I'm excited to finally launch SpaTravelGuy.com in the next month or, as it will be the first spa lifestyle magazine for men, and I'll finally be able to pull together all my spa travel and reviews into one place.   To prepare for the dive into spa and wellness living, I've been doing a lot of research into raw and organic foods, including an amazing weeklong stay at Living Light, a raw vegan chef training institute in Fort Bragg, CA (I'll post a video of that trip later).   The raw food lifestyle has been amazing, as I've found so many great raw/vegan restos in and around Oakland, and I've also learned to make a huge assortment of raw soups, salads, wraps, nori rolls, pates, nut milks and cheeses, green smoothies, desserts, etc.  It's REALLY not about eating lots of carrots and salads -- you can eat an amazing assortment of gourmet raw foods if you just know how to do it. 

Another big component of the raw food lifestyle is juice cleansing, with many proponents taking on 30-90 day juice fasts (or juice feasts, a protocol outlined at juicefeasting.com which includes drinking 2-3x more juice than you would on a juice fast).  A juice fast/feast/cleanse is a common way to detox and transition to a raw food lifestyle.

Now I love bacon cheeseburgers and ostrich tacos and dirty martinis too much to ever go raw completely, but I've definitely learned that raw and whole food can cure or balance almost any disease you can throw at it, including obesity, diabetes, and cancer.  Destination spas are basically places that use whole food, exercise, and bodywork to facilitate the body's own transformation back to health.  So before I launch the site, I thought I'd walk the talk and do my own juice fast of at least 30 days to prepare.

I'll do a weekly video blog and talk about my own results - here's the first one: