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100% Raw or Not?
Psychologists have found that in any situation 5% will go to the extreme, and 95% won't. In Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, they had only to separate 5% of the men (the gang-leaders) and the rest would never try to escape.
The 5% are teachers and leaders. The rest of us are the students, happy to learn from and be inspired by a good teacher. Of course you can be a teacher in one world and a student in another.
Once you experience raw foods are healthiest, then it's likely you'll join the 95% of raw-foodists who eat a little cooked food for a variety of reasons – because you enjoy cooked starch, you love eating out with friends and family, you don't have time to endlessly prepare raw dishes, or you're not an extremist in anything.
A friend who was all-raw for two years traveling with a leading rawfood teacher, e-mailed me:
"I am actually not 100% raw anymore. It was a choice I made to be less strict with myself and have some fun. I am about 90% raw. I feel better because I am not binging on fruits, nuts and dates. I have lost some weight actually too:) I definitely think the more raw foods in your diet the better, but to enjoy your food is just as important."
Dr. Gabriel Cousens is the leading medical doctor in the rawfood world. He writes in his book Conscious Eating (2000):
“I have not been able to detect a significant difference between 100% raw and 95% raw in terms of day-to-day health or physical and spiritual energy ... My observation is that getting in touch with just the right amount to eat rather than overeating, even of biogenic [living] foods, plays a more critical role for health than whether one has a 95% or a 100% raw-food diet. That 5% is important because it allows some social leeway, as well as keeps one from getting stuck in a perfectionistic-type thinking.”
In his first book, Spiritual Nutrition and The Rainbow Diet (1986) Dr. Cousens points out:
“The key is to find the diet that best supports the flow of spiritual energy in our system, and at the same time supports our function in the world.”
Experienced rawfoodist Jinjee – e-mail info@thegardendiet.com – wrote in Rhio's newsletter of September 2004:
"My friend believes that the raw vegan diet is only for those who need to vibrate on a higher frequency to do their work in the world. She believes that different types of work require you to vibrate on different frequencies, and that this requires different diets."
But this is Jinjee's experience:
"Einstein said you could tell when you had found a true mathematical formula because it was beautiful. Things in this universe make sense and are beautiful. It is a beautiful thing to evolve to a point where you don't kill any more. The raw vegan diet is a thing of beauty that makes harmonious sense on every level. If one has faith that this universe is good, true, and beautiful, then it is easy to embrace the raw-vegan diet wholeheartedly."
Rhio is my favorite raw-food writer, I love her free e-newsletter Raw Energy Hotline. To join, email rhotline@aol.com with the words "Join Elist" in the header.
Essence of 80-95% Raw Diet
I remember it as F-W-G-W – easy to tick off on my four fingers because FG follow each other in the alphabet.
When you reach FWGW, you've made it as a raw-foodist. You're focused on creating your dreams and you feel free and happy every day, as if Life is one glorious unforgettable vacation.
* NO FACES – no food that was a face or comes from a being with a face, so evolve away from chicken, fish, meat, or eggs, cheese, milk, yogurt, icecream, etc.; switch to seed and nut milks and yogurts;
* NO WHITES or WARM oils – never cook with oil, use only cold-pressed unheated oils, avoid snacks with cooked fats like hydrogenated oil; and say No to the Whites – white sugar, white rice, white pasta, white flour, cakes, cookies, chips, chocolate, etc. – use the dehydrator at gogreen.org to make your own snack foods;
* GREENS by the ton – blend greens, juice greens, chew on greens, take wholefood green powders like organic spirulina or dried grass juice; you can *never* overdose on greens; they will clean and rebuild you faster than any other food;
* WHOLE foods only – avoid food from machines – frozen, boxed, canned and bottled – eat it sparingly, even if it looks whole, like frozen vegetables;
* 80 percent or more raw foods.
If you need machine food to make yours tasty, use as little as possible, e.g. sprinkle vegetable broth powder on your buckwheat pasta, instead of pasta sauce, or simmer chopped dried tomatoes with pasta and add raw garlic and olive oil when it comes off the stove.
Better still, eat whole grains rather than pasta. An easy way to cook whole grains is in a thermos flask. Use one cup grain to 2-3 cups water (experiment with different grains); pour grain into thermos, boil water and pour it onto grain in thermos; leave for few hours. This way you don't have to watch a slow-simmering pot of grains.
Best of all, eat raw spaghetti. Look in homeware dept. for a cheap kitchen utensil that cuts hard vegetables into spaghetti threads and spiral shapes – called Saladacco or Spiralizer in US. Use this to grate yellow zucchini or butternut squash lengthwise into long thin strips. Cut the strips into lengths that are easy to eat. Toss with any tasty sauce from a rawfood recipe book.
Essence of 100% Raw Diet
Raw plant-based Fats, Fruits, Greens – all three daily – are the essentials for not only the raw-food diet, but any diet.
David Wolfe writes in The Sunfood Diet Success System (2000):
“I do not know of another person who has communicated with as many successful 100% raw-foodists as I have. In every single long-term raw-foodist I’ve met, I discovered the following dietary pattern: green-leafy vegetables, sweet fruits, and fatty [plant] foods. To me discovering this pattern was a revelation. It tuned me up to an incredible level of health and clarity.”
RAW PLANT FATS are seeds, nuts, avocado, olives, coconuts, and durians. Fats are soft, heavy and filling, they fill the empty spaces and ground you, bring you back to earth. They satisfy hunger. They feed your nerves so you're happier and handle stress with a smile. Seed and nut milks are a delicious way to eat fats.
RAW FRUITS are all foods with seeds for their own propagation. They include the sweet fruits we love, plus sour fruits (cranberry, grapefruit, lemon, lime), vegetable fruits (bell pepper, cucumber, okra, pumpkin, squash, tomato, zucchini), and sun-dried fruits. Eat only red or yellow peppers, not green peppers (they’re unripe). Avoid seedless grapes and watermelon.
RAW GREENS should be LIVING. Build a Sprouter or order one ready-built for you here at eatsprouts.com, so you harvest a plateful of fresh greens daily in your kitchen. There is *no other* Sprouter on earth that will give you such a big plate of organic greens daily in such a labor-free way.
“It was tough at first because cooked food is addictive ... Once I cleansed my body of the cooked-food residues, I no longer craved cooked food. What a liberating experience! I can sincerely tell you – it is magical ... I just did my best each day to go without cooked food and I didn't worry about how much raw plant food I was eating ... I stopped eating cooked food completely after about a year.”
Stephen Arlin, Raw Power, Building Strength & Muscle Naturally (Maul Bros. Publ., San Diego, CA, 1998)
All three foods – fats, fruits, greens – may be eaten at the same meal. Natural hygienists disagree, they say never mix fruit with anything and 'specially not with fat. I enjoy sweet and fat together, e.g. banana and nut-butter. I think food combining rules apply to cooked food, but I don't bother when all the food is raw.
However, I have the upmost respect for the research of the late Dr. Herbert Shelton and today's natural hygiene followers. I would do it if I had the discipline. If you experience digestive distress (cramps, flatulence, bad breath, headache, etc.) then don't combine the three food groups in one meal.
For raw foodists, 80-90% of daily diet is fats, greens, sweet fruits. The rest is any other raw plant foods – vegetable fruits, or roots, flowers, stems, herbs, fungi (mushrooms), sea vegetables (seaweeds), algae, sprouted legumes (mung, lentil, green pea) and grain sprouts – especially oats for silica, and ancient non-hybrid kamut and quinoa.
Include heating foods especially in winter, e.g. raw cayenne, chili, garlic, ginger, jalapeno pepper, onion. Fresh ginger and herb teas melt my heart.
Relax
My Sprouter and mainly raw-food diet make life so simple. I feel so balanced, full of energy, and HIGH every day!
When you think about it, the reason we do *anything* is because deep down we want to feel good. The more raw food you eat, the more you wake up feeling good.
You experience the power of a focused brain, and joy at the heart of every cell. Your cells get so happy when they get to work at peak performance. They were born to be raw.
Health is simple. Health is easy. It’s no big deal if you struggle with self-indulgence and rebound into binging. FOCUS on doing the RIGHT thing ONCE a day – Energy Soup and green juices made in the multi-purpose juicer at wheatgrass.biz.
Don’t bother about the gazillion wrongs, they’re pin-pricks of darkness in a vast Universe of Light. You’re in the right place, you’re moving towards freedom.
Your body-mind is re-creating itself at its own pace.
http://eatsprouts.com/diet.html
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