Re: Going to start chelation with ALA today, sick of being sick, a few questions.
Eating raw food would almost certainly not be enough to remove metals. I suspect that the people are feeling better for other reasons, but the metals remain. One possible reason is that they're also suffering from a yeast problem and their diet is not feeding the yeast as much.
Here is a place where you can find information about Cutler's Protocol if you haven't already seen it. You can probably find a lot of answers to your original questions.
http://onibasu.com/wiki/Cutler_protocol
Basically, you take ALA every 3 hours and at least once in the middle of the night. You do this for 3-5 days and then take a break. Start with smaller doses and increase if your body is able to handle it.
To give you some idea about one of your questions, it took me 6 months of chelating before I felt noticeably better. You can tell if chelating is working by how you feel during a round. If you feel at least some of your symptoms become a bit worse during a round, chelating is working (note that some people feel better during a round and worse between them). If you don't have any kind of reaction, then it's likely not having the desired effect. There's a lot of variability in all this, so it's hard to tell you definitively what experience you will have during chelation.