I've started a raw food diet today along with my wife. I'm just going one day at a time but I will be really impressed with myself if I make it a full week. Great restorative changes in health have been attributed to a raw diet including improved eyesight. Looks like I'll be consuming lots of green juice, berry smoothies, hemp protein powder, raw seeds, and agave nectar. Anyone interested should check out Dave the Raw Food Truck Driver on youtube. He has reversed diabetes, eliminated precancerous tissue, and lost 200lbs! in several months. My wife met him last night at a raw food meet up. He is incredibly inspiring!
I'll let you folks know what kind of results I get.
Feeling great. Didn't catch much sleep last night but my energy level is good. How my body was going to react to not getting nearly as much protein was a concern of mine but apparently if you are juicing you get all the amino acids that are locked inside protein without the effort of unlocking protein enzymes.
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My sense of taste has become much more acute and eating excellent recipes consisting of living foods is a rapturous experience. Fortunate to live in a town with a raw cafe and several vegan joints.
+ A bright clear-sky day with long shadows is giving me much better than regular clarity.
Tomorrow I will have made it through a full week. I've decided to go for the entire 90 day stretch that my wife is committed to. I'm excited about it and hardly daunted anymore by the prospect of going without some of my favorite cooked foods. There are many great easy recipes online to keep us happy and satisfied with this lifestyle. I've been enjoying my food in the last week more than I have for a long time. There is nothing like natural unprocessed deliciousness and deep cellular satisfaction in the same bite! We made kale chips and flax seed crackers in the dehydrator this weekend. Yumm!
I think I better take the rest of my reports to my effortless vision blog.
I too tried a 20 day 100% raw food trial. I noticed some benefits.
Seems rather obvious that raw foods are good for us, I mean all the other animals are eating 100% raw, but I'm also disappointed that the mainstream rarely if ever talks about raw food in health topics. We're advised to eat lots of fruits and vegetables but nothing is said about cooked vs raw.
The hard thing about it is that you have to give up a lot of staple foods like potatoes, beans. I saw there are a lot of recipes with sprouted lentils, chickpeas. I tried sprouting these but they tasted horrible. I started giving up meat 2 years ago and I'm happy that I fully adapted 1 year ago to a vegetarian diet.
I've heard it has to do with humans not having the digestive enzymes that other animals do, and cooking food breaks down the food enough to make the enzymes not a factor. Others say the enzymes are included in raw foods before they're cooked. And others say the enzymes included in the food aren't the right kind.
Dave
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
I've heard raw food takes more energy (calories) to digest than the same food cooked, but most raw food is more nutritious, with the exception of tomatoes which are more nourishing when cooked. Of course if you want to eat yams (MUCH better than white potatoes in my book) or beans they have to be cooked. This whole thread seems like an ideal topic for moderation and common sense and personal preference -- I suspect an all raw diet or an all cooked one isn't good.
As with the Bates Method, if it sounds worth trying out, you should try it. The experience alone will tell you if it's something you want to be doing, if it is worth the familiar foods that will be given up. Personally, I haven't stayed raw due to my living situation and my wife not currently being raw but I am at least sixty percent and I can't image ever dropping below that again.
