- Eating for Energy Interview -

The Importance of Eating a Raw Food Alkaline Diet

with Yuri Elkaim, BPHE, CK, RHN - Author, Eating for Energy

Chris Lopez: Hi, this is Chris Lopez and on the call today is my friend, fellow Torontonian, holistic nutritionist, and nutrition expert Yuri Elkaim. Yuri, how are you today?

Yuri Elkaim: Well thank you, how are you doing?

Chris Lopez: I’m great. I want to get this thing started because I know you’ve got a lot of interesting things to talk about, so why don’t you tell people about your site and how you got into holistic nutrition and the whole health, fitness, and wellness thing.

Yuri Elkaim: Yeah, for sure. Well, I’ve been pretty active my entire life. Playing professional soccer, from a young age, was my goal. I was playing soccer from the minute I could walk and over the years I got to pursue my dream of playing professional soccer.

So I was always very active, always working out, always into fitness and because of that I got into kinesiology and health sciences at University. It just seemed to be a really good segway for me. So I went to the University of Toronto for 4 years and really enjoyed my time there.

When I was in school, I thought I may as well get into personal training so that I could actually apply some of the information I was learning. That’s when I first started working with people. It was during my first year of University. I was starting to see some great results, in myself physically, and helped people achieve some amazing breakthroughs.

At the same time I thought I was eating a healthy diet. I was brought up on bread and pasta, the typical kind of Western Diet. I thought I was fairly healthy. I was taking nutrition courses at the University level, some pretty basic stuff.

Then I went overseas to play soccer in France and didn’t understand why I always had to take a nap in the afternoon or why my body was always tired. My performance could have been a little better. When I look back on those days and I look at what I was eating, it’s no wonder I had to nap.

I would have cereal for breakfast, pasta for lunch, baguettes, bread, lots of milk, and salad now and then. These are foods that sports nutrition textbooks tell us to eat! They say that you need carbohydrates and that you need to replenish your glycogen stores, so eat lots of bread and pasta. I began to feel a big disconnect between what we were being taught and the way my body felt.

So, when I finished playing soccer I came back to Toronto and I decided that there was something else I needed to do with my life. I want to empower people to live a healthy active life, just like you, Chris. One of my first orders of business was to get my nutrition under control. I dove straight into holistic nutrition because it was the total opposite of what formal academics and Dietitians were talking about. I was exposed to some unbelievable stuff.

In just one year long intensive learning experience, holistic nutrition opened my eyes to an entire different world of nutrition that I had no idea about. I just needed to write about it. Eating for Energy, the book that I wrote is really just my experience and transition from where I used to be to where I nowadays. It’s what I learned along the way.

I looked at what the healthiest and most energetic people in the world were doing, what works in nature, and how we can apply it in our own lives. So I started off in fitness and then I realized that fitness was one thing, but if we are not eating well then it’s going to be a very tough road. When you incorporate eating well into being active, the results can be really profound.

Chris Lopez: That’s great. There’s a lot of good information there. I think one of the best things that you touched on there was how you went from performance to actually learning about physiology and kinesiology and then going into nutrition. That just goes to show you that being healthy encompasses and entire lifestyle: the performance aspect, the fitness aspect, and the nutrition aspect as well. Everything has to be clicking to live a healthy life.

Yuri Elkaim: Totally. I tell people nowadays that you can be fit but unhealthy. I’ve always been fairly thin and strong, and gaining muscle has never really been a real priority. People always told me that I would always be thin and slender and fit.

But there is a big difference between healthy and fit. It’s dangerous to be slim and unhealthy because thin people don’t necessarily pay attention to what they eat as much as other people who are struggling with their weight.

Sometimes I tell people, if they want to lose weight, you may be in a better position because you are forced to pay attention to what you are putting in your body. People who don’t have to worry about their weight may eat McDonald’s food and still maintain a decent body shape, but what is happening inside their body is really what counts. That’s what people are not seeing until later on in life when things start to go wrong.

Chris Lopez: Great point Yuri. Ok, so your book is called Eating for Energy and it can be found at eatingforenergy.ca if anybody wants to check out the book first hand. In your book, you talk about the quality of our food supply and how it has diminished over the past 50 or 60 years. What in your opinion is the cause of that? You also touch upon the importance of eating organic foods over commercially produced foods. Why is eating organic important? What is your opinion in the lack of quality in our food supply?

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