I’m always thinking about the idea of "absolute health"…there has to be some diet out there that is the best possible diet for a human…we have dog food figured out; the same food every day and they get all they need! Why isn’t there "human food"?
So, I wonder if raw food is the most natural and healthy way to eat. It sounds good on paper, but what do you think?
Hi! Allow me to share with you my experience with "going raw"…
I also think about what is IDEAL when it comes to health and nutrition, too. My curiosity and research led me to where I am now.
I became a vegetarian initially because it really does NOT seem very natural to me to eat meat or animal products. Read this article by Milton Mills and really think about some of the reasons he gives.:
http://www.all-creatures.org/mhvs/nl-2003-wi-meat.html
My husband and spent all night talking about those exact things one night right before we made the decision to go veg. We had already gotten rid of a lot of chemicals from our lives and were trying to get a little closer to how we felt Nature intended us to treat our bodies; after really thinking about whether we’re naturally suited to eat animal products we thought going veg made sense.
I spent a lot of time reading different sites and browsing recipe books at the bookstore the first few months. I kept seeing stuff about "raw vegans" and I was really drawn to the idea of raw food. I kept buying raw recipe books and reading about all the experiences of people who have gone raw. It really did sound too good to be true! Again, though, it made sense to me. It just doesn’t seem like Nature would intend for us to cook most of our food. I really respect the incredibly complex way that Nature manages to make everything work together so perfectly and I believe that (most)food in its natural state is perfect. Cooking it and adding chemicals to it…it all makes it not perfect anymore. We see this when we boil food and it loses so much of its nutrients to the water or when we heat food and it loses all the enzymes that Nature had to have put there for a reason. I read SO much stuff about raw foods before actually giving it a try. Honestly, I didn’t think I could do it. But little things kept gnawing at me, like all the bizarre and elaborate recipes you could do with raw foods (not the most natural way to eat, but the next best thing – some of the recipes just looked so FUN) and things like photos of blood after eating raw food and then after eating cooked food (white blood cells en masse as if our bodies attack cooked food like it was poison!) and all the descriptions from raw foodists about how they GLOWED and had all this energy and were becoming more beautiful and more healthy every day. I was too intrigued and had to give it a shot.
I went completely raw right away and stayed that way for about a month. Within the first week I noticed a big change in my overall attitude and energy level. People were commenting on what a good mood I was in. By the end of the month I was seeing that GLOW other raw foodists talked about and my husband even said my eyes sparkled. I felt fantastic. My food was digesting better than ever (I never really thought about digestion until I did it RIGHT and noticed the difference) and I had a whole new appreciation for the tastes and textures of food on a different level. I would say the whole experience touched me on several levels. Do you ever have experiences that just click with you as "right"? So, of course I stayed 100% raw, right? No! Can you believe it? The fact is, it was a lot of work the way I was doing it. I like to prepare complex meals and so I was doing a lot of recipes that involved blending and dehydrating and there were a lot of experiments that turned out awful. I travel a good deal and just didn’t prepare as much as I should; eating at restaurants gets old when there’s really nothing but salads for you on the menu. My husband was really losing patience with the food I was preparing, too. And we DO get addicted to certain kinds of foods: comfort foods, snacks like popcorn at the movies, real cookies, nice, hot soups. You don’t realize how we associate so many different foods with different things in our lives until you do something drastic like go completely raw. Anyway, it got to be a lot of work and wasn’t as satisfying as I’d like for me on an emotional level. I started eating soaked and cooked beans more and more often and eventually I found excuses to add more cooked food to my diet until I got to where I am now, which is about 50-75% raw depending on the day. I am a little disappointed in myself because I like to think I can do anything I put my mind to and I KNOW in my heart that raw foods CAN do amazing things for our bodies and health if we consistently make them a large part of our diet. I am going through an especially busy time in my life right now and I keep telling myself that when things calm down a bit I’m going to be better and smarter about my diet. I wish I could have stuck with it all the way, but, alas, no one is perfect. We can try to be, though, and I think a raw diet is a pretty good thing to aim for.
