Raw Love...for Beginners!

I've been researching the raw food lifestyle for about 5 years now and, every year, I increase my raw food intake. I like to call my style High Raw. I'm not big on packaged 'raw' foods, and am certainly not going to get myself a dehydrator any time soon. I use a simple Oster blender and a small Cuisinart food processor. I augment my creations with help from the kitchen at Organic Lives and the juice bar at Whole Foods. I buy organic as often as I can.

Friends and family ask lots of questions about what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Basically, my premise is simple. Food attachments are what get us into trouble. As a society, we no longer eat for nourishment; we eat for entertainment and, thus, we eat for flavour, not health! If you've listened to any of my talks in the last few years, I've coined the phrase 'the yumminess factor'. This is the guide by which most of us choose our foods. 

In the mid-80's, I attended a 6-day workshop in California. The week's menu was based on Nathan Pritikin's model, which included very limited amounts of sugar and salt. I was pretty dismayed by what they called 'soup', which was an almost clear liquid with a pea pod floating in it! It had almost no flavour. But sitting next to a fellow workshop attendee, Jack gave me my first introduction to the concept of eating for health, not flavour. Jack had recently experienced heart failure and heart surgery; he was exhilarated at his new lease on life and had come to the conclusion that his poor food choices had been the cause of his heart problems. That day, much to my astonishment, Jack relished in the soup!

We were told that our 'snacks' could be found in the fridge; they consisted of raw carrot and celery sticks in copious amounts. I was hardly impressed but so began my humble journey. It's been a roller coaster ride, a pendulum swing, a dance between my taste buds and my conscience! But I've successfully navigated a complex world to make it work for me and I feel like sharing this win!

So I'm compiling a list of my favourite raw recipes, as well as some guidelines about a simple and easy way to introduce the raw concept slowly into your life. I'll be putting all this into an E-book, and starting a workshop series next year. Stay tuned and love raw!