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!