I tried the Hallelujah Diet

Strange diets have long been a-buzz on the internet. Celebrity diets and ‘miracle pills’ aside, you can only go so far on Facebook nowadays without someone’s pal preaching about Juice Plus or Herbalife and how it’s changed their lives. I myself watched ‘Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead’, a documentary about juicing, and ended up buying a £100 Nutribullet blender. I’m still convinced that I have been mind controlled. Somehow.

With all this hype, people just keep going further and further in the name of health and nutrition: blending everything and adding protein powders and superfood supplements and all sorts of other things. Yes, these do have a lot of positive implications on paper, but it made me wonder what kind of person could actually live off blended kale and spinach before they started to go slightly insane.

After trolling through some seriously strange diet regimes (like the Shangri la Diet, which advocates drinking oil  in between meals to keep yourself full and Breathatarianism) which asserts that human beings can live on simply breathing and sunlight alone, like plants (spoilers; you can’t) – I finally settled on the Hallelujah diet.

The Hallelujah Diet was created by Rev. George Malkmus and his missus, Rhonda. It prescribes what they calls ‘God’s Diet’, from Genesis 1:29, you only eat what Jesus would have eaten; specifically pre-Noah’s ark.
God essentially said;

“I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.

Great. No bother big man. Every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth sounds pretty generous. Until you try and live solely off it. Then it doesn’t seem so generous.

The rev claims to have cured himself from cancer through the diet and is claiming to be able to naturally cure most ailments through it. As much as it seems unbelievable, there is a lot of scientific backing that eating mostly (if not all) raw fruit and veg, can have massively positive results if it’s done properly. So, I was willing to listen with an open mind.

Then it got weird.

I mean, really, it’s no new concept, it’s essentially just raw veganism. The diet commandments, if you will, told me that I had to eat 85 per cent raw and unprocessed plant-based food, and the other 15 per cent I could cook. Apparently, toxic meat and meat products etc. get ‘stuck’ in your body (emphasis on the ‘apparently’) and by removing these products, you can essentially restore your body to absolute perfection and live a happy, healthy life for… wait for it…

Rev and Rhonda claim that, with strict adherence to this diet, human beings should be able to live for over 900 years.

“This diet was for the long haul, as man lived over 900 years, even after the Fall.  God designed man to live even longer; had it not been for sin, this diet would have worked well for even longer than 900 years.  We refer to this diet as the Genesis 1:29 diet.  It was the perfect diet for man in his perfect environment.

Ah, OK, I get it now, you’re just making stuff up. This would have been much easier if you had thrown the crazy at me straight away. So now I have to work under the premise that God is real (fine), he wrote a number one bestselling biography that details a diet plan (okay), that diet plan is magic (whatever), and it will make me near immortal (bring me Dorian Grey). Fantastic, the carrots seem more appealing already.

Now, I work in a coffee shop that sells literally the most delicious cakes I’ve ever tasted, and I am a coffee and cake kinda gal. So i’m not going to lie, going to work in the morning was torture.

I found out early on that the diet had a lot of contradictions. “Every seed on the face of the earth?” Said I. “Any pulses or beans?” Said I. “Why I’m quite sure that a coffee bean is a bean is it not? Jesus would have had coffee. So I shall have coffee” Nope. Apparently not. No caffeine whatsoever on the plan. So I decided to go decaf, convincing myself that decaf coffee beans grow in the ground.

Then I find out i’m not allowed any soy products either. I found this out half way through choking down a decaf soy latte which tasted like liquid cardboard. I was so unhappy. Fucked it already. I was pretty damned sure that coffee beans would have been fine. I found myself muttering “fuck you, Jesus” a lot. Sorry big man, I know it’s not your fault, but you seem like a forgiving kinda guy. I stuck to herbal teas, which were allowed, but totally not the same.

Then lunch came. I opened the staff fridge to half of an entire coffee and walnut cake. With tears in my eyes I declined. No thank you kind fridge, I will be eating only unprocessed fruit and veg today. I was beginning to envy the Shangri La diet. I would definitely down a pint of oil for some cake right now.

I was saved by the shining beacon of light that is FUEL, the juice shop.

I had a Carribean Green with some extra supplement powder things (because apparently that’s allowed?! Like Jesus ever had powdered wheatgrass… but whatever, i’m over it) and it was surprisingly good. I would usually opt for something sweet and packed with yoghurt and fruit, not the best but not the worst, now I was drinking some pretty healthy shit and it tasted good.

It also filled me up… for about an hour. I was all happy and satiated and then when I got off my lunch, I just crashed. I thought I was going to die. I nipped out and bought some fruit and some more smoothies to keep me going, but the bill for my lunch was now well over £10.

On the way home, I popped into the supermarket to get some awesome vegan things to make awesome raw vegan stuff with. It was a lot more difficult than anticipated. I love cooking and I wanted to challenge myself with this but… not this much. I had a big salad with mango dressing and then decided to make a strange banana bread hybrid with my 15 per cent leeway of cooked food because I could still feel the coffee and walnut cake staring at me and I wanted something that vaguely resembled cake.

This was an awful idea, but I was so hungry that I ate half of it and then actually had a dream about how terrible it was that night. I drank like four cups of herbal tea and went to bed as early as I could so that the day would be over.

When I woke up in the morning I felt nauseated and I had a horrible headache. I think it’s definitely the amount of sugar I had with all the smoothies because I’m too pussy to eat raw veg. I felt really weak and terrible, but I did look a bit slimmer (maybe I was trying to convince myself it was worth the pain) and my skin looked a lot brighter.

I think that incorporating more fruit and veg, especially raw, into your diet is awesome, but I don’t think a meat eater and cake lover like me can transfer over permanently and sustainably that quickly. I definitely didn’t plan it well enough. I opened myself up to some new options and I’m definitely more aware of what i’m putting in my body, but I think it’s safe to say, I won’t be trying it again.