Why the Saying "Moderation in All Things" Will Ruin Your Health & Happiness
The other day I read something Paramhansa Yogananda wrote in his Praecepta 3 book about nutrition that I must say that I disagree with in a BIG way. Just keep in mind I love his book "Autobiography of a Yogi" and many of his spiritual teachings overall.
As you read further I think you’ll clearly see how even a highly evolved Soul (in my opinion) like Yogananda can completely miss the mark on VERY important issues.
And make sure you stick with me to the end as this article is loaded with lots of breakthrough youth restoring and raw food ideas that could change your life. Plus there’s a quick, one question poll at the end that I would love if you would participate in.
Here is the quote I’m talking about.
One of the greatest rules of health is, "Moderation in all things." This applies to every phase of living, that the necessary balance may be reached and kept.
Yogananda, Paramhansa Swami. Your Praecepta: Step III (p. 169). Kindle Edition.
On the surface this sounds like good advice but when you put it into practice things go downhill from there rapidly. Below is a note to myself that I typed in my Kindle right after reading that quote.
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100% Bullshit. This kind of thinking would allow me to eat chocolate cake once a week. This moderation would poison me and I'd get instantly addicted to cooked food by being moderate in all things. Same goes with Divine Law. Shouldn't be moderate with your morals either. 1.21.23
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How far do we go to be balanced in all things?
Is it ok to lie to your spouse once a month to balance out your honesty the rest of the month? After all, everyone knows that it’s important to be moderate in all things.
Would I be happier overall if I ate one slice of chocolate cake a week?
Not a chance!
Why?
Below I list several reasons why.
Because it really doesn't taste that great compared to raw food anyway. Yet by eating one kind of cooked food (chocolate cake) it will automatically increase my desire for more and more cooked food. That chocolate cake would act like a gateway drug and quickly pull me into desiring other cooked foods.
I know this is exactly how it works because I struggled with trying to be moderate on cooked food in the late 1990’s. Just one cooked food meal per month and my 100% raw food experiment was soon over. I tried this over and over again and was immediately seduced back into eating the drug called cooked food in higher and higher quantities.
When I was "balanced" eating 65% raw food and 35% cooked food I was less happy and far less healthy than I was after I went 100% raw.
Not to mention that I would be less happy because I am putting chaotic death vibrations into my body from that chocolate cake. Raw fruits and vegetables have life and happiness energy in them.
When you cook food you remove the happiness, life and LIGHT ENERGY from the food. By eating 100% raw I have experienced what I call happiness from the cellular level. Through trial and error I learned that the more cooked food I ate, the less happy I became.
In fact, I found that eating cooked food also puts psychological burdens on you. It literally contributes to psychological complexes. Yes, just by eating 100% raw you can become a better person mentally. For instance, you may start to feel that you have a much better handle on anger if that is an issue for you.
Also when you eat cooked food you're less able to handle severe emotional traumas that life can bring you.
It would also start to degrade my health by putting in the wrong or broken building materials to create the cells in my body. Just one slice of cake per week would actually make a big negative dent in my overall health compared to eating 100% raw.
Plus eating chocolate cake is highly mucus forming and will lead to me having mucus deposited in my lungs just so that I can be "moderate in all things." By being moderate I then will start to lose advantages in life and sports due to a lack of deep breathing ability.
And by eating that one piece of chocolate cake a week I would lose another one of my raw food superpowers. And that is the fact that I don't get infections. By eating mucus forming food I also open myself up to getting infections again like I used to in my cooked food days.
What if I only ate something many people consider to be healthy... a bowl of brown rice daily and kept everything else raw? I already know from experience that it would reduce my overall happiness level. And it would soon start corrupting the cellular structure of my body.
I've heard about this process from some of my friends who went back to eating just some cooked food after years of being raw. They always end up telling me how much worse they felt once they reintroduced cooked food into their diets.
Why should I be "moderate" when I already love eating all raw foods? I've long ago stopped needing any willpower whatsoever to stay raw. Does a lion need willpower to stick to just eating antelope and other animals it kills? For someone who is no longer addicted to cooked food, being moderate or not sticking to 100% raw would be extremely destructive.
In fact, an experienced raw foodist knows that eating cooked food is the equivalent of taking drugs. Cooked food many times is a drug in the way it alters behavior. But drugs also damage cellular structures of the body as does cooked food.
In addition, eating cooked food is the main reason people show signs of aging.
Is a rabbit being too strict for only eating raw plant foods provided to him naturally in his environment? If he was given raw meat to eat once a week would it be the right thing for him to eat so that "balance may be reached and kept"? Would he even have any desire at all to eat raw meat?
What if it he was given Kentucky Fried Chicken? Should he eat that to stay fashionably balanced?
Doesn’t make any sense for a rabbit to eat meat or KFC?
So why should it make any sense for humans to eat foods not natural to the human diet?
Can anyone in the world make a scientific argument that chocolate cake or even cooked brown rice is a food natural to the human species? I think not.
We are primates and are frugivores by design. We definitely don’t have the proper biology to be omnivores. Yes we can put anything in our mouths but it doesn’t mean that food is right for us.
Would a lion really be happier if he ate a hot fudge sundae once a week? We know for sure that is not part of his natural carnivorous diet. And almost certainly that would make him sicker and weaker overall... even if he did start enjoying his weekly hot fudge sundae and got addicted to it like most humans are addicted to ice cream.
People eat insane diets and have for thousands of years. Just because it's an ancestral diet does not make it the diet humans were designed to eat. We most certainly have not EVOLVED to eat cooked food. Just look at your many thousands of obese neighbors and I’m sure you’ll realize it’s true.
Even moderately taking in poison will make you sick almost immediately and it will gradually if not rapidly ruin your life and dramatically lower your potential for beauty, health, happiness and success in life.
What if you asked an alcoholic to take a drink once a month so that he could be moderate in all things? We all know what would happen there 99% of the time. That one drink a month would soon lead to one drink a week and then drinking multiple drinks per day and hence a relapse into full blown alcoholism.
Imagine someone who never took any drugs decided to take a snort of cocaine once a month because she wanted to be moderate in all things. Is that not one of the most ridiculous things you’ve ever heard?
When it comes to poisons, addictive substances and toxic habits the best solution is to be rid of them 100% as soon as you can. You can’t be moderate with these things. And I most definitely classify cooked food as poison and a highly addictive substance.
Please realize that by continuing to eat cooked food you are destroying yourself. And for no good reason since raw food tastes delicious and will satisfy all of your cravings. Having a few good recipes is really helpful in this department.
The concept of "moderation in all things" is used only by addicts or people who don't know any better.
Please do put in the comments if you think there are specific situations in which the concept of “moderation in all things” would actually be helpful. Though obviously it can’t be “in all things” because I’ve already disproven that saying when it comes to diet.
Yogananda probably didn't know that he was a cooked food addict just like the majority of humanity. He didn't realize how extremely damaging cooked food is to the body and even to the spirit.
Yes most people who go raw notice it's much easier to connect to Divine Love and God when their body is more electrically conducive due to eating only raw foods.
Hard to believe that Yogananda fell for this. Though I do understand part of his reasoning.
I read in a biography on Yogananda that he was once invited to a raw food group to eat a raw meal. They asked him to speak after the meal but at first he refused. Eventually he relented and told them something like this. This is the worst tasting meal I ever ate in my life. And if you don't change your ways and start eating more nutritious foods that one of you will die within 30-days.
(Or something to that effect, I’m just going off of memory.)
Well it turns out that one person from that group did die shortly after he made his prediction. And supposedly it was due to malnutrition.
But to blame the death on raw food in general or to blame their lack of food prep ability on raw food is a mistake. Yes if you do a Raw Food Diet like most raw food no-clue-roos teach, you will eventually start to become malnourished.
And some people are very extreme by sticking to only eating fruit (Fruitarian Diet) and their health downfall is much faster due to an extreme lack of nutrients. But one can become malnourished just as much on a carnivore, keto or the Standard American Death Diet if you don't find a way to get all of your daily nutrients.
If you're eating a fruit only raw diet then yes that is extreme or unbalanced in the sense that you are not getting a full complement of nutrients. However eating your natural diet is not extreme in the least. It is the balanced way of eating. You don't balance yourself by regularly eating poison.
And make no mistake, Yogananda did specifically say he was against the "FAD" of eating an entire (100%) Raw Food Diet. That is stated a bit earlier in his Praecepta 3 book. Though I wouldn't call the Creators plan for our nutrition a fad.
As far as I’m concerned cooked food like rice is the fad. And what wild animal outside of the influence of humans drinks milk as an adult? We’re the only ones.
One should not become faddish in the matter of diet, and make sudden and complete opposition to that to which the body had become accustomed. This is especially true in regard to an entire raw food diet. Certain foods do not lend themselves well to raw consumption and assimilation at this state of anatomical evolution. This is particularly true of raw starches, which seem to need a certain amount of cooking to aid in the breaking down process.
Yogananda, Paramhansa Swami. Your Praecepta: Step III (p. 168). Kindle Edition.
What Yogananda didn't understand is that starches like rice, bread and pasta are not human food. We can eat them of course, but it causes us health problems.
The human body can only use simple sugars like those found in fruit anyway. Hence if you eat a starch it must be broken down into simple sugars before the body can use it. Hence the body wastes all sorts of energy in the process of breaking down complex carbohydrates into simple sugars.
If you have to cook a food to eat it that means it is not a food designed for human consumption. It’s that simple.
Why Yogananda did not look to what animals do in Nature is beyond me.
Applying this concept of course is under ideal circumstances where all the raw foods you need to eat a nutrient complete diet are available to you in your area of the world. If I couldn't get a certain nutrient in my raw diet and had to get it from cooked food then I most certainly would eat that cooked food. This is why I do eat one Brazil nut per day to meet my body's need for selenium.
(NOTE: As far as I know you can't get a truly raw Brazil nut here in the United States and most of the world. Even if it is unroasted it is still heated to high temperatures multiple times during processing in the jungles of the Amazon. They do this because the high humidity would quickly make the Brazil nuts moldy if they didn’t.)
If Yogananda were alive today I could prove to him that eating all raw is not only nutrient complete and the most healing diet on the planet. But I could also make him some recipes he would adore like my Anticraver Secret Recipe (which you can find how to make unlimited variations of it inside of my LEN group).
Though raw foods themselves are super delicious on their own. You don't need to put a date or a durian into a recipe to make it delicious. In fact, that would be fruit abuse.
And the longer you go raw the more your taste buds adapt to eating and enjoying raw foods as mono meals. Like how I now love eating raw lacinato kale as a mono meal when I used to dislike it even when mixed into a recipe.
And Yogananda was very fond of eating raw fruits and vegetables and absolutely recommended his students to eat lots of them. He spoke about the importance of eating them all the time in his Praecepta discourses. But he was still under the illusion that humans needed to eat grains and dairy as well.
Hence he had to face the dire consequences in his own life of being moderate in all things.
Which if he really thought about it I believe he would disagree with that principle in most other areas of his life.
What were the consequences he suffered?
1. He was overweight for much of his adult life.
2. He very much showed all the signs of aging that come from eating even a vegetarian cooked food diet. You can see in his pictures the poor quality of his skin as he got older.
3. He is documented having health problems later in his life.
4. He passed on at the young age of 59
However, one can very much get all the nutrients they need on a Raw Food Diet. I’ve been eating all raw now for over 21 years.
I teach my raw students how to eat raw in a way that is nutrient complete. Full details of what I eat in a day can be found inside my Light Energy Nutrition (LEN) group.
Plus there is a handy dandy resource guide with all the foods that are high in the hard to find nutrients in a high carb and lower fat based Raw or Live Food Diet.
There are about 8 nutrients (selenium is one of them) that are harder to find on a high carb Raw Food Diet and you'll learn what those nutrients are and how to easily get them into your diet with raw foods inside of LEN.
Light Energy Nutrition (LEN)
A note to Yogananda fans and or students:
The only reason I even mentioned Yogananda as having said this quote is because is because I wanted to demonstrate via example that you cannot necessarily believe everything a guru says is automatically true on every topic.
There are plenty other famous people (like success lecturer Jim Rohn) who have stated this false concept of "moderation in all things" in regards to diet. Long ago I heard Jim Rohn give the exact same bad advice when it comes to diet. And of course he displayed all the classic signs of cooked food damage on his body due to his moderation of eating cooked food and ice cream every now and then.
I'm sorry but when I hear “moderation in all things” it sounds like the justification an addict makes about his addictions.
Yes I do generally follow Yogananda's spiritual teachings or similar but as you can see I do not follow his advice on nutrition because I know better due to over 26 years of experience with eating raw. And the first five years of trying to eat 100% raw but failing over 30 times to stick to 100% raw.
Had I known then what I know now it would have been easy to stay all raw. The right knowledge is so very important to succeed longterm on the Raw Food Diet.
These days it's much easier and more practical to eat a full and nutrient complete Raw Food Diet than in Yogananda's times of the early to mid 20th century. With the advent of supermarkets and fresh produce all year round, a Raw Food Diet is possible for humans who do not live in their natural tropical environments.
Remember that if you want to keep your body perpetually young… the first prerequisite step is eating a nutrient complete Raw Food Diet. Each unnecessary bit of cooked food is breaking down your body and mind while making you look older and uglier.
If you’re truly serious about beauty then following our natural frugivorous diet is the only choice you have.
Please let me know what you think in the comments section below. I’d love to hear what your thoughts.
And please participate in the quick poll below.
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I agree that "moderation" shouldn't be used as justification for bad habits.
But drinking a literal ton of water will kill you (supposing it would fit inside you), so I guess there should be a limit even to the good stuff, hence the need for some moderation.
Also, sometimes you need to compromise, so again you have to find your balance, weighing pros and cons.
However, one should never choose evil "in moderation", what is bad is something that must not be chosen. As for what is good... there is another saying that says "better can be the enemy of good", meaning that sometimes, while trying to find better, you lose the little good you have. Some good things you can never have too much of, such as love and wisdom, but other good things do require some moderation, like, for example, light is a good thing, it enables us to see, but too much light can be blinding.
So, if Yogananda was refering to moderation as a wider philosophy, he wasn't necessarily wrong, but regarding diet, you are absolutely right, "everything in moderation" is terrible advice, especially since the limits are not specified.
Agreed, and shared! Raw vegan and vegan cooked for 17 years now, almost 18. More all raw period longer than ever these days. If I eat cooked its only brocoli or cauliflower basically in moderation at worst.