Living the Raw Life
I ate nearly 100% raw for a year and felt great! However by the end of that year I was going through a very emotional transition in my life and wasn’t eating enough. I began to lose far too much weight and needed to re-structure my eating just to stay alive. I backed off the raw food as my primary diet and began eating some cooked foods. Within two years I realize I had departed from my former raw food life style and was feeling the results of it. I was low in energy, gained weight, experiencing menopausal symptoms, having a lot of pain in my body and over all very sluggish. I knew what I needed to do. So I went back to eating raw. Since my first experience with eating raw I got married and my teenage son came to live with me. Neither my husband or son were interested in eating raw, however they were interested in implementing some of the raw foods I was eating into their diet. For example they loved green smoothies, raw chocolate smoothies, the raw nuts, olives, goji berries, fruit, and most of my salads. It was not my intention to set out to convert my family, but rather to get healthy myself. So if my family received benefit in the process, all the better. My son found himself eating much less, and wanting to exercise more, so he began a daily running routine. He had been struggling with some extra pounds for years while living with his dad and dropped them effortlessly simply by adopting more raw foods into his diet. Now he is proud of his fit and slender body. The most challenging part of living the raw lifestyle for me is being exposed to cooked food on nearly a daily basis. I still love the smell of cooked food! Some raw foodist will tell you it doesn’t bother them any longer, but for me, I seem to experience a type of deprivation. Although my family isn’t into fast food they love to go out for Mexican most of all. And…Mexican was always been my favorite food before going raw. I tried getting the Mexican restaurants to prepare me a raw salad, only to my disappointment every time. I would get a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce with a couple wilted tomato slices and maybe a couple slices of avocado. I would pick at my iceberg while my husband and son enjoyed their wonderful smelling meals. At one point enough was enough. I had to make a decision to get me through the next couple of years where I could enjoy dining out with my family and still maintain a primarily raw lifestyle. We made a compromise. They would be happy to go with me to restaurants where I could get a great salad and I would go with them to Mexican restaurants and eat whatever I wanted as long as I was willing to pay the physical price of my meal. What I found was that I could eat a small amount and be fine. But if I ate the whole enchilada I would be suffering by the end of the meal. I also found that I needed to go back to 100% raw for the next couple days to cleanse from the Mexican meal. Was it worth it for me? Yes! And I’ll tell you why! As a teenager I had a serious eating disorder. I was anorexic and bulimic. As an anorexic I starved myself to a dangerously low weight and nearly died. I didn’t develop bulimia until later after my near death experience. I believe there was an aspect of my subconscious mind that was afraid of starving to death and another part of me that was afraid of gaining weight. So I toddled between binging and purging for years until I had messed my poor body up so badly it took many more years to recover. What I learned from my eating disorder was that it can be every bit as unhealthy to focus too much on food and eating then the food we eat. Our minds are very powerful in creating our reality and just the thought of eating something, not on our diet, can create actual physical symptoms. Stressing over what to eat and whether or not something is raw or organic can be worse than actually eating something that is not raw or organic. Also feeling deprived is not conducive to a healthy lifestyle. Everything we do must be a conscious choice. There are consequences to every choice so when we make each choice we must live with the consequence. I’ve eaten ice cream because it was a childhood favorite that somehow contributed to an emotional feeling of well-being. We could go back and forth about the negatives of eating ice-cream on a purely scientific level, but we are talking about more than physical science here. We are talking about the whole picture. If I said to the little girl within me “NO you can’t have any ice cream, she will feel deprived, especially when everybody else is eating ice cream. You can explain to her how she will be healthier than every body else in the long run, but it doesn’t help in the moment. For that little girl, there is no future. Life happens now! Either she gets to join the others and enjoy a little ice cream right now, or she feels left out, deprived. This is emotionally unhealthier than just having some ice cream. So…my little internal girl gets to have ice cream and then she gets a stomach ache later that day. “It’s the ice cream” I tell her! “Whenever you eat that crap you get a stomach ache, remember?” So sometimes we have to go through the process several times before she decides she really doesn’t want to have the ice cream this time. And…sometimes she will have some ice cream and not get a stomach ache at all. So I have to ask myself…is it the ice cream or the thought of the ice cream creating the stomach ache? Raw food science versus Science of the Mind. One day I sat down with my pendulum, which is a type of divination tool to help us communicate with our subconscious mind, and I ask it if eating a 100% raw food diet was in my highest good. The pendulum will swing one way for a yes and the other way for a no. I got a no on 100% raw! I continued to move down to 95%, 90%, 85%, 80% and so on until I reached 70% and low and behold the pendulum began swinging to indicate a big YES! In attempt to get validation one time I decided to see just how many people were successfully eating a 70% raw food diet. I found one person on the internet who subscribes to a 70% raw food diet and low and behold, his thought process was the same as mine. He also believes that being too strict can create problems when living in a society that is primarily cooked food oriented. Eating 70% raw gives one the great health benefits of a raw food diet and also the flexibility to enjoy a favorite cooked meal or desert every now and then. Most raw foodists are pretty strict, and have developed a belief that eating anything NOT Raw is BAD! Yet I find no real, visible evidence to suggest this is true. I started looking at the long term “raw foodists” who have been eating this lifestyle for 20 years or more and looked for evidence of aging. Raw foodists still age and they still die. Although eating a raw food diet can slow aging, combat disease and obesity, it isn’t going to make us immortal. There isn’t enough evidence out there to show the average lifespan of a die hard raw foodist because the movement is relatively new. However there is plenty of evidence to show some indigenous people living long lives that are contributed to different factors. Eating natural is a factor. Cultures that don’t have the processed diets we do are ahead of the game. One group of people live long and healthy lives eating a diet of primarily coconut and fish. Another clan do well on yoghurt. Other clan’s good health is attributed to climate, being separated from society, the high altitude, the water, and specific types of fruit. There are even studies showing that the social interaction between the members of a group is responsible for their good health and longevity. Lots of love and group support is the key! So who is better off, I ask myself. A die hard raw foodist who has a pompous attitude that he is somehow better than everyone else because he has the discipline to eat nothing but raw fruit and vegetables, meanwhile isolating himself from society because people feel somehow belittled in his presence? OR…someone who has great connections with others, is happy, loving and caring, and eats a diet of some raw foods, some cooked foods, drinks a little wine, smokes a little herb, has a positive attitude and lives life to the fullest? In the end isn’t happiness the key? What good is living if we haven’t found a way to truly embrace life and be happy? Of course we need to take care of ourselves the best way possible and eating healthy is important, but there are so many other factors such as mental attitude, outlook on life, emotional wellness, capacity to love and relate positively with others, and also life purpose. There are many pieces to the pie of wholeness. When embracing a healthy lifestyle, it is important to consider all pieces and the raw food diet is only one piece. |
I first made a decision to begin eating a primarily raw food lifestyle several years ago after a debilitating year of juniper allergies in Arizona. I went on a fast to cure the allergies, which worked in about five days, and not wanting to risk having them return I wanted to adopt a diet that would give me the same kind of energy as I had on my fast.