Living on Live Foods, by Alissa Cohen, is the book my wife and I have been following for the past 25 days. Alissa Cohen is apparently a pretty big figure in the world of live food diets these days. She provides scores of recipes for live food meals. Some are so good you could slap your mamma (no offense, Mom); others are so sub par that we’ve cringed at the amount of money and food spent preparing a dish that offends the palate.

Since we began this diet/lifestyle on August 6th I have been steadily losing some weight; not much, mind you, but enough to notice the difference. Unfortunately, I have also been losing strength. I feel weaker. I notice it most when I play basketball at the rec center and when my whole body feels like mush and doesn’t want to move. I am still reserving judgment. I’ve been told that detoxing can take awhile (especially when you have excess fat to burn – darn root beer belly!). It’s possible that my weakness and occasional sluggish feelings stem from the detoxifying process. Then again, I could just need more good protein and fat.

Here’s what you miss out on with the Live Food lifestyle: milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, sour cream, beef, pork, chicken, fish, venison, baked breads, and various other wonderful goodies. My mother-in-law’s personal research is beginning to reveal the possible need to re-include meats and dairy. We need certain vitamins that we seem to only get from eating meat, such as Vitamin D and Vitamin B12. Sure, you can get Vitamin D from sitting out in the sun, but who has the time or the willpower to sit out in 100 degree weather just to get a little bitty vitamin? We also need a certain level of cholesterol in our bodies which is apparently difficult to maintain without some amount of fat in our food. We obviously can’t eat avocados until we burst just to get a fraction of the fat we could quickly get with a slab of yummy beef. Did I say yummy? Well, pretend I didn’t.

Tonight we will have hamburger patties in an attempt to raise our pathetically low cholesterol levels. And for the love of everything sacred, please don’t believe all the addle-brained hype about lowering your cholesterol. Scientific studies are currently so conflicting that some say you need to eat fatty foods to maintain healthy levels of cholesterol while others are saying eat only lean cuts of meat to lower your levels. My wife, in her God-given nutritional wisdom, believes that some amount of fatty meats are necessary, and that the truly bad levels of cholesterol come from eating processed and chemically enhanced foods.

Yes, my friends, that is correct: Whataburger and Sonic hamburgers do not constitute a healthy dose of meat, bread, and vegetables (I know – real shocker). They still taste really good, but it is junk food (fake food) that raises harmful cholesterol. I don’t mean to come across as preachy. I still crave all those tasty chemicals too. I’m not judging anyone for what they eat. But I do think that we become responsible for the knowledge we come across. It is the difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is living with a lack of information. Stupidity is making the same decisions over and over after hearing how they are bad for you and expecting to get a different result than everyone else in America.