One thing that I have found on my personal journey on a fruit diet, is that the more I travel along the fruity path, the less I seem to need to eat to maintain both my vitality and my energy requirements.

When I first started out on a fruit diet, I found that I needed to eat quite a bit of fruit and also the more concentrated raw foods such as Avocados and dried fruit to feel comfortable and to maintain my body weight.

I have great faith in the body and its great inherent knowlege and wisdom, inspite of what us humans may do to it!

Therefore I guess that my body always knew what it was doing and maybe there was a need for more fruit to stabilise or slow the rate of elimination as I first adopted a fruit diet. Also I believe that my body could have needed more fruit as I was not necessarily assimilating at an optimum rate, because I still had some internal intestinal cleansing to do.

I also strongly believe that the body has an optimum weight. This weight may vary depending on age and body type. Also for an individual their optimum weight may change at various times in their lifetime to reflect different stages in their lives.

When many people first start out on a fruit diet, they may find that they loose weight. This seems to be a concern for those of us who are already lean and do not particularly want to loose any more kilos.

However , I believe that the body does really know what it is doing (as long as it is given the right environment in which to heal and cleanse). So we may loose weight as part of the body's clearing out and general house cleaning.

I do believe that as long as we have a positive attitude and we are feeding our bodies with great quality raw fresh fruit, then we will never starve or go below a weight that is dangerous for our health. As I think I may have mentioned before;the body really does know what it is doing.

The real turn about in cleansing and assimilation came for me, personally, after I finished a 52 day Orange Juice mono diet. I had not intentionally embarked on this diet to improve my assimilation of fruit. But after I had finished the mono diet, I just felt how fruit was doing me so much more good.

It was not something that I thought about consciously, it was more of a feeling ; something that I experienced deep inside.

After my mono diet, I found that I needed to eat so much less fruit, and especially the more concentrated forms of fruit, to maintain my weight.

I think that I may say that the less I eat, then the more energy that I have and the better I feel.

This only really kicked in for me after my cleansing experience on Orange Juice and the cleansing period may be different for each of us; the mills of the gods do indeed grind slowly; but the cleansing period is exactly that- a period.

It does not last forever, and those that have been on a fruit diet for a while find that as the elimination ceases then so comes upon them the most wonderful energy and endurance. Arnold Ehret was a real pioneer in his views that what we eat does not give us energy, rather the removal of blockages does.

I know, personally, that I have the most endurance and the most energy when I eat lightly or I am on a juice or mono diet.

When we eat more than our body really needs to function at its optimum, then we have less energy as our vital forces are needed for digestion and to deal with the excess of food. Fruit may be less taxing on the system than other foodstuffs, but an excess of it still makes for less than optimum health.

When we first start on a fruit diet, we may need to eat more fruit, simply to ensure that we do not eliminate too much or to make sure that we do not feel 'hungry' and therefore are tempted to eat foods other than fruit.

This whole fruit diet, is such a continual learning thing, and I still enjoy discovering new things every day.

One thing however that seems to be common to all the long lived societies of this world is that they ate far less than the people in many modern Western societies.

So maybe eat less.. but keep growing!!!