I started experimenting with a raw food diet a year-and-a-half ago. I went off the wagon some when the weather was cold, but I’ve been very “high raw” for the past several months and I love it. I never dreamed I could feel so good that I don’t even want any cooked food. If I wanted it, I’d have it; this isn’t a religion. And I don’t know what the future (especially the winter) holds. All I know is that right now, I’m ecstatic to be nourishing myself is such a lively fashion.

When I turned fifty, even though I was a vegan and exercised and did yoga and all the stuff I thought I was supposed to do, I could definitely see the bottom fall out of the youth-and-vitality thing. I did a lot of research, even hooking up with some of the raw folk in NYC, and it all helped. It resulted, in fact, in a book: Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body & Revitalize Your Spirit. But I wasn’t ready to go raw then. Too many other paths called to me, the mega-supplement people and Ayurveda, telling me that as a Vata, I shouldn’t eat much of anything raw. I still respect the many paths that brought me here, but I have to say that, if I keep on keeping on with this, I expect my sixties to be the best decade of my life. And I expect my seventies to be pretty darned good.

It’s not just the physical well-being either: I’m so happy. I feel appropriately sad when losses come or disappointments happen, but my day-to-day default is joy. It’s such a wonderful way to live. I do the other joy work, of course (meditation, prayer, spiritual reading, journaling, etc., etc.), but I’ve done that for decades, and I only feel this content now that my brain is running on such clean fuel.

Today I went with William, who’s eating largely raw as well this summer, to the big farmers’ 

market in Union Square, an 8-mile walk. We got tons of fab produce and a tomato plant to grow in our NYC apartment. Then we had lunch at Adelina’s (the menu is half raw and half veg-Italian — very good), and stopped in at One Lucky Duck (some of its products pictured here) for a sushi mat and hemp protein power. Tonight I sliced a huge platter of heirloom tomatoes and our dinner was a tomato buffet on the bed. I’m not sure life gets much better.