Posts Tagged ‘raw diet’

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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.

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Transition to a Raw Food Diet

April 20th, 2010

Starting a raw food diet can be a daunting task. It is not simply a quick change in the way you prepare food, but a whole new way of looking at the fuels you put into your body.

It is a lifestyle change, and as such, it is going to require some work on your part in order to make the transition as successful as possible. If you invest the time and effort in these early stages, you will be paving your own way towards a healthier and happier life as a raw eater. It is often said that the lazy man works double – once to do things the easiest way possible, and once again to go back and correct all of his mistakes.

You will probably start by wondering exactly how to eat a raw diet. Unless you have recently moved, or are willing to go through your cupboards and pantry and throw out or donate everything within, you are likely going to be left with some items that simply cannot be eaten raw. Boxes of pasta, loaves of bread, and some meats like pork and chicken just have to be cooked (or already are).

A successful transition, however, does not require you to simply toss this all to the side and start anew. Cold turkey might work for some smokers, but new raw eaters might eventually crave hot turkey if they just try to switch too abruptly.

And of course, there is the financial aspect to consider in restocking your entire kitchen. Instead, a better way to transition to a raw foods diet is to do just that – transition. Use what you have, but augment every meal with at least one raw item. Do this until you are used to it, then up the raw and thin out the cooked.

If you continue this plan of attack until your supplies of cookable food are exhausted, you will find that you have an easier time adapting to your new plans, and fewer cravings for your old cooked favorites.

If you need more raw food help, there are plenty of places to turn. Go to your local holistic or organic grocery store – you will find plenty of great ingredients to ignite your imagination, and the staff there will be able to offer suggestions for new meals. Look online for blogs, articles and web sites dedicated to raw food meal plans, run by uncooked aficionados.

The biggest thing to remember when transitioning from a traditional North American diet to a raw foods diet is that not everything needs to be done in one step. Rome was not built in a day, and neither should your all-raw meal plan.

Put in the time now, and you will find that, once your cupboard is bare of cookable food, you will have no problems stocking it with great raw alternatives, without missing a beat.

And if you ever find yourself tempted to go back, just stop and think for a few minutes before you eat, and remember that for every cooked and dead food item out there, there is a similar raw option.

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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.

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Beginner’s Guide to Going Raw

April 16th, 2010

The idea of “going raw” might sound odd to some, confusing to others, and downright terrifying to the rest. In the day and age in which we live, there are fewer and fewer options available that are truly raw. We survive and subsist on a diet that is made up of processed foods, whether it be fast foods, prepared meals or even home cooking. So the thought of giving all of that up, and going back in time to a more archaic and uncooked diet might sound less like an adventure or challenge, and more like foolishness and delusion.

But for those brave enough to take the raw plunge, it can still be a rather confusing and somewhat off-putting process. How does one transition to a raw diet? Do you simply dive in, head first, forsaking all cooked and processed foods? Can a person truly survive and thrive on a diet change so drastic and unusual?

If you are interesting making the switch to a raw food diet, or simply want to add more raw foods to your daily intake, there is no need to fear. There are some simple steps you can take to make your transition relatively smooth.

First, don’t think of this as a drastic change that needs to be undertaken overnight. If you are like most people, you have a very low percentage of your regular daily intake that is raw. For some, it is as low as a piece of lettuce or a tomato on their fast-food hamburger. If you are in that group, the thought of doing a 180 degree turn in your eating patterns can be unnerving at best, and debilitatingly impossible at worst. Instead, look at eating a raw food diet like you would any other lifestyle change. You don’t have to do it all at once. What you need to do is work at it, a little bit each day, and build up your body and prepare it for eating more raw foods.

In this way, it is a lot like weight lifting. If you are working out with heavy weights, you don’t simply walk in to the gym and try to bench press a few hundred pounds. Instead, you start off with a light weight that you can comfortably handle, and as you progress, adding more heft to your bar. The same principles apply to eating a raw diet. Instead of throwing yourself into it, try easing your way in. For starters, try replacing at least one meal a day with a raw food option.

This might take you several weeks to get used to, but it will give you a way to get your body used to an increase in raw foods, without shocking your system and making you crave the old, cooked foods from which you are now estranged. After the shock wears off, you will notice just how good you feel after your raw meal as compared to your regular cooked meals, and the transition will be easier to manage going forward.

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Why Eat a Raw Diet?

April 8th, 2010

“Why don’t you go raw?”

You might have had this asked of you at some point, if you have been talking to people about some of the new and innovative diet plans out there today. A raw diet plan has been gaining traction lately as far as popularity, and that has led some people to dismiss it as just another silly fad diet.

But hold your horses – this is not another quick weight loss miracle plan. If you take the time to really look, you will find that eating raw can offer you a lot of benefits. It is not always the easiest diet plan to follow, but the best things in life often require a little bit of hard work.

So, why go raw?

There are all sorts of benefits to consuming less cooked foods. For one, when you cook many of the foods we eat today, you leach away a lot of the benefits that your body could really use.

With vegetables, common cooking practices often include steaming or boiling, both of which pull out valuable nutrients and vitamins, leaving you with soggy, mushy carrots that are not nearly as useful or nutritious as they were before they hit the heat.

By cooking, you are also killing off the natural living enzymes in many foods – enzymes that can help with healthy digestion and processing of food within your body. Without those additional sources of enzymes, your body has to work hard to process, digest and pass foods, and often does a poorer job of it, meaning that what few nutrients are left in food are sometimes not fully absorbed by your body.

Another example of the killing power of cooking is milk products. These days, every milk product you can buy in the store – milk, cheese, and yogurt – has gone through a pasteurization process, killing off all of the bacteria in the milk. While this does protect you against the bad bacteria, it also destroys the good bacteria that can help your body.

Want proof?

Look at the new trend in yogurt – adding back in certain active bacterial cultures in order to benefit your overall health. Without pasteurization, those bacteria wouldn’t have to be added in – they would already be there.

So, how do you go raw? The best way to get into the groove with raw foods is to add them slowly, and little by little, remove the cooked items from your diet. Start off by substituting your side dishes at meals with raw items – cold raw soups, fresh salads or mixed vegetables instead of the usual hot items. Then, once your body begins to get used to these new sources of vitamins and nutrients, you can replace a meal a day with a raw alternative.

Breakfast is often the best place to start, as a smoothie for breakfast can really get your day going. Again, small steps are the best, and before you know it, you will be eating nothing but raw foods, and feeling great for it. And not only that, you will be able to sustain that sort of eating plan for the long term.

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