Ted Carr: ‘I Focus on My Mind, Mouth and Muscles’

Ted Carr, 24, is originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, and went raw vegan at 18. He travels extensively and is living in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the moment, where he trains as a triathlete. He has his sights on performing well at the Ironman World Championships.

Ted is a co-author of Clean & Simple, featuring more than 50 recipes. He produces videos on fitness as well as a fruit-based raw food diet. Ted’s websites are FruitLiving.com and 100SquatsADay.com.

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Brian’s note: I began 10 sentences with targeted words, presented in boldface below, that serve as conversation starters and asked Ted to complete the thoughts in this condensed “interview.”

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My path to a fruit-based diet started when I was 18. I quit college to pursue my dream life of health, fitness and adventure. This is where my real life began. I was free! Free to be me.

And of all things, the first thing I wanted to do was help others. I wanted to have a direct impact on people’s lives so I did what I saw someone else doing and got certified as a personal trainer. During that course, I was offered to take another course to get certified as a nutrition specialist. I signed up for that as well. At this time, I knew nothing about raw veganism, but as I dove deeper and deeper into answering the question,  “What is the healthiest?”, I found it.

I cared about changing my diet only because my skin was so terrible. I had bad acne and I figured that maybe I could clear it up with diet since the creams, potions, and lotions never worked. Sure enough, within just a week of going on a fruit-based diet, my skin totally cleared up, and this was after years of having acne!

(Side note: First I cut out dairy, and that helped my skin a lot, then I cut out gluten and that helped big time as well. But only when I stuck to a low-fat fruit-based diet did my acne totally disappear.)

My raw food lifestyle is super simple. I focus on my mind, mouth and muscles. I wake up early and meditate for my mind. I then have about 100 calories of fruit (one to two mangos or a papaya) for my mouth. Then I workout for two to three  hours for my muscles.

Upon finishing my morning workout, I come out, fill my mouth again with fruit, take a nap for my mind and wake up to start editing videos to express myself creatively. In the evening, I work out again, but this time it’s not as much for my muscles as it is for my mind. My evening workouts are less intense, and I sometimes have an audiobook with me during my bike ride or stair climb workout. The evening workouts feel like I’m taking a medication, and I love it! I go a bit stir crazy if I can’t get that second workout in. This happens only if I’m stuck on a plane or something.

My training program is quite intense. I train two to four hours a day in the form of swimming, biking, running and some strength training like pull-ups, squats, and other bodyweight work. I focus on five aspects to make myself the most complete, well-rounded triathlete I can be:

1. Recovery
2. Nutrition
3. Consistency
4. Specificity
5. Intensity

Without these five aspects in order, things don’t go right long-term. If I’m not recovered, I don’t even feel like eating. If I’m not eating, I won’t be motivated to be consistent. If I’m not consistent, I won’t be able to get specific enough in my workouts for my events. And If I haven’t been specific enough, all the intensity in the world won’t help me with my event.

I also do quite a bit of imagery work and visualization to supplement my physical training. I believe the mind is what controls the body to do what it does, so it’s important to train the brain to see and feel things before they actually happen. This way, when they do happen, I won’t feel as if it’s the first time. For example, when I won my latest triathlon, it didn’t feel like anything new—even though it was my first overall win—because I had been there 1,000 times before in my head.

The Ironman World Championships (IMWC) is a race I like’d to perform well at. Whether I win the race, get on the podium, or even place in the top 10 isn’t something I can control because ranks depend on who shows up, but I do care about my finishing time, and I want to get under 8:30 in Kona (IMWC) because I think even the guys I admire right now struggle with that. I’m training for it now with all the workouts I do, and I visualize crossing that finish line under 8:30 often.

Eating fruit in Thailand and other tropical locales is ideal when your hometown winter temperatures don’t permit great fruit to grow. I could still do a fruitarian diet in Canada, but it’s just not the same when you’re huddled in blankets in front of a fire trying to keep warm with your frozen berry-banana smoothie.

The tropics allows you to feel how a natural human would feel. You can have a vast selection of fruit all the time, you can walk around without clothes (in your house) all day without feeling cold, and you can get ample sunlight on your skin every single day—even when it rains!

My favorite fruits are always changing. I used to think it was mango until I met durian, and now after having unlimited access to durian, I’m thinking my new favourite fruit is the dragon fruit. I eat so many dragon fruits everyday it’s pretty crazy—10-plus on average when the mangos aren’t ripe enough.

Making videos is my passion. I never get tired of expressing my creativity through film, and I can literally “sit for hours” without moving—just locked and loaded on the task at hand, tunnel vision directed at the editing screen. I’ve been editing videos since I was 11 or 12, so by now it feels like second nature for me. I feel a wide range of emotions through the editing process, and when finished, I have an amazing sense of accomplishment as if I could die right now and be happy.

Once the video gets published, it’s hard for me to sleep. So I need to publish the movies in the morning so that by evening, the thrill has worn off, and I can sleep without feeling like I’ve just had three coffees.

Clean & Simple is my first e-book, which I put out with my friend Shay Mazza. It has over 50 recipes from the foods we used to eat together on our raw vegan diet. However, Shay and I both now eat primarily fruit and fruit only, so a lot of the recipes in the book don’t reflect how we currently eat. But I would still make and eat 100 percent of those recipes if I felt like it! They are definitely healthy, clean and simple!

You can get this book for less than $15 on FruitLiving.com.

I envision a future where all cars are electric, everyone has Internet, the term “loading” does not exist, organic fruit is the norm and everyone is a lot healthier than they are now. I envision a world where everyone has access to cheap, high-quality fruit, and eating any form of animal product is considered barbaric and totally old fashioned—like smoking in the car with your children in the back seat is considered now.

One day, I want to have many children of my own. I love children. By many, I mean 12 or more.I plan on living till I’m well over the age of 100, so I’ve got time to make it happen!

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Watch Ted Explain How He Eats and What He Does

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Discover Ted Carr’s Top 5 Tips for health!

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Hungry for more? Check out Ted’s Post Bike Ride Smoothie recipe.