Archive for August, 2009

My biggest problem when I first learned about raw back in 2007 stemmed from information overload. There was just so much advice out there about raw foods and so many different educators…all providing very different guidelines for living the raw lifestyle. And all I wanted to know was which raw diet was best and what I had to do to implement it!

Fortunately for me, I stumbled upon the healthiest diet of all rather quickly. Fortunately for you, I can explain what that diet is just as quickly, with 3 easy guidelines! So let’s get started…

#1: Eat More Sweet Fruit

I want you to think back to a time when you ate some delicious fruit. Maybe it was an exotic mango, a perfect peach, or a juicy orange. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was scrumptious, sweet, and satisfying. And the best part? No guilt! In fact, you probably felt pretty happy with yourself for choosing such a healthful snack over greasy chips or fatty cookies. Now imagine experiencing that satisfaction, both with yourself and your food, every single day… Pretty sweet, huh? How can you experience this? By simply eating a diet based on raw, sweet fruit.

Fruit is full of water-soluble fiber, packed with essential vitamins and nutrients (not too mention the oh-so-popular antioxidants and phyto-nutrients), calorically dense and water-rich, and provides easy to digest healthy sugar in its simplest form.

#2: Don’t Forget Your Veggies!

But it isn’t all about the sweet stuff. A well-rounded, healthy raw diet also incorporates moderate amounts of mineral-rich vegetables. These include tender leafy greens like romaine and non-sweet fruits like tomatoes and zucchini. Not only do these foods provide some extra variety (and maybe a nice break from all the sweetness) in your diet, they also provide higher levels of necessary minerals than their fruity friends.

#3: Hold It On the Fat

Although many raw foodists eat and promote a fatty diet that rivals any standard cooked diet, this is *not* optimal. While raw overt fats like avocados and nuts are healthier than their cooked versions, too much fat in a diet still results in many health issues, including but not limited to heart disease, arthritis, and even depression.

This is certainly not the makings of the best raw diet. The best raw diet does contain these healthy raw fats, but in a limited quantity. For optimal nutrition, the bulk of your calories should come from low fat sweet fruit, not fat.

Final Words

So there you have it! The best raw food diet, in a raw nutshell!

For more information on the best raw vegan diet, be sure to visit Fit On Raw and subscribe to Swayze’s newsletter Peachy Keen Ezine. By subscribing, you will also receive the free report The 4 Principles of a Healthy Raw Diet as well as the 5-week mini-course The Fool Proof Transition to Raw.
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This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s Renegade Roundtable. In this excerpt, Happy Oasis shares on getting family members and especially teens interested in trying raw foods. There is great advice here.
Happy is the chief visionary Officer of the raw spirit festival, a motivational speaker and author of Uncivilized Ecstasies and Bliss Conscious Communications.Kevin: Ann has a question. She has a husband and a 14 year old daughter. She’s trying to let them know how important raw foods are. They don’t seem to understand and she doesn’t know how to explain it to them. She frustrated. What can you tell her?Happy: Well, I wonder if you could give them the gift of the children’s book, Serge and Valya. They wrote that really wonderful book when they were, I think Valya was around 14. She might have been 15. They weren’t very old. Give them that as a gift or have somebody else give it to them, instead of the mom. Sometimes 14 year olds do exactly the opposite of their parents and it’s so frustrating for parents. But it’s actually the sign of a healthy teenager, so I understand. I’m not a parent but theoretically speaking a rebellious teenager is sometimes psychologically just doing what healthy teenagers do. So it’s a tricky one. However, I would say just the most enthusiasm, the most gusto in yourself. So instead of us trying to make our teenagers do something I would do it by the enticement.
That’s what I love to do with everybody I meet. For 13 out of 14 years I’m not convincing anyone to do anything. The first year I was like, “I want everybody to do this because it saved my life.”
I would suggest ice cream. Most teenagers love ice cream. Freeze some bananas. Does she have favorite nuts or strawberries? After dinner, have your ordinary dinner, then just make ice cream. That’s awesome. The other way to get them on board, we all love desserts. So if you have a chance to bring home some gourmet desserts and then some gourmet dishes. So if you make your lasagna as good as a lot of the raw lasagnas, that teenager is going to cross over. Pizza is a hard one because raw pizza is very different from cooked pizza. What are her favorite dishes? Make them even better raw. Then they can just do the cross comparison.
Next, somehow try hooking them up with other teenagers. We have a teenage program at Raw Spirit Festival. It’s led by teenagers. She may or may not want to come but if she did, we have a teenage table and we have teenagers telling us – they’re going to be on the main stage this year – teenagers and children telling us what they would like to see happen with the Raw Spirit Festival and what they would like to see happen in the world, in the future. I would say really valuing the teenager’s perspective.
How about raw chocolate? A lot of teenagers have acne and raw chocolate can cause a little bit of acne but it’s much less extreme than the cooked chocolate. So if she has any acne challenges, suggesting the raw chocolate.
I think winning people over by the taste buds is the way to go. If you make a really awesome carrot cake or something, those kids are going to gobble it up. They won’t care if it’s cooked or raw. Then after a while she’s going to get it.
Another thing is if she could perhaps just try one meal a day and see if she has more energy. I love to talk to construction workers, at least in the past I did, who would be older people, might be really macho guys, and you could tell they were a little lethargic. I said, “Don’t tell anyone but just go sneak away while everybody is having their burger and go have a salad and then come back to the group and go back to work and see how you feel.” I tell you, 100 percent of these men would say, “I have more energy. I’m stronger than the guys half my age.”
I’ve done this with students too. Students are hyperactive and they have attention deficit disorder. I say to them, just try for lunch this organic, leafy green salad and maybe a sweet drink. Make the juice as well. If you can get on just pure apple juice with a little bit of lemon and a little bit of cinnamon, just apple juice.
See if she likes it, to get off Coca Cola and that kind of thing. Go for the sugar at first and then slowly, slowly they’re going to actually wean themselves off the sugar.

We are feeding him royal canine brand of food and we have heard good things about the raw food diet, but we have NO idea where to start?
What can you feed them? Does it have to specially prepared for dogs?
Can you feed kibble for one meal and raw meat for the next like breakfast & dinner?
Our dog is almost 8months old, is this a safe age to start raw meat or does he have to be older?
basically any info you can give us will help!
THANKS!

When a person starts this diet they will at first experience considerable weight loss because it is difficult to extract a large number of calories from these foods (though I have seen people actually gain weight on a pure melon diet, so much sugar do these fruits have, and well-chewed watermelon seeds are very nourishing). Eating even large quantities of only raw fruit and raw non-starchy vegetables results in a slow but steady healing process about 10 to 20 percent as rapid as water fasting.A raw food cleansing diet has several huge advantages. It is possible to maintain this regimen and regularly do non-strenuous work for many months, even a year or more without experiencing massive weight loss and, more important to some people, without suffering the extremes of low blood sugar, weakness and loss of ability to concentrate that happen when water fasting. Someone on a raw food cleanse will have periods of lowered energy and strong cravings for more concentrated foods, but if they have the self-discipline to not break their cleansing process they can accomplish a great deal of healing while still maintaining more or less normal (though slower paced) life activities. However, almost no one on this diet is able to sustain an extremely active life-style involving hard physical labor or competitive sports. And from the very beginning someone on a raw food cleanse must be willing and able to lie down and rest any time they feel tired or unable to face their responsibilities. Otherwise they will inevitably succumb to the mental certainty that their feelings of exhaustion or overwhelm can be immediately solved by eating some concentrated food to “give them energy.” Such low-energy states will, however, pass quickly after a brief nap or rest. Something else gradually happens to a body when on such a diet. Do you recall that I mentioned that after my own long fast I began to get more “mileage” out of my food. A cleansed, healed body becomes far more efficient at digestion and assimilation; a body that is kept on a raw food cleansing diet will initially lose weight rapidly, but eventually weight loss slows to virtually nothing and then stabilizes. However, long-term raw fooders are usually thin as toothpicks.Once starchy vegetables like potatoes or winter squash, raw or cooked, or any cereals, raw or cooked, are added to a cleansing diet, the detoxification and healing virtually ceases and it becomes very easy to maintain or even gain weight, particularly if larger quantities of more concentrated foods like seeds and nuts are eaten. Though this diet has ceased to be cleansing, few if any toxins from misdigestion will be produced and health is easy to maintain.”Raw fooders” are usually people who have healed themselves of a serious diseases and ever after continue to maintain themselves on unfired food, almost as a matter of religious belief. They have become convinced that eating only raw, unfired food is the key to extraordinarily long life and supreme good health. When raw fooders wish to perform hard physical work or strenuous exercise, they”ll consume raw nuts and some raw grains such as finely-ground oats soaked overnight in warm water or deliciouslysweet “Essene bread,” made from slightly sprouted wheat that is then ground wet, made into cakes, and sun baked at temperatures below about 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Essene bread can be purchased in some health food stores. However, little or no healing or detoxification can happen once concentrated energy sources are added to the diet, even raw ones.

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