What You Gain from a Raw Food Diet: A Conversation with Skye of ROAR

Physical healing, mental freedom, emotional clarity, spiritual connection, and the lust for life that most people have forgotten was even possible. This is what a raw food diet actually gives you.

Skye Conway of ROAR is one of the brightest lights in this community and one of the most genuinely vulnerable people I have had the pleasure of talking with during this whole bundle week. Her story is remarkable. Twenty years of chronic illness, 60 surgeries, eight organs removed, most of her life in a bed, and five years into a raw food diet she is swimming across oceans in winter and dancing and living a life she could not have imagined. We went deep and I loved every minute of it.

The 2026 Ultimate Raw Vegan Bundle Is Open Until May 11th

Skye brings two beautiful contributions to this year’s bundle and both deserve a proper introduction.

ROAR Simple Raw Recipes is exactly what it sounds like and then some. Simple minimal-ingredient raw vegan recipes that recreate classic comfort food favorites, creamy cheeses, hearty steaks, satisfying burgers, indulgent desserts, all made with whole natural foods and no complicated steps. Nourishing, accessible, and genuinely delicious.

ROAR Beauty takes the same philosophy into your bathroom cabinet. Raw vegan skincare, haircare, and body product recipes using natural whole ingredients you can actually trust, no chemicals, no hidden toxins, and designed to support real beauty from the inside out. Minimal ingredients, easy methods, powerful results.

My contributions are The Model Diet, 411 pages covering the full philosophy, science, and framework behind low fat raw vegan living, and the 80/10/10 Diet Masterclass co-created with Dr. Douglas Graham, which includes Dr. Graham’s The 80/10/10 Diet as an ebook from day one.

Over 30+ Raw Vegan Resources worth over $1,500 all for just $50 until midnight Pacific time on May 11th.

What You Actually Gain from a Raw Food Diet

The honest answer is that you gain across every dimension of life simultaneously, and that is not hype. It is just what happens when you start removing barriers between yourself and the nourishment your body was designed to run on. Physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, they are all connected and they all shift together.

Skye’s physical transformation from a raw food diet is one of the most dramatic I have heard. Within six weeks of going fully raw she had no symptoms, after 32 years of chronic illness. Joint aches cleared. Digestion normalized. Weight came on evenly and healthfully, 12 kilos in a year using dates, bananas, and avocado, without nuts or seeds. The body, given what it actually needs, knows exactly what to do.

For me the physical gains have been real and ongoing too. Chronic candida brought back into balance, joint recovery from decades of skateboarding and a serious motorcycle accident, faster recovery than I had in my 20s, and a consistent body composition that responds directly to training because there is nothing in the way. The raw food diet does not put a ceiling on physical performance. If anything it raises it.

The Mental and Emotional Shifts Nobody Talks About Enough

Both Skye and I came from genuinely dark places before this lifestyle. I went to bed wishing I would not wake up. I was on airplanes hoping they would crash. Skye was isolated, disconnected, running on survival mode after a lifetime of medical trauma. Neither of us would have predicted the mental and emotional transformation that came alongside the physical one.

What a raw food diet does to the inner narrative is profound. For me the negative thought spirals got shorter and shorter over time until they barely completed a sentence before I caught them and redirected. The self-limiting beliefs and the shoulds and the have-tos started to sound hollow instead of absolute. It is not that they disappeared overnight but the raw food diet creates enough clarity and enough energetic lightness that you start to hear yourself more honestly.

Skye put it beautifully: when you are surrounded by darkness and you put physical packets of light into your body, you will find light. That is not poetic license. That is a lived experience that I have heard described in almost exactly those terms by more people than I can count. Eating light creates light. The connection between what you consume and how you think and feel is not subtle once you have experienced both sides of it.

The Spiritual Dimension of a Raw Food Diet

This is the one that surprises people most, especially those coming from a purely physical health motivation. The raw food diet has a consistent and well-documented effect on intuition, synchronicity, and the sense of connection to something larger than yourself.

In the early years for me it was almost overwhelming in the best possible way. Synchronicities everywhere, moments of what I can only describe as genuine nirvana, a sense of being completely connected to everything. Skye described walking through spring gardens and being able to see which flowers were vibrating louder and watching the bees follow that vibration. That sounds extraordinary and it is, and it is also real for people who have made this shift.

The way I understand it is that the habits, belief systems, and substances we take in create buffers between us and our own source energy. Like a dirty windshield. The raw food diet clears that off. The connection was always there. You just start to feel it more directly. Over 22 years that sense has settled from the intense honeymoon electricity into something quieter and more consistent, less fireworks and more steady warmth. Both are gifts in their own season.

The Gains Nobody Expects

Animals and children notice you differently. Skye’s nieces started asking to go to the fruit market. Kids at friends’ houses start gravitating toward fruit when raw food people are around. Animals relax. These are small things and they are also not small at all.

Your relationship with your own purpose clarifies. Skye talked about feeling so strongly pulled toward sharing and serving that the universe almost would not let her do anything else. I know that feeling. When you are living in genuine alignment with your physiology and your values, what you are here to do becomes less of a question and more of an obvious next step.

The so-called social challenges of a raw food diet also reframe themselves over time. What feels like isolation in the beginning often becomes the gift of getting to know yourself before you build back out into the world. You let go of relationships that were built on shared numbing and make space for ones built on shared light. That is not a loss even when it feels like one.

On B12 and Living Honestly

We touched on B12 and I want to include it here because I think honesty around this matters. I did not supplement for almost a decade and steadily declined to a point of serious deficiency and real symptoms by year nine. I have supplemented since and it has made a real difference. We do not live a fully natural life. No socks, no sanitized world, no toilet paper, hands in dirt, drinking from natural streams. We do the best we can with the life we actually live and B12 is a small and sensible awareness point rather than a reason for concern. Monitor it, supplement when indicated, and get on with thriving. I have a full dedicated post on B12 here.

Go Find Skye, She Is a Genuine Light

Five years raw, two books in the bundle, retreats, coaching, and one of the brightest smiles and most infectious laughs in this whole community. Find her on Instagram @roar.skye and on YouTube @roarskye. Go give her some love.