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Why I chose a Raw Foods Diet to heal

Most Disease is just our body trying to survive us poisoning ourselves

As Americans, we have spent most of our lives eating the Standard American diet of meat, cheese and heavily cooked vegetables. This makes it hard to imagine eating only raw plant based foods. As such, many people feel overwhelmed just at the idea of change.

Accomplishing the transition to a healthy diet feels like such a drastic change that most people become overwhelmed at the thought of it. Often quitting before they even begin and often letting their health suffer instead. But it doesn’t need to be overwhelming. We don’t need to live in fear of disease.

Why Choose Raw Food?

I will start by saying that my personal journey to a raw foods centered diet did not happen overnight. Most people who transition to a Raw Foods centered diet, do so gradually, as they become more educated about nutrition and food choices. However there are many people, particularly those who are already sick, who choose to jump right in to Raw Foods 100% from the start.

I had been a vegetarian for a large part of my life, since 1992, but by no means a healthy eater. For most of my Vegetarian life my diet focused on Bread, Pasta and Cheese with the occasional Veggie “meat” convenience foods.

In 2011 I transition to a Vegan diet, but this was not much of an improvement to my diet. I simply swapped the Cows Milk cheese for oil based “Vegan” Cheeses and the junk food for Vegan versions.

However I did feel a dramatic benefit from just removing dairy from my diet. This benefit was reinforced if I accidentally ate something without realizing it had dairy in it. I felt so sick after eating just these tiny amounts of dairy that it really reinforced how much impact just one wrong food can cause on draining our health away.

However, my Vegan diet was still very Starch heavy, cooked food centered and included very little fresh fruit. I was still tired all the time, depressed and feeling and looking old well before my time.

So I began researching nutrition more heavily. Nutrition has interested me since I first read the books Diet for a New America and Never Be Sick Again shortly after college. So I knew there was a better way of living, I just had to find it. This research led me eventually to the Raw Food, Fruit Centered Diet, and while the transition was not always smooth, I can say confidently that it was worth every moment.

Benefits of Raw Food and Why I choose Raw Food still today

Here are some of the benefits that I have seen from my transition to a Raw foods diet.

I Lost 40 lbs over the course of about 6- 7 months, effortlessly, and without ever feeling hungry or deprived and without joining a gym. (My primary exercise comes from walks and hikes with my dogs and gardening.)
My physical endurance has increased astronomically, I feel like an athlete now, something I have never felt in my life.
My self confidence is greatly improved. I wake up happy, grateful, joyful and full of energy.
Cavities in my teeth have begun to repair themselves.
My joints no longer ache and I recover quickly from strenuous hikes, bike rides and other exercise.
My complexion has cleared up, my skin looks brighter and younger and my hair is extremely long, shiny and healthy.
I have abundant energy from morning to night.
My sleep has improved drastically. I no longer have insomnia or restless nights. Waking I spring from the bed ready to tackle the day.

The list of changes could cover pages so I will stop here, but overall I feel amazing and that is what keeps me motivated. That and the food is delicious and I can eat as much as I want.

What has kept me on the Raw Foods diet is realizing just how bad I feel when I eat cooked and processed foods. It took several months to detox all of the junk, but now I can’t believe that I let myself go on feeling so tired all the time.

You aren't "getting sick" you are being poisoned.

The craziest part though, at the time I was eating cooked foods, wheat and cheese, I had no idea how bad I felt. It wasn’t until I started eating a natural biologically appropriate human diet and started to feel really good that I even realized that I was feeling so bad before. If you have never felt this good before you have nothing to compare it to.

If you have eaten cooked foods and science projects your whole life, like I had, you have no experience of what eating vibrant foods feels like. You have no idea how much you are actually suffering. So it wasn’t until I started nourishing my body that I truly understood how weak and sick I was. I just thought it was normal to feel that way.

So this is Why I choose Raw Foods. I can not emphasize how important real food is to our health. Try Real Raw Food for just 30 days, I can say with the utmost confidence, you will feel better, you will look better and you will live longer. You will never want to go back to eating science projects again.

What is a healthy diet?

Join me in Eating for Health. Reverse Disease, Lose weight and have more energy by using common sense and eating a natural human diet.

What is a Healthy Diet?

How Do we determine a healthy diet through all the misinformation?

What is a healthy diet really? There is so much misinformation and contradictory information that we are bombarded with daily, it is difficult to discern the truth from the half truths and the outright misinformation. Advertisers have, for decades now, been able to provide misinformation about health in order to promote their products, with a complete disregard for our health. Scientists and Doctors are being bought by industries to deliberately mislead us into believing that we should eat more of this and less of that. So how to we sort through all the lies and find a truly healthy diet?

Our Food system is broken – How do we fix it?

Our food system has become a wasteland of nutrition-less junk, science projects and non-foods that we routinely are led to believe are healthy. So what is a healthy diet really? How do we even determine what is healthy and what is not? Well to start with, we need to look for nutrient rich foods. As we talked about in What is Disease?, a nutrient poor and toxin rich diet leads to disease. So a healthy diet is a diet which is nutrient rich and low in Toxins.

So where do we look for a more nutrient rich diet?

How do we find out what we should be eating?

The best way to sort through all the misinformation and get to the facts is by looking at nature. Animals in their natural habitat eat food which is naturally designed for their optimal health. They don’t eat cooked food, they don’t eat processed foods, they just eat foods as nature intended.

To find our ideal diet we can look at our closest biological relatives in the animal kingdom. The Chimpanzee shares 98.6% of the same DNA as humans. They are our closest ancestors, and while I am not suggesting that we hop into the trees and start eating insects, we can certainly base a healthy human diet off of their example.

Chimpanzee Diets consist primarily of fruits, greens and blossoms, with some seeds, pith, bark and small amounts of insects. Some chimpanzees eat a small amount of meat, the equivalent of about 3% of their total diet or 9 days a year, although not all Chimpanzees eat meat. The meat they eat is raw, fresh and unprocessed, as close to its natural form as possible.

So using this example we can look at a healthy human diet like this. We should be consuming primarily fruit, 50% of our diet should come from fruit. Then large amounts of leafy greens, at least 20-25% of our diet should be leafy greens. Vegetables would come next with 15-20%. Fruits, greens and vegetables should include a large variety, varied both seasonally and weekly. The remaining 5-15% should consist of Nuts, Seeds, Cold Pressed Oils, and if desired, organic pasture raised meats or organic fish and organic eggs.

So how do we go from a nation living in a state of chronic dis-ease to a state of vibrant health and abundant energy? How do we change from a nation of Animal Protien and Dairy consumers to fruit and vegetable consumers? We start slow, we make small changes until they become a habit and then we make a few more.

Want to learn more about how to eat healthy? Read on:

How do I transition to a Healthy diet? Getting Started in a Healthy Diet. Healing your body from the inside out.

How to get healthy today – Part One: Eliminate the Toxins

Are the foods we are eating unhealthy? Do unhealthy foods lead to disease? Can healthy foods undo the damage?

To attain good physical health, to be free of disease, to achieve a healthy weight and to gain strength and vibrancy, we must fuel our bodies with the nutrients it requires.

To attain true mental health, we must first have a brain that is functioning properly. To have a brain that is functioning properly, then we must fuel our brain with the nourishment that good food provides. Once our brain is nourished, then we can begin to rebuild our thoughts to attain the strongest and happiest version of ourselves.

So it all comes down to the food we consume. Good food equals good health and unhealthy food equals disease, depression and discomfort.

In order to understand what good food is, first we must look at what unhealthy foods we consume regularly in the Standard American Diet. It is important to understand what is unhealthy so we can begin to replace these unhealthy foods, which rob our energy, with healthy foods that support a vibrant, strong body and a strong positive mind. So lets take a look at some of the food that we eat in a Standard American Diet (S.A.D.):

Dairy

Dairy is a huge contributor to disease in our country. We have been taught since childhood to drink a big glass of Milk every day for strong bones. But did you know that there is not a single study, that was not paid for by the Dairy Council, that shows that milk builds strong bones?

All independent studies showed that people who consumed milk daily actually had less calcium in their bodies at the end of the study then when it started.

This is why, even though most of us have been taught since childhood to drink milk every day, the rate of Osteoporosis is steadily on the rise. Crazy right?

Milk is acidic (6.5 ph) and consuming milk and all dairy products regularly, leads to the body being in an Acidic state. In order to survive, the body must maintain a ph of between 7.35 and 7.45, so when the body becomes Acidic, the body pulls from its mineral reserves, calcium being one of the most effective, to neutralize the acid and get the body back into homeostasis. (See Alkalize to learn more about Ph and why it matters.) So if we consume too many acid causing foods, without balancing them with abundant amounts of Alkalizing foods, eventually our Alkalizing Mineral stores will become depleted, and this is when disease begins.

Let’s look a little deeper at Milk. If we look to the animal kingdom, there is no other species around the world which consumes the milk of another species, this should be our first clue. Also looking at the animal kingdom, there is not another species on our entire planet which drinks milk from its mother once it has been weaned. You don’t find a juvenile or adult animal anywhere in nature who consumes milk.

Cow’s Milk is specially designed for baby calves, which being born at around 100 pounds quickly gain weight, growing to 8 times their weight (800 lbs) before being weaned. A human baby, being breast fed should gain about 6-8 pounds in their first year, so with an average weight of 8 pounds at birth this is just about 2 times their birth weight by their first birthday.

The composition of human milk, cow’s milk, goat’s milk and all other mammalian milks are completely unique, they contain different levels of proteins, sugars and nutrients in a specific balance which has been determined by millions of years of evolution. These milks are specifically designed for the unique bodies and growth patterns of their own species. The only milk we as humans need, is human breast milk, and only until we are grown enough to eat solid food.

Let’s just look at one last factor about dairy. How do we get the milk we drink? As you probably know, female cows, just like human women, only produce milk as long as they are nursing. As the baby cow weans, in nature that is, the milk production stops. So how do factory farms circumvent nature and get cows to continue to produce milk long after they naturally would?

Modern Dairy cows, through extensive genetic manipulation, have been bred to significantly increase the amount of milk they produce, up to 12 times what they would in nature. Then by artificially inseminating cows (on what the dairy industry so appropriately calls a “rape rack”) and then taking away their calf, the dairy “farmer” is able to take the milk meant to raise the calf.

So we have bred these cows to produce far more milk then they ever would naturally and we steal their newborn child from them. If you have ever been a mother or know someone who has, you can attest to the physical drain that the body is put through during childbirth and breast feeding. This is why it is so important for mothers to be properly nourished, so they can support their own health as well as their babies health. Well we are taking this extremely draining process and forcing these cows to go through it for an unnaturally long time, just so we can drink something that is detrimental to our own health. Does this sound crazy to anyone else?

Protein

We have a misguided notion that we need large amounts protein to build muscles and to survive. I am not sure where this idea came from, but it is pervasive. If you don’t believe me, just ask any vegetarian or Vegan what is the question you get asked most frequently? They will say, “Where do you get your protein?” As Americans we are always concerned that we are getting enough protein, but actually the average American eats more the double the RDA for protein, primarily from animal and dairy sources. At 125 lbs your RDA protein requirement would be 46 grams for females and 56 grams for males, however this RDA has a large margin of error built in, and our bodies actually can survive and thrive on far less protein.

You can determine your own RDA for protein by using this formula: Body weight (in pounds) x 0.36 = recommended protein intake (in grams)

The problems with consuming too much protein, particularly from animal sources are numerous. Consuming large amounts of protein has been shown to increase urinary calcium loses. Which means the more protein you eat, the more likely you are to get Osteoporosis. Protein from animal sources has also been shown to be the cause or a major contributing factor to several Cancers including Colon Cancer, Breast Cancer and Colorectal Cancer.

The biggest problem with consuming Animal proteins is in the cooking process, most Animal foods require cooking and most are cooked at very high temperatures, which not only kills enzymes which help to break down food in the body so it is digestible, but also cooking anything at high heat, changes its molecular form, making it Carcinogenic (cancer causing) to the body. Cooking also destroys most, if not all of the nutrients in the food, so not only are we consuming large amounts of foods which have been shown to be cancer causing but we are cooking all of the beneficial nutrients out of these foods. So what are we left with? A big mass of hard to digest useless material which makes us nutrient deficient, tired and depressed.

Toxins

As Americans we consume a staggering amount of Toxic substances, from food coloring and MSG to artificial sweeteners and petroleum by products. We are also subjected to Toxins in the air, in the water we drink, in the pesticides sprayed on our foods and in the personal care products we use on our bodies every day. We have been led to believe that these products are safe to use everyday, through advertising campaigns by the companies who make a profit off of these products.

Scientific studies saying the opposite have been silenced by the big corporations that profit from our pain, even to the point of threatening Scientists lives or the lives of their children and families. Scientists and Doctors have been bought, put on the payroll of giant food companies and industry boards, like the Dairy board, to spread misinformation and discredit true studies. But slowly this information is coming out and we are no longer subject to only the information that the most money can buy, thanks to the internet and social media, documentaries, independent publishers and individual people who are tired of being sick and poisoned for profit. Advertisers no longer have ultimate control over the information we receive. We are now free to search for studies that have not been paid for by the corporations trying to get approval from the FDA.

All of these toxins are acid causing in the body, which further strips our bodies of nutrients as our body naturally tries to keep our body at a slightly alkaline Ph. (To learn more about Body Ph and why it is the key to disease, check out the Alkalize Section of this website.)

Most people don’t realize, that the body uses fat cells to store toxins which it can not process quick enough. So the more toxins your body is subjected to, the more fat cells your body will store. One amazing example of this process is “Diet” Soda. Diet Soda uses artificial sweeteners to maintain a low calorie beverage. The problem is these artificial sweeteners are highly toxic to the body, so the body attempts to clean them out using the liver and kidneys. But as we continue to consume them daily, the liver becomes over taxed, so the body jumps into survival mode and starts shoving these toxins into buffered little fat cells. To protect the body from these poisons.

This is why, even though the market is saturated with “diet” products, obesity is on the rise. Have you ever noticed that there are very few skinny people who drink diet soda regularly? And those that do are usually skinny for other reasons, like being smokers or taking diet pills. They do not typically look healthy, their complexion is usually a little grey or even yellow. They are tired all the time or they are constantly hyped up on caffeine.

Grains

We consume large amounts of grains through not only the consumption of breads, cakes and pastries, but also hidden in lots of processed foods like your breakfast cereal. Have you ever tried to eat a dry, unprocessed grain? Not very appetizing, yet grains make up an astounding percentage of our daily meals. You have probably heard, through advertising, the health benefits of consuming “Whole Grains” and I’m sure you’ve seen the stickers on products all around the grocery store for “heart healthy, contains whole grains”.

Haven’t we always consumed grains?

Grains are so ingrained in our lives (pun not intended) that we think that they have always been a part of the human diet, but in reality grains have only been consumed by humans for 10,000 years. Okay, you are probably thinking, 10,000 years is a long time, I’m sure they are fine. But when you consider that scientists have determined that humans as we are now have been around for about 200,000 years and our ancestor species have been around for about 6 million years, 10,000 years is a comparatively small length of time and certainly not enough time for us to evolve our digestive processes significantly.

Grains began being harvested in mass quantities during the Agricultural Revolution. The consumption of grains is also in direct correlation with the decline in human intelligence and strength. Scientist have been studying the strength and intelligence of humans, which peaked just before the Agriculture Revolution and has been on a steady decline since.

Grains are not all bad, but unfortunately the way that we consume grains has changed so drastically that our bodies can get little to no benefit from them in their current state. Originally, grains were harvested and left in the fields, where they would naturally sprout before consumption. Grains contain Phytic Acid, which is a nutrient blocker. When Phytic Acid is consumed, it blocks the bodies ability to absorb nutrients. When allowed to sprout, the phytic acid is broken down and the nutrient content rises in the grains.

Since our grains are now harvested immediately and shipped off for processing, they still contain this Phytic Acid and the nutrients are limited. So now we are consuming another food which is stripping our body of nutrients rather then providing them. If we could bring our grain processing back to more natural methods, where they are sprouted and naturally fermented they might not be so damaging, but in their current highly processed state, they are not offering us much in the way of nutrition.

So now that we have looked at the biggest offenders of unhealthy foods in the S.A.D. diet, lets look at how we can remove these unhealthy foods and replace them with healthy food options.

Tag: healthy weight