An interview with raw food blogger, Sean Evans, at the Fruit Winter meet-up in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
How did you find out about Fruit Winter?
I found out about Fruit Winter from a YouTube channel, HandymanBananas, which is produced by Conor McMillen, the founder of Fruit Winter.
How important is diet and lifestyle to you? Do you have a particular health regime?
Diet and lifestyle are very important to me. I’ve spent a lot of time and money in the search for the best diet for me. I found that raw, living foods made me feel the best. Before this diet I experimented with a Paleo diet which included grass-fed meat and grass-fed butter. My love for animals and the environment made it a clear choice for me to stop eating animals and consuming animal products. Now I am eat fruit in the morning and afternoon and will eat some cooked rice or noodles and vegetables in the evening. Yesterday I started a coconut water fast which I hope to continue for at least 21 days.
Johnny F D is an online entrepreneur, a location independent “digital nomad”. After a three week vacation to Thailand in 2008 he left his home and corporate job in Los Angeles and bought a one way ticket back to Thailand.
He talks in the podcast about the strategy for creating online businesses – known as “drop shipping” – which has enabled for him a dream lifestyle of leisure and travel. He is the host of the Travel Like a Boss podcast and was the organiser of the recent Nomad Summit in Chiang Mai, a free day of talks given by highly successful nomads.
Conor McMillen is a therapist and lifestyle coach with a popular YouTube channel, Handyman Bananas. Just three years ago he was addicted to drugs and alcohol. He believes that eating a fruit diet was the key factor in his rapid recovery.
The interview took place at the recent Fruit Winter festival which Conor now organises each January in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The podcast also covers his experiences with the Internal Family Systems (IFS) psychotherapeutic model, which he now also utilises as a therapist.
Also on the podcast is Brittany Taylor, a lifestyle coach who also has a popular YouTube channel, called Simple Living and Travel.
Three years ago she downsized her life, leaving her job and home to become a digital nomad as a “location independent” IT consultant, in order to follow her dream of a lifestyle of optimal nutrition, physical movement and play.
Due to very poor sound quality in the first part of the interview, a complete transcript of Conor’s interview has been provided, below.
The two latest podcasts from The Eternities feature interviews with three people who have found ways to live their dream lifestyles of travel, health and time to play. But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. In these interviews they outline how they did it, why they did it, and how others can do it, too.
I met all three while escaping the cold in tropical Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. I’d come to attend Fruit Winter, a free festival of daily meet-ups and activities with dozens of inspired and inspiring folks from around the world, held there for the past two Januaries. Chiang Mai, one of Tripadvisor’s top 25 world destinations, is a great venue with its laid back atmosphere and warm welcome for tourists. Unlike larger cities where corporates reign, Chiang Mai is human sized and human geared. It’s also an attractive base for an ever growing band of Digital Nomads, of which more later.
Conor and Brittany
Fruit Winter is the brainchild of Handyman Bananas – a.k.a. Conor McMillen – a lifestyle coach and therapist from the US with a popular YouTube channel where he inspires others to follow his own path from bad habits to shining health. In the podcast, he talks of beating drugs and alcohol with the primary help of a fruit-based vegan diet, and how he has further aided his personal development via a fascinating integrative psychotherapeutic therapy known as Internal Family Systems, of which he is now a practitioner.
“It’s mind blowing, you know,” he says of his transformation. “It’s living my dream. I never thought I’d find my passion. Now I feel I’m living passionately. I did at some point have a hope and desire and a dream to live this life but I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. I do remember laying in bed and drinking beer, wanting to change so badly, and watching some YouTube videos of some healthy people in Thailand – this is like, three years ago – and thinking to myself, ‘Fuck, I just want to do that. How do you do that?’ And there were parts of me that totally didn’t think I could. But there was a part of me that had hope, there was a part of me that had a dream and a desire, and now all my parts are here with me in Thailand living that dream.”
“Agriculture is really the dominant system of 8,000 years, and it’s more than a way of growing food. It’s a way of domesticating humans and organising humans. It is ‘the’ system.” So says the environmental author and journalist Richard Manning in the latest podcast from The Eternities. “And the system that brought us here and made us sick is not going to fix us.”
Manning is the author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilisation, which argued that major world shaping forces, such as trade, imperialism and disease, were conditioned and driven by agriculture, both for good and ill. But, mostly ill.
Manning has now returned for another tilt at civilisation with Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization, co-authored with John Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of such titles as A User’s Guide to the Brain. The book attempts to show that our human physical evolution is lagging far behind civilization’s socio-cultural advances, significantly affecting health and wellbeing.
