I’ve got a real special treat for you guys today. The other week I interviewed my good friend and renowned raw foodie, Tera Warner, and asked her to explain her thoughts on calorie counting, weight loss, and other common “diet tricks” people use to lose weight and better their health.
Tera is always a pleasure to speak with because she’s so positive, uplifting, and delivers amazing content. I know you’ll agree.
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Yuri: Hey, everyone, Yuri Elkaim here, author of Eating for Energy, and I’m excited today because I’ve got a good friend of mine, Tera Warner, on the phone. We’re gonna be talking about weight loss, counting calories, and getting maybe a little bit more metaphysical; maybe not metaphysical, but a little bit more, kind of like a different approach to looking at these topics as opposed to what we’re constantly hearing about in the sense of, you know, looking at the number of calories, looking at specific foods.
Tera’s gonna touch on a couple things that are a little bit different. If you don’t know Tera Warner, she’s done some amazing stuff, really, really, someone I resonate with within the raw community, and we can talk about that a little bit more during the call. Tera, I’m really happy to have you. Thanks for joining me.
Tera: Aw, thank you so much for having me. I’m honored.
Yuri: Definitely. Anytime, anytime. So, before we kinda jump into the questions here, why don’t you give our listeners a bit of your background and part of your journey?
Tera: Well, you mean my journey related to food and general life?
Yuri: Yeah, definitely. I think so. That’d be good.
Tera: Well, I remember the first time I actually started questioning what was on my plate. I was living out on a farm, and I come from small-town Alberta, Canada. So, we lived out in the mountains, and I remember we would eat, at the time, different kinds of game.
So, my stepfather at the time was a hunter. I remember asking questions when it would be suppertime. I wanted to know, “What is this animal that I’m eating?”
And I remember the answer would be something like, “Well, it’s pork.” “What’s a pork?” And as soon as they would get to the specific animal, I’d be like, “Oh, I don’t wanna eat a pig.” And I remember just, “It’s venison.” “Well, what is it really?”
So, those are the earliest times I remember questioning it, and pretty much as soon as I left home, I was really drawn to the vegetarian diet, partly because I thought it was something that would keep an extra ten pounds off my body permanently, to be honest. Vanity is sometimes a motivator. But then some were ethical reasons; it interested me and I just kept from there.
From about the age of eighteen, just kind of kept exploring health and well-being and food and nutrition, and it kind of led me to the raw-food path about eight years ago, where I remember being in the doorway of my apartment and my friend talking about raw food and I said, “That’s ridiculous, this idea of raw food,” but I tried it.
And after three days I was done; I just could not go back. I was a very productive person, so sometimes people are drawn to the raw-food diet because they have some kind of health condition that they’re trying to improve or they have low energy, but I was a single mom—was I pregnant or just had had a baby?—and I was very productive.
I was training for a marathon, I had two businesses, I really had no, I was not searching for anything; it was just out of curiosity. But after three days just the softness of my skin and this little change—you know, many of us know—I don’t know if it’s true for guys, but I know many of us women know this little bulge in our belly, like this little belly bulge we can’t seem to get rid of.
Well, it disappeared when I stopped eating things like grains and cereals, and I thought, This is the body; this is the body that I… Whenever I look down at my skin, I just wonder, you know, you kinda look at yourself and think, This is just not me; I don’t recognize myself?
Well, after three days on raw food, I was like, That’s the body. So, I just never went back, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
Yuri: That’s awesome, man. What’s so cool about raw foods is that, you know, you experience such a benefit in such a short amount of time. As you just mentioned, just after three days you could barely even, not even think about going back to the way you ate before, so that’s pretty cool.
Tera: Well, and what your thing is is really important, because so many people—we’ve received just way too much information about food. It is coming in at us from all angles, from the media, from our grandparents.
I see my kids come home with these food pyramids about what they’re supposed to be eating, and I just wanna pull my hair out. So, it’s come in at us from all different directions for a very long time; so much so that most people are actually operating with a bunch of circuitry. It’s just stuff they’ve heard and it’s there.
They pick it up; they hear someone else talk about Omega-3 fatty acids, so then they start talking about Omega-3 fatty acids. And they hear someone else talking about, “Well, you need protein,” so then they start telling everybody else, “Well, you need protein.”
This stuff just gets picked up and passed around almost by osmosis, social osmosis and we don’t even actually realize half of the things we’re saying and if we do realize them, we don’t know that they’re actually based on any fact. What I love about the raw-food diet is that I think it’s one of the truly best opportunities for people to just ditch the pile of nutritional manuals and, I wanna say nutritional jargon.
Stop it with the protein. It does not matter about the carbohydrates. Just pick up a green smoothie for a couple days; stick some cucumber, avocado down the pipes, and after three days tell me how you feel.
Look at your body, because people get so addicted; they’ve been so used to being fed data about food that they’re hungry for it. And when we do workshops, I just get so many questions, so many questions.
“Well, what about this? Well, should you combine strawberries with bananas? Well, what about this?” And I just say, “Listen, let’s talk about this. your body is the most beautiful messenger you have, and at all times it is communicating with you about what’s going on inside.”
So, your energy, the softness of your skin, the brightness of your eyes, your attitude, your general outlook on life, how you sleep, your libido, your digestion, all these, there are so many health indicators that body is flagging before you, but because we’re just kind of stuck in a rut and running on circuitry on food instead of being taught to actually observe what’s going on in our body, like digestion or elimination, then we overlook some of the simplest things.
And what I love about raw food—and some people are kind of maybe disappointed in this because I just really don’t engage in nutritional jargon because I’ve observed that when I just eat what makes sense from a biological, anatomical, just tastes really good perspective, then I see—and just natural; so, the closer it comes to this food as it would exist in its natural state, the more likely I am to be interested in it, and then I eat those foods, I feel amazing; I have more energy.
Those are my flags; these are the little validating steps in the path that keep me moving forward, and as long as I notice and experience and observe improvement, well then, no nutritional pyramid is gonna change my mind about the fact that what I’m doing really makes me feel good.
Yuri: Absolutely. I have a friend in San Diego who’s a former athlete, basketball player, and he teaches basketball players how to better their stuff, you know, their game and everything, and he just transitioned to more of a raw-food diet about two weeks ago.
And within, again, like, two to three days, he’s just like, “I’m never going back.” He feels amazing and it’s just incredible. And just to kind of mention or kind of pick up what you finished with there, when you feel amazing and you’re just eating, you know, just eat food, you’re not stressing about protein and carbs and fats and stuff, you feel better.
And I think sometimes people, they look at, “Okay, well, am I getting enough protein or B-12 or something else?” Again, don’t worry about that stuff too much. If you’re feeling good and you’re looking good and you’re performing well, those are, as you mentioned, great indicators that things are working as they’re supposed to.
Tera: Yeah, I sit on the end of my chair and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And the other thing is that so often, these people, before transitioning to a diet, when they were eating burgers and French fries, were not wondering if they were getting enough protein or vitamin B-12.
They never questioned to what degree the foods that they were eating were actually robbing them of the vitamins and nutrition that they needed. So, it’s so strange that sometimes as we move toward a natural, even healthier diet, our obsession and worry factor increases, and so much of that has to do with media and marketing and what we’ve been taught we were supposed to have.
So, anytime we try and go against the sociocultural grain and do something that most people are not doing, it creates a certain degree of insecurity. It actually takes guts to do what the majority of people are not doing. So, yes, your own observation and results are kind of the validation you need to keep going, because even doctors, most doctors don’t get that much education in nutrition.
Yuri: Yeah, definitely. All right, so let’s move to the whole topic of counting calories and weight loss in general.
This is a big thing from things like Weight Watchers to, you know, the big common weight-loss programs that are saying, “You’re only allowed to have this many calories from protein or this many calories from fat or this many carbs or this many calories in general.”
I think, obviously, I understand your take on calorie counting, for you, why is calorie counting a problem in general, not even for just weight loss?
Tera: Well, you know, calories counting for me is kind of like scale watching, is kind of like body obsession in general. So, first of all, I think just choosing food naturally—I mean, what I wanna is this, and this might not be the answer you want, but I just wanna say, calories counting isn’t okay because it keeps people in an obsessive relationship with their bodies and with their food.
That’s the answer I wanna give you, but in terms of choosing food based on calories, it has nothing to do with its nutritional value. There are days when I may only consume a couple hundred calories, and then there may be days when I consume thousands of calories.
I have no clue; I don’t watch it. I have no idea, but I know I feel great. I know some days I actually want more food and some days I don’t.
Whoever invented the calorie, you know, or decided to measure food that way, it’s very interesting, but this is it for me. It keeps people trapped in an obsessive relationship with their bodies and with their food.
Trying to explain why 
