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For the past few days I have been reading lots of information, and watching videos online, about the Raw Food Diet and its benefits.  I have been intrigued by the subject of healthy eating for a little while, but always give up when it comes to having a defined diet because I find it difficult to keep track of everything.  Usually I am bombarded with questions like, how many calories do you ingest?  Are there enough proteins?  What about fat, sugar, etc?

I’ve tried counting calories, not because I want to lose weight but rather because I don’t want to overeat.  I find that to be difficult to keep on a daily basis.  How do I know how many calories are in that apple I ate?  How much sugar is there in the orange?  Questions keep popping on my head every 5 minutes.

All this being said, I saw some very interesting interviews with Raw Foodists, particularly an interview with Restaurant Owner Karyn from Chicago.  If you go to her YouTube channel you can watch it, it’s among her ‘favorites’ list to the right.

She’s 62 years old, and full of energy.  Hasn’t been sick for many years (longer than I’ve been alive) and has so much energy that she has had to train herself to sleep more  since she used to sleep only 3-4 hours after she moved on to eating raw foods because she has so much more energy in her body.  She runs a business (restaurant, studio, etc.) and teaches many people to detox their body and move on with a healthier life.

Saw, what is this whole Raw Food Diet all about?

The premise behind the Raw Food Diet is simple, when you heat living things above 118˚F most of them lose their enzyme activity.  If you haven’t studied this, enzymes are found in living organism and help them process things faster and using less energy.  Thus, if you eat raw food, your body will be full of enzymes that will help you digest food and not make you tired.  You will then have much more energy to keep yourself running during the day, and will use this same energy to keep your body healthy and prevent you from getting sick!  Your body will be able to do what it’s designed to do, heal itself and restore its cells to optimum health, which will leave you feeling healthier and younger.

A great reason why people do raw diets is because you get rid of lots of toxins.  According to many raw foodists a lot of sickness they and their family had was cured after they became raw foodists.  Eating the right things gave their body the fuel needed to battle the sickness that were normally considered part of the aging process, or even sicknesses they had carried for years.  A mother with arrhythmia, her husband with a bad case of arthritis at age 38, and their daughter with asthma all switched their diets to raw food in a desperate attempt to improve their quality of life.  Today, they are all disease free.

Weight loss is another aspect of the raw food diet.  When your body cleanses its cells through its natural processes, it gets rid of all that extra fat and weight that is making you feel dense and clumsy.

We pay so much attention to how we look, how we portray ourselves, yet we seem to pay little attention to what we put INTO our bodies.  I’m not saying that a raw food diet is for everyone, but I am willing to start making more of my meals raw food meals.  I found a great website, The Best of Raw Food, that has many recipes that are easy to make and delicious, all with raw food.

Raw Food is not painful to eat!

Raw foodists eat lots of fruits, vegetables, and some of them eat raw fish (sashimi) and they eat these things in abundance, they eat all the avocados they feel like!  Some of them have been very creative and have been able to make very interesting a delicious dishes, easily.  If you are interested in the diet, just google ‘raw food recipes‘ and you’ll find a wide variety of delicious dishes that instead of making you feel bad or tired after eating them, will make you glow!

There is a great amount of people who want to be masters in the art of juggling among many things at once.  We do this at work, at home, with friends and relationships.  Then after 6 months we look back and think, “what have I achieved?”  Is it really that great to juggle among so many things?  Think about how well you are doing in each of these areas.

Stop the haze and really make meaning of what you are doing.  Ask yourself, why am I doing this?  Think about the way each thing you do affects all the other parts of your life.  Will helping your friend to move to a new place prevent you from spending time with your children?  Will taking up that extra task at work stop you from going to the gym, or sleeping at least 7 hours that night?  Will going out with that new person you met prevent you from furthering your current friendships?

Everything we decide to do WILL definitely affect the other areas of our lives, and that is OK only if we know how and are satisfied with that.  If we take the extra case at work and can still spend time with our family on Saturday, that’s great.  If that is not the case, and we really feel that we must spend time with family, we shouldn’t try to shove it all in and sacrifice quality of life, or happiness.  We may need to learn to prioritize.

TRY THIS TECHNIQUE I LEARNED

Write down a detailed view of how you see yourself in 20 years (can adjust the number of years from now as you see fit).  Write about how you want to live, where, doing what, etc.  Write about the relationships you want to have, what type of friendships, how strong are your bonds with your family.  Write about all the major things, things that are very important to you.  How you want to see yourself and have others look at you.

Now evaluate the things you are doing in your life and think, is this helping me achieve my goal?  Why am I doing this?  If some of the things you are doing are not congruent with where you want your life to be in 5, 10, 15, or 20 years down the road, maybe you can reassess the feeling of ‘having to do it.’

Let me know what you think and how you feel about this.  I think that once I started thinking about my life this way, it was much easier for me to drop certain things that others wanted me to do but didn’t contribute to my long-term goals, and then picked up other activities that would.

Many of us are afraid of being perceived as a failure because we ‘quit’ doing something.  We wouldn’t want people to think that we just give up on things.  But the fact is, life is meant to be enjoyed, and if you are tying up your days with a lot of things that are not contributing to your goals, or giving you the joy you deserve, there is little good done by keep on doing them.  Each activity deserves it’s special consideration, but this is generally true in my experience