Raw Dish!

By Stephen Parker

At first glance Brian and Jody Calvi appear to be a conventional American couple.  You could set them down in any part of the United States and they’d easily pass as an attractive all American couple, in their 30’s, healthy and fit.  They both have people friendly winning personalities; they’re articulate and smart.  Someone might tell you that Brian is lawyer with a successful law firm and Jody is a professor at a university, and that they live in a comfortable home in a good suburban neighborhood and they have two children along with the family dog and you’d readily believe it. 

Appearances can be deceiving; Brian and Jody are not the typical conventional all American couple.  They have made very unconventional life decisions.  For a young American couple they lead atypical lives and would be considered quite radical, “loco”, by the majority of Americans.Brian & Jody Calvi  

I met Brian and Jody while they were traveling around the United States giving talks about their experiences with raw food living and their work at La Finca de Vida.  Karen Ranzi, author of Creating Healthy Children, invited them to speak at her and husband Harvey's home in Ramsey New Jersey just a couple to days before they headed back to Costa Rica.

Brian is an athlete.  At one time he was a tennis pro who toured on the American circuit and his life was very different from today.  He was a hard playing athlete who, when he wasn’t on the tennis court, partied as hard as he played. By his own admission, Brian was the life of the party-drinking, smoking, etc.  He was a Big Mac French fry eating guy who admits to mercilessly teasing a teammate for being a vegan.

Things changed for Brian.  One morning he woke up and he couldn’t move; he couldn’t get out of bed.  His back had spasmed.  He made a few calls and managed to get to a medical doctor.  Never mind a chiropractor; chiropractic was too weird for a guy like Brian.  The doctor prescribed muscle relaxers and thus began Brian’s descent into what he calls the “rinse and spin cycle of western medicine.”

Brian had temporary relief but the problems remained and doctors prescribed more drugs and that resulted in more symptoms.  Brian’s health deteriorated.  He developed severe infections which were treated with increasing amounts of antibiotics.  The doses of antibiotics were so high and frequent that a port was implanted into his arm so the drugs could be more efficiently administered.  Sinus tissue was removed, he developed irritable bowel syndrome, migraine headaches, TMJ, insomnia, muscle spasms and he continued to have sinus infections. 

Jody was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when she was a baby.  At the age of 18 months she began a life of consuming pharmaceuticals to control the arthritis and suffering from the side effects of the drugs.  At age 13 she developed a seizure disorder that consisted of vomiting and diarrhea, then a seizure followed by a deep heavy sleep. She now recognizes this was her body’s attempt to detoxify.  Her complications eventually included dead bone where the blood circulation to bone tissue had stopped; she had gastrointestinal problems as well as liver problems caused by the toxicity of the strong arthritis medications.  All of this was in addition to debilitating rheumatoid arthritis.

Karen Ranzi, Jody Calvi, Brian Calvi, Harvey RanziBrian became a high school social studies teacher when he left pro-circuit tennis.  However, as fit as he had once been as a pro athlete, after he began the medical protocol for his health problems, he couldn’t get through the work day.  He didn’t have the stamina; he had hit rock bottom with his health and vitality.  Eventually he was diagnosed; “You have the classic symptoms of Fibromyalgia” he was told. 

On the TV news magazine show 20/20 Brian watched an interview with a doctor who was having success treating fibromyalgia.  The radical treatment involved removing two cervical vertebrae and opening up the Brain stem.  It sounded extreme but Brian was desperate.  He made an appointment, was examined by the doctor and scheduled the surgery.  The surgery never happened.  Brian’s medical insurance denied approval because they considered Brian’s problem to be a preexisting illness.

Brian went to see another specialist; the doctor’s advice to Brian?  “Learn to live with it.” 

Jody’s health also continued to deteriorate.  She was on crutches and couldn’t get around very well.  Ironically, Jody has a Master’s Degree in Public health. She worked and conducted Behavioral and Health Communications Research -research studies on getting people to eat more fruits and vegetables.  She also coordinated a pediatric obesity prevention program and health literacy studies.  She herself sought out alternative medical treatments of all kinds but they never worked.  Looking back she realizes that she never believed the alternative treatments would work; she was stuck in her belief in and dependency on conventional medical treatment.

Brian, within his belief system and mental constructs about health and medicine, had hit a brick wall.  The doctors he had seen and the medical system had not helped.  His health was continuing to deteriorate; his body and mind were exhausted and he know didn’t what to do or where to go to get well.  He was a sick angry young man who wanted his health back. 

During his trip back home after his last doctor’s appointment with the “Learn to live with it” doctor,  Brian did some serious soul searching and it seemed clear to him that he had to take his health into his own hands; everything else had failed.    He didn’t know what to do or where to go but he was beginning to realize that healing his body was his responsibility, and that it was up to him and him alone to find the solution and to follow through with it.  No one could do it for him.

One evening, still sick and searching for answers, Brian, on his way to see a movie, stopped into a bookstore.  He wasn’t looking for information on raw foodism –he’d never heard of it, but in the bookstore on the shelf he happened to be standing in front of was a copy of Raw Power written by Steve Arlin (who now goes by the name of Thor Bazler).  Brian bought it, began to read and became intrigued because, Steve Arlin is an athlete, a body builder. 

After reading Raw Power Brian began to buy every raw food book he could find and his coffee table became stacked with raw food books.  He bought a vitamix blender and a juicer and implementing raw food health principals he began to change his diet.  In the beginning his raw diet consisted of smoothies, green juices and salads.  He also did colonics and he embarked on water fasts that lasted for two or three days.  He started going to bed early and getting more pre-midnight sleep.  His health improved remarkably.  He began to exercise again, cycling.  At one point he experimented with eating raw meat, but that lasted only a few weeks.  Raw meat didn’t have much appeal. 

Brian and Jody met when Brian was about six months into his healing process.  He had become a recluse since no one he knew, none of his friends or family, was interested in the raw food alternative healing lifestyle.  A friend invited Brian to a party.  The friend insisted that Brian get out of the house and go to the party -that he couldn’t continue to keep himself alone and isolated; that wasn’t healthy.  Brian, who had once been the life of the party, agreed to go but when he got there he felt very out of place.  There he was, at a typical beer drinking party but Brian was now a raw food eating, juice consuming, natural healing advocate who was committed to regaining his health.  Socially, his self-esteem had taken a big hit; he couldn’t relate to this scene anymore and he wasn’t sure where he belonged.  

At the party Brian noticed an attractive woman who was on crutches and he walked over to introduce himself.  The woman was Jody.  Neither of them explicitly described their meeting this way, but hearing them tell their story, it seemed as if it was the sick and vulnerable meeting the sick and vulnerable. They struck up a conversation and eventually the conversation came to the subject of getting together for a date.  According to Brian, he was very reluctant and he told Jody how it wouldn’t work, that he lived very differently from most people, how he was healing himself with alternative methods, how he didn’t eat like other people; he didn’t drink; he wouldn’t know what they would do on a date, and so on.  Wryly, Jody asked Brian “You’re not a raw foodist are you?”

Brian and Jody did go on a date and they continued to date.  Jody, following Brian’s lead began to explore raw foods and to ease herself into raw living.  Adopting a raw life was not a quick decision for Jody.  Her process was slow and exploratory where as Brian’s had been a Eureka! moment, and he had dived in, full steam ahead.  Jody on the other hand had lived her entire life dependent on medical treatments and the western medical belief system.  She says that she had to work on her thoughts and thinking as much as she needed to work on her physical self.

According to Jody she “began to play around with a raw food diet” but that she wasn’t consistent.  She began to take the raw food wellness approach seriously in March 2007 when she was seeing a Natural Hygienic doctor.  She says that’s when she began to “put all the practices into place -diet, sleep, 36 hour fasts, rebounding, cycling, prayer work and probiotics.”

 As she became more comfortable with raw and holistic living Jody experimented with coming off the arthritis medications.  She’d wean herself off but the symptoms would flare up and she’d go back on the meds.  She didn’t give up and finally she went off of the powerful toxic arthritis drugs for the last time.  Yes, the rheumatoid arthritis symptoms did flare up and tests showed the typical systemic inflammation, but this time Jody kept going; she had decided she was not going back on the meds.  After about six months, everything cleared up.  Symptoms went away and blood work showed that the systemic inflammation was gone.  She was drug free and symptom free for the first time in many, many years.

As raw foodists, Brian and Jody have had their challenges.  First of all, really believing that adopting a raw food diet would help their bodies to heal was a challenge.  Also, Brian is from an Italian family with strong emotional bonds to cooked food and there have been challenges with food in family and social settings for both of them.  Jody admits that “cooked food nicely numbs the emotions.”  Even after Brian began to resume a full active life, he still had some issues.  At times he felt weak when cycling; he experienced coldness in his extremities, sensitive teeth and he sometimes had difficulty sleeping.  He decided to add raw goat milk to his diet and all of these issues improved.  The sensitivity in his teeth disappeared after his first glass of raw unpasteurized goat milk.  Additional challenges for Brian and Jody included financial ones -doctors’ bills and costs from seeing alternative healers and raw food coaches. 

When Brian and Jody got married they went to Costa Rica for their honeymoon.  They loved the climate, nature, the fruit and the people.  It was then that they began to make plans to move to Costa Rica to open a raw food bed and breakfast and health retreat.  After their honeymoon they went back to Atlanta and began to make their dream a reality.  They saved their money and with their savings and low interest loans from family, they purchased some land in Costa Rica.

That land is now La Finca de Vida, “The Farm of Life”, located in south western Costa Rica.  It’s in the mountains and has beautiful vistas.  A beautiful undeveloped oceanfront is only a 45 minute drive away.  Once the first buildings were constructed, Jody moved to Costa Rica full time to prepare the guesthouses for guests.  Brian stayed in Atlanta and continued to work and save and he moved to Costa Rica in spring of 2010.  Now healthy, vibrant and thriving in their raw food lifestyle, Brian and Jody are living full time in Costa Rica.

Looking back to when he was sick Brian recalls how there are many raw food and holistic healing centers that the average person can’t afford to visit.  For many sick and suffering people, the help and environment they need in order to heal is financially out of reach.  Brian and Jody are committed to keeping the cost of stays at la Finca de Vida affordable to the average person.  Having been a school teacher, Brian wants to have a place where a person who earns school teacher’s sized salary can afford to go.

Photographs of La Finca de Vida show a beautiful verdant mountainous landscape with attractive green and sustainable buildings nestled into the hillside.  La Finca de Vida can accommodate about 20 guests in various guest houses.  There is an open air “restaurant” that also serves as a dance hall and classroom.  An open air yoga studio is built on the side of a hill.  The water is on-site mountain spring water and the food is locally grown.  A significant portion of the food is grown on site a la Finca de Vida.  Brian and Jody have filled their property with a wide variety of young fruit and nut trees that will eventually produce most if not all of the food they serve to guests.

It would be easy to continue with details of Brian and Jody’s beautiful Costa Rican farm and raw health oasis but that’s not the important part of this story; the details about la Finca de Vida are easy to see on the website. 

The essential point of this story is how two people had the courage to do what only a small percentage of the world’s population is doing.  They’re trusting their instincts and disengaging themselves from the media driven amped up pharmaceutical based living that was literally killing them.  Brian and Jody had the courage to do what no one they knew was doing.  They took responsibility for their own health, they learned the laws of health, and importantly, they got well.  They are working to fulfill their dreams and lead the healthy life they want to live and not the life their former peers and families think they should live.

When I met Brian and Jody they were casually dressed in khakis, a tee shirt, sandals and a sun dress and carrying a laptop computer.  They looked like the typical conventional American couple on vacation.  As I wrote earlier, looks are deceiving.  I see Brian and Jody Calvi as contemporary pioneers, setting an example for others to follow.  Maybe one day Brian and Jody and others like them will truly be the new conventional American couple.

Find out more about La Finca de Vida.