Navigating the Raw Food Lifestyle
As a raw foodist for several years now, it is kind of annoying how much misinformation is out there. In the beginning I spent a lot of time sifting through websites educating myself and learning things by trial and error. Many don’t realize how many people are in the raw foods movement just to make money and they will tell you anything to sell their product. There isn’t anyone regulating the term “raw” so any company can slap it on their product despite having cooked ingredients in it. If you want the full effects that come from living a clean eating lifestyle, including a heightened sense of awareness and a closer connection to Source (intuition) there is a lot to learn. In the beginning stages of raw, your body is going through a lot of detox. It can be uncomfortable and gourmet raw foods with lots of fats make this process more tolerable. But eventually as your body gets more and more clean you will notice that your body doesn’t do well with a lot of fat or with crazy food combinations. You have to listen to your body and notice when it is not tolerating certain foods so that you can remove them from your diet. There is not a single guru out there who can prescribe the perfect diet for you. Only you can learn to listen to your body and feed yourself your own perfect diet. Eventually you will want to water fast for the most optimum deep cleansing possible. Toxins are stored in fat and when you fast your body goes into ketosis which means it uses fat for fuel. This is when a lot of toxicity can be released. But that is much later in the game. If you’re just starting out on raw there are a few things that are helpful to know. I’ve put together a list to help get you started.
Raw Food Top Tips
*The first thing every raw food initiate should know about is detox! Detox is a defense mechanism of the body; it’s how you are able to get rid of toxins that are reducing the effectiveness of your cells. In actuality your body is detoxing as much as it can all the time, but it’s difficult when it’s bogged down with mucus and toxins. The reason most people wake up feeling sluggish in the morning is because their body has gone into a state of detox and their first morning efforts are to shut it down by drinking coffee or eating sugary or greasy foods. When your body is getting a constant array of fresh, water dense foods, it’s going to stop making the mucus that it uses to digest cooked food. This is going to free up a lot of energy in the body to put towards cleansing. It’s not what you eat that makes a raw food diet healing, it’s what you don’t eat. When the body is no longer bogged down with chemicals and processed cooked foods, it’s going to kick out all the toxins that are stored mainly in fat cells. The body works from the inside out to heal so organs are first on it’s list. If you have back problems, keep in mind you WILL heal, but the muscular system is low on the body’s list of priorities as far as healing goes so that will come later down the path. Detox symptoms can range from mild to extreme depending on your past eating habits, any drugs (prescription or street) you’ve taken, your emotional life ect. Emotions are strongly tied to toxins because we often use food and drugs to bury our emotions and when the toxins come up so do the emotions. Be prepared for headaches, nausea, acne, odd skin irritations, anger, sorrow, guilt…all these things need to come to the surface and be released. The body may choose any possible way out to get rid of toxins so the skin is often just as viable a choice as the digestive system, depending where your toxins are stored. Just know that it’s a good thing that you are temporarily feeling lousy because on the other side is a more vibrant, healthy, happy and energetic you. Allow those stored emotions to flow and bless the toxins as they go. The initial intense detox can last a few days or a few weeks, but over time you may run into detox issues again especially if you keep lightening your diet as you go. Many people blame the food and say eating raw doesn’t work for them. Raw Living can work for anyone who puts in the effort to get past the detox and discover the foods that are easiest for your personal body to digest. Every body is unique.
*Be careful if you buy prepackaged raw foods. A lot of people will try to make a buck using cheap ingredients or ingredients that aren’t raw. Read labels carefully. Here are some common ingredients that are NOT raw. If you aren’t sure, contact the company: agave (is not only cooked but is worse than corn syrup as far as sweeteners go), nama shoyu (often used as a soy sauce substitute because it isn‘t pasteurized, it is made with cooked soybeans so it is not raw--try coconut aminos, which are raw and make a much better soy sauce substitute) Braggs, any kind of yeast, some common nuts that are used are often not raw, usually cashews, and almonds. Cashews are flash cooked to destroy a toxic substance in the shell. It costs a lot more in labor to carefully hand shell each nut so there are only a few truly raw cashew brands on the market. Most almonds are pasteurized by law in California. To get raw almonds you need to find independent growers and contact them directly. A good source for truly raw nuts is the online store Raw Food World.
*Nuts should be soaked in water for at least two hours to remove the enzyme inhibitors and the water you soaked them in should be drained, not used in the recipe. Allowing nuts and seeds to sprout overnight is even better. It’s very easy to sprout things like sunflower seeds which brings them to life and makes their nutrients more bioavailable. If you are using them to make a nut cheese you should use a probiotic if possible to make them easier to digest.
*Food combining is important. Nuts should always be eaten with greens or with green juice for good digestion. Soft juicy fruits that digest fast due to high water content such as melon or papaya should be eaten alone so they don’t get caught in the digestive tract with a bunch of slow digesting foods where they will ferment. You should try to avoid eating fats with sugar as it will feed candida.
*Raw dairy is an ethical issue even more than a health issue. Our bodies are not made to digest the milk of other animals so it is a health issue, but many people don’t realize that a cow has to be impregnated to give milk and their baby cows are taken from them so that humans can have the milk. Those babies are often raised as veal cows, kept in a tiny crate and never allowed to move their muscles their entire lives to make their meat super tender, so dairy also contributes to the meat industry by default. Also, after their short life in hell as dairy cows they are most often sent to become hamburger. If you are a vegetarian for ethical reasons, then eating dairy is contradictory to the belief you claim to promote. Imagine how you would feel if your baby was stolen from you so that your milk could be taken for someone else. Colostrum is the first milk a mother gives that sets up her babies immune system for life. How can a person actually believe that it is somehow OK to steal the colostrum for themselves on some purported idea of achieving superior health? Companies like “Surthrival” that promote how healthy it is to take colostrum are unethical and I urge you not to support them. The company also sells deer antler which is an awful process that cuts off a deers young antlers before they are meant to fall off and results in bleeding and pain for the deers.
*Many fruits and vegetables on the market are hybridized and genetically modified. These foods are not as easy for our body to digest because they aren’t made by nature. For example, carrots are a cross between two plants and never existed in nature before humans got involved. Also, all the corn on the market now is not as it was first found in nature. Broccoli, also manipulated by humans. Bananas don’t even have viable seeds. That means you can’t plant a banana and grow a banana tree. The strain of bananas that is on the market was bred to condense the sugars. I personally cannot tolerate them. My skin breaks out if I eat just one banana. There are many varieties of bananas and they are all amazing, but hybridized bananas that can’t grow when planted are one of many of what I call “Franken-fruit.” Oranges and apples are also bred in a way for extra sweetness and fewer seeds. Even the papayas on the market are generally gmo (genetically modified). In fact it’s difficult to find foods in the market that aren’t tampered with by humans. Just try to eat hybridized and gmo foods in moderation and in small portions. Most greens and herbs are still close to how they were first found. Try to get heirloom varietals and wild foods in your area. Growing your own from heirloom seeds is always the next best to harvesting wild foods in nature.
*Organic is really important. If you want the best food possible you should grow it yourself to insure the land is cared for with love and you aren’t using demineralized soil, but of course this isn’t always possible. The next best choice is organic because organic farmers tend to have more integrity and care more for the land. But foremost, no amount of poison (pesticides, fungicides, larvacides) is tolerable to the body. Use common sense; how could something invented to destroy life forms, even tiny ones, be healthy for a living body? The point behind raw food is to give your body the best health possible so that it can heal and detox from years of toxins. How can you detox when you keep adding toxins to the mix? Organic does cost a little more, but you are what you eat and you tell the Universe what you are worth by what you give yourself. Are you worth a bunch of cheap toxic crap, or are you worth the best that is available to you? Make your priority the best food you can find. Most people skimp on food so that they can acquire more things, but you only have one body and you won’t find any worth in a bunch of material objects if you don’t have a healthy body.
*Water is possibly the most important part of a healthy diet since our bodies are mostly water and water is a conscious entity. I drink only spring water that I collect in glass. Water from the tap is polluted with chlorine, fluoride, pesticides, prescription drugs and worst of all wood pulp (toilet paper!). Also, if you buy spring water in plastic bottles it leaches the bisphenyl A from the plastic into your water. BPA is a hormone disrupter. You can locate a spring near you on a website called: Findaspring.com. It’s one thing Daniel Vitalis is doing right by promoting spring water. I tell all my clients that if they can do only one thing to improve their health it should be finding a good water source. Even water filters do not get all the junk out of the tap water, and even if they did, tap water is “angry” water because it is forced in through a piping system that rearranges the structure of the water. Spring water is intelligent, clean water. It defies gravity by moving upward through the ground and filtering out contaminates. It is a great adventure to harvest your own spring water from nature on a regular basis.
*Oils separated from their source (olive oil, coconut oil ect) are not part of a healthy diet. If you pay close attention to how you feel when you eat certain foods, you’ll notice that oils are the most difficult to digest and take a lot of energy as well as coating your cells in fat which makes sugars really hard to digest. They can be the cause of aggravated skin (acne) and fatigue as well as contributing greatly to candida. Notice if you feel tired or ill after eating a lot of oil. It taxes your liver incredibly as the liver is forced to dump a bunch of bile to process the fat. If you are following your body’s desire to lighten up, you will find that oils should be the first to go after your initial transition and detoxing has passed. You can modify any recipe that includes oil and don’t fall for the advertising campaigns that suggest you need these “healthy” fats. You get plenty of fats without adding oils where they aren’t needed.
*Exercise is often missing in people’s “diet” regimen. Oxygen is an important element of a healthy diet and we don’t get enough sitting around indoors. When we exercise oxygen is forced through our blood and lymphatic system. If the lymphatic system is stagnant, dis-ease can develop. We need that oxygen pumping through our system for many of the bodily processes incurred by digestion.
*Some people claim that if you eat a healthy raw food diet you don’t need to supplement vitamins, but we are eating a lot of hybridized and gmo foods that have been grown in depleted soils. We aren’t getting anywhere near the nutrients we need in our food…plus years of eating a poor diet has depleted our own storage system. I believe that we are meant to live without food and the process of eating breaks down the vitamins and minerals our bodies would naturally make if we weren’t constantly depleting them. It’s why certain vitamins are recommended to take together: they work in conjunction with each other because they burn each other out. B12 is the most common vitamin missing from a vegan diet but it is often low in omnivores as well. Oral B12 supplements do not work well in most people. I use a B12 patch and it works really well. B12 shots can also be considered. You will notice your mood improve a great deal when you are getting proper amounts of B12. Taking a good raw multi-vitamin (I like the vitamin code line) as well as enzymes and probiotics for digestion should round out a well balanced diet. It’s true that the enzymes are intact if you don’t cook the food, but the way many people combine foods makes it more difficult for digestion and any strain you can take off the body is a positive addition to your health protocol. We have a finite enzyme storage when we’re born and the less your body has to draw from it’s own storage the better. In fact, many people have been brought to the raw food lifestyle because they are experiencing health issues and this can be an indicator that you’ve burnt out your enzyme storage.
As I mentioned, I believe that we are meant to live without food. There are many practicing breatharians living on the planet already. I’ve even had the pleasure of having a consultation with Genesis Sunfire who doesn’t eat or drink at all. There are even many more liquidarians. If you have been called to raw foods, it’s highly likely that you are on the evolutionary path to eating less and less dense food until you will eventually get back to the natural state of living on prana. I’ve outlined my theories and my life story up to this point of my evolution in my book “Why we Die and How we Can Stop” available on my website RACrystalPalace.com. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve humanity during this time of planetary transition. Cheers to your health and good luck on your journey.
