Tonya Zavasta

Early life

Tonya Zavasta was born in 1958 in the Soviet Union with a congenital hip defect. Even after enduring many surgeries in her childhood, including a number of years in a body cast, the total joint deterioration in her right hip resulted in her right leg being much shorter than the left. She credits these difficulties as the driving force behind her health, anti-aging and beauty research and writing.

Zavasta immigrated with her family to the United States of America in 1991. After completing the Master of Sciences degree in Pure Mathematics at Memphis State University (today: University of Memphis), and while working on her Ph.D. in Theoretical Mathematics, she finally located a surgeon willing to operate on her deteriorated hip joints. In preparation for the first surgery, she became increasingly interested in anti-aging practices. After learning about the raw food diet and switching to a 100% raw food lifestyle, she immersed herself in this field, and in 2004 wrote her first book Your Right to Be Beautiful. Soon thereafter, she began touring around the U.S. giving seminars about achieving optimal health and beauty on the raw food diet. She credits the switch to raw foods and her stringent Bikram yoga regime with her improved health and appearance.

Career

Zavasta is sometimes referred to as a natural beauty expert. While an imprecise term, it echoes the philosophy of Zavasta. She challenges that the way to determine if a health promoter's message is correct is to observe the promoter, and if you don't like his or her personal health results, then you should look elsewhere for advice. Perhaps fittingly, Zavasta, along with her husband Nick, regularly tour the U.S. as well as Canada presenting lectures such as Making Aging Optional, and Secrets of Radical Rejuvenation and giving everyone a chance to determine for themselves whether they are satisfied with Zavasta's results. According to many accounts, she appears many years younger than her biological age and has been described as vibrant and glowing.

Tonya Zavasta has authored five books about natural beauty and the raw food diet: Your Right to Be Beautiful: Miracle of Raw Foods; Beautiful on Raw: UnCooked Creations; Quantum Eating: The Ultimate Elixir of Youth; Raw Food and Hot Yoga: From Severe Disability to Superior Health; and Rawsome Flex: Beautifying System of Facial Exercises and Raw Foods. She has also self-published two ebooks: 100 Days to 100 Percent Raw and Raw Foods and Your Compromised Teeth.

CRON proponent

Tonya Zavasta's brand of raw foodism is one that marries the raw vegan diet ingredients (that is only eating fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds in their unheated form) with aspects of the CRON-diet whereby she recommends eating less than the U.S.D.A. recommended daily amounts as well as advocating fasting. She refers to this combination of caloric restriction and two raw meals a day as the 'raw and low' method, meaning raw in quality and low in quantity, which she believes will help one attain superior health and anti-aging benefits.

Quantum Eating

She has developed an advanced raw food diet plan that she calls "Quantum Eating", which she outlined in her book by the same name.

Recent activity and media appearances

Most recently, Zavasta was invited to introduce the raw food segment of the Russian Vegetarian Festival in the Summer of 2010. She was also a presenter at the 2010 Women's International Summit for Health. Earlier, Zavasta was a speaker at the Raw Spirit Festival in the Summer of 2008.

Tonya Zavasta was shown on News Channel 3 in Memphis demonstrating how to prepare a green smoothie and attempting to entice the hosts to try it. Zavasta was also interviewed on CBS Evening News about the benefits of raw foods and the raw food lifestyle's influence on family life. She has been featured on the cover of Get Fresh! magazine, a U.K. based health/diet periodical focusing on the raw food diet. Currently, she is a quarterly contributor to this magazine. Zavasta was listed as one of the world's leading raw food experts featured responding to questions about the raw food diet in the book: Raw? Your Biggest Questions Answered.

Zavasta was featured discussing the raw food diet and providing raw food recipes in the September, 2011 issue of КРАСОТА & ЗДОРОВЬЕ ("Beauty & Health"), a magazine based in the Russian Federation.

She penned a chapter for the e-book Profoundly Raw: Inspiring Guidance Offered by 12 Raw Food Authors, edited by Angela Stokes-Monarch.

Tonya was featured on the cover of the Winter 2013 issue of Canada's Holistic Health Magazine Eternity Watch.

Cosmetics line

In keeping with her belief in sharing her own health and beauty secrets, Tonya Zavasta has developed a line of natural beauty products called Your Right to Be Beautiful, which includes cosmetics such as anti-aging facial cream and hydrating facial mask, oral balm, scalp tonic, shampoo and conditioner. She markets her beauty products as being the appropriate ones to use on the outside while the raw food diet does its work on the inside.