How would you like to
- Sleep better?
- Have increased energy?
- ‘Expel’ easily?
In the world of raw, you don’t have to forsake everything that is cooked. It’s about bringing more goodness into your life and maintaining a good balance. Sure, you can go for the whole 100 per cent but that does not necessarily mean you are going to enjoy better health all the time – there are no guarantees. If you have toyed and flirted with raw food for a number of years now and have been worrying about how much to eat in a day or how to balance it with your cooked food, just relax! Think about introducing more raw foods into your daily routine and embrace the ‘gotta have chocolate’ monkey on your back (hooray for raw chocolate!) and focus on the end results. We ALL want to sleep well (yes, you can go to bed earlier too!) We all want increased energy. And it’s safe to say that if we were all able to eliminate our waste more effectively, we’d be a far less grumpy nation! * (not an official statistic!)
So how does eating ‘more raw’ enable you to achieve those three results mentioned above?
You might find that eating a 50% raw food diet is more achievable for you, or 75 per cent – or perhaps you don’t even need to think about numbers at all. Just strive to eat consciously. Start the day off with a green drink full of super greens, have some kale chips for a mid-morning snack and a vibrant salad for lunch with some nut-based crackers. If this means you then have a cooked meal at the end of the day, consider throwing some raw veggies in with it to keep the balance. You might be surprised how eating this way enables your body to rest well at night. And how in the morning, your can get into the rhythm of eliminating waste with almost ‘no effort’ from you at all.
Why not regularly remind yourself that there is a direct chain of events between what goes into your mouth and how you feel afterwards. You want your ‘fuel’ to give you power and an alert brain rather than feeling dragged into a slower gear and switching your mind off. Perhaps you’ve recognized that you have an emotional connection to certain foods – like peanut butter on fresh white bread, ice-cream and white flours and pastas – but when you stop for a moment and think of the consequences, you might also find yourself choosing differently. Remembering that ice-cream occasionally gives you stomach cramps and white flour pasta slows down your digestion, leaving you constipated and clogged up can help you to reach for the alternatives and thankfully these are abundant and super-tasty! Think raw almond or cashew nut butter, frozen bananas blended with raspberries, home-made spinach pesto with maize-flour pasta and luxurious salads topped with fresh creamy avocados and sprinkled seeds, with a fresh green smoothie, macadamia cheese and a raw date chutney. Striving to create new emotional connections – instead of bonding on cake and coffee – can bring a new positive connection to the table. All it takes is a change of mind-set and putting into action buying different food.
As we know real food, in its purest form contains complete nutrients that have not been nuked, boiled or baked out and contain the sweeping-brush of fibre that work through the intestines. But did you know that fibre helps keep the thousands of tiny finger like projections called ‘villi’ in our intestines clog-free and able to absorb nutrients from our food into the blood? Our incredible life-fluid flows through the network of veins carrying nutrients to our brain, bones, organs and muscles. When these ‘villi’ strands are clogged up, our blood receives little or no nutrients and our whole system suffers. Dr. Joel Furhman describes how we are currently living in a society in the West that is becoming dangerously over-weight yet nutritionally starving. He strongly advises we need to focus on increasing our nutrient intake rather than counting calories. A clogged digestive system puts pressure on the body to continue to move the food through and out when we are asleep, creating uncomfortable eliminations and a body that never fully rests. Good digestion enables us to expel our waste easily and to wake up refreshed as a clean system in sleep gives our organs the nightly opportunity to expel toxins and heal.
So eating more raw – and as organic as possible- is one of the greatest gifts we can give to our bodies, as our digestive system will thank you with easy eliminations, good sleep and more energy. Supergreens anyone?!
Enjoy!
xxxxx
Victoria Leith
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