I Tried a Raw Food Diet for 30 Days—Here’s What Happened

Raw food diets tend to come with dramatic before and after promises, clear skin, endless energy, a completely transformed relationship with food. One woman decided to actually test that promise for a full month back in 2012.

What started as a simple thirty day commitment ended up shaping the next several years of her life in ways she never expected. Keep reading to see what actually happened, both during that month and long after it ended.

She Committed Publicly To Stay Accountable

In February 2012, culinary nutritionist Tansy Boggon announced on Facebook that she would eat one hundred percent raw food for an entire month. She even printed out photos and recipes of what she was eating and hung them at the wellness clinic where she worked, hoping the public commitment would keep her accountable.

That level of visible commitment reflected how convinced she was that this particular diet held some kind of answer. She had spent years already searching for what she describes as the perfect way of eating.

The Physical Changes Came With A Catch

The month did bring some noticeable physical changes. She has said her stomach became the flattest it had been in years, but that same sensitivity came with an unexpected downside once the month ended and normal food crept back in.

A single soy latte or slice of pizza was enough to bring back bloating, and with it, real anxiety about losing that appearance of health. Looking back, she has openly questioned whether that fear around ordinary food was actually a sign of something healthy at all.

One Month Turned Into Years Of Teaching It

Rather than ending after thirty days, the experiment became the start of a much bigger chapter. She began teaching raw food workshops just weeks later, and kept running variations of those classes, along with raw food high teas, for roughly four years afterward.

She eventually enrolled in a certified raw food chef course to deepen her expertise even further. It was during that advanced training, she has said, that something in her thinking finally started to shift.

The Real Turning Point Came Years Later

Sitting through lessons about the supposed energetic healing power of raw food, she found herself questioning the entire framework for the first time. She has since written that she began wondering whether the diet was more stress inducing than stress relieving, and whether her own eating had quietly become disordered along the way.

That questioning eventually led her back to school to study nutrition and eating disorders, and away from teaching restrictive diets entirely. What began as a single month of raw food turned into a years long journey that ended with her publicly stepping back from the very diet she once taught.

So her thirty days of raw food never really ended the way she expected, it just became the beginning of a much longer and more complicated story. Sometimes the most honest result of a diet experiment is not a transformation at all, it is realizing years later how it changed your relationship with food, for better and for worse.

This piece touches on disordered eating, which can be a sensitive topic. Anyone struggling with their own relationship with food can reach the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline for free, confidential support.