Let’s say you are new to the idea of eating raw foods and you don’t know where to begin.
Transition to a raw vegan diet can be easy or difficult, according to the type of knowledge you acquire.
The first thing you should do is be clear about what you want. Do you want to simply improve your diet by adding more raw foods? Do you want to eat “mostly” raw? Do you want eat “100%” raw?
Set your expectations first, so you’re not constantly focusing on food and forgetting about the other important aspects of your health and your life.
There are also a lot of misconceptions and fallacies about the proper transition to a healthy raw food diet.
First of all, simply “adding” good foods to your diet (like fresh juices and smoothies) won’t have a big positive influence on your health unless you first work on *removing* the foods that are harming you the most.
In other words, it doesn’t matter if you just add good stuff to your diet. Your health will be directly influenced by the bad stuff you still consume.
Here are the first steps you should consider taking:
– Go vegan
Going vegan or plant-based, can be one of the easiest things in the world to achieve. I literally did it almost overnight.
Leaving the ethical issue aside, animal products can contains enormous amount of fat, which isn’t good for you.
To give you an example, one slice of cheese pizza from Pizza Hut contains 40% of calories from fat. If you compare eating a slice of pizza to a single banana, which contains only 4% fat, the difference in fat consumption becomes clear.
It’s also important to point out that there is no essential nutrient in meat or dairy – and even grains or legumes for that matter – which is not also available in fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds; and in a form that is easier to digest.
– Choose whole foods
Natural whole foods are any type of food that you eat in its natural state. In other words – it hasn’t been tampered with in any way – hasn’t been cooked, refined, pickled, bottled, preserved, sweetened, flavoured, processed, canned, or mixed.
You will get the most benefits by avoiding processed or refined foods and concentrating on whole foods, in their natural state; any kind of tampering with food (including cooking) is detrimental to its quality.
– Reduce fat intake
Because of their complexity, fatty foods are the most difficult foods to digest.
The most progressive health experts and most credible research done in the world, such as those conducted by T. Colin Campbell and featured in the China Study, have suggested we keep the fat levels below 15% (of percentage of calories).
Health declines significantly on practically every level when fat consumption rises above the mid-teens.
Consuming too much fat will thicken the blood; causing the red blood cells to clump together, so they cannot deliver oxygen to the cells. A high-fat diet not only destroys your health, but it also ages you.
You will notice that, after following these concise steps as highlighted above, you will start getting a lot healthier – and it becomes easier to increase the amount of raw food you consume.
As long as you eat a “low fat” whole food plant based diet, and you eat plenty of fresh fruit in the meantime, it doesn’t really matter what percentage of raw food you consume overall in the beginning.
Remember that the concept of eating a raw food diet should not be a race towards eating 100% raw, but to start giving your body the fuel it needs in order to properly function and phasing out the junk.
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One Response
Just wondering how to get rid of sulphites on fruit and vegetables especially greens and grapes . I can’t get organic grapes and I love them but react badly to sulphites
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