Posts Tagged ‘cooked food’

Top 5 Reasons to Follow a Raw Foods Diet

April 26th, 2010

Near more reasons to follow a raw foods diet? Well, here we go…

There are lots of reasons to change the way you eat, and consume less dead and cooked food items. It sounds wonderful, but sometimes, it can be difficult to put into words why exactly you would want to change your diet and eat more raw foods – particularly when speaking with someone who does not agree with your new-found ideas.

While a diet change is not about converting those around you to a system that works for you, here are a few points you can present when asked “why on earth would you want to limit yourself only to raw foods?”

1. Raw foods can help you to lose weight.

When you start to eat for energy with a raw food diet, you are going to notice that the volume of food that you eat is not going to differ drastically. You won’t be asked to skimp and starve yourself; but while you will be eating plenty, you will likely see a loss in overall body weight. Because raw foods tend to have a high concentration of fibre, you will feel more full, and because they contain no artificial sugars, you will be consuming fewer calories, on average.

2. Eating raw foods will give you more energy.

Hey, that’s why they call it eating for energy. Raw foods contain living enzymes. These enzymes are fairly delicate, and when cooked, tend to be destroyed. When you ingest raw, living enzymes, you provide your body with help. Extra calories that, in the past, would go towards digestion can now be harnessed by your muscles, giving you a boost in energy.

3. Eating raw will also reduce your energy consumption in your home.

Many of us have very high energy bills every month, and a large contributor to that are our appliances. Microwave ovens, stoves and conventional ovens take a huge amount of energy to run in order to provide us with cooked foods. When you switch to a raw food diet, you won’t need your oven or microwave any more – the biggest appliances in your kitchen will be your fridge and a food dehydrator. Those savings on your monthly energy bill will really add up.

4. With a raw food diet, you get more vitamins.

Sure, many of us get all the vitamins we need, because we take daily supplements and pills to ensure that we are meeting the minimum requirements. But if you up your intake of fruits and vegetables, you are going to get more than the minimum daily requirements – without having to choke down a fistful of pills every morning.

5. With a raw food diet, you will likely find that you are going to get sick less often.

This high energy diet helps to keep your body in great shape, inside and out, and a healthy body helps foster a healthy immune system. Your body will be able to fight back more effectively against the average flu bug or seasonal cold, and you will be able to bounce back quicker when you do get the sniffles.

=> Got any other reasons to eat more raw foods? Please share.

No comments »

Posted in Raw Foods

Tags:

Raw Food Made Easy

April 19th, 2010

Raw foods recipes often sound a lot harder than they actually are, and the very best ones look like they have taken hours of kitchen prep time to get onto the table. This sort of impressive presentation gives a perception that eating a raw food diet is going to be a lot of hard work – but nothing could be further from the truth.

There are plenty of easy raw food recipes out there that are incredibly delicious, and are even easier to prepare than their cooked-food comparisons. If you have your doubts, take a look at these three meals in a typical day on the raw food diet, and you will see just how easy it could be to switch your diet to an all-raw way of eating.

For breakfast in the morning, many people do one of two things – they either pour themselves a cup of coffee and forgo an actual breakfast, or they chow down on sugary cereals, drowning in over-processed milk. While the cereal is better than simply skipping, neither option can hold a candle to the power and flavor of the mighty green smoothie recipes that you can incorporate into your everyday life in a raw eating plan. All you need to do is combine leafy greens with some firm-fleshed fruit, and after a few seconds in the blender, you have an easy raw breakfast.

Lunchtime can be a hassle – you only get an hour, so a fast food hamburger is often the best pick out of a pathetic local selection. But if you take into account the cost of that food and the time you have to wait in line, you’ll be saving on both by packing a raw lunch to bring with you. A hearty and delicious salad will fill you up with vitamins and fiber, instead of heavy, processed fats and sugars. You will feel the benefits from the very first time you make the switch – when that dead period hits everyone else a little later in the afternoon, you will still have energy to spare from your easy raw lunch.

Dinner can take upwards of a hour to prepare, with plenty of time spend watching the oven or stove top. But an easy switch to a raw food diet means that, very simply, you put your food into the dehydrator instead of the oven, and other prep times are comparable or less, meaning that eating raw will actually give you more than just higher levels of energy and better delivery of vitamins – it will also give you back time at home. And don’t worry about getting bored – meals can be as simple as chilled soups, or as complex as raw pizzas.

The key to eating a raw diet is never to let the perception and the fear dictate how you eat and what you consume. If you simply dive in and try it, you will find that there are an abundance of raw meals that are incredibly easy to prepare, surprisingly delicious, and as varied as your old ways.

4 comments »

Posted in Raw Food Recipes

Tags:

Raw Diet Recipes – Great Tasting Simple Nutrition

April 3rd, 2010

If you remember a few years ago, there was a very effective advertising campaign for a beer company, debating what the key quality was that drew in their consumers. Was it the great taste, or the fact that the beer was less filling? There was no clear answer, no definitive winner.

And while you would usually be at a loss as to what a mass-produced beer and a healthy raw diet might have in common, this is one instance where a similar argument can be made for both.

With a raw diet, there are two key reasons to forgo the cooked foods, and move towards a diet rich in vitamins, nutrients and fresh foods. Raw foods taste great! No, raw foods offer better nutrition! Both are right, and both draw a different group of people to the raw food diet.

Sure, raw foods taste great. Raw food recipes use plenty of fresh, ripe produce that is full of its own flavors – so much so, that you rarely need the salts and sugars that you might otherwise add to your cooking to give an extra dimension of taste.

Take, for instance, those fresh green smoothie recipes that you have heard so much about. While the average grocery store purchased smoothie might be full of sugars, preservatives and other chemicals in order to enhance the long-dead and diluted tastes, a fresh smoothie recipe reads more like a haiku. No long list of additives and other outside influences on flavor. Instead, it’s a few simple ingredients that will taste that much better.

This is great, especially if you have children and you want to set a good example for them by eating healthy, and providing them a tasty way to follow in your footsteps. After all, if you make the healthy option a delicious one, it makes the raw food diet a lot easier to stick with.

On the other side of the coin, those easy raw food recipes are more than just crowd pleasers for taste. The vitamins and nutrients that you find in the average raw food diet are going to be several powers higher than a similar cooked food item.

A great example of this is broccoli. Most people eat their broccoli cooked, which means boiling it in a pot of water, and then covering it with melted cheese to make it somewhat palatable. But if you skip the scalding, and eat your broccoli raw, you will find a lot more than better flavors. You will find that the vitamins A, C and K that you hear so much about will actually stay on your food, not get leached out in the cooking pot. On top of that, the natural levels of glucoraphanin in your broccoli will be closer to what the studies tell you should be there, helping to create sulforaphane in the body to help fight cancer. And don’t forget about the iron, calcium, magnesium and other minerals that will stay on your broccoli, and get into your body when you consume it raw.

No comments »

Posted in General Nutrition

Tags:

Why it’s Good to Eat More Raw Foods

February 24th, 2010

If you’ve been on the fence wondering whether eating more raw foods is a good thing or not, then let me help you over – to the good side. Obviously I have a very biased opinion about eating raw foods, after all I’ve written a book on the subject (ie. Eating for Energy).

But you just can’t refute the numerous benefits of eating raw. One of the reasons I started eating more raw foods several years ago was that I wanted more energy. I was sick and tired of needing lots of sleep (ie. 8-10 hours) to feel rested and somewhat energetic.

After all, most sleep experts have told us that our bodies need a “specific” amount of sleep for our body to regenerate and feel rested. I used to believe that…now I’m not so sure. What I’ve found is that when most of my food intake comes from raw foods, I don’t need as much sleep. In fact, when I’m about 80% raw, I can thrive on just 5-6 hours of sleep.

Part of the reason this happens is the body is getting “life energy” from the foods you’re feeding it. When we eat dead, cooked foods, there is little to no energy (other than calories) that we are providing our body.

Think of eating raw foods like recharging a battery. The more raw foods you eat, the more you are recharging your battery – which, in this case, is your body. Conversely, when the majority of your diet is comprised of dead foods, you inherently drain more of your battery’s energy.

This occurs because dead foods require more energy to be digested and metabolized. For instance, eating meat (that is cooked) draws more water from your body to be digested since most, if not all, the water in the meat has been evaporated by the cooking process.

Not only does eating cooked meat help to dehydrate your body but it also taxes your body’s digestive enzymes. Because the food is dead it no longer contains it’s natural food enzymes. As a result, your body must now spend more of its own energy to produce and secrete more of its limited digestive enzymes.

These are just a few reasons why cooked foods drain your energy but there are many more. Now, I’m not saying that you have to totally forego cooked foods from here on out (I certainly haven’t) but it’s important to understand that you should offset some of the “stress” imposed by cooked foods with an abundance of raw foods.

And it doesn’t have to be complicated. Simply eating more fruits and vegetables, in their raw state, is really all you need to do. When people ask me how to start eating raw, I usually just tell them that the easiest way to do so is by adding a few more fruits and vegetables into their daily diet.

Once you experience the benefits of doing so, you’ll find it easier to transition away from those foods that have held you hostage for so many years.

Go for it – you can do it!

smoothie footer

1 comment »

Posted in Raw Foods

Tags: