Hi everyone.

I started going raw 3 weeks ago when my daughter sent me the book, "The Hallaluya Diet". I was sceptical but decided to take the 21 day challenge (and today would be day 21). That lead me to "The China Study" and Norman Walker books, and "Green for Life", and I just received "The Sunfood Success System".

The first week I was all raw except for a trip to McDonalds (yes, I know, yuck) which was weird because I haven't eaten there in a long time.

The second week I thought I was all raw until I realized that roasted almonds are not raw. Are they dead really? Are they bad?

My third week was the same as the second week except for some rice crackers, which I guess are dead too. I needed something to crunch and something to put my guacamole on.

I'm totally into this now! I got some raw nuts this time and am giving up the crackers. I discovered that the guacamole was better by itself anyway! McDonald's Never Never Never Again.

I've been reading the posts here for the last week and enjoy them a lot.

I already had a Juiceman centrifugal juicer which I have been using to make juice, using lots of greens. But, thanks to JJ (it's Juicin' John, right?), I'm purchasing a Green Star; it looks like amazon.com has them for less than at the Green Star site. Is it a good idea to purchase from amazon.com for this product?

I'm also getting a good blender for smoothies. I plan on doing mostly smoothies and juices. However I had the best dinner ever tonight of cantaloupe/blueberries/mango with flax seed (ground up) on it (all organic). I think it's important to chew sometimes.

I've lost 13 pounds, and weight loss was my first motivation, but now it's the lifestyle and health of it.

I am waking up at 5 am and going for an hour long walk. I have lots of energy. This is not "normal" for me. I never get up that early and any exercise was a drag. It's nice that I have more time now, about 4 hours more time, cause I need it for making juice. And I LOVE my walks; I get to see the sun rise!

I read the posts about the Lara Bars, which I had never heard of, saw some at a store, read the ingredients, came home and made my own bars with dates and raw macadamia nuts. I put it through my food processor and it was very easy to do. I'm not sure it was cheaper though.

I tried some wheatgrass and loved it, so I am looking forward to juicing my own with the Green Star when it arrives. I can buy the grass at a local store for a little pot of it at 2 for $3.00. I've read about growing my own, am wondering about the difference of wheatgrass grown at home in trays verses that grown in soil; the difference in nutrients, anybody know about that? Also, what about buying wheatgrass from growers who flash freeze it? I live in a small town and don't have a smoothie bar or anywhere to go and buy it freshly pressed.

Also, I have apple and pear trees that are about ready to pick. I would like to preserve these somehow, but what way is more nutritious, freezing the juice or dehydrating the fruit. Is freezing bad? Does it kill everything? There is too much to eat before it turns bad.

I am so excited about this new lifestyle. I didn't think I would love it as much as I do. I'm totally sold. The first week was pretty hard on my digestive system, but it's much much better now. I am now wanting to buy a little parcel in the country and move there and go organic and just do this, but alas, I guess that will have to wait awhile.

I'm thinking of turning my backyard into a garden. Not sure if it's cost effective, in fact I'm sure it isn't, but it's so appealing nonetheless. I have a need to compost the pulp from juicing. I hate throwing it away.

I work in a Chinese Buffet restaurant and am around the best chinese food I've ever eaten every day at work. It has been 90% of my diet for 3 years now. Since day one of going raw, I have not had any of the food. It still looks and smells great, but I just have a salad instead and have not been tempted, and I cannot believe I have pulled this off. A great part of my ability in this, I think, is to just observe the customers. Buffets attract people with eating disorders and since our prices are so good, we get them all. I feel so sorry for many of them, they are killing themselves. Like I was.

I am, however, having a hard time not telling them to stop eating this stuff! I'm starting to have a problem with working here at all, it seems hypocritical. But since I am the only person there who speaks English, it would really be a hardship on these wonderful Chinese friends of mine if I quit.

Also, after a week on this diet I went into the grocery store and had to restrain myself from telling the other shoppers that they were buying poison. I have surprized myself with this attitude, it's really not like me.

So instead of annoying everyone I know and strangers also, I decided to join this site and annoy all of you with my questions, questions, questions.

Also, I've been juicing using a variety of veggies that I like, and I've read that I shouldn't be combining so many of them. Is that wrong? I love the combos I've made.

Well, it's nice to meet you all.

nice to meet you also
annoy away cuz i learn when you anoy!! LOL
funny you mention the people watching cuz i was thinking this just last thursday. my hubby and me and the kids went to a burger joint called red robin before the kids went to karate. my kids and hubby are all sad eaters anyways i was watching this bigger sized woman and her like husband just tearing into this burger filled with bacon and the works and it was like 3 inches thick. all i could feel was sorry for her (them) as they killed themselves with this crap. i wasn`t judging them or anything, i was truly sad for them. it`s like the world is asleep and i`m awake.weird...anyways..you are doing so well!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!congrats
patty
ps- i know of that book...i have the website bookmarked

Your post has been such an encouragement to read. I love hearing about your success. I'm going to comment on a few of your questions:

1) I believe your wheatgrass is as good as your soil. Ask questions about the soil it's being grown in.

2) Yes, yes, yes. Plant a veggie and herb garden. It's incredibly cost effective, especially when you start from seed. The worms and soil microorganisms will love composting your juice pulp into nutrient-rich soil.

3) Be careful about not becoming a 'Raw Nazi'. People will not appreciate your advice or like you. I don't talk about being raw unless people come to me and ask me about it. When they come to me, they're receptive about what I have to say. Also, it's easy to develop a spirit of pride when one is leading such a healthy lifestyle. Again, be careful. You know what they say about pride going before the fall.

Keep on keepin' on!

Whoops. I accidentally posted this message twice, so am deleting the second one.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/05/2007 05:04AM by smilebig.

Congratulations and Welcome! That's so exciting to hear about your journey. Please keep us posted

I would dehydrate fruit over the freezing option. Nutrients are retained through dehydration. With freezing, you can lose up to 30% of the nutrients. But, hey, 70% nutrition is better than nothing, right?

For nuts...raw is best. Are you soaking them? They're easier for digestion if you soak them to release the enzyme inhibitors. If you need more info on soaking, please let me know.

Another tip...store as much as you can in glass mason jars. Inexpensive and healthier to store in glass than in plastic.

If you have any other questions...don't hesitate to ask.

Cheers!

Kristen Suzanne
--
www.KristensRaw.com
www.KristensRaw.blogspot.com

Welcome, and gee it looks like you are doing all the right things! I know how hard it is to not tell people about the raw food diet..but you'll find the ones interested where you can discuss it.

It would be difficult to stay in a job where people are overeating all kinds of junk. When you are ready, you'll find another line of work.

Apples..can't they go into cool or cold storage for many months? Apple slices probably dry well, or even freeze. I'm not sure about pears though, you might look up dehydrating and or freezing methods for that fruit.

You are doing great, keep us posted on your progress and any questions you have.

Love,
Prism

Welcome...welcome...welcome! I got all excited reading your post and look forward to reading more.This is an exciting lifestyle and I would have never dreamed that changing my diet would make so many changes in my life. You'll find everyone here very honest, encouraging and helpful. I have purchased a number of items from Amazon.com and haven't been disappointed, but sometimes you can find better prices with different vendors on the internet. Do a search.
Here is a great chart on food combining that will help you understand which foods are best combined for proper digestion. [www.thewolfeclinic.com]
Keep up the great work. Its a learning process and there certainly is a lot to learn!

Hi everyone,

I'm doing good on my 4th week raw. Today at work (at the restaurant) I got a bit tempted to have some rice noodles as I was hungry and my salad didn't fill me up much. But I remembered the posts I have read here, which helped, and then a lady came into the restaurant who comes in a lot, is overweight. I had never seen her look so bad, I was actually alarmed at her appearance. I looked on her wrist and she had a hospital band on. I asked about this and this lady came directly from the hospital to the restaurant to eat Chinese food! So I just had some fruit. I felt so sorry for her, and hope she is alright. But I couldn't help but think that it is the food she is eating that put her in the hospital in the first place, ya know?...glad to know dewey that I'm not alone in making these kinds of observations....

and don't worry smilebig, I didn't say a word about food to her. I promise not to become a Raw Nazi, I promise not to become a Raw Nazi, I promise not.....

Thanks for you input Kristen's Raw, I don't know about soaking nuts. Just put them in water for awhile or what? Wet raw nuts don't sound very appetizing so I imagine I'm missing something here?

I picked my two pear trees today and they will ripen in 3-5 days, so I'm hoping my GS juicer gets here about then! Prism, I wish I could store the apples but all I have is my refridgerator, which is full of veggies and fruit already. So I guess I'll dehydrate as many as I can and then juice the rest. I have a whole tree full of apples. I wish I could share all this produce with y'all, I've got plenty to share. As it is I will give as much as I can away and still have too much left. I've been blessed by abundant fruits this year!

I also grow plums, strawberries, blueberries, lots of herbs, and an odd tomato plant here and there, but I think next year I'll go ahead and turn the backyard into a garden. It's going to be hard to find time to work, but what fun! I love walking around my backyard and just eating off the plants. And now I love it even more.

I've noticed that the veggies and fruits taste and smell better, and that I crave them more. I've seen this written about here and am giddy that I'm experiencing it. I think I've learned though that too much fruit isn't as good for me as I would hope. I get hungrier and don't feel quite as much energy. Perhaps that's due to my metabolic syndrome problem with glucose intolerance. I'm hoping that once I've been at this for a longer time that this condition will just go away and I can eat more fruit.

Islandgirl, thanks so much for giving me the chart for combining! It's excellent to have all that information all in one place. What a time saver and I'm so glad to have it so early in this adventure, cause I was combining all wrong. And gee, I wish I were an islandgirl, sounds exotic.

Thanks for all your inputs!

Hi Imfree,

What a wonderful username. From the sound of things, you really are.

You asked whether it's bad not to heed all the food combining advice. It's okay if you keep on enjoying those fun combinations. It's fine to ignore food combining practices until you think you would like to improve your digestion. This often happens later, after you've been raw for a while, because some (not all) become more sensitized to foods. Eating fewer nuts and seeds over time is a good example of this.

The theory is that while fruits and veggies do have enough protein to sustain us, we can't absorb it all on a SAD diet. That's why nuts and seeds often feel pretty good to eat at first, then can seem to heavy as the digestive tract builds hydrochloric acid, dissolves the mucoid plaque lining, and becomes the efficient raw digesting machine it was always meant to be. As you become more efficient, you may develop issues with how you've been eating, which could prompt you to fine-tune your diet, such as taking more care with how you combine foods.

Soaking nuts is another example of this. You can soak them to make them more digestable, or you can wait until you want them to be more digestible, or soak them sometimes and eat them out of the bag you bought them in other times. If and when you decide to soak, you can eat them wet on salads or in recipes, or you can dehydrate them for snacking on.

We all relate to the frustration of sitting on our hands while people kill themselves with the food they eat. For me, it got easier with time. Now, I feel more (not completely, but more) accepting of people's eating choices, even though they look so pathological to me. For what it's worth, it gives me comfort to think of diets as being a part of our diverse spiritual paths. And after all, one cannot judge another's spiritual path, because no one knows what another will learn from their progress on it.

Finally, you mention starting a garden, which is a lovely idea. Most people start gardens with enthusiasm and great intentions. Know that most people also end up getting into other things and let their gardens get run over by weeds. Then they feel overwhelmed by the upkeep and guilty that there's another chore to be done that they've neglected. Okay, I'll fess up, it's true that this happens to most people, but I'm mainly talking about me. But there's hope! I just got a book from the library called, _Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space with Less Work_ by Mel Bartholomew. There's also his website that claims to be "The Official Site of Square Foot Gardening", which has nice pictures and simple, straightforward information. This is at [www.squarefootgardening.com].

You are so lucky to have so much wonderful fruit!!!! I wish I could take some of what you wish you could offer, too.

Betty

"Don't believe everything you think."

--Bumper Sticker

imfree...LOL...I'm really not exotic. I'm a 47 year old grad student, wife, homeschooling mom of 7 kids, one still at home...but its fun to dream huh! But I used to live on an island, Amelia Island, in NE FLorida...hence the name!

I love these posts everyone
I've been reading these forums for a couple of months now and would like to share a little about my going raw experience.

I was a SJV ( standard junkfood vegetarian since about 1989 which included more and more salads and healthy things as time progressed. In these early years I was considered prety weird for being a vegetarian and everyone would keep on asking me why I did it.

Then for another 2 or 3 I became Vegan but still ate alot of things I now consider quite toxic. Now over the last 2 or 3 I've been starting to realy explore raw and healthy foods and had periods where I ate 100%. I have no real idea why it happened but it seems that being healthy just grew more and more important to me as time passed.

About 5 weeks ago I was reading these forums and Storms blog about raw experiences and it just hit a cord with me. When sharing the things I learned with my mother and older brother who have had a similar information and dietary progression as I have had, we all just decided that it was time and have been basicly 90 - 100% since.

Ironically now that vegetarians are fairly commonly accepted, I am now raw which again is still just plain weird to most people. Hopefully one day soon I will be accepted

I find posts like imfree's very inspiring, and make me feel a certain excitement at the prospect of a world to come. I don't know how many others feel it, but it seems to me that there is an awakening going on and that one of the ways in which this is reflected is by the number of people that are suddenly starting to choose healthy lifestyles.

I also think that being healthy goes hand in hand with developing compassion and positivity which the world so desperately needs right now. May the world fill with people like the ones who post on these forums !!!

Lightform Wrote:
I don't know how many others
> feel it, but it seems to me that there is an
> awakening going on and that one of the ways in
> which this is reflected is by the number of people
> that are suddenly starting to choose healthy
> lifestyles.
>
> I also think that being healthy goes hand in hand
> with developing compassion and positivity which
> the world so desperately needs right now. May the
> world fill with people like the ones who post on
> these forums !!!

amen!
patty

Betty, thanks so much for your knowledge about everything. I was happy to read about combining because I just love my juices with garlic, onion and jalapeno in them (little amounts). Well, one of my juices combos. I don't add this to my beets/carrots/coconut water, or my other carrot combos. It just makes the greens tasty. So now I feel better about that and know I can adjust as time goes by.

I'll have to try the soaking of nuts. How long should they soak? I assume I should soak them in distilled water, is that right?

I've learned to keep an emergency stash of seeds and nuts in my car for emergencies. This helps me at work where I am under constant temptation (yet, I have not succumbed, miraculously).

Islandgirl, you mean to tell me that you think being a 47 year old grad student, wife, homeschooling mom of 7 kids isn't exotic? hehe.

I see hundreds of people a day and know most of them and many are asking me what I am doing different, that I look 20 years younger! After just 4 weeks! I do believe the dark circles I've had under my eyes since I was 4 years old are fading a little bit....and I'm hoping that 4 more weeks will take off another 10 years, is that too much to hope for? So, when they ask me what I am doing differently, I tell them, and nobody has said I am strange to my face yet...

So lightform, there is hope for you too. Speaking of an awakening, I think you might be right. I have an opportunity to spread the word more a bit myself but I think I shall post it in a new thread.

Imfree,

Your posts are such a joy to read, I'll look forward to your next thread. I think one day you'll write a very good book.

The nuts generally get soaked overnight, but it doesn't really take all that long for the growth-inhibiting enzyme to come off. A couple of hours will take most of it away. There are charts that tell you how long to soak them in order to sprout them, like this one: [www.astrologyclub.org], and this one: [www.sproutamo.com]. I don't usually sprout unless it happens on accident when it takes me a while to get to them. I usually just soak nuts and seeds when I'm using them in a recipe. Otherwise I just don't eat them much, since I've been raw for 3 years and don't need them so much anymore. But before, when I was transitioning, I needed lots and lots.

You said too much fruit is a problem. If you want to eat more without feeling bad, try eating them with nuts, seeds or oil (like coconut, flax seed or hempseed oils), Putting fat with the fruit buffers them and makes the meal stick to your ribs better. I used to get dizzy and sapped of energy when I ate just fruit for breakfast, but then I followed the urgings of my nutritionist and started coating them with oil and adding sesame seeds or walnuts. I felt much better.

Betty

"Don't believe everything you think."

--Bumper Sticker

Oh yeah, you asked if the water to soak the nuts has to be distilled. No, usually people just use purified.

Distilled water is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it doesn't have anything bad in it, so it won't contribute to toxins in your body. If your detoxing, it's useful because it absorbs the toxins as it goes through your system.

On the other hand, its absorbtion is non-discriminating. It'll take the minerals you'd like to keep, like calcium. When people use it, they only use it for a short time while fasting, then go back to purified. Some people think the reason why soda was found in a study to strip teenage girls of calcium is because the water is too purified. I personally don't drink super purified water. This summer I've been using Brita, because it has a reputation for doing a poor job of purifying water well.

Betty

"Don't believe everything you think."

--Bumper Sticker

Thanks Betty, I'll give this a try. And thanks for telling me this about distilled water, the last thing I need is to leech calcium out of my body!