Raw Food Diet For Weight Loss
Having More Energy, Looking Younger,
and Reclaiming Your Health
Why the Raw Food Diet?
By Alison H Andrews
So why the raw food diet? One of the best explanations I've heard for why we should eat raw, living foods is because they are LIVING! They are actually still alive, their nutrients and enzymes are 100% intact.
If you take fruit for example and put it in your fruit bowl and ignore it for a few days, it will continue to ripen until it spoils. If you take that same fruit and stew it with some sugar, will it continue to ripen? Of course not! But why? Because it is dead. Cooking food effectively kills it.
There are plenty of arguments that cooking expresses certain nutrients that would not otherwise be available and that is true. But for every one nutrient that is expressed through cooking, 10 000 are destroyed! I prefer to lose one rather than 10 000, wouldn't you?
Cooking is one of the most nutritionally damaging things we can do to food, and for what? Without artificially spicing and salting it to high heaven, it's pretty bland. Okay I'm sure the arguments will come thick and fast about how delicious various dishes are, but the truth is, you educate your taste buds about what to like.
If you are accustomed to eating salty spicy food, then natural raw foods taste bland. But if you eat lots of whole, raw, natural foods you come to appreciate the natural flavors of the food even more!
If you eat whole, fresh, ripe, raw foods, digestion is quick and easy, which frees your body from the process of complex digestion which then gives YOU more energy. The concept of needing to have a snooze after a meal becomes a distant memory on the raw food diet.
That sluggish feeling you get after a heavy meal occurs because your body needs to focus all its energy on the task at hand; breaking down this complex cooked meal into the amino acids and sugars that it can actually utilize. Raw fruits and plants contain these sugars and amino acids in their simplest form so they require very little work before they can be utilized by the body. They are the perfect ENERGY food.
Beauty is another answer to the question of why the raw food diet. Eating raw food will allow you to sculpt the most beautiful you. Whether you won the genetic lottery or not, your true beauty is likely hiding away under puffiness, blotches, acne, cellulite, excess weight, eye bags, wrinkles, varicose veins, broken blood vessels and bloodshot cloudy eyes. Even if you're still young enough not to have begun to show the degeneration of your body, internally that is exactly what is happening. Wouldn't you prefer to be regenerating?
With the raw food diet you give your body the chance to clear out years of accumulated junk, all those toxins that have been tucked away in your fat cells, in your eye bags, your acne and your blotches. As those toxins clear out, your most beautiful self will be given the chance to shine.
But its not just physical! The physical part is just a happy side effect. Another compelling reason for why the raw food diet is the mental clarity and spiritual connectedness you feel. Your memory will improve, along with your concentration and focus.
Since I have gone raw I have made the most life changing decisions effortlessly. I feel so much more in touch with who I truly am and I can no longer do anything BUT live congruently. I must be who I truly am and I must follow my heart. My intuition is growing stronger by the day and I am beginning to feel so in touch! In touch with myself and in tune with my intuition and my life's purpose. This is the most amazing thing of all.
So why the raw food diet? Why the hell not!
Alison Andrews is a full time author, blogger, vlogger and musician. She is also the author of the book Desperately Seeking Jude: Confessions of a Sex-Mad Beauty Queen. She lives in Dubai with her husband Jaye, and spends her time creating content for her websites http://www.loving-it-raw.com/index.html and http://www.alison-andrews.com/index.html
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alison_H_Andrews
Recommended ProgramRaw Food Diet For Weight Loss
Having More Energy, Looking Younger,
and Reclaiming Your Health
Frederic Patanaude Shares on Raw Food Motivations and Mentors
By Kevin Gianni 
In this article, Frederic Patanaude shares on raw food motivations and mentors. Frederic Patanaude has been on a raw food journey for thirteen years. He is the author of The Raw Secrets.
Kevin: Well Frederic I want to welcome you to this program, I'm excited to have you here.
Frederic: I'm happy to be here.
Kevin: So let's start, for those who've never seen you or heard of you before, tell us who you are and how you got into this.
Frederic: All right, well I got into raw foods and the natural health movement about 10 years ago. I started in 1996 experimenting with it.. I'm 32 now. I was pretty young when I
started. I published a magazine for many years called "Just Eat an Apple." It was the first
professional thing I did in this movement. Then I did a lot of books, recipe books, that I published and then in the last four to five years I have been doing online projects exclusively. So I have been doing a lot of program courses.
Kevin: Tell me about, in the beginning I know you had some struggles with raw food, you just didn't get into it and then it was awesome for you and ongoing.. Tell us a little about some things you learned throughout those beginning years.
Frederic: It was very different back then. When I started the Internet was just getting started so we didn't have people like you, sharing a lot of great information. It was more difficult to just get the information. And what I found is that the information that I got at first was not complete, it had serious pieces missing. And I would say the first four or five years I experimented with the diet and at some point I went 100% percent raw for several years in a row and I was not getting the results. Now I can totally understand why, in retrospect looking at what I did, it's very clear what didn't work. But at the time I had no clue and there was no way to know. I couldn't find the right information. And unfortunately the people at the time that were leaders in the movement didn't have it all down to a science, it wasn't that clear. It was more empirical, based on experience, but that's often misleading. So I had some problems. I still experimented with it over the years till I found a way to do it. Up to recently I was still doing some experimenting and now I'm pretty sure I got it right.
Kevin: What have you been doing now that you feel was missing, even through the past 10 years? Why are you confident now that it's really right for you?
Frederic: Well the main difference I guess is my motivation, the source of my motivation. That's really important because changing your diet is something big, you do it for a reason, and the reason I had was more philosophical. It made sense to me but I was 21, so I didn't have many health problems and I didn't have good reason to do it. Since I turned 30 I became more interested in improving my fitness, because I see other people around me you know that are the same age that are starting to decline, their health is starting to decline. I don't want to go down the same path. I'm not just talking about raw foods here I'm talking about the general program including fitness, which is something that I didn't include enough in my program.
Another reason was, I think the biggest reason probably was just that I was not eating enough calories. That's quite stupid, but it's very simple to understand when you're 22 you need to eat a lot of calories. And when you're 30 or 40 and you're really active, you need to eat a lot of calories. You're not going to get that from a breakfast of three apples. So that's something I didn't understand because I didn't fully analyze the diet. That's been a huge difference.
Kevin: What turned you on to the caloric intake? Were you feeling worn out? Were you feeling tired? You said you got to do something here and you searched around for the answer or...?
Frederic: I never had enough energy, so I always reverted back to cooked foods. I always reverted back to other foods or massive quantities of fat or massive quantities of nuts, like a lot people. I think a lot of people are beating themselves because they have cravings. What I found is if eat enough fruits and vegetables I'm not going to have cravings because I'm getting enough. So when you have a craving it's just your body telling you you're not eating enough. I mean there's also other types of psychological cravings where you would want to have a certain food because it reminds you of something, or you want to be part of a social environment. That's different, it's not like physical where you feel compelled to eat it, like where you can't resist. If you can't resist eating the food then obviously you're not getting enough nutrition. People look in the wrong places when it comes to nutrition. They look at, "I'm not getting enough of this nutrient or this vitamin." It's not the little things that are missing it's just the calories. So that's been a huge breakthrough for me.
Kevin: The book "Raw Secrets," I love the book "Raw Secrets," and I think the reason why is because it seems like it's spoken from someone who one, cares about the reader, and then two, you've done a lot of research. And you've done research with reading into Herbert Shelton, and TC Fry. What do you think is the good stuff from those authors?
Frederic: Referring to Herbert Shelton, especially Herbert Shelton, TC Fry and the early authors, I think the good thing about them is they had a more complete picture of health than many current authors who focus specifically on one thing, like they're going to focus specifically on raw foods, without changing the entire paradigm behind the model that we use to judge if something is good or not.
So for example, a lot of people are still in the medical model. For example for diet, all medical diets for weight loss are always the same. It's always a high protein, low carbohydrate diet. No other variation of the diet, it's always the same - Atkins, it's just the ratio that varies. You look at the South Beach Diet, all these different weight loss diets, they're always the same. It's the medical model for weight loss which is force your body to consume less calories by consuming high protein foods which are detrimental in the end to your health, in high quantities. But it works for weight loss. So that's always been the model.
So this is one example in diet, but there's other examples in terms of if you're asking yourself whether you should take a certain supplement or if you should use a certain drug. You know, some instances call for the use of technology and even drugs. But how are you going to judge that? I think that's what these authors offered us, a better understanding of the fundamental principles in self-healing and how the body works, and how nature works. That's what they brought us, this understanding, these basic principles which I find are not often emphasized in the raw food movement.
Kevin: Yeah, now you spent time with, doing program with Dr. Doug Graham.
I love a lot of the stuff he puts out. What was your experience with that? And what were some of the things that you learned from him as a mentor?
Frederic: Yeah, well I definitely have high esteem for Dr. Graham and what he's bringing to the raw food movement. And I think it goes back to what we were saying about the basic principles and this understanding of health. He has a bigger understanding, a wider understanding of health, and all of its aspects, not just diet, not just raw foods, but also, you know, how's your sleep, how's your fitness program.
Especially about fitness, I'm one of those people that was never really fit in my life. I actually was not very sporty in school and I hated exercise, and I was more the brainy type. I've changed that and I've started doing more exercise and improved my fitness and I learned a lot from Dr. Graham in that regard. So that's been a very important part of improving my health.
And also I think, definitely what he brought to the movement is a better understanding of the nutrition aspect the raw food diet, because if you look at it from strictly an academic perspective, some of the raw food diets just are not healthy, you know. [laughter] And it doesn't matter if it's raw or cooked, you have to look at, are you getting enough calories? How much fat are you getting? How much salt are you getting? And, these things are, we don't need that much research to prove that, the research has already been done.
Kevin: What does raw food mean to you? When someone says, "Oh, you're a raw foodist," what does that mean?
Frederic: Well, the word raw I think is important to define too, and the problem I think is people have used this word in scientific perspective, where they'll say, "Raw is when you heat a food below a certain number of Fahrenheit degrees, like 105 or 118." And there's like this magic number and if you go above that then it's no longer raw. But to me raw foods are just foods in their natural state, so fruits and vegetables in their natural state. Of course we can make some compromises and say, "OK maybe you can dehydrate a nut and still it can be a part of the program," but we're talking about foods that are in their natural state. It's pretty easy to know which ones are and which ones are not, you know? So that's the definition of raw.
In terms of the definition of raw foodists, it's a term that I don't particularly like, but I guess to me it would be someone that eats 100% raw food is a raw foodist, but then, you can eat 100% raw food for a day and are you a raw foodist then? So, if you make an exception once, does that count? So, that term is not important. You want to look for improving your health and using raw foods is one way, and eating all raw is certainly something that I recommend and I try to do. So the definition can be very different from one person to the next.
Kevin Gianni the host of "Renegade Health Show" - a fun and informative daily health show that is changing the perception of health across the world. His is an internationally known health advocate, author, and film consultant. He has helped thousands and thousands of people in over 21 countries though online health teleseminars about abundance, optimum health and longevity. He is also the creator and co-author of "The Busy Person's Fitness Solution."
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kevin_Gianni
Recommended ProgramRaw Food Diet For Weight Loss
Having More Energy, Looking Younger,
and Reclaiming Your Health
Free Raw Food Recipe - Best Blueberry Or Blackberry Pie Raw Recipe
By Helen Hecker
If you're looking for a healthy alternative to cooked berry pies or even cooked desserts that are laden with unhealthy fats and sugars, why not try my live-food, free, easy, raw berry pie recipe. Many people are gradually making the switch from cooked desserts and cooked foods which are causing so many of our health problems today. It doesn't matter if you're a raw fooder or eat the standard American diet; you'll love this raw berry pie recipe and know that you're doing your body good in the process.
In fact making a raw berry pie does not require turning on the oven and can be made in virtually minutes. I have often timed myself and can make this pie in ten minutes or less if the ingredients are assembled. Equipment: food processor.
This is my own creation, one of many vegetarian, vegan and raw food recipes that I have developed and created over the past few years as a raw fooder - eating raw foods, having cured myself of breast cancer, fibromyalgia, arthritis and sinus infections along with many other ailments.
You can use the pie crust for dozens of other types of raw food recipes or live pies including raw or live apple pie. I've experimented with dozens of variations and tried various ingredients but I've found this raw blackberry or blueberry pie recipe is the best, fastest and easiest recipe to make. In fact if you're going to have company coming over you can whip this free raw food diet recipe up in no time.
Helen's Best Raw Berry Pie - the ingredients: 12 organic medjool dates, 1 cup raw pecans, 4 cups fresh or frozen blueberries, blackberries or boysenberries and 2 bananas.
For the crust put 1 cup of raw pecans in a food processor and grind until fine. Add 8 pitted organic medjool dates and process until mixed fairly well. Place into a 9-inch pie plate.
For the binder mix two bananas, 8 berries or so for color and 4 medjool dates in a food processor - use the same food processor - don't need to wash it. Remove to large bowl and carefully fold in 4 cups of fresh or frozen or partially frozen blueberries, boysenberries or blackberries. Spread berry-binder mixture on top of the crust. Decorate with boysenberries or blackberries around the edge of the pie. Refrigerate.
This live or raw berry pie is a family favorite and one I have served on many occasions to company who are not aware they are eating something healthy containing all the vibrant nutrients - nothing cooked out.
This pie is really good with boysenberries too. You can also slice some fresh kiwi on the top or other fruits that won't turn color.
One nice thing to know about fixing any raw food recipe is that you can eliminate, substitute or add ingredients easily and it will still taste delicious! In this vegan or raw food diet recipe - you may only have one banana on hand for example or you can make half the recipe. You can substitute the pecans for a mixture of one half cup pecans and one half cup walnuts, or all walnuts.
If you live in an area where you have tons of wild blackberries you can make this pie for pennies. Pick blueberries cheaply in the summer and freeze them for year-round use, although fresh berries are always the best. You can make raw berry pies with this free raw food recipe year-round and you'll feel good too knowing you have served your friends and family something that will help them better their health and help them lose weight if they need to too.
For my raw food diet cure and secrets - how I used it to help cure my breast cancer, arthritis, fibromyalgia, acid reflux-digestive, sleep issues, headaches, pain, weight loss, etc. see a nurse/raw food expert's http://www.RawFoodDietCure.com and my easy raw food recipes http://www.RecipesRaw.com
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