Hello, I’m Laurie Getchell. How I came to start eating fruit? It’s kind of a long journey, me and my husband, Gabe Smith, had moved to Chicago. We were vegetarians about five years ago. We’re actors, so we try to take care of ourselves, but once we moved to Chicago, we kind of let that go a little bit. We got really into drinking and eating a lot of deep dish pizzas. A lot of vegetarians, I think, once they give up the meat, they up the cheese. I think we were very unhappy in a lot of different ways, mood swings. I have suffered from depression since I was a teenager. That wasn’t really improving. I never liked taking medication for it. We were not in a good place and Gabe decided he wanted to challenge himself and run the Chicago marathon.

It really was kind of a five year process of how this came about, because we were vegetarian, and then we went vegan right after we got married. After that, we went on our honeymoon to Costa Rica and we ate fully raw when we were there. It was inspired by The 80/10/10 Diet, that Gabe had read. When he decided to run the marathon, which was last year, he started training on a raw food diet. At the time I was addicted to chocolate, coffee, and I was a vegan, but I was still eating lots of oil. When he was like, “Let’s go raw.” I was like, “Okay.” I remember when I was first detoxing from coffee, I was like, “You better be thankful that I’m your wife, because no other woman would do this for you.”

A little after that I thought, “oh yeah, I won’t stick with this. This is a an experiment. I think it’s okay to have a vegan cookie, here or there, a vegan hot dog.” We went hardcore with it for about four months and after that, I just didn’t feel very good at all, eating any kind of processed foods, even rice or potatoes upsets me now. On the other hand, the fruit has given me a lot of energy. I don’t suffer from that depression. This sounds weird, I don’t know if other people have this when they have depression, but you wake up and in your head you have this thing like, “I want to die,” just a little thing in your head that says, “I just want to die.” I don’t have that anymore, which is amazing, because who wants to start their day off like that?

I’m really thankful that we fell upon the lifestyle. We were so inspired that we decided to start a YouTube channel called Easy Raw Food. We also have a website called easyrawlife, we talk about anything from barefoot running, which is what Gabe did when he ran the Chicago marathon. We have a vegan dog, we talk about our dog. We talk about compassion. Sometimes we get a little blunt with the vegan arguments that people have. We make recipes. We try to make it fun too. We do music videos. Tt’s a all around lifestyle channel for us.