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(NaturalNews) This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Rawkathon, which can be found at http://www.Rawkathon.com. In this excerpt, Frederic Patanaude shares on raw food tricks, techniques and tracking.

Rawkathon with Frederic Patanaude. Frederic Patanaude has been on a raw food journey for thirteen years. He is the author of The Raw Secrets.

Kevin: For you who went through, well, I mean obviously the diet is always changing and always evolving, what would you recommend to someone right now who maybe said, "Hey I'm starting raw food?" What are like three or four things you would say to them that would maybe help eliminate the learning curve that you went through?

Frederic: Yeah, that's a good question because you can lose a lot of time trying to transition your way to the diet. I know about this myself; I took ten years to transition and you don't need to go through that. I think, what's important is most people don't want to think that they're going to eat that way for the rest of their lives and they shouldn't. You have to give it a try first, but you have to give it a fair try so one thing you can do is give it a try for 30, 60, or 90 days. So, try it for 30 days; I would recommend even longer, maybe 60 days or 90 days, where you do it 100% and you try to follow the recommendations as best you can. And you give it a try. You're going to find a lot of,
get a lot of insights from that experience; maybe you're going to go back at the end, and that also is a part of the process because you want to see the difference maybe in how you feel. I'm not going to recommend to people that people necessarily...people will do what they have to do, you know, but they shouldn't beat themselves down for that. Or if they go back, that's when you give yourself a fair trial and you say, "I'm going to do it for 90 days, or 60 days." Then you're free to do whatever you want in the end. But at least you gave it enough time. And then of course you want to follow the recommendations. I mean, there's a lot of little recommendations that you can follow that will make it easier to go through... So, give it a 60 day trial, a 90 day trial. That would be a thing that I would recommend.

Kevin: Do you think it's valuable to go for 60 days and then try to re-introduce some things and see how you react to them? Do you think that's a valid process?

Frederic: Well, I think that's almost inevitable. I don't know anybody who just went 100% raw and never looked back. Well, I know some people did but that's not how I work. [laughter]

Kevin: Yeah.

Frederic: And that's not how most people do it. I think it's valuable because you can definitely see the difference of like a teaching experience, but you're teaching through pain. [laughter]

Kevin: Give me an example.

Frederic: Well you could go for 60 days on a low fat raw vegan diet and exercise every day, and then at the end say, "I'm just going to go out with my friends to a restaurant and see what happens, and then maybe have a drink and have a glass of wine or a beer and eat some pasta, pizza, whatever." Then you go the next day and you might not feel it immediately. Of course it's going to taste good; all foods taste great, you know so that's not an issue. But you'll wake up the next day and probably first thing you'll notice is your sleep won't be the same. You might even have terrible nightmares, terrible nightmares. You'll wake up the next day swearing that you'll never do this again. Then maybe you'll go for a run and then you'll notice that you're not doing as well as usual. But then by the evening you'll notice that you know what? You still want to go out and eat some of that food again. So even though in the morning you swore never to do it again, then you feel like eating that and that's not saying that necessarily that food is addictive, but definitely a stimulation. Then you find that your fruits and vegetables won't taste as good anymore. So then you can draw your own conclusions. But at least nobody is telling you what to do.

Kevin: So let's talk about some of those tricks and techniques that you think are kind of essential to really getting this down right for anyone.

Frederic: Well, I think there's many things you can do. The first thing would be to decide why you're doing this or what are some of your motivations? What are you trying to accomplish? Maybe you're an athlete; you want to improve your performance. Might be you want to lose some weight, so that's going to change a little bit the program that you're on. Most people have some body fat to lose, so it's good to know; because then if you under eat a little bit at first it's not going to be that much of a big deal. It's more going to affect your success in the long run.

For example when I first started ten years ago, I didn't have any weight to lose. In fact I was requiring a lot of calories so that's why it made it harder. So that's one thing to kind of know why you're doing this. What are some of your goals? Kind of define that in advance.

Then, I recommend a low fat diet. Of course I got that idea from Dr. Graham but even before that the hygienists were recommending that. A lot of the mainstream books, not totally mainstream but vegetarian books, were talking about the importance of eating lower fats. I think that makes a big difference. If you start it first you want to monitor what you eat, so there are different kinds of programs. I have a program I use on my phone where I can enter the different foods that I eat and it can give me all the ratios. There's a program on line... There's many different kinds of programs like that. This helps you understand how much you are eating. You shouldn't look at all the vitamins and so on. At first it shouldn't be your focus, more on just the calories and the fat intake and so on. That's one thing I would recommend, that someone keeps track at first.

Then you want to eat foods as much as possible in their natural state. I recommend that people learn some basic recipes, like smoothies... How to make a raw soup, maybe how to make a dressing that doesn't have any fat in it. How to make a three course dinner. Then people should also figure out how to, how much they need to eat in order to be satiated and not have to worry about food in between meals. That takes a little bit of practice.

Now I don't know how I could explain all of this in five minutes; that's a lot of information but there's all the books that people can check out to get the details. It's important to, I think it helps at first to keep track because people might be thinking they're eating enough but they're not or might be thinking that they're not eating a lot of fat but in fact they are. By actually having this sort of objective evaluation in the form of these softwares or programs you can get a better idea.

Kevin: And do you still track now?

Frederic: I actually still do. [laughs]

Kevin: Oh you do? OK.

Frederic: I don't always do it. I do it by period. I'm doing it now because I'm training more and I'm doing more exercise, so I realized that I was not eating enough calories a few weeks ago. So I started tracking again but I won't track it all year round. It's more like when I feel I need to.

Kevin: Right when you're tracking, when you're exercising. Why don't you tell me a little bit about the difference in energy levels when you're eating enough calories and when you're not, so someone who might be feeling the same way kind of knows that maybe this is what they're experiencing.

Frederic: Well one is just not having enough energy to exercise, but that can come from lack of sleep, that can come from dehydration, that can come from a lot of things. But if you're not eating enough calories over several days, you might not have the energy to exercise. There's a lot of things that go on like your body will burn body fat to compensate. It depends on how hard you exercise. Personally if I don't eat enough calories, I'll just be hungry, so that's what will happen. Suddenly all kinds of foods will tempt me. So that's how I know.

For more from this excerpt of the Rawkathon, plus 14 other amazing raw food interviews, please visit http://www.Rawkathon.com.

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