How I'm Learning About the Raw Food Diet

I have slowly changed my eating habits and lifestyle over the last 10 years. In 1999, when I discovered the supplement company that I now consult for, a whole new world of nutritional understanding opened up to me.

Since then, as many of you know, I have virtually stopped having colds and the flu, I've shed 30 pounds of body fat and, at age 48 competed in my first Body Building contest.

Here we are in 2008, and I am researching a possible new avenue of change for my life...the Raw Food Lifestyle.

From her book and website (www.rawnutrition.com), here is an article by Carol Alt about the process of learning and adopting the Raw Food diet. My diet is already about 50% raw, in the way of salads, fresh fruits and vegetables, and nuts. Now I plan to go a little further and see what else is in store in this, apparently supremely, healthy lifestyle.

Just a reminder about my disclaimer that my messages are not meant to replace the advice of a competent healthcare professional. Please don't undertake major changes to your diet without consulting your doctor.


Getting Raw: Ten Steps to the Raw Food Lifestyle

Maybe you’re the type of person who can make radical changes in their lifestyle overnight. Take my boyfriend. When he met me, he’d never even heard of raw foodists. But he was intrigued, and one day – boom – he made the switch. Four years later, he’s still at it.

But if you’re like me, it’s going to be a more gradual process. You’re going to have to help your body (or at least your taste buds) acclimate from the cooked food you’re used to, to the raw food you were meant to eat. Don’t get me wrong, when I say “acclimate your taste buds,” I don’t mean to imply that a raw food diet isn’t delicious. It is – and I wouldn’t go back to cooked foods if you paid me. But being a Westerner, it’s virtually guaranteed that your body is addicted to sugar and starch. The best way to stop craving those foods is to remove them gradually. Eventually you’ll wonder what you even saw in them!

So here’s your own personal roadmap for going raw, based on my experience and broken down into ten easy steps.

1. Reflect on your diet

Turn off the radio, find a comfortable chair and think about your diet for a moment. What do you eat? Not in your ideal world, not if you had time to eat healthy – in your real life. What did you eat over the past three days? Think about everything: the meals, the snacks, the beverages.

2. Track what you really eat

Recalling gives you an idea of what you eat, but tracking what actually goes into your mouth can be an eye-opening experience. So for the next three days, write down every thing you eat and drink. Write down the time you ate it. Just carry a list and keep it with you at all times. Don’t change your diet – we’re trying to get a realistic picture of what your body runs on. Why? Because any change you want to make in your life depends on awareness of how you do things now. Once you’re aware of what you eat and when, you’ll be better equipped to eat the way you were meant to.

3. Notice what’s already raw

It’s been three days and you have your list. Now take a highlighter and highlight everything on that list that’s raw. Maybe you already eat a lot of raw food. Maybe you love salads, or fresh fruit, or sashimi. Or, you could be like I was and subsist on a diet of nearly 100% cooked foods. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you want to make the change to a raw foods diet.

In addition to the highlighted foods on your list, think about other raw foods that you maybe didn’t eat in the last three days but do enjoy. Add those to your list. This is your starting point, no matter how short or long your list.

4. Find creative substitutes

Here’s where the fun starts. People assume that if they eat raw, they can’t have the things they love. But finding creative substitutes allows you to eat the way you like – without feeling guilty!

If you eat a bowl of yogurt and granola with fruit on top for breakfast, it’s easy to switch to raw. Trade your regular yogurt for raw, unpasteurized yogurt, switch out your cooked granola for raw granola made with dried fruits, nuts and seeds (you can find pre-made raw granola or you can make your own), and top with fresh fruit as usual!

If you’re more partial to a bagel with lox and cream cheese, then go for raw, marinated salmon (called gravlax ) instead of lox, substitute raw Camembert for cream cheese, and pile it all on sprouted Ezekiel bread. The bread isn’t technically raw, but it’s made from sprouted grains and is cooked at low temperatures, so it’s the next best thing.

Start thinking creatively and you can find raw substitutes for just about all your cooked food favorites.

5. Adopt the 2:1 ratio

I don’t expect you to go raw overnight the way my boyfriend did. So follow this easy rule: eat a 2-to-1 ratio of raw to cooked foods. In other words, eat twice as much raw as cooked and you’ll be well on your way to better health and better looks.

I recommend you follow the advice Dr. Brantley gave me when I first started out: make breakfast and lunch your mostly raw meals and dinner your mostly cooked one. Why? Because breakfast truly is the most important meal of the day. You want your healthiest, most nutritious meal first thing in the morning so you can have the energy you need to think and work.

Eating raw for lunch carries that energy on through the rest of the day. Most of us don’t really need that much energy after dinner – our day is winding down. So save your mostly cooked meal for the end of the day.

6. Think about each meal

After you’ve gotten accustomed to eating raw, take that 2-to-1 ratio and apply it to each meal. So every time you eat, aim for two-thirds raw to one-third cooked.

Remember, you don’t have to stick to traditional breakfast foods and traditional dinner foods. I love to have a salad with seared tuna for breakfast. You could have a cooked egg for lunch with a raw broccoli salad, accompanied by some raw cheese and crackers. Dinner can be a baked potato with seared steak. When you follow the 2-to-1 ratio at every meal, you are making sure that at all times, the health-giving, vital foods outnumber the depleted, dead ones.

7. Identify your cheats

A stumbling block for a lot of people in the conversion from cooked to raw is that they don’t want to lose their favorite cooked foods – those foods they feel they can’t live without. My answer often surprises them: Don’t!

Look, we’re not aiming for perfection here. We’re aiming for a mostly raw food diet. So identify which foods will be your “cheats,” and then consciously decide – and this step is crucial – what they are and how often you “need” them. Write them down and write down how often you can eat them. Otherwise, you’ll be making exceptions left and right.

Once you know that it’s okay to cheat every now and then, it makes sticking to your guns much easier. And most people find that they only actually want to eat their favorite cooked foods about once or twice a week. Totally doable.

8. Stress the right meals

In America, we’ve got it all backwards. We eat light for the most important meal of the day, grabbing a muffin or cereal to keep us going until lunch, and heavy for the least important, stuffing ourselves with calories right before we go to bed. It doesn’t make any sense!

Follow this advice instead: “Breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, dinner like a pauper.” In other words, if you want consistent energy, make breakfast the biggest meal of the day, then lunch, then dinner. Think about it: If you eat a small breakfast – or worse, skip it – you’re giving your body very little fuel when it needs it the most. After all, it hasn’t been fed for over 12 hours! Skimp on breakfast, and you’re more likely to grab whatever’s available once you start to crash.

9. Become a hunter/gatherer

Back in our species’ raw food days, we hunted and gathered our food. We never knew what we’d find on that particular day so our diet was naturally varied. These days, we likely shop in the same supermarket, going down the same aisles, buying the same foods and cooking the same meals.

Get back to your hunter/gatherer roots! There are so many different places to shop for raw foods – in your regular supermarket, yes, but also in natural food supermarkets, small health food stores, farmers’ markets, local farms, produce markets, food co-ops, raw food specialty stores and the biggest treasure trove of all: the internet.

10. Trust your body

As time goes on and you experiment with different foods, the list of raw foods that you particularly like will grow. You won’t like everything – I’m sure you don’t like all cooked foods – but you’ll keep adding new and different foods until your list is quite long.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy at first. You’ve been eating cooked food your whole life – of course making such a drastic change is going to have its challenges. But once you make the switch, once you allow your healthy, beautiful raw self to bloom, you’ll be so pleased with the results you won’t want to go back.

And then an amazing thing happens. You get back in touch with your body’s real needs and real desires – not the ones it’s been trained to have, not the things it’s addicted to. Your desire for cooked food will most likely just fall away. And when you do eat cooked foods, you’ll notice your body doesn’t actually like them. You’ll actually feel bad after eating them. Congratulations! At this point, you will have crossed the threshold. Your body will now naturally choose what it knows will nourish it. And you’ll never go back!

Let's gradually go raw together...Billie