Cooked Foods and Parasites

After 3 weeks eating raw food I gave up, because I was just too cold. I later found out that it can take several months to adjust to eating just "cold" foods and my attempt in November, whilst surrounded by snow-topped mountains was not the ideal time!

Over the next few months, I decided that, if I couldn't eat raw, at least I could aim for less junk and more vegetables. So I lightened up my diet, tried to avoid chocolate (failing miserably at least 3 times a week!) and added some detoxifying herbs that tasted disgusting but really did make me feel better! The herbs were inspired after my youngest got worms at school (yuk!) and I really didn't want to give her the worm-killing pills. So we bought some children's worms herb pills that tasted sweet, lemony and a bit horrible at the same time, plus some wormwood, walnut and cloves (Hulda Clark's protocol).

Eventually after 3 months, the worms had gone, but it wasn't as easy as I'd thought, since worms are tenacious and do their best to stay hidden from the herbs. Just as we thought they'd gone, one girl would get a "tickly bottom"! Then another 2 months later and the worms were back - probably being re-infected from school, so back to the herb pills for the girls and herbal tinctures for me. What I did notice is that I was actually feeling very calm as a result of the herbs (or maybe less parasites!) and so continued to take them even after we were all clear.

As the summer months approached and the weather became kinder and warmer, I decided to give raw food eating another go. By now I'd been helping to sell Biscru for 8 months and had encountered lots of raw food selling websites and their lovely, inspiring owners. One such site is Raw Living, run by Chris Wood and Kate Magic, who buy raw food for themselves and also sell it to the public. As I discovered, because of this, the food they sell is wonderful and of an incredible quality. Chris started selling Biscru for me and I started asking him questions about raw food, which inspired me to join some raw food forums to see what other raw food eating people did!

This exposure and the additional knowledge I was learning gave me the confidence to try eating all raw food again - I realised that there were other foods I could include other than vegetables and fruits, that would help stave off the hunger! More about that in another post....

What I learned?

Pinworms and parasites are incredibly prevalent, and amazingly tenacious when you're trying to remove them. I eventually tried EFT to help support the herbs, with great effect

Walnut is a great blood sugar balancer, in addition to being an anti-parasite

I think that wormwood tastes disgusting but thankfully so do the parasites!

The raw food community is a very supportive one with some wonderful people who share a very gentle and loving approach to life.

About Soya

This has very little to do with raw food but I wanted to follow up from my comment in my last post. Since moving to France a few years ago, I started relying heavily on soya as a source of vegetable protein. This was before I realised that the best source of protein is, in fact, raw green leafy vegetables, which I now eat every day. In fact, I've discovered dandelion leaves as being a free and readily available leafy green and put them in a raw smoothie everyday!

Getting back to soya - after 2 years, I found that my weight was going up and so I thought I better start counting calories. Horrifyingly, I discovered that I was eating around 1200 calories a day (and very active too!), but still putting on weight. I assumed that my metabolism must have been slowed right down after I lost my baby weight after my 3rd child - the first and only time I actively dieted to lose baby weight. So, I simply cut back more and ended up eating around 800-900 calories a day. I also cut out chocolate, which shows how committed I was!

This didn't feel good - I was hungry all the time, felt tired, sluggish and couldn't concentrate so I started doing some research on the internet.

What I found made a lot of sense. Apparently, soya (the non-fermented variety that I'd been eating), interferes with the thyroid function (this is one of the key glands involved in regulating metabolism). It can also take several months for the thyroid to repair. So, I immediately cut out soya from my diet and started supplementing with coconut oil which I'd discovered helps increase metabolism.

Nothing much happened for a while, but I did start to feel more alive and alert and I also stopped gaining weight. Then after about 4 months, I noticed that gradually I started to look a bit less puffy! I never weigh myself and had stopped counting calories (it's so boring!) but I did a check one day and found that I was now taking in around 1800 calories, being less active if anything and seemingly losing weight.

So, that's why I don't eat soya!

So, what did I learn?

Soya is not that great a food - in fact, for me and many others, it proved to be detrimental to health.

Fermented soya products, such as miso (which I think tastes disgusting) are fine if you can tolerate their cheesy feet/rotten food flavour (which I definitely can't!)

Coconut oil is a great and underrated product, touted by most raw food eaters as being wonderful (it tastes great, full of natural anti-bacterial/anti-fungal agents, and helps speed up metabolism. It certainly helped for me and it deserves a full post, since its something that is used to make raw chocolate and to add to many raw food meals in a really quick and easy way.

My first attempt to eat all raw foods

My first attempt to "go raw", as raw food eaters would say, was in November 2008, which was a silly time of year to start in hindsight since I realise that your body takes a while to adjust to eating raw food and I ended up feeling pretty cold for most of the time (I live on the edge of the French alps)!

My other mistake was to think I could survive on salads and fruit all day long (after all, the raw foodists seemed to, so why couldn't I? After 3 days, my stomach was so full but I felt weak and couldn't concentrate. I was starving! One evening, I worked out my calorie consumption for the day - just 750 calories - no wonder I was hungry!

I started filling up on nut butter and tahini (not raw) in between my main meals of salad, but my tummy felt a bit better and I did feel very healthy, albeit cold and definitely craving some warm food.

About 2 weeks in, I spotted some new raw biscuits on sale in our local health food shop. "Raw and not salad!", I thought and so I grabbed a few bags, thinking this could be what I was looking for. I couldn't wait to get home and opened one of the Tomato and Paprika flavour bags. They were delicious! In fact, I was overjoyed to have found something that tasted so good and was also raw.

After 3 weeks on my raw food diet, despite the raw crackers, eventually hunger and cold got the better of me and I cooked a soya burger and some stir fry vegetables - they tasted delicious! Looking back, I also remember feeling pretty awful a couple of hours after I'd done this - tired and heavy feeling, but put it down to needing to adjust to cooked foods and carried on regardless. Then later that evening, still feeling hungry, I ate a whole bar of Lindt 85% chocolate (and was awake all night as a result!!!)

Now I know that soya is one of the worst things I could have broken my raw food trial on.... but more of that in another post.

What did I learn?

Raw food did make me feel better, but I needed to find a different balance of foods.

The timing wasn't right - I resolved to try again when the weather was warmer.

That raw crackers are delicious.

I still love chocolate!