natural to me I still like I want a little something and I’m always curious, does that mean in that moment I’m a little bit dehydrated? Does that mean I haven’t really topped up my fluids, and I’m not sure, but I always pay attention to that and obviously….19:26
………whenever they’re going to eat, and to see how and what there kind of pattern is, but yeah I think I’m in the same boat as you Justin.

JUSTIN: I hear yeah. So when we come back I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about some of the emotional issues with what you went through and healing and losing weight and some of the emotional things, attachments that you may have had to let go of, because I know you do a lot You Tube videos about that, just regarding such a huge shift in your diet so we’ll come back and we’ll talk to Philip a little bit more about some of those issues.

Hey there thanks for listening, I really appreciate it. Hopefully you’re getting a lot of value from this show. I know I am. I just wanted to take a brief moment and talk about a program that I really, really, strongly stand behind. It’s called the Get Juicy Program by Philip McCluskey.

I’ve been following Philip’s work for many years and he lost over 200 pounds on a raw food diet, so if you’re interested in doing a cleanse, this could be the cleanse you want to look at. It’s a 10-day juicing cleanse specifically designed to help you lose weight, help you gain more energy, help flush out toxins, and the whole cleanse is delivered via video through his website and you can check that out at extremehealthradio.com/juicy. And if you purchase through us we’ll make a commission and that will help us run the show here, but I only promote products I really, really believe in and this is something I really believe in. He is someone you want to listen to because a lot of people talk about cleansing and detoxification but Philip’s done it. He’s lost over 200 pounds and completely changed his life, so this is definitely something you want to look at before you do something drastic about your weight loss or things like that. It’s completely safe and he walks you through every single day, all 10 days what to make and how to do it and it comes with tons of free Ebooks that he throws in as bonuses and and I think there is a form in there too, I have access to it actually, I should do a review of that and show you what that looks like and I will probably soon.

But anyway, you can check it out at extremehealthradio.com/juicy if you want to learn more about that, if you’re interested in doing a cleanse and all of that stuff. And also if you’d like to visit our store we’ve got all kinds of really great products in there. Everything from products for your dog and products for your children, how to raise healthy babies during pregnancy and after pregnancy, the Longevity Conference, we’ve got tons of really high quality products so check out our store if you’d like to support us and if you want to make a donation that would be really, really appreciated over here. Lots of people donate and you can so monthly for as little $1.00 or just a onetime gift and man that would really, really help keep the engine running here. But if you make purchases on Amazon feel free to go to extremehealthradio.com/amazon and you can make your purchase and we’ll get a little commission too and that will help keep everything running too, so we really appreciate that.

And if you just want to follow us on Facebook, if you don’t want to do any of that you just want to keep it free and just enjoy the show, follow us on Facebook and click Like as many times as you can and send a link to your friends and use Twitter and all that kind of stuff, so we’d appreciate it if you did that. That would help us continue providing hopefully really good quality information that you could really benefit from, so thank you so much for listening and with that said lets get back to this interview.

Alright. Today we have Philip McCluskey on our show, real excited to have him on and you can find out more about him at philipmccluskey.com, and also his Facebook page and Twitter account and YouTube account and all that good stuff. I’ve got a link to his newsletter so you can sign up to his newsletter, all of that is linked to extremehealthradio.com/5, and you find all of his information on the show page and in the show notes there and so before the break Philip we were talking about some of the emotional issues that a lot of people face trying to lose weight and you know weight loss can be a very emotional thing, right?

PHILIP: I found that literally probably 95 percent of the people that I’ve come across, whether they’ve dealt with any kind of obesity or not, have some sort of emotional attachment to food, whether it’s just a trigger in a memory from childhood, whether it’s part of your custom in what you’ve always done, for myself I was from an Italian family so we had big get together, lots of people, lots of fun, lots of laughing going on, lots of eating across from a big long table with a bunch of people so whenever I would think about certain foods like pasta, for example, like spaghetti, whenever I would think about that I would always kind of associate that at how to trigger that was created that would always relate back to the feeling of love, and being excepted and that hung banner across the table that I used to have with my family. So sometimes when we can get those emotions or those feelings, like a feeling of love somehow tied in with a bowl of pasta or a bowl of spaghetti when we are not feeling that love in our lives sometimes we’ll go to replace it with that spaghetti because that’s the association we’ve created, the trigger we’ve had imprinted in us so we go to eat that food and there are times I’ve had, growing up, I mean I’ve had five servings of spaghetti.

I’d go back, I’d go back for seconds, I’d go back for thirds, fourths, fifths you know, because I was always looking to get love inside my life or that feeling of acceptance in whatever situation I was in. My parents separated at the age of five so I was always going through a little bit of that struggle of feeling loved, of course both parents loved me, but just some of the basic things that happened whenever there’s any kind of disruption within the household and I was always looking outside of myself and food ended becoming the constant.

I found out that one thing we all really love is some kind of consistency in our live as much as we love things to be random, and fun and exciting, we do love a certain consistency. And that always provided the same results you know, so if there was again any kind of stress or any kind of thing that comes up we would go to the constant and for food for me it would always kind of knock me out really, I would end up eating so much that I’d fall asleep on the couch and it would kind of numb any kind of emotion of feelings or pain I was going through, and it would always do the same thing every time. If I want and got that large pizza and ate it myself it was going to numb everything out every much like a drug would. And so it becomes the drug of choice for so many people and I think the statistics now are at 60 percent of the US being overweight and around 30 percent being obese.

So we can see this drug is becoming an epidemic and it’s legal and it’s in essence we all, somewhere or another, we’ve all scene what’s it’s like to emotionally eat our experience, emotional eating, and the idea being of course is to recognize what those triggers and patterns are and break those cycles so we can be free and we can actually just have emotion as we do sometimes, and just be alright with that and not have to put on the food band-aid back and forth, but once you start to pick apart those things, and it’s different for everybody, sometimes people have, in their family there’s just certain expectations of simply cleaning their dish. Then you have a lot of feeling around that and even though you’ve grown up, and you don’t have maybe your mom or your dad there telling you, you’re kind of replaying that story inside your mind all the time so in order to be good, you’ll clean your dish and so the idea let’s always try to be good to please somebody. I’ve seen that story play out quite a few times with clients and it’s an interesting thing how it shows up in our lives.

For me, food was a big reward. So growing up again with a single mom at a time she was working three different jobs so we really didn’t have much and we were doing everything we could just to sort of make ends meet, but what we could have might be a dollar or two on some food snack, go out and get an ice cream cone or something like that so food becomes the reward system. And then you are finding out, my gosh, how many roles does food actually play in my life. You know, when I got a raise at work, I would take the guys out for a beer and wings. Then when I was sad, I might have gotten some food to console me, like when people are cold, they want something warm to keep their body warm. The list goes on and on. If you are depressed, you might want something sweet to sweeten up your life, and you have given food so many responsibilities, that the thought of changing our diet, or improving our diet, doesn’t just have to do with food, it has to do with so much more, because those things are so intertwined with all of these different emotions and feelings and the way we process our world. It’s almost like you are distancing somebody from their home, it feels that dramatic for ourselves.

JUSTIN: You can see that. I don’t do much TV, but people tell me about the biggest loser and these kinds of things. There are people crying all over the place and it’s such a huge deal. I think the food and the emotion that goes into addictions and things like that, I think it’s more than we probably even know. I wanted to ask you about, on your journey, you tried 30 different diets and going into the raw food diet, at least going into it, because at that point you didn’t have any experiential knowledge of it, as you hadn’t done it yet, and you went 100% raw overnight. So, going into the raw food diet, did you have a different emotional outlook to the possibility that this could work, as opposed to the other diets you tried?
They all sounded good, right?

PHILIP: First of all, I put my trust in a lot of people. I tried going to a doctor. I tried going to a nutritionist, a therapist, a coach, a counselor, a hypnotist and fitness experts and all that. Then there were times that I tried to put my faith in certain programs with packaged meals and institutions, whether it be Weight Watchers or frozen meal programs and different things like that. And then, when I started reading about raw food, it was the first thing that I think made complete sense and was clear. I’m not sure they were nutritional experts and there wasn’t any around me, and if I really wanted to be interested, I would have to read books and educate myself. And then, the second thing was, you know, it didn’t feel like there was any big packaged program that I had to buy, or frozen meals, it was just stuff that I could grow in my backyard if I wanted to. So, that was kind of out of the equation. I was so used to picking apart diets, finding out what wasn’t going to work for me, and okay, I don’t like that food, that’s not going to work, I don’t like that, that’s not going to work.

I had already me feeling the diet in my mind before I started it. Because really, at the time I liked about four vegetables and those were all probably toppings that I put on my hamburger, and that was it. I didn’t like much else. I didn’t know anything about dark greens, I used to have iceberg lettuce and that was the extent. I didn’t even know about romaine. I pretty much ate fast food for 2-3 meals a day average, and the only thing I would cook would be either pastas or maybe a steak on the grill. I didn’t know anything about any kind of healthy food, healthy preparation, but when I first read a book and it mentioned raw food, I took a moment to look at it a little bit longer. For some reason inside, it just felt like it was right. I could see that man’s first diet, before we discovered fire and food that grows naturally us and it wasn’t anything processed. I didn’t know anybody else who was doing it, but I remember thinking that something inside me was just like wow, this is it, this is what you’ve been missing. I remember even questioning it and think, you like four vegetables, how are you going to be a 100% raw vegan. I just felt like I was going to figure it out and I literally went from having 7,000-10,000 calories a day, overnight to being 100% raw vegan.

I remember just taking those few vegetables that I like and just trying to make something work with it. And, you know, the next week I liked more and the week after that I liked even more. Then I was hard pressed for finding a fruit or vegetable I don’t like anymore. I guess the one thing I can say is that it didn’t feel like there was any big conspiracy behind it. There was no big company that was making tons of money behind it. It just felt right. It just seemed that logically it made sense.

I kind of had this excitement going into it already and you know, my first thought was hey, I get to have fresh fruit in the morning, and that sounds like fun and I’m going to try to make some blended stuff. I was just ready to give it a go, and basically at the time, more than anything, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. So, I was either going to chose something that I was going to live for and with, or I was just going to die. And I may as well just make up my mind and get it over with, so to speak.
That’s when I kind of just gave it my all.

So, I think, more than anything, a switch kind of just went off in my head and said ‘you no longer eat like this anymore, now you eat like this and you are going to start valuing yourself and putting yourself first. If you are going to chose to live, then you are going to chose to live all the way, and you are going to give this a proper go’. So I did and I stayed 100% raw for about five years. It is one of the most amazing experiences and cleansing experiences in life’s transformational type of experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

JUSTIN: Yes, I was the same way. I did the 100% raw as well, from 2003 to 2010, and I have to say, it was the most amazing thing that you could ever do. It’s interesting, I’m sure you have heard this from David Wolfe and some other people you’ve read, that when you start to change your diet, it really starts to open up your mind, and it starts to really open your mind up to things that you never really would have thought before. That’s something that I found to be really true. Have you found that as well?

PHILIP: Yes, in such a big way Justin. I mean, growing up in poverty, I grew up mainly eating food that didn’t have labels on it. They were like no frill Government brands and hash browns and the worst of the worst. So, when I think about literally having 29 years of my life eating foods that have pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, chemicals, dyes, poisons, no wonder I could barely think, no wonder why I didn’t have much excitement for life, no wonder why I couldn’t clearly see my purpose you know, because I was eating things that were, the only way I can say this kind of drugging me, and taking a moment and literally putting all those things aside, bringing in a whole new life style of change of food, new fear, things I hadn’t been used to before and giving my body a chance, an opportunity to cleanse all that old stuff out, all of a sudden I’m able to think clear, I able to multitask better, my relationships improved,I wanted to be present in people’s lives, I wanted to make real contact in their lives instead of kind of like the hi, bye as you walk down the street type of mentality, and I noticed every single area of my life shifts, my confidence shifts, my spirituality changed, the way I interacted with the opposite sex changed, the way I felt confident in business changed, I mean every single aspect changed from making one small health improvement which really, I would say, became the foundation of catalyst for every other great thing that has happened in my life.

JUSTIN: Yes. I think there might be something to the whole macronutrient, phytonutrient thing because when you get dietary advice from just the mainstream media it’s always macro nutrients, fats, proteins, carbohydrates, those are all great things to balance each other out on a larger level but I think what’s missing is phytonutrients and getting nutrients into the cells and really flushing out the cells and getting those incredible phytonutrients you just can’t get from a slice of pizza or something like that, right?

PHILIP: Yes. And I mean because, and that’s right and being somebody who is overweight I would find that with just the simple things, the time I was never actually satisfied. I’d eat a hamburger, a fast food hamburger which we know now is 50 percent GMO corn and the other 50 percent they believe is from up to 100 different cows, so Id put this thing in my body and my body is like okay Phil we’re low in this, this, this, we need these vitamins and we’re not sure what you just gave us, it’s got calories in it we’re going to process it I guess, and we’re see it you break it down and if not it’s probably going to get stuck along the way, but my body is like I don’t know what you give us but we’re still waiting for you to top up this vitamin, this thing, this thing, so it would send me that hunger signal again.

The next thing you know an hour later I’m hungry again and I could go and eat another burger, or a double cheese burger or whatever that happened to be, or a whopper and then I’d be hungry again the next hour. It never got an opportunity to really get what it actually was crying out for, so it just kept sending me all those hunger signals on a eat these empty calories and just continue to put on weight.

Now I find that I eat probably 1/5th or 1/6th the amount of food that I used to eat, and I don’t feel hungry hardly at all. Even when some times when I’m just doing a juice cleanse I would experiment a lot with juice cleansing, I’ve done a 100 day juice cleanse before and a 60 day juice cleanse and a 30 day juice cleanse and usually after day two I’m not even hungry anymore, it’s my body like wow you’re finally flooding us with everything that we wanted and it’s just a different dynamic especially when losing weight you can kind of see just the dramatic change, we’re eating really nutrient dense food versus eating a lot of false foods or just empty calories.

JUSTIN: Yes. I hear a lot just about how it’s calories in, calories out with just mainstream nutrition. It’s just bulk ingredients and calories in calories out, I feel like what happens is that a lot of people, especially people like trainers, nutritionists, they treat the body like a machine, like we’re sort of mechanical machine rather than looking at the body like a living ego system which is something completely different, right?

PHILIP: Yes. I kind of like to do the comparison back and forth sometimes both ways because I think sometimes we tend to think like a machine in regards to being able to comprehend the picture of the machine a little bit easier.

One of the things I always love to relate back to is the amount of meals we eat, I just remember reading the article about the oldest living guy in the states, I think he’s 115 and you always say what are your two things that kept you this old, or what you’re one thing that kept you this old that got you to this place and his things were: A that he eats smaller meals than everybody and B that he only eats two meals a day versus the average American eating three to four to five depending on what your workout routine is, or how much you just eat in general and I always kind of find that a bit interesting because I like to compare that aspect to the machine because I think in regard to pictures I always think about when they’re testing out new cars and you see sometimes in commercials and they’ll have a machine that will just open and close the door of the car all day long, open and close the door hundreds and thousands of times and see how long it goes before it breaks down.

With different parts of the car, I think back in my days when I was 320 lbs and trying to be a weight lifter and thinking that was going to be my avenue in life, and there was some of the high end weight lifters who would eat 10-12 times a day. And I used to think to myself, my God, if I’m eating 2 times a day, or if the man who lived up to 115 years and in doing that kind of natural systematic, a little bit of under-eating, not pushing myself to full, to just eating what the body wants, and he’s eating 12 times a day, he’s running his car 6 times more than me. That machine now has to open and shut his car door and it’s working 6 times higher than mine. And I think who is going to live longer and whose car is going to wear out a bit faster. I kind of like to make the analogies like that, but overall, yeah I totally agree.

JUSTIN: That’s an interesting way of looking at it, because if you do play with that analogy, like a lot of people like to do with these machines, you are just wearing your machine out. The more you eat, the less you live kind of a thing.

When we come back, I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the things you’ve been able to do with your business, and starting basically,
a brand new life around what you have been able to accomplish. I would also like to talk to you about some of your products, a little more in detail, and maybe some of the things you have planned in the future. So, stay with us and we’ll talk about all of those things, and we’ll be right back.

Okay everybody, thank you so much for listening and I hope you are enjoying the show. We really love providing this kind if content for you. Thank you again for listening.

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Now, let’s get back to this interview.

Okay, thank you again Philip for joining us and I really appreciate this.

PHILIP: Thanks Justin.

JUSTIN: I want to talk to you, really quickly, about a few things. Am I correct in my understanding that you didn’t do much of any exercise for the first year that you lost, how much did you lose in the first year, and I don’t think you did much exercise in that first year, did you?

PHILIP: When I first started raw I was 400 lbs and, in the first year, I decided I wasn’t going to do any exercise. I just wanted to see what the diet change would do. And, to be quite honest, I just really wasn’t in shape to do any exercise. Just even walking up the stairs to get in the house, I would already be sweating and winded. I just wanted to see what the diet change would do. So, for the first year, I just changed what I was putting in my mouth, and just from that alone, I lost 100 lbs. Now granted, with a little bit of exercise, it would have been a lot more, I’m sure.

But that was the pace I was looking to go at. The second year, after I’d gotten down to 300 lbs I started being more mobile, I guess I can say, and that’s when I started to incorporate some light movement and exercising. I found that in the form of hiking. Hiking did two things, one it kind of just, I really wasn’t excited about being 300 lbs and running down the street with people around, and stuff like that. It kind of saved me my privacy. And two, as you’re hiking through the woods on the east coast here, you are kind of covered by the trees, which were kind of protecting me a little bit from the sun and I wasn’t sweating so much. But hiking became my form of exercise as I started into the second year. And then, the second year, after just staying with the raw food lifestyle, doing a little cardio exercise and then doing a 100 day juice cleanse during that second year, I lost another 100 lbs.

So, I literally went from 400 lbs to 200 lbs in two years, which cut my weight right in half. It was a quick turnaround and I really believe the proper amount of time to lose that kind of weight, I have seen people get gastric bypass surgery and lose 150 lbs in three months, but they have a lot of issues with hanging skin and feeling uncomfortable in the body all over again, but now for a different reason.

There have even been people in the raw food movement who have gone gung-ho and have lots tons of weight in a really short time. But they find that skin retention is a lot better, especially if you are adding in some skin brushing or adding in some good exercise, or taking MSM or something along those lines. They are finding out that they are getting a much different result from the weight loss surgeries and a lot of those procedures. That’s what I found has been really quite helpful.

JUSTIN: Do you think there is something to be said for comparing the amount of time it takes to get to a particular size, comparing that to the amount of time you should possibly consider for losing that weight, as you see a lot of people who will lose some ridiculous amount of weight in a short amount of time, and then their bodies have issues with sagging skin and things like that. Do you think there is something to be said for taking it slow, as it could have taken you a lifetime to get to that level.

PHILIP: Sure. And it does and we’re so exciting that we found an avenue of losing weight. Sometimes we want to just expedite the entire experience, okay I need to lose 200 pounds well I going to lose it in 10 months. Generally people would have been excited if they’d lost that kind of weight at all in lifetime, and then so many times as our mind starts to expand we start to recognize our limits we can say, well that’s not, I want to lose that in two years and then we do that, which is what I did and then some people act like I want to lose that in two months. It can get a bit crazy because it does take, for me it took 29 years to put that kind of weight on, and that’s a lot of time of stretching my skin over and over and over and feeling unwell and of course there’s going to be a lot of toxins in the body as well, even sometime people might experience a little bit of detox symptoms as there going through that and sometimes it’s a lot of detox symptoms as so I think pacing it out is helpful and when I first started I was eating lots of fats so I didn’t like jumping to a juice cleanse or anything like that.

I was eating a fare amount of avocados and nuts and seeds so even though I’d switched from have 7,000 to 10,000 calories a day to this raw vegan lifestyle I was enjoying lot of fats and my body didn’t go through any crazy detox symptoms or anything like that and it felt natural it felt smooth, my body really reacted well to it, I was losing weight pretty consistently the entire time but it never felt like a struggle it always felt like fun, I got to train myself in the kitchen and really see what it was like to create my own recipes or make healthy food for the first time in my life which led on to doing four recipe books after that, but I do believe it take a certain amount of time because it take a certain amount of time to come off and it’s going to be a shock to the system even though you’re losing weight which obviously is beneficial, it’s still going to be a bit a shock to the system if you’re looking to lose big weight in an extremely short amount of time and lot of times we just find that the emotional swing, it’s even the physical changes or the sagging skin but the emotional swings tend to be too heavy and that’s why a lot of times you find that people have gone through and had the gastric bypass surgery, went through the whole recovery period, went through all the training and everything that it took to understand about the process and procedure and then find that they still can’t stop eating because they haven’t really healed the emotional component that got them there in the first place. So yes we cut up their skin and we shrunk the size of your stomach, but unless you get that other dynamic it’s very easy to put it back on and I know who had gotten the surgery and lost 150 pounds and then re-stretched their stomach back out again, gained the weight back and then somehow convinced another doctor to do the surgery again and then gained the weight back again.

It was heart breaking to hear this type of stuff but that’s what really comes about when they’re not healing that other aspect, the emotional aspect, because it’s not just about calories in calories out so to speak and you might know if you’re going for five portions of something that you’re over eating or there might be something better than having bacon and eggs every single morning and there are some healthier choices out there and I think most of us have an idea about that but it’s, I always think what’s the reason why you pick up the fork, what’s the reason why you might be eating past the point of being full, what’s the reason why you eat foods you know might not even serve you? That’s the real root of the issue that I like to really address with people because I find once you get that addressed that’s when you have the most long lasting change.

JUSTIN: We only have about five minutes left, but I wanted to ask you, let’s say someone is listening to this and they are overweight and they want to make a couple of changes, maybe anywhere from one to five changes, what would be some of the main changes that you would suggest that a person could start doing to begin this process?

PHILIP: The first thing is, and I like to call it the replacement method, it’s just adding in one delicious thing into your diet. You don’t have to worry about changing everything overnight, you don’t even have to change lunch, you don’t even have to change dinner right now, you can just do one thing so if you’re generally having a drive through Egg McMuffin on the way to work, what would it be like for you to create a bowl of fruit or a green smoothie? If a smoothie is too drastic idea fine, what’s it like to have just a bowl of fruit in the morning, just adding in one good thing and keeping the rest. And you work that, the idea being you want to work that for four to six weeks until it becomes a real strong habit, until it becomes just as normal for you as brushing your teeth in the morning, and you don’t feel like you’re doing anything, you don’t feel like you’re on a diet, you don’t feel like anything is strenuous or you’re having an issue it just becomes part of life.

And then once that’s really easy and really comfortable you add in the next good thing and again you work that until it becomes a habit and eventually you’ll notice over time as you’ve added in so many good things that there is just not time in the day to eat the foods that I’m serving you, with all the new wonderful foods I’m serving you. What happens a lot of times is that you build up momentum because you start to see what it feels like to feel good, because you’re having maybe your green juice or your smoothie. And you’re not hungry and ravenous all day and you’re not getting those mood swings, you know those spikes that used to bother you.

A lot of times, what will happen is, people will get excited and pick up the pace even more so, and now it’s not like I’m being pressured to add things into my diet because I’m on a ‘diet’. But now it’s like, wow I’m so excited that I’m changing my life, losing my weight, my skin has become clear, I’m able to think better, can multitask like never before and I’m more present with my family. Those type of things come up and get you excited to do it on your own. That’s really the trigger point that I like to see in people, when it feels like they’re doing it because they have to do it, to enjoying this lifestyle because it’s now no longer a diet, it’s a lifestyle and they embrace it and are excited about and they wake up every morning and are excited about it, thinking about how they can enjoy their day and have the most radiant health ever. I always like to encourage small, easy steps. You don’t want anyone feeling like you’re twisting your arm, like telling you not to grab a cookie from the cookie jar, you want to make it fun and you want to make it easy, and you want to make it something that is realistic, something that you’ll do and stick with it and create a lifestyle from it.

JUSTIN: That’s huge actually. Looking back at my own journey, that was a lot of how I introduced raw foods to my lifestyle. I would be walking down the street and we had a Baskin Robbins across the street from my place and would say, I want that, I’m really craving that, and I would say, okay that’s cool I could have that, that’s no problem I could have the Baskin Robbins shake that I loved, but before I do I have to, I made it my goal to have a juice or a smoothie everyday and that place was literally across the street and so I would just go and make my smoothie and then all of sudden I didn’t want Baskin Robbins and after a certain amount of time it was amazing, I could actually start to feel the food.

PHILIP: Exactly, you replace the other stuff out naturally.

JUSTIN: I know we’re running against the clock here, but I wanted to ask you a little bit about what kinds of things you’re working on, where you see things going and what kinds of goals and intentions you have over the next year or so?

PHILIP: Yes, fantastic and thanks for asking. As you know, I’ve created four recipe books, that I created right after I went to the raw food diet, and I found that so many recipes were 15-20 ingredients long and skills way beyond what I have, but I decided to create books that were quick and easy. The first one was called Raw Food, Fast Food and you can make recipes in there in 10 minutes or less, simple ingredients, most of which you probably already have at home. And, one of the things that I find is that raw foodies like to have lots of soups and salads. So the second one I created was called Raw Food Salad Bar, which includes my favorite recipes in that area. A lot of people were into chocolate, but they just weren’t excited about the caffeine anymore, or they wanted to have a bit of a change, so I created a book called Raw Food Carob Desserts, which brought out carob, which was a more popular product 20 years ago and was a bit of a health craze and then it sort of died out because people didn’t really know how to use it. It would bring life to that with an entire book with carob desserts. Finally, I got into juicing and created Raw Food Juice Bar which has all of my favorite juice recipes that you can use for a 3-day, 7-day or 30-day cleanse.

From there, my wife and I recently finished our program, that I mentioned earlier, The Get Juicy Cleanse. You can check that out at getjuicycleanse.com That is a 10-day program that guides people through their own juice cleanse, complete with audio, video, community support, a 100-page book and recipes, everything you need. More importantly, it really gives you and empowers you to see how you can juice at home and it walks you through every step of what you’d experience during a 10-day cleanse. We’re going through it with you in the program and we know what you’re going to be feeling by day-3, and we know what’s going to be coming up by day-7. We kind of address that to really get you through the emotional part. You come out feeling clean and detoxed and energized and really excited about your purpose in life.

So that’s one we’ve been working, and my wife and I are also in the process of combining our websites together and launching a new company, which is still a little bit of a secret, but we’re excited about that.

I recently did a raw food lecture tour throughout Australia and hit up five spots there, which is where I met my wife, which was fantastic. I really loved doing that and love doing lots of traveling. I foresee, after the launch my new company, there will be much more traveling and lecturing and just meeting people. I love meeting people who are interested in making a change and they are ready for that change in their life. I love seeing that happen. Yes, I’m looking forward to getting back out to California as well.

JUSTIN: Thanks Philip. Would you mind staying on after we close out the show.

PHILIP: Sure will.

JUSTIN: Everyone can visit Philip McCluskey at philipmccluskey.com and I highly suggest you check him out. If you have any questions, visit his site, follow him on Facebook and Twitter and all that kind of good stuff.
With that said, that you very much Philip, I appreciate you being on today.

PHILIP: Thank you, I appreciate it.

JUSTIN: Well, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Philip McCluskey. He has some really good things to say, doesn’t he? I think one of the main things that I found in my life, I didn’t have a lot of weight to lose, but as far as changing my diet and lifestyle was the concept that he was talking about, which is the subtraction by addition. We were talking about that. Most diets these days talk about how to stop eating certain foods. You want to not eat carbs, not do this and not eat that. That’s all great, but it’s missing one component, and the component is adding things in. When you add things in to your diet and lifestyle, it will naturally replace the bad stuff. I think most dietitians and nutritionists are not adapting this concept. You can all the junk food you want, but just make it a goal to have a salad every day and make it a goal to have a green juice every single day. When you get used to that, that’s cool. It might take a month, but when you get used to that, you can start adding a smoothie every day. So now you’re doing a juice and a smoothie. You can still have your pizza and pasta and your beer and all that good stuff. You can eat it all, but just keep adding things in, as you feel comfortable over time. And that is the biggest thing that makes lifelong change.

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