I can't remember what it was, exactly, that inspired me to make a very large fraction of my diet raw (I am still not 100%, but most days in the 80%-90% range).

I started out from an only slightly unorthodox nutritional standpoint: cooked vegetarian (at 27. I am now 43). At the time when my interest was growing in the nutrient contents of individual foods, I tended to focus on iron and calcium and omitted many of the vegetables that are not known as rich sources of those two. I also assumed that I'd get just about everything I needed if I focused on those two. So I was eating whole grains, cooked legumes, cooked collards, kale, or mustard greens, cooked sesame seeds mainly, with a few pieces of raw fruit thrown in for good measure. And I thought this was a very healthy diet.

But somewhere along the line, I saw the light. I don't know if it was a newspaper article or something in a magazine, or something in a medical journal, or something on the internet. It was not friend or family conversations, I know that much. But I started eating a lot more raw food, and developed a fixation with the lettuce family, well before I'd ever heard of any of the "gurus".

I can't take any credit personally, I can't say I figured it out for myself. There must have been some trigger, or a series of triggers. I wish I could remember them! I can clearly remember the sequence of conversations leading me to give up meat. But not going raw, I am not sure why. Maybe it was a gradual awakening.

How was it for you? I am curious.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/24/2006 03:44PM by arugula.

Health problems.

Health problems lead me to looking for solutions. I read Dr Norman Walker and Ann Wigmore and everything made sense again.

I have to contribute most of my healthy eating to Yoga. I was always a pretty healthy person - I have never had any health issues. When I started doing Yoga, I became a vegetarian. I ate lots of grains, cooked veggies and fruit. A while back, maybe last year sometime, I heard some famous actress (can't remember who it was) on the radio talking about how she eats only raw foods, and then I looked it up online and thought "Wow, that's crazy! There's no way I could eat that way! It's too restrictive and time consuming". And for whatever reason, I kept looking into it more and more, and now here I am, eating raw foods, and it really is not restrictive or difficult at all! Two of my biggest motvating factors are my husband and daughter. My dad died when I was 17, and that could have been prevented if he had taken care of himself better. And now I am watching my father in law go through some serious health problems, at the young age of 62, and it could all be prevented if he ate better and exercised. I want to be around for a long time for my daughter and husband! I don't want to be 50 years old and not able to keep up with my daughter.

I would say that I am about 95% raw. I don't let it run my life, so to speak. For example, the other day at my daughters school, they had "Muffins with Mom". So all the kids spent the previous day making those muffins. And my daughter was so proud when she placed one in front of me and said "Try it, mom!" There was no way in the world I was going to say no to that!!!

Before I came to the US, I wasn't eating much meat at home, mostly cooked veggies, with lots of salads, and fresh fruits, not much pastries etc. The country side life in France with a garden.
Then I came to the US, lived with a fmaily for a couple of years, and started eating more meat (every day...), and low quality veggies, all cooked. Less salads and fruits. I got sick, in my body and my head. My body started to tell me: stop the meat, stop the fat. And I started a low fat vegetarian, then vegan diet and started to feel better.
Still cooked though, with lots of rice/wheat/legumes.
After that, I decided to buy all my produce organic, and I found a local farm having great produce. It was a plan to reduce the ecological impact of my food. I first became aware of that from becoming vegan, and discovered all the conventional farming techniques. I was so scared, I can't eat anything that is not organic (certified by my eyes most of the time ;-)).
From this farm, I could get fresh veggies, and I started eating all my veggies while preparing dinner. Slowly, I was eating less and less rice/beans etc, almost none at one point, because I was full and good from the veggies I had before dinner. I think at that point I was about 80 to 90% raw. Raw all day with fruits for breakfast, lunch with a salad, and salad veggies for dinner, and sometime rice or beans.
One day, with my wife we took a trip to NYC, and I looked around for organic restaurants there. I was so surprised to discover the rawfood restaurants among those, and I started asking myself why I was eating rice still? But, the food in restaurants was way too heavy for me, and I thought that if that was rawfood I couldn't do it.
By volunteering in the organic farm, I eat veggies off the plants from the field more and more, and could go several days like that no problem.
I lost the taste for any prepared rawfood. I only wanted to be able to taste each individual food by themselves.
It saves me time, energy bills, equipment (I never bought anything beside a mandoline, and a friend gave me a vitamix which is sitting in the kitchen...). And I love it.
Now, I eat fruits during the day, and a large salad at night. I feel so good, and I can ride my bike faster than I ever did, while learning more and more physical tricks. Everybody think I'm just turning 20, and I'm now 28. I like that too, sometimes...
Now, my plan is to quit my job, and start to live completely. I'm doing research in physics at the University, but now I only see the useless aspect of the work: trying to find money and grants all the time, not doing any research anymore. With my wife, who transitionned the same way than me almost, but at a slower pace, we bought some land in Andalucia, south of Spain, and we are moving there next spring to live on our land, with our land, feeding her, and she'll feed us back.
I'm more than impatient to be able to celebrate my 30th birthday and my early retirement together in my farm!

BTW, now my parents are starting to do it as well (70-80% I think). More and more raw. They are 66 and 67, and they feel better than 10 years ago. It makes my day every morning.

Raw Fruit Festival
[www.raw-fruit-festival.net]
Health, Fitness and Fasting Retreats in Spain
[www.fit-in-nature.net]

The health benifits and super powers which raw foods affords me.

Ian.

Sickness, unfortunately or fortunately.
I actually started by reading Marilu Henner and giving up dairy. From there I discovered Rev. Malkumus at Hallelulah Acres and was vegan but mostly cooked and eating as far on the edge as I could (in a bad way) As I kept reading and wanting more, I discovered this web-site. And here I am trying to heal my body of an autoimmune disorder which would not heal through a half-hearted vegan diet. Still in the beginnings of my journey but learning alot and changing through this site.

Some health problems. Eventually, though, I realized that cooking does NOTHING to improve the vitamin / nutrient quality of the food I eat.....and had to ask myself....do I value taste over health? I chose the former...and made a commitment to reach 100% healthy foods. It only took 2 years! Not bad for 20 years of abuse! I'm VERY proud of myself!

-David Mason

WOW! Great question, arugula! Thanks for asking it.

My story is a journey for sure. I read Diet For a New America by John Robbins over 15 years ago and my life was impacted in many ways. I became veg and then vegan very quickly. My 10 year old son followed my steps soon afterward.

My motivation was mostly my love of animals, with the environmental and health issues as added benefits of the vegan lifestyle. In other words - I ate crap!

I did an unplanned detour into alcoholism for a few years and started smoking cigarettes (after having quit for 10 years) while on the detour. I finally recognized the alcoholism for what it was and got help. Had a "spiritual awakening". Life became GOOD! Traded for a caffeine addiction and still smoked and hated myself for that.

Finally, I went to visit my son in Arizona and he took me to Rawsome Cafe. He had already told me about how much he wished that I would quit smoking. He said that he was going to go raw on Jan. 1st because he felt sluggish, fat (he wasn't) and out of shape and unhealthy. He had some books with raw recipes lying around and I would pick them up and read them while he was at work. So, I said that since I was visiting for a few more days, that I would join him and we could be on the same page in terms of eating. We went raw on Dec. 28th and I quit smoking on Jan. 1st. I was in shock and major double withdrawal! But there was just something about the way I was feeling in spite of the withdrawals (kind of like a "Towanda" power surge) and so when I flew back home to Indiana, I just took it one day at a time and never went back to cooked food. I didn't make a pledge or anything, I just didn't look back. Happy Happy Joy Joy!!! I'm blessed!

Life Is Good!

alive!

Wait....I chose health over taste.....heh...heh...

-David Mason

Seven years ago, I contracted lyme disease, was diabetic, had just had a miscarriage and lost my mother to breast cancer, all in about a months time. I heard about someone with lyme who was helped by raw foods and since I had always had the "raw" instincts and had always loved animals and hated eating them I knew it was right. I had tried being vegetarian but because it didn't help the diabetes I went back to SAD.

Also my mom was doing the Hallelujah diet and I read David Wolfe and realized that I was being led to this way of life and I would do it or die young. My mom was seemingly the healthiest person I knew. She ran 5 miles a day (at 60 yrs. old) and ate fairly healthy so losing her was a real wake-up call for me.

I also had terrible reflux and swallowing problems which are gone now as well as the diabetes, and joint pain. Staying with it is the key.

i felt extremely happy when i first went raw
so i figured
what the heck?
why not just continue this?

made sense to me

also, when i went on my first fast
i could NOT believe how DEEEEEEEPLY i slept
it was like sleep of the angels
or something like that
kind of hard to describe

so that made a HUGE impression on me

and it was just fun and tasty
to live off of the bounty of the earth
always been attached to the dirt

i went vegan because i wanted to "detox" after a heavy ten-month drug program for a serious back injury. i also went vegan because i believe it is cleaner-burning fuel, and i am an elite athlete. all other reasons to be vegan soon factored in as well (nutritional, environemental, and cruelty).

Raw started to call out to me when I heard all the emphasis about the power of enzymes. admittedly, i was REALLY attracted by the idea that i would have more youthful skin (i'm only 22, but i'm starting to worry about aging already!). finally, i knew how WONDERFUL a vegan diet made me feel, and I can only expect a greater return from a higher percentage of raw foods in my diet.

Hey David Mason, I think you chose taste AND health, right?

Cheers,
J

health problems here too. but more than that (as the health problems were not life threatening) i am and have long been searching for an "optimal" life. i'm extremely interested in what we beans are capable of spiritually, mentally and physically, and what we eat is foundational to health in the largest sense of that word...so here I am.

khale

An angel, Arugula. And while she was alive, we shared bunches
of arugula together. A short time after my grandmother's
passing, she visited me in a dream. Basically, she told me
to eat raw foods and warned about packaged foods. I began
researching papaya, what she told me to eat.

Reading about the strong digestive enzymes in papaya, I
search more on enzymes and serendipity brought me this
website. The logic of all the info here and the testimonies
moved me to begin this path.

A prelude to this was discovering years ago in my grandfather's
library a collection of essays by Herbert Shelton on the 'miracle
of living foods'. Cooked food addiction was soon replaced by
addiction to the bliss and light raw energy brought me.

Strange but true... I was raised with my grandparents after my moms divorce and my mom, brothers and me moved in with my grandparents. My grandmother cooked everything to mush. It was gross to me, even as a little girl. When I became a teen, I started to eat healthy and became a vegetarian. I would eat crispy fresh, veggies and fruit, something I craved as a child growing up, but rarely was around the house. I really don't remember ever having fresh veggies or fresh fruit at grandmas. One day, I was about 4 years old, the neighbor lady gave me a fresh grown tomatoe of the vine in her garden... I loved it! Commercial tomatoes would never cut it with me, as they have no taste and don't taste like a tomatoe should. So since I was a teen, I've always been atleast 50% raw, just because I like fresh raw veggies and fruit. I stepped up my game, early this year, when the popularity of the Raw Foodists became trendy here in California. I research it, and was/am sold on it.

Eating mostlyraw just feels right.. so primative and natural... Instinctively, I just know beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's the right way to live.

A singer with a lost voice found it again as he went vegan, and his voice grew more and more as he learned more about raw foods. That is my story.

Yogamama, your "Muffins with Mom" story is sweet!

And I agree with you, that it is LESS restrictive and time consuming for me. I HATE doing dishes. It's so much easier to clean up after making a raw meal, compared to a cooked meal. When I do prepare a cooked meal, it is something that requires very little preparation, from scratch.

HA! As it turned out....yes! (Of course, I didn't know things would taste so much better at the time.....heh..heh..).

-David Mason

For me it was when I began to question current average western human diet, I started by questioning the fact that the way I felt couldn't possibly be the way I was supposed to feel. I was tired all the time, I ached in different places, I was overweight, I looked around at other people and there were so many of them overweight.

I developed carpal tunnel syndrome and was looking for answers, the cure, something to get rid of this horrible nightmarish pain that was going to cost me my job soon. I started having accupucture and that relieved the pain. The accupuncture gave me such a high, I wanted to figure out how to feel good like that all the time.
So I started researching healthier diets, became vegetarian, then vegan because my dairy allergy gave me that push. Then I stumbled on a number of raw food websites and it clicked, that this is the original human diet, it made sense and I feel so much better. The carpal tunnel is now gone.

I am still not yet 100% raw, where I would like to be, but hey it's hard to break an addiction you have have since childhood. People reach for cooked food the same way nicotine addicts reach for a cigarette.
Not only is cooked food poisonous it is also highly addictive. Personally I don't want to have these unhealthy attachments to food.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/26/2006 12:27PM by jadedshade.

Rawrrr! Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yogamama, your "Muffins with Mom" story is sweet!
>
> And I agree with you, that it is LESS restrictive
> and time consuming for me. I HATE doing dishes.
> It's so much easier to clean up after making a raw
> meal, compared to a cooked meal. When I do prepare
> a cooked meal, it is something that requires very
> little preparation, from scratch.

I am glad you liked my little story! And I agree with you about the clean up after making a raw meal. I am always telling my husband how much easier it is to clean up the kitchen after I make our meals! It's so easy now!

Bump.



I like this thread!


Life Is Good!

alive!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/28/2006 01:42AM by alive!.

I started totally by accident.

Go back 7 years. I was a carnivore and suddenly found myself diagnosed with terminal heart disease that could not be cured with bypass surgery.

okay okay so I plugged my arteries with the Great American Diet.

Doritos, anyone??

Fast forward to 2 months ago. I had lost nearly 80lbs... total lifestyle change to lots of veggies and very little flesh foods... and this the only real direction to take when one has as much advanced and diffuse coronary artery disease as I have.

And then....

a couple months ago I went on a bean soup binge. I am that way... I get a hankering for a 'taste'... and then I go on an obsessive mission of cook and cook and cook until I achieve the objective.

How well I recall my Mom's bean soup. It was stuck in my brain. (okay okay so it really was nothing more than Campbell's Bean Soup with half the recommended water and an additional half stick of butter floating in it)

Anyway.. I wanted that specific taste from my childhood again... it was in my mouth... my mouth was set for it... BUT.. it had to be without the butter... and the fat...

so, there I was making this batch of bean soup... and I put 1/3 of the beans in my Kitchenaid Blender to puree to make the soup thicker (hey this was going to be way better than Mom's soup, she never had a blender), and these big clouds of smoke came out of my blender... and it quit. Damn!

So... I went on a quest for a new and better blender.... and... one thing led to another.....

So I got my new blender... no beans to puree... so.... first I decided to try a smoothie... with fruit... tasted good.... BUT... I decided it was way way way way too many calories for me. No way I want to gain 80lbs back. BTW... I weigh all my food so that does not happen again. Fruit is big calories. Don't wanna be the Michelin Man again. (a stack of tires on a web cam is not a pretty sight)

So... what can I do? I know.. cut the calories by blending greens.... so the spinach scare is on.. but... AHA!!!... there is frozen spinach in the frozen food aisle. Wow the first batch is really ucckkkkky even with some apple and strawberry in it. BUT... I have this bottle of sugar-free Kahlua syrup.. and it saves the day!!!

After a month +... I have gravitated to more and more greens in my blender and less and less fruit. Yes I still spike my blender concoctions with sugar free syrups like Kahlua flavor or vanilla flavor... but, good gawd I cannot believe the difference in the way I feel these days.

And since then, I have found this web forum and Victoria Boutenko's Green for Life thing (and even ordered the book)

after 5 weeks of blending raw greens and fruits... and yes, I still eat some cooked foods that have been my lifestyle mainstay during the healing of my heart and they have brought me this far on life's journey... they have taken me the last 7 years without me croaking because of my bad heart.... and I will continue to consume those cooked foods...

(and yes, okay okay I seem to have lost some of the desire for my standard cooked lifestyle staples, but I am not going to abandon them just yet, they are some good eating.. and yes.. I am a damn good cook)

and then... just when you think you have seen it all... and you think life is all that it is ever going to be... and you resign yourself to this being as good as it is ever going to get... and... then... you suddenly discover blended raw foods.

And life takes a jump to a new level.

My aunt died of pancreatic cancer a year ago, and this got me thinking about diet and how it affects one's health. She ate a lot of meat, potatoes and sugar. I was also having swollen throat glands every month that were not being cured by antibiotics, so I needed another solution. Raw food sounded right and felt right. My swollen glands are gone, I feel great, my eye sight has improved, my skin is clearer, and my moods are more even. I know it is right for me....

Thanks to all for your stories.

I, too, lost my mother to cancer a long time ago. My dad, who is a physician, chose the most aggressive treatments for her. Neither I nor he would opt for the same course of treatment, it was truly dreadful. But he loved her and wanted to keep her around for as long as possible and he did what he thought best at the time.

Prevention is way better than "cure."

for some reason in the 9th grade i became very concerned about health. i became vegetarian then vegan and at the same time trying diets like 'fit for life'. i then came across a book called 'raw energy' and then i knew this was best after a few weeks of raw foods i felt great and was getting plenty of compliments on the way i looked (i was 17 at the time and never concerned with my looks). i kept eating fruit for breakfast, but stopped the raw thing during college. then about 3 years ago i got ill and have been trying off and on to use raw foods to get better. its prevented a gall bladder surgery, but i'm not there yet. i am however convinced raw is best, now its a question of what kind of raw works best for me

Two years ago, my sweetie and I decided to have a baby. In preparing our bodies for conception, we wanted to be in optimum health. I got it in my head one day that we should eat only raw foods. Now, I know this is going to sound strange, but I really thought this was my own idea. It came to me one day. I never heard of it before. I immediately went to Barnes & Nobles thinking I might find a resource. (Internet did not occur to me). There was one book there, one of Dr. Cousens books (can't remember name, big thick, fancy recipes). So, my hubby and I got the gear, sprouted like crazy, dehydrated like mad, spent hours upon hours happily in the kitchen and created humongous gourmet meals. It was a lot of work, but we were thriving and healthy. Got pregnant, had baby, 9 months later everything in my body telling me to go back to raw. (long story as to why we were unable to continue during that time). I was hesitant because I still had never met anyone or seen any other simpler version than Dr. Cousens giant book. It felt way too overwhelming to take on that kind of endeavor with a baby in tow. But....
One day I met someone who happened to say to me with no tangible inkling that I was seeking raw, he said, "you should check out Arnold's Raw Cafe..." So, I went and I told Arnold what I basically just told you. He said, "If it takes more than 3 minutes, you're taking too long!" I sat down and waited 20 minutes for my raw meal. LOL Anyway, my mind was sort of blown by that experience. This amazing man, incredible cafe and market, and little ol' me sitting there wondering why I had just moved to Pennsylvania from southern Oregon away from my family and thinking maybe part of it was to find Arnold's Cafe.
My husband, baby and I are raw "one meal at a time". That is my motto. It turns out that most days we are 100% raw and others we are somewhere else. Baby weight is falling off of me, my skin is vibrant, my child is the happiest little light, my husband is healthy and happy. My parents are starting to do it too because of our example. Dad with Multiple Sclerosis, Mom with diabetes, brain tumor and heart disease (both are under 60). They are intrigued and inspired to heal themselves.
And now I've found you...I enjoy reading this site. I laugh at myself for thinking I was the only one, that it was my idea. For isn't it true that we are never alone? The cosmic consciousness strikes again!
Give Thanks.
Aho
Shawna

pantyraider

you are HILARIOUSSSSS!!! i enjoyed reading your campbell soup story
don't ask me why
i 've not had campbell soup for aeons
but for some reason
your story was very touching
happy that you are feeling better now
and able to give your heart a good ole jump start cowabunga raw energizing
VOILA !!

keep using yer blender for happy greens n fruits and whatnot

The ether.