How I Eat Raw Food

Firstly, apologies for the delay in posting. Life has been busy (in a good way) but I never seemed to find time to update my blog.

This morning, there was an article at Dr Mercola about eating raw food. I made a comment and thought that it would be helpful to post a summary about how I eat raw food.

My first comment is that I follow no rules and have developed my own pattern that suits me. I got very confused about the numerous different "ideal" raw food diets that are recommended by raw foodists. Some of these appear very extreme, almost judgemental in their approach (ie, if you eat too much fruit, "it's bad", or if you don't eat enough green vegetables "that's bad", or if you eat unsoaked nuts "that's bad").

I take the view that, if you are like me, trying to improve your diet and end up eating unsoaked nuts in place of soya burgers, this is better than before! It's all relative and I'm sure that in 10 years' time of eating raw food, I'll prefer to eat soaked nuts. But, for now, I'm a newbie and, as the French say, ça va (it's OK).

Here are examples of what I may eat in a day - it's not typical, because I'm inconsistent and eat according to how I feel.

One winter day could be like this:

Breakfast - often nothing because I'm not hungry
Mid-morning - fruit
Lunch - mixed vegetables cooked in coconut oil, with lettuce, grated carrot
Mid-afternoon - nuts and raisins
Dinner - coleslaw, raw crackers, mixed salad, olives
Evening - dark chocolate, red wine

So, around 60% raw

And another day....

Breakfast - sheeps yoghurt with a raw green superfood, like MegaGreens
Lunch - Vegi burgers made with all vegetables, plus spinach and mixed salad
Mid afternoon - packet of organic puffy crisps (I know, not perfect!)
Snack - more sheeps yoghurt and greensuperfood
Dinner - raw crackers and grated carrot salad
Evening - dark chocolate

This is around 50% raw

Note about superfoods: I've yet to discover these properly so that I can do them justice in a blog post, but have found a couple of green superfood mixes that have been incredibly helpful. I live in France where organic leafy green vegetables are so hard to come by, unlike in the UK and US where you have a huge selection. But the discovery of pHresh Greens and Boku has been fantastic, because now I get enough leafy green vegetables simply by adding them to water or a little yoghurt.

Then during summer, things are lighter...

Breakfast - often nothing
Mid-morning - fruit (eg, banana, apple, figs in season)
Lunch - Green smoothie, made with courgette, carrot, peppers, dandelion leaves from our garden, xylitol to sweeten, spices to flavour as I feel like
Mid-afternoon - avocado with grated carrot salad
Dinner - raw crackers and coleslaw
Evening - fruit and always some dark chocolate!

Here it's around 90% raw

To the above, I add when I feel like it, coconut oil, raw nut butter, dried apricots and dates and plenty of alkaline water all day long. The warmer the weather, the more raw food I eat.

So what did I learn from eating raw food?

• That I have more energy and less hunger, as long as I eat a balanced diet
• That I never get ill eating at least 70% raw food
• That I like it (that bit's important!)
• That I listen to what my body needs, and not what others tell me I need
• And, that mixed green superfoods, such as pHresh Greens.

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.