PLEASE Remove high heels before entering. “A raw foodist is a person who consumes primarily raw food. Raw foodists typically believe that the greater the percentage of raw food in the diet, the greater the health benefits.” Wikipedia
“Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and is a major cause of disability. The most common heart disease in the United States is coronary heart disease, which often appears as a heart attack. In 2009, an estimated 785,000 Americans will have a new coronary attack, and about 470,000 will have a recurrent attack. About every 25 seconds, an American will have a coronary event, and about one every minute will die from one. [1] “(CDC, Feb. 2009, http://www.cdc.gov/features/heartmonth/)
“The general public must learn how to challenge heart disease as the nation’s number one killer” (Fuhrman, p.112, Fasting and Eating for Health).
How is it possible that it is common to ignore and choose not to even learn about, our great nation’s number one killer, when we live in a country with such a strong will to stop enemies. After 911 many strong people were willing to risk their lives, leave their families and travel to another country. It can’t be that the idea of changing ones diet and/or starting exercising can seem even scarier. Maybe we think we have the cure. Unfortunately, it is not so simple to have a pill or an operation to cure heart disease.
Pills and outcomes of heart surgeries do not keep the problem from continuing to get worst the way changing your diet is proven to do. Also the surgery involves many risks. Being put to sleep in an operating room, having one’s sternum split and chest pried apart, while a heart-lung machine pumps your blood is a procedure that can and has ended in death or decline in mental ability. “…in-hospital death rate for bypass surgery is 4.45 percent for women and 3.33 percent for men.(11) Bypass surgery is also associated with a 13 percent rate of post-operative compilcations, including heart attacks, strokes, bleeding, kidney failure, and infections. In almost every heart bypass patient, some brain injury occurs from the time spent on the heart-lung machine.(12) It is believed that 15 to 44 percent of those who survive such surgery suffer permanent brain damage, detectable as minor degrees of intellectual impairment, memory loss, sleep disturbance, and personality change.(13,14,15)” (Fuhrman, p.104, Fasting and Eating for Health)
Why is it so difficult for many of us to eat vegetables? Well it is obvious they are not addictive in the way sugar is and the process of losing this addiction can be incredibly uncomfortable, although that feeling is temporary. In the face of so much junk food, a plant-based diet requires a conscious development of tastes. It can be very hard even to slowly develop this change after so many years of habits. In my opinion, slight changes to your diet is a great way to start. For example, plan to eat one large salad a day. Also in my opinion, it is best to start by focusing on adding great foods (especially greens) rather than demonizing any foods. See what you are doing that is ultimately working best for you or has worked best for you and plan ways to do more of that; find books/people/ideas/journal articles/etc. that inspire.
It is easy to demonize “that” industry. It is much more difficult to see clearly what happened. This was a culmination of U.S. policy (for example, subsidizing farmers to grow crops that result in corn syrup), scientific discoveries (for example, synthetic nitrate fertilizer), business opportunities (resulting from the mass production of cheap calories), and the vulnerability of the human condition. This is not about evil being evil or some mysterious force. This is about policy decisions that of course did not predict our current status. It is about people wanting to earn a buck and people just reacting to their natural urge to eat. Of course it is a difficult pickle for the country to get out of and one of the main problems is the cheap availability of the addictive synthetic foods.
I was watching a documentary on potato chip production. I realized many of the same industrial equipment inventions can be applied to producing healthier foods en masse. Apparently it takes four pounds of potatoes to make one pound of potato chips. The documentary didn’t specify if the weight of the oil and salt is included in said pound of potato chips. The rest of the potato goes largely to cattle feed. (An aside: It was interesting to me how they proudly noted this instead of saying, my god, can you believe that? That 3 pounds of “waste” potato (plus multiple other resources) will help put an ounce of dead cow on a heart attack’s plate, instead of feeding a family 3 pounds of mashed potatoes.)
One of the interesting processing inventions was using a sort of log ride for the potatoes to move from one process to another. This saves energy and baths the potatoes at the same time. Afterward another clever machine peels them in bulk (using centrifical force to push them to a blade). The potatoes also had starch removed from them and this went to the boxing industry. The starch is used as a part of the glue that holds boxes together. They also had a system where a camera detected which potato chip was brown and this set off a system of air jets to blow the chip off the belt. It is really interesting to watch these synthetic food manufacturing shows on Modern Marvels. However unbiased these shows may try to be, they lean towards promotional and still end up making the “food” seem repulsive to me.
The talk I am citing here was very interesting and the first speaker bases some of his information from the book Fast Food Nation. http://forum.wgbh.org/lecture/fast-foodfat-nation-americas-growing-obesity-epidemic
Alan Meyers, pediatrician, Boston Medical Center
Location:
Cambridge Forum
April 11, 2007
Pediatrician Dr. Alan Meyers and a panel of experts discuss the link between the nation’s eating habits and obesity. What impact will obesity-related diseases have on the quality of life of the next generation? What stresses will our fast food lifestyle place on our health care system and health care costs?
I got a question about this topic recently. You are welcome to read the article for yourself it is open access via BioMed:
http://www.nutritionj.com/content/3/1/19
Here is the abstract for the article (titled: Nutrition and cancer: A review of the evidence for an anti-cancer diet):
“It has been estimated that 30–40 percent of all cancers can be prevented by lifestyle and dietary measures alone. Obesity, nutrient sparse foods such as concentrated sugars and refined flour products that contribute to impaired glucose metabolism (which leads to diabetes), low fiber intake, consumption of red meat, and imbalance of omega 3 and omega 6 fats all contribute to excess cancer risk. Intake of flax seed, especially its lignan fraction, and abundant portions of fruits and vegetables will lower cancer risk. Allium and cruciferous vegetables are especially beneficial, with broccoli sprouts being the densest source of sulforophane. Protective elements in a cancer prevention diet include selenium, folic acid, vitamin B-12, vitamin D, chlorophyll, and antioxidants such as the carotenoids (α-carotene, β-carotene, lycopene, lutein, cryptoxanthin). Ascorbic acid has limited benefits orally, but could be very beneficial intravenously. Supplementary use of oral digestive enzymes and probiotics also has merit as anticancer dietary measures. When a diet is compiled according to the guidelines here it is likely that there would be at least a 60–70 percent decrease in breast, colorectal, and prostate cancers, and even a 40–50 percent decrease in lung cancer, along with similar reductions in cancers at other sites. Such a diet would be conducive to preventing cancer and would favor recovery from cancer as well.”
The 238 citations for this article each have their own link to abstract in Pubmed.
BioMed has a huge list of medical journals that are open access. You could find many more articles pertaining to this topic via BioMed:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/
Best wishes and happy searching!!
Reference:
Nutrition and cancer: A review of the evidence for an anti-cancer diet
Michael S Donaldson
Nutrition Journal 2004, 3:19doi:10.1186/1475-2891-3-19
I wanted to quote from the American Dietetics Association’s 2003 statement on what they call functional foods (vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds) with respect to biologically-active phytochemicals, however I need to first make sure I am not running into any copyright issues with quoting from an academic journal which is not open access. So instead here is a great quote from Eat for Health, “We overeat because we are unknowingly seeking nutrients. In addition, these [portion-control] diets reinforce the low-nutrient eating that we now know causes most medical problems in modern countries. They are founded on weak science and perpetuate nutritional myths. To become healthy, disease-proof, and permanently thin, you can’t escape the necessity of eating large amounts of nutrient-rich, healthy food” (Joel Fuhrman, 2008, p.86).
Another really interesting (and new for me) concept he mentions is that eating frequently apparently causes problems. The body cleans out the cells of gunk in between meals so when you snack all day it is just not enough time for your body to empty out. So that, ” in scientific studies, reduced meal frequency increases the lifespan of both rodents and monkeys, even when the calories consumed each week were the same in the group fed more frequently and the group fed less frequently” (Fuhrman, 2008, p.85). There he cites: Mattson MP, Wan R. Beneficial effects of intermittent fasting and caloric restriction on the cardiovascular and cerbrovascular systems. J Nutr Biochem. 2005;16(3):129-137.
Thank you Joel Furhman for bringing the research to our table. By the way I have been pouring through his new 2 book-set, Eat for Health. The first book includes 16 pages of journal article reference citations from standard medical journals you can read via PubMed or by contacting a local or medical librarian for help accessing these primary resources. Academic medical libraries frequently do include a mission to serve the public and are of course online. Please enjoy this video of an excellent talk given by Joel Fuhrman.
Joel Fuhrman’s new book, Eat for Health, actually it is a book set of 2 vol., has recently been published in 2008. His (2005) Eat to Live book, is my favorite how-to-eat book. He is convinced, the way I am, that increasing nutrient rich food does have the effect of decreasing hunger. It makes sense your body would hunger for specific nutrients and then in a moment of unconsciousness if you inhale a low-nutrient habitual food you can experience you are still hungry. Or worse you just eat without thinking sans hunger.
Pema Chodron mentioned there have been many studies showing that when you are trying to move out of an old habit you can say I won’t do that and then experience a moment of going unconscious and just do it anyway. Her idea is essentially if it is your mind that is driving you to the fridge, work with your mind; train your mind using mindfulness techniques. Pema’s work is brilliant.
Last plug for Joel, I just reopened Eat to Live to the page where he recommends a six-week plan. I still find this book very helpful, even after a few years it is my fav.
That said, in my opinion, this field has a real need for writers and writing can be a helpful tool for your progress. I strongly encourage you to get writing your blog, your book, your journal, your website, your emails, vlogs, audio, etc. It seems likely this field will ride a large and long wave of popularity and we all need a variety of good material to inspire us. We all have to start somewhere and be willing to fail in order to get started. Mom, I really want you to write a book and tell your experience – please write this book!
A note about Joel Fuhrman’s new book, Eat for Health, I understand it is about to be republished in paper back, it can be tricky to get a copy at the moment. I just had to reorder a second copy through a different online vendor, hopefully this one will actually have a copy.
Monthly posts to this blog may be on temporary hold due to a case of: extremely busy life. Have a great day!
Thanks Jane for the great question.
In fact when you eat fruit whole, eating the fiber slows down the absorption of the sugar. Drinking fruit juice (even freshly squeezed or juiced in a juicer) does cause a fast absorption of the sugar and many times I have read advice against drinking too much juice for this reason. A smoothie is different because in a smoothie you keep the fiber in the drink, it is not extracted the way it is in a juicer. For smoothies, I suggest a K-Tech blender for its strong/dependable motor and fitting under kitchen cabninets.
A couple studies I found will say juice still finds its place at the table, helping prevent cancer: “Double strength orange juice given to the rats in place of drinking water inhibited mammary tumorigenesis induced in female Sprague-Dawley rats by DMBA more effectively than double strength grapefruit juice.” (Inhibition of mammary cancer by citrus flavonoids. Adv Exp Med Biol. 1998;439:227-36)
And:
“The results with naringin and naringenin show that both of these flavonoids significantly lowered tumor number [5.00 (control group), 2.53 (naringin group), and 3.25 (naringenin group)]. Naringin also significantly reduced tumor burden [269 mm(3)(control group) and 77.1 mm(3)(naringin group)]. The data suggest that naringin and naringenin, 2 flavonoids found in high concentrations in grapefruit, may be able to inhibit the development of cancer.” (Inhibition of oral carcinogenesis by citrus flavonoids. Miller EG, Peacock JJ, Bourland TC, Taylor SE, Wright JM, Patil BS, Miller EG. Nutr Cancer. 2008;60(1):69-74).
Overall, eating more fruit fills your body’s craving for sweetness and can reduce your interest in gaining it in other ways (i.e. processed sugar which is dumped into many packaged foods-it is an effective marketing strategy to get users hooked). Fruit keeps you regular (how do I say that nicely?, it is important to know, if you are having trouble there try increasing your daily fruit intake).
Developing a hankering for fruit can turn into a craving for bitter flavors in fruit like the white of a grapefruit. This can open you up to a whole new realm of tastebud extravaganza. This happened to me and now I have cravings for nibbling on a head of raddichio.
On the go, fruit is the ultimate packable “water bottle”.
I am taking the liberty to go off topic for this historic moment. I am so proud of our country, really the most proud I have ever been. Today we saw how many ways people have to yell it, sing it, scream it before long wished for change happens. Thankfully, for the moment the media was able to embrace the real problems of racism. I hope when a woman gets elected they will talk in the same length about the real problems of sexism. It was 50 years after black men were allowed to vote that women were allowed to vote.
“* 15th Amendment (1870): ‘The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.’
* 19th Amendment (1920): ‘The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.’” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffrage
To accomplish three more dreams at once, we could vote in a woman of color who is openly gay to be our next president. Yes we can. Really inclusion is the best way to get the most creative solutions arriving at the table and the ones most likely to work for the most people.
Rawfoodism seems to have cornered a market. And at times it may be more of a grasping than a market. I sometimes hesitate to tell people I have a raw food blog because the word rawfood conjures up some resistance even in me I suppose. And yet there is a need for the genre of eating habits or influences called rawfoodism because it is inclusive of vegetarians, vegans and meat eaters (even cooked food eaters) it is not about extremism. It is only radical in so far as we now live in a society that finds the norm in commonly self medicating with synthetic foods. In a culture where we all grew up eating primarily fruits and vegetables and living on farms it would have been absurd to speak of a raw food community. Now as an organized group it irresistibly exists even in the heart of the busiest cities, including a giant span between beautifully simple delicacies and the gourmet.
If you wanted to find a way to let go of the ding dongs and increase delicious fruit and vegetable options in your life where would you go? Why should you also then have to determine you must also let go of eating this or that in order to join the many most excellent veggie groups. What if your sole inclination was to find a way to gain the habit of filling up on many delicious pounds of fruits and veggies so that you had decreased interest in the food habits you were trying to let go of. There is a place for us all because we are all going to keep being all of us.
Because I have spent years as variants of vegetarian/vegan I can say my focus was not always about increasing fruits and vegetables at that time. The focus often lent itself to what are you not eating and you got defined by that. And after having poured through the (literally) 15 rawfood books I own I can say this invites you to focus on what you can eat more of. An aside: eventually I plan to dig into current medical journal research studies on the topic. PubMed would be a place to start.
In my opinion I think a useful idea is to focus on what you are eating and to do it via an Appreciative Inquiry style. And of course from there the focus in particular is what raw fruits, nuts, seeds and vegetables are you eating and how do you get it so that you find even more of them even more irresistible. It does happen bit by bit, when for example you get used to making a great new raw recipe. What have you noticed that you are already enjoying? Have you expanded on that in some way?
“Avocados, nuts, olive oils and other foods rich in unsaturated fats can curb hunger pangs between meals. The oleic acid in these foodstuffs elicits production of a hunger-fighting compound in the small intestine called oleoylethanolamide, according to a new study in rats let by UC Irvine pharmacologist Daniele Piomelli. The findings appear in the October 8 issue of Cell Metabolism.” (Science News: Magazine of the Society for Science & the Public, November 8, 2008. p. 4)
I always feel so fortunate when I get to corner a biochemist and ask them what they think of the rawfoodist idea. I got another chance and here in my lay-persons language is what I learned from a biochemist who is currently focusing on nutrients that will best grow human cells in the lab. Incidentally he also expressed reservations about eating grilled food anymore after learning what he knows about cooked food. He verified that vitamins do get destroyed by the heat. He said that when the food gets brown or black from cooking toxins have been produced.
Apparently toxins were originally these nice little molecules that got hot (for example from cooking), broke up, mixed with others and created a new molecule that has the nasty ability to get itself stuck inside one of your DNA chains. This new DNA may decide to do…well we don’t know what all. He said there are theories that the body has yet to be understood immune systems. The body can go in and say hey that cell is funky and try to repair the situation, they may succeed at this, they may not. There are billions of cells in your body and it only takes one cell to grow up like this to cause trouble. There are many conditions to create a cancer problem.
Ok I really have to go now, life is so busy and I know this is too short. Still it is interesting don’t you think, biochemists giving up their favorite grilled foods? He is not the first to tell me this. He also said it makes sense that the body would be more built to eat raw foods since that is what we ate for millions of years before discovering how to build our first cumbersome fire which was relatively recently. I think the rawfood community and the biochemistry community find they have some things in common.
Because for me so much about finding the right foods that work for you is about having access to information that helps, I couldn’t resist offering a few of my favs:
Type in anything that interests you into PubMed’s free database access and spend some blissful time pouring through academic articles that are free for anyone on a computer.
Google Reader (or Bloglines an award winning RSS reader) – using an RSS reader is liking hooking yourself up to a information IV and you pick what sites go in the bag. Seriously, why waste your time, get your list of headlines and go from there. GoogleReader’s science bundle was a fun place to start for me, finally a way to access the latest science article for free from a variety of sources.
Use Delicious.com to bookmark all your favs (add a tag to make them searchable). This makes expanding your horizon online feasible, retrievable, organizable from any computer.
Write your docs on GoogleDocs and they will back it up for you. For me it is very helpful to access all the folders of docs from anywhere.
One way to get stuck, Big hat and no plants, is to go to the grocery store, big hat and no plans. Recipes are not my favorite way to plan these days, however if that is what you can do they work great and raw recipes are ALL over the internet. I have a catagory link on this blog called recipes that list some of my favs. Mostly these days I enjoy no preparation at all, I literally pluck my favorite foods into a tupperware and that is lunch to go; it is often mostly just the SALAD TOPPINGS- how simple is that and fun to eat finger food at work. I took a photo of my recent lunch that I tossed in my bag:
Why not say ok you can eat as many bananas, fruit, dried figs, etc. as you want? If you say ok on my diet I can eat as many kiwis as I want, it is probably safe because you probably won’t eat 30 kiwis since they don’t have that chemical addiction that can trigger you to eat 30 cookies. And fruits are giving you so many phytochemicals they are still discovering all the great things they are doing for us, like lowering your cholesterol, etc. You could probably say I get to eat as much produce and fruit as I want and not gain weight at all. I have lost some and then stayed about the same weight since I began. 100% raw people can gain weight, don’t fool yourself on that one, however I have never heard of one gaining 300 pounds.
Processed food doesn’t let go of you the way raw fruits and vegetables do. Your blood vessels will tell you there is a big difference between getting fat on dried strawberries and getting fat on baked goods. Sometimes we can do things in increments. So if you’re attached to noodles you might move to whole grain oatmeal and from there to melons or whatever. Its like getting across a river jumping from one rock to another, except sometimes being on our diet feels more like being on a slowly deflating raft in a stream and we can see the coast and we have this one little oar and we just paddle and paddle and we are so close if we could just get to the coast we’d be fine. Most of my life I have been and still am about 150 lbs which is remarkable given how much fruit, avocados and raw nuts I eat. I do most often keep the nuts to about an ounce a day, since they can be really lethal to a diet, still raw nuts are a better choice than so many common foods that are getting people fat. If you have to get fat do it on the healthy stuff I really think when your body gets in the habit of eating that, this food will let go of you, it is just not as addictive. Somehow having the bank of live enzymes and vitamins and minerals – it gives you a real full feeling and your body gets familiar with/and craves what brings it that feeling. Once I read that your body gets hungry when it is after a particular nutrient it is missing and really won’t be satisfied until it gets it. So if you try to fill the void with non-foods there you’ll be still after the thing you needed.
It is interesting how your prospective on prices can change too. Years ago when I first started buying avocados I thought oh that is really extravagant, where filling up on a bag of chips that is just standard policy in many households. Either one costs about the same and sometimes a single avocado with lime and salt can make a nice guacamole and be satiating for 2 (my favorite way to eat guacamole is on a spoon). If we look around at the grocery store probably any of us could be shocked at what any others of us are willing to pay for what.
I just received a post fromgovgabgovgab (one of my favorite blogs) about growing your own food. We just grew the most delicious little yellow tomatoes that I eat by the handfuls. One of my favorite ways to grow food is to toss some snap peas seeds by a fence and they will just crawl up the fence. There are so many ways to get the plants in your life and be surrounded by their growth and life. Here is a picture I drew years ago:
Over the years people have laughed at the way I incline towards using a paring knife and no cutting board. Having been a wood carver it must be my pleasure to go for it and simplify. And the standard line, don’t try this at home. I am recording with my little Mac laptop and trying not to drip on the keyboard, that got really hairy at times; this was edited from the first try so apologies up front for awkwardness, please turn on your sound for fun music and some cheering at the end which makes me smile, such silliness. Speaking of silliness, some web business decided to buy domain name myrawfoodblog.com, I don’t have anything to do with this company and my blog, MyRawFoodBlog, is URL: http://rawfoodist.wordpress.com, so I put it in the title to keep clarity and requested Google delete the site and I will contact the webmaster by phone, and big thanks to WordPress’s excellent help in this little thing! WordPress is awesome!!
Holy cats there are tons of raw vegan ice cream recipes in the world! The first 4 books I opened I found many many…what to do…well first quit picking up anymore books…here are a few:
Preface: Young (Thai) coconuts (you can find in Whole foods) are different from the easier to find brown coconuts we may have grown up with, inside they are gelatinous and full of fresh coconut milk. You need a butcher knife-like implement to open it (cutting a square in the top ideally with 4 whacks) and they come in an all white shell. Here is one youtube video I have seen on “opening a young coconut”
Take a look at some others, there are some pretty wild ones out there, maybe skip the guy with the hack saw or the one pounding on it with his hand or the guy pounding it on a boulder on the side of the road…yiaiy. In fact maybe I will put together a video too; maybe my method of putting it on a cement floor and using an axe (I don’t own a butcher knife) will be useful for someone who wants their fingers well away from any blades when opening a coconut and I find it very fast and simple. Here is an option I never saw before, however watch how close the hands are to the blade, it was hard to watch for fear (much more typical is hacking a square in the top with a butcher knife with four chops) I don’t recommend her method because of the proximity of the hands
Back to the ice cream.
This is from one of my favorite chefs, Renee Loux’s “The Balanced Plate”, in a high speed blender:
1 1/2 cups raw macadamia nuts, soaked 2-4 hours in filtered water and drained
3 cups fresh coconut water
1 1/2 cups young coconut meat
1/2 cup raw macadamia nuts
3 tbl coconut butter
4 tbl maple syrup
4 tbl agave nectar
2 tbl raw honey
1 vanilla bean, split and seed scraped out
1 teaspoon non alcoholic vanilla extract.
Charlie Trotter is an internationally know gourmet chef who made a raw book, “Raw” which turns out to be one of the most beautiful raw books in print today. Here is Charlie’s vanilla ice cream which he folds into a pecan praline (I will just give the ice cream)
in a high speed blender:
1 cup coconut water
1 1/2 cups Almond Milk
3/4 cup chopped young Thai coconut meat
2 tablespoons coconut oil
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup date sugar
seeds from 1/4 vanilla bean
This from “Raw the Uncook Book” (by Juliano Brotman):
in a blender:
1 cup frozen mango (dice and freeze)
2 cups fresh-squeezed orange juice
1 cup raw cashews
1 cup banana, frozen
2 cups soft or soaked dates
You can eat it right away or if you can wait, chill for 20 minutes in freezer.
Here is another one from a book I have used a lot, “Rawsome” (by Bridgette Mars):
in a blender:
1 1/4 cups coconut water
1/4 cup lime juice
1/2 cup dates, soaked for 20 minutes
1/4 cup coconut oil
1 medium avocado
1/4 teaspoon celtic salt
1/2 peel of an organic lime
“Living in the Raw” (by Rose Lee Calabro), offers a few; one is just so simple:
Blend frozen bananas
- Show quoted text -
Just couldn’t resist passing on the concept of having a thing taste cancer-flavored. The verbiage was born three minutes ago from a conversation; a couple co-workers were mawing on some gum and one said wow this gum tastes so great. And I said wow what kind is it and looking at the package I am trying to find one of my least favorite flavors, which is fake-sugar variations and there it was, aspartame, sitting among other versions like sorbitol (listed first before gum base). They are patient with me and one offered oh I thought you were going to say you wouldn’t like it because it is “cancer-flavored”. So funny! Now I will have to think about that, it may be the perfect descriptor for me for some other things.
My salads (especially my take to work salads) have evolved to be dressing-free simply because I got sick of ruining clothes with oil stains. I have discovered a salad without dressing can be finger food too which is more fun to eat. It is so simple to make too. Just toss in a whole carrot or two, cherry tomatoes, red peppers, grapes, berries, a slice of a cabbage or raddichio, and for spice I am into jalapenos, pickled and olive bar types of goodies. I like to add the earthy flavor of a mix of salad greens that really has a chance to come alive sans salad dressing. Then I often have a bag of raw walnuts at work as an omega-rich side. It really takes about one minute to toss this into a tupperware and off you go! Enjoy!
The U.S. government is single largest producer of information in the world. Taxpayers are paying for the research and it is a happy moment when anyone is able to put it to use. For years the work is being done to make the information accessible with some of the best websites ever designed and done to make the info user-friendly and online. There are even kid games on Nasa.gov and via thomas.gov there is Ben’s guide.
USA.gov is a main portal and so for example you could go there and type in weight loss into the search bar and come up with a nice starting point for NIH, FDA, and FTC info.
I know an old lady who swallowed a fig
she danced a jig and then swallowed a fig. Perhaps she’ll die.
I know an old lady who swallowed a flower
in a spell of womanpower she swallowed a flower.
She swallowed the flower to pass the fig. She was dancing a jig, when she swallowed the fig. Perhaps she’ll die.
I know an old lady who swallowed a nut.
oh what a glut to swallow a nut.
She swallowed the nut to pass the flower, she swallowed the flower to pass the fig. She was dancing a jig, when she swallowed the fig. Perhaps she’ll die.
I know an old lady who swallowed a shrubbery
in a bit of a floury she swallowed a shrubbery.
She swallowed the shrubbery to pass the nut, she swallowed the nut to pass the flower, she swallowed the flower to pass the fig. She was dancing a jig, when she swallowed the fig. Perhaps she’ll die.
I know an old lady who swallowed a tree
On an eating spree she just swallowed a whole tree.
She swallowed the tree to pass the shrubbery, she swallowed the shrubbery to pass the nut, she swallowed the nut to pass the flower, she swallowed the flower to pass the fig. She was dancing a jig, when she swallowed the fig. Perhaps she’ll die.
I know an old lady who swallowed a farm
what a strong-arm to swallow a farm.
She swallowed the farm to pass the tree, she swallowed the tree to pass the shrubbery, she swallowed the shrubbery to pass the nut, she swallowed the nut to pass the flower, she swallowed the flower to pass the fig. She’s dead, Of course.
The “Unconscious Emotions” idea is exactly the concept that popped to mind in coming up with a draft for this post with reference to diet and losing weight. I was thinking of how it can be tough to remain conscious in the face of food and to continue to make choices we are ultimately happy with in that context. So while I wanted to say from my experience and from talking with people who have lost 100 pounds the most important two things in weight loss are will power and what you put in your mouth. Then I thought of this problem with consciousness. It is very real. I once did a group meditation on eating a dried cherry. We weren’t told what it was first. We were asked to focus on every sensational aspect and proceed with extreme slowness in order to catch it all. What I found so funny was the like adrenal rush I experienced starting up before we ate it. First we had to just look at it and smell it and what I noticed building was this awesome anticipation. Of course it isn’t new the idea of eating unconsciously, eating away emotions, worries, distracting and distracted both.
It was a surprise to me to see this physiological response once I stopped and focused. It is typically a challenge for me to stop and notice what I am eating before it is gone, I am often too busy thinking of something else. So I would add that to the list. While exercise is awesome for so many reasons, it doesn’t make this streamline, simple as possible, that is hard enough right there list because fat people are running marathons and thinking they can eat whatever they can think of and still not losing weight. So I don’t want it on the list because it is so disturbing to me when people spend hours, change their whole lives to lose weight by exercise AND give no thought to the possibility of eating more fruits and vegetables and how that might affect things. So my list became 1) Remain conscious 2) Will power 3) what goes down the shoot. How can I leave out calorie counting? Oh, I know so little and I have to stop here on this.
The author of Mind Over Back Pain explains unconscious emotions as being able with the mind body connection to reduce oxygen in an area and cause hundreds of problems like back pain. It does seem absurd that psychology and other medical academics can not hold hands even just a little more.
Recently for the first time in my life I was in such awful back pain I had to sleep for a week and could hardly get up and walk at all from the excruciating pain. After seeing so many medical professionals none of whom have a clear answer for me like “oh you ran up too many stairs”, I can’t think it didn’t have anything to do with the stresses coming to a peak in my life right now. So I am getting in contact with my meditation teacher to restart some classes.
Last night I was reading Pema Chodron where she mentioned the “…emptiness or suchness of all experience…” Thinking of that out of context is tough…think about “this too shall pass”. See how the two ideas are similar? Why “shall” it pass? Maybe because it has so much emptiness in it. And something in the past doesn’t even “exist” at all, it only used to exist. That is kind of interesting isn’t it? Still we take our life so seriously and the events in it so seriously it can stress us out so much our muscles tense up and throw out the back, of course. Why isn’t that an obvious possibility? Pema Chodron invites us to lighten up. I love her bodies of work, this morning I was listening to her on the bus.
I want to encourage all the writers out there to start a blog on any topic that inspires you, it is such a nice journey. I learn and step forward with a little more courage and organization this way. A big thanks to all the readers, I am so new at this I do encourage you to look at all the better blogs than mine. After my first winter on this food plan of raw food I can see it is easier to keep the weight off. And I would accredit it to the detox from so many chemicals and carbs as you dive into the flesh of fruits and vegetables.
I have occasionally started thinking of some food as having at its base something that is like sand (flour, sugar, baking soda) and some foods have as their base tiny cells filled with water (like the tiny parts of a grapefruit). Think of the image of a person’s body filled with sand. Then think of another’s filled with cells full of water. It is an interesting image. Have you ever held a bag or toy animal stuffed with sand, it hardly moves kind of how you feel after you ate too much, or when you are stiff with arthritis.
Imagery can be inspirational. I think it was conjured up by the idea behind the ancient Indian netti pot of washing your insides with water. Think of the image of washing your insides with water and eating water filled cells, the two make sense together. I once read a similar metaphor: you wouldn’t try to clean the side of your car with a slice of pizza.
Photo by Astor-oid via flickr.com
(This is an rewritten post)
The goal was to create the most simple way to add more daily greens, and after months of daily experimentation here’s the find.
Most often this smoothie sees zero great additions like Udo’s oil, bananas, apples, kiwi, etc. It has just three ingredients (water, pinapple, kale). To adjust to taste add sweetness by adding fruit (an apple works well for this). A very ripe pineapple will keep it sweet. However I am not such a sweet fan and I even add lemon juice sometimes for zing.
Add to blender:
1.5 cups of water
half a pineapple
roughtly 2 cups of kale
3 tips:
Put the pineapple in first, then the kale, then you should be able to press the pulse button on and off without having to lift the lid or push it down with any tools. After pulsing a bit, just blend away. It is very nice not to have to mess with any tools, instead just pressing buttons.
Buy pineapple without mold spots on the bottom and kale with the long straight leaves live much longer in the fridge then the curly leaves (the curly leaves have more surface area to dry out).
A K-tech (Blendtec) Blender is a great thing. After burning out previous cheaper blender motors, this one has stood the test of time and is extremely easy to clean (the pitcher and the lid) and fits under the kitchen cabinets.
This smoothie fills you up with a bank of live enzymes, is quite filling and a gorgeous green. It’s easy to drink while you run around getting ready to go somewhere.
Please excuse me while I pat myself on the back, can you believe it (?), I have been going at this blog for over a year now! The first post was Feb. 6, 2007. How simple it was too…and fruitful!
In honor of the anniversary I have updated my profile and the “about this site” link. Here is the profile:
Enjoy the blog, the goal is for it to be informative and useful and fun. I am not a professional writer, I am just having fun and learning. The thing I have found is that writing this has inspired me to move forward, so I always encourage people who like to write, to start a blog on whatever trips their fancy and just see where it goes. I am very glad that people have found it useful, already myrawfoodblog has had nearly 15,000 views and many subscribers, I haven’t seen the number in a while (and I can’t find it right now). By the way that is spam free and anonymous, I never know who is subscribed, so if you find it interesting I encourage you to subscribe, you can unsubscribe anytime and this way you only get an email when I have a new post, which is once a month on average.
And wordpress I am grateful for this free application and service.
And to all the readers, it is a true honor for me, thank you.
When you are thinking you would like to incorporate more raw veggies into your daily routine, it can be helpful to narrow your goal. As in, pick a single veggie/fruit that you like and that you don’t eat often. Pick one that you think it might be reasonable for you to try eating once a day. Just think of that one vegetable or fruit. Just one. And maybe take a week or so occasionally imagining eating that beautiful production of nature, one time every day. Think about how that one fruit or vegetable grows from a tiny few cells into a complex creation. Think about all the thought, time and energy that went into that. It is pretty different from the way a boxed synthetic food gets mechanically pumped out of a dark factory.
If you don’t live on a farm I think it is real luxury (an honor) to get to sink your teeth into a part of a plant that sat outside all day in the hot sun. So see what happens with your idea and do yourself a favor, don’t play the shame blame game, if it happens it happens if it doesn’t move on, be kind and honest and open with yourself and then be kind again.
Apparently it is pretty common to shoot too high and have unapproachable goals that end up calling the whole deal off. It is much tougher to keep your brilliant sights to a smaller deal at least during implementation. That way you are not stuck: big hat and no plants. The nice thing that can happen is you can find your list of plants your addicted to eating growing and that is what you find yourself filling up on. Once a raw food guru I knew told me, your body chemistry will change so that iced espresso will just not work for you anymore, it will feel way too acidic (the way hot coffee already is too acidic for me). Well I am certain that has happened to me with many many foods, meanwhile so far iced espresso is still a staple. Still there are a lot of foods that just don’t attract me anymore the way they used to and I would rather eat guacamole, brazil nuts, walnuts, grapefruit, grapes, cherry tomatoes, a delicious kale/grapefruit smoothie, carrot juice, honeycrisp apples, etc.
When you are thinking of foods you might like out of your diet, think the same way. Just think of one. For example when I first started to think about white rice, it was easy one because I never noticed having strong feelings about it. I tried rice totally plain and surprise it had no flavor for me at all. No flavor, how can that be? Try it once, see what you think.
I started thinking the reason we like rice is because of what we piled on top of it, that is what we were really after. So can we get creative and pile that on something healthier and get a similar result? That’s sans bleach and added nutrients and maybe even less calories – blink, blink you mean rice has calories too?! Here I have been eating all this rice with no flavor and it has calories! Aye. It was helpful to see how plain and boring I thought this thing was that was adding to my waste line unnecessarily. Dropping rice was kind of a no-brainer. However maybe you love love love rice plain or with whatever, it is your experience that you are looking for, just pay attention to it and listen-in.
Of course rice is an important staple for people all over the world. While having options it is nice to see you can order a burrito no rice or a “naked” burrito no rice (then you don’t have to deal with the burrito shell (also for me a zero taste/no-brainer)) have them pile on the corn/tomato/green salsas, lettuce and guacamole and squeeze some fresh lime on that. In fact so many people have realized gluten problems that food preparers expect this more and more common request. It is your body, your own personal laboratory, feel free to experiment.
One way to get stuck, big hat and no plants, is to go to the grocery store, big hat and no plans. Recipes are the plan and raw recipes are ALL over the internet. I have a links on this blog to search or heck just google raw recipes or YouTube Ani Phyo (she has very clear recipe videos), there is great stuff out there, print one off and walk into the grocery store with it and just go for it. Open a new door and see what happens.
And remember be kind and patient with yourself, falling in love with a newish plant food can take time.
Pickled herring may be an acquired taste and may be one you have an inkling to acquire. I just spoke with a producer who gets it salty, raw and wild from Canada and tosses it into a wine sauce marinade with crunchy, thin-sliced onions; no is heat applied. The photo shows it with radishes which is an excellent way to add more color. Radishes are rich in ascorbic acid, folic acid, and potassium. They are a good source of vitamin B6, riboflavin, magnesium, copper, and calcium.
Herring are one of those fish that swim along with their mouths open (that is kind of how I feel some days), filtering the plankton from the water as it passes through their gills. Per Wikipedia: “Herring has been a known staple food source since 3000 B.C…Herring are very high in healthy long-chain Omega-3 fatty acids, EPA and DHA. They are a source of vitamin D. They are also very low in the toxins PCBs, dioxins, and mercury. [Pickled herring is famous in Jewish cuisine] and can also be found in the cuisine of Hokkaidō in Japan, where families traditionally preserved large quantities for winter.” And for a link to more than you ever wanted to know about herring see clupea.net.
The move to raw foods has changed my perception and maybe even my ability to enjoy flavors. I am really wondering if it’s increased my actual ability to taste more varieties, subtle complexities and depth of flavors. The insulin rush, numbing out and compulsive eating coming from the habit of eating primarily noodles and breads has moved backstage to this new experience of flavors. And the new raw foods have become simply what I look forward to because the flavors are so much more interesting.
Eating one of those pre-cut up raw collection of cruciferous and other vegetables mixes you can buy in a grocery store can become a real experience when you don’t add any topping and just offer yourself an opportunity to just enjoy the flavors present in that moment of each bite. Each one has a pretty different culture of flavors packed in there (radishes, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, etc).
Right now I am enjoying a simple grapefruit, my new all time favorite food. My enjoyment of them keeps growing, weeks ago I noticed the flavor being better than any candy I had ever tasted. Today again something about the dry tartness or richness and complexity of the flavor is reminding me so strongly of the darkest and finest chocolates I used to eat years ago. Except the flavor is just lingering and lingering, it is pretty odd in fact and especially to feel like I have eaten so many and never really consciously remarked about it, instead just inhaled another one of these beautiful creations. Physically they are very interesting too, don’t forget to explore that.
I hope you are enjoying this blog and I hope you don’t pass up an opportunity to slowly devour the largest pre-cut selection of vegetables you can find one day, just sitting there and enjoying all those bites and then noticing afterwards how you feel. I had the opportunity during a long car ride where I was the passenger and a most captive audience, with nothing else pushing to especially distract me.
Walking down the street past many restaurants, I was wondering why I was so looking forward to the salad I brought for lunch sitting at my desk. I realized it is because this salad is exotic and here are the lovely ingredients:
radishes, grapes (still on their vine), huge black olives with their seeds from the Whole Foods olive bar and peppadews also from this olive bar (they are little mildly spicy red peppers), all kinds of leaves including raddichio (one of my favs), carrots shredded and cut in all sizes, 2 tablespoons of shredded ginger, a very spicy pickled pepper I get in a glass jar (sans dyes) made by Mazzella and sold popularly,
the dressings: olive oil, mirin (a Japanese sweet rice wine), aged balsamic, soy sauce, Udo’s oil, freshly squeezed lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of the following relish:
The relish:
one bag of cranberries
2 oranges
1/2 cup of sugar (agave is not very sweet so add more if you are using agave; try honey or maple syrup; I have only made it once so far so I will experiment off the original recipe next time)
I just had the lucky opportunity to run into a geneticist who has his own company in the field. Also, I had just read a blurb in the New York Times that went something like, does eating the black charred part of grilled meat cause cancer, answer: yes it does. When you see something like that in popular media it is impressive, when you hear it from a geneticist who includes that he also cuts off the browned crust off of bread the notion becomes even more clear.
He explained an experiment where they offered mice slightly browned food all the way up to blackened and there was a clear correspondence of how burnt the food was to how many cancers were resulting. It seems real folks. I have heard about this correlation plenty before. If it is true it is sad. We are attached to our charcoal. It is in our espresso. Espresso is especially burnt so that it can be ground even finer and help create a stronger flavor that I for one am very addicted to. Oh and I love tea…why can’t I make a switch?
The more beautiful raw food recipes become a part of our lives, the more we are set free from old habits. One recipe at a time. The more I can become aware of for example the acidic feeling I get after too much espresso, the more I can relate that feeling to the feeling of wanting a cup the next day and that is one time new choices often begin to be made. When we are simply tired of the old way. When we want to do something new this time, something different just this time…Otherwise do we have to do the exact same thing every single day? Are we so chained like that?
More on carcinogens and burnt food: Google scholar this topic and get it from the medical journals.
Had a report from my raw guru friend that “Best” coconuts found in Asian Food stores are the only brand of young coconut that is not irradiated for the U.S. market.
We took an ax, set the coconut on a newspaper on the garage floor and voila, painless delicious sweet milk from the young coconut and its gelatinous “meat” scooped out with a spoon.
A hatchet, an axe, a meat cleaver, a machete will all do the trick with four chops to the top of the cone making a square around it. It can sound like a really bizarre way to get a treat, yet how delicious and exotic it is! Fun, even simple once you are used to it and extremely healthy.
When you find the young coconut in the store it is all white (not a hairy brown thing), young coconuts look like the ones in the picture below. “Old” coconuts are hairy and brown, the milk is sour and the “meat” dry and sometimes rotten, that is a very different beast and I really don’t care for them.
Photo by AnnKelliot via flickr.com
Thank you Joshua for an excellent post, I am glad I am subscribed. I couldn’t help quoting it here and encouraging people to visit his…hmm well I can’t find his blog…his site link goes to a website that sells cool raw food stuff and has a newsletter sign up link so I am guessing that will do it. Joshua if you are out there thanks, take care, and get your blog on!:
“Grass, it’s not just for cows any more
By Joshua Schmidt
That’s right, although the wheatgrass craze is a bit past its apex, it’s clear that its popularity is more than just a passing fad. Somehow, despite the fact that obesity is on the rise, the country is getting more interested in health. Now I could do an entire article on what I believe to be behind this dichotomy but for now trust me, they aren’t related. Cows are fat for other reasons.
So once again this will be basic stuff for a great many regulars in this community but it’s important to keep pulling in those who are just getting into this stuff. And because the whole Juicy Josh community is relatively new, I think the basics need to be laid out.
Some health enthusiasts believe wheatgrass to be the pinnacle of healthy living, going so far as to claim that 1 pound of wheatgrass is the nutritional equivalent of 25 pounds of choice vegetables. I wouldn’t go that far. But there’s solid evidence that wheatgrass is good for everything from fighting cancer (for a great documentary watch Crazy Sexy Cancer on TLC tonight, 8/30/07 at midnight) to preventing tooth decay. It is enormously rich in beta-carotene, the vitamins A, B, C, D, K, and E as well as many amino acids, such as lysine, tryptophane, and phenylalanine. But most importantly wheatgrass is one of the highest sources of chlorophyll. Chlorophyll strongly resembles the molecular structure of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein of red blood cells and this is probably the reason it is so beneficial. Essentially it helps in clearing drug deposits from the blood, it counteracts and purifies toxins, removes heavy metals stored in our tissue, and increases the enzyme level in our cells. All this amounts to the rejuvenation and preservation of our vital system.
Not to mention it gives you quite an energy kick. Almost makes me want to MOO…
photo by plecojan via flickr.com
I have read it is cheaper to buy raw produce then buying boxes and boxes and bags and packaging and wrapping, which when you don’t have that raw…how do I say…alkalinity you just can crave and go through many packages of manufactured “food”. It becomes less and less enjoyable when your body starts craving its usual avocado, or mango, or apple, or banana. The green smoothie a day has really helped my body start this raw love affair.
My mom gave me some raw food tips this weekend, one of which is just so simple I feel like a dolt not to have thought of it, anyway here it goes. Cut up some raw cabbage and toss it in a bag in the fridge. Whenever you are ready to make your favorite salad toss that in as a “filler”. Years ago I read cabbage has more vitamin C than grapefruit (my favorite fruit right now), is a wonder medicinal food all the way from the ancients, is super cheap, comes in purple and pink, and keeps in the fridge for ages.
These days for me my favorite salad means adding the cabbage to romaine, tomatoes, flax seed oil or Udo’s oil (even better), than olive oil, and soy sauce – delish!
A beautiful gang of rawfoodies dropped by yesterday, that is so much fun and I always learn so much from the conversation and they lug in coolers of food to taste test…on their way to a potluck function usually involving the outdoors and looking for wild edibles in the forest. Ah another life! Right now there is enough on my plate, however I can at least relay the possibility to others, all over the country strangers are hooking up over the raw food potluck, starting on websites like “meetup.com“. More power to you! It really was an honor to meet them all, some of whom are leaders in the raw food movement in Chicago.
One pate I especially fell in love with that I found entirely new and delicious:
1 cups Pumpkin Seeds
(soaked overnight -that becomes like 2 cups after soaked)
1/4 cup Sundried Tomato (soaked at least 20 min)
1.5 Tbl White Miso
1 tsp. sea salt
1 Green Onion
.5-1 cup water
I made it in a blender and haven’t yet tried it in a food processor where I would add less water. Tastes great with seaweed or wrapped in any leaf.
Ever get the feeling you might start floating away…bumping your head on the ceiling…hear the lines in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, “look out for the fans!”?
Bread is evil and sugary foods (milk is sugary incidentally). People want to blame “too much” fruit although I am not ready to take that leap. Fresh fruit is full of live enzymes that digest themselves and sticking with less sweet fruits is so much healthier than being anti-fruit. There are certain diets that just want to blame fruit for everything and I think it is really dangerous; they’ll have you cut out the fruit before the milk! Specific fruit to cut back would be fruit juices, canned fruit, dried fruit, oranges, melons. In fact increasing all raw food (including fruit) resolves bloating when you can keep the bread, crackers, and noodles out and add fermented foods.
Fermented foods, growing specific cultures and making food from it is a whole world within rawfood that I have not actively ventured yet. It is a big deal and I just haven’t made sufficient time to go there yet and many raw food books don’t spend a lot of time with it. Some rawfoodists I know dropped by with some excellent birthday presents including raw dehydrated breads, a wheat grass pallet, etc. and a culture called kombucha in a liquid in a little glass jar.
There are better resources than me!, since I have studied it little, here is what I have found so far this morning:
A book suggestion:”The Raw Truth” by Jeremy Saffron has a section on fermented foods. He talks about the four food groups of Raw eating. Fresh, Dehydrated, Fermented, and Sprouted. Great Book, you should check it out.
Nutrition Frenzy Blog This is a very interesting blog full of information about fruits and vegetables and has great “you can do it” spirit as well! There is a recent post on fermented foods, her is a quote:
“My Zone Therapy teacher was from Sweden and she taught that the appendix is the transition place between the small and large intestinal tract where the food gets fermented. The appendix secretes a chemical that ferments the food magnifying its nutrients before entering the large intestine. She said that if we take care of our intestinal tract then we have a fermenting system, if we do not take care of it, we have a rotting sewer system. One of the ways she said to take care of the intestinal tract and ease the burden of the appendix was to eat fermented foods each day. It is much the same as comparing rotting food with fermented food. There is a totally different outcome. Fermented consists of good bacteria or positive flora and rotting is when the bad bacteria takes over.
There are many fermented foods to eat. Kombucha is a wonderful fermented beverage that is naturally carbonated and a great alternative to soda. There is also naturally made sour kraut, pickles and olives. (I say naturally made because most of the ones in the regular grocery store are not fermented and have chemicals added to them). Raw cheeses, sour dough breads, kimchi, apple cider vinegar, and yogurt are also good choices for fermented foods…
Even though it can be medicinal, most people just eat fermented foods just to maintain proper balance in their intestinal flora.”
Here is a line from another article :Feeling a little tipsy after that cake? Like other yeasts, Candida eats sugar and produces alcohol as part of its digestion process. ” source
Feeling spacey, memory loss, depression, mood swings, allergies, loose yellowy stools are all symptoms of yeast infection. From various sources…the lists I am finding always seem too long to be real or quote.
Woman to Woman has a really nice overview with tips in a pleasant layout. Includes lists of what to eat as well as avoid.
In a newspaper article today that sought to relate genetic potential and nutrition along with height and the success of a country, it was pointed out that the U.S. is no longer the tallest. It spoke of a rising tall population in Japan and mentioned Holland is now the tallest and pointed to nutrition as the culprit.
When the FDA is successfully lobbied to make toxic substances legal to sell as “food” and we start hiring some of our most well educated academics to imprint logos in children’s minds before they hit 18 months, what do we think is going to happen? Medicare is getting pounded by the costs. Here are the 2002 costs for diabetes alone (not mentioning cholesterol heart attacks, etc.):
Cost of diabetes in the United States, 2002
Total (direct and indirect): $132 billion
Direct medical costs: $92 billion
Indirect costs: $40 billion (disability, work loss, premature mortality)
from NIH.gov
An aside: In interviews about her book Born to Buy, Juliet Schor mentions how people she would interview in the food marketing industry would confess to her how bad they felt about what they were doing, one kept saying, “I am going to go to hell for this.” Some of the marketers goals are to get the kids to learn how to badger for what they want and essentially drive a wedge in the family relationship.
One interviewer was surprised there wasn’t more focus on toy marketing. She pointed out how much more of a typical family income is constantly going towards food choices. In her research, TV seems to be among the biggest problems, the more that is watched the bigger the problems. For interview links visit a different blog of mine, My Mindfulness Blog
It seems like we have to be satisfied with bit by bit solutions…we love our free market place…still there are substances we are glad are made illegal or at least not pushed on our kids. It is so personal to start lobbying against something around a persons favorite “food” they grew up with, it gets messy. People feel very attached and unlike smoking when someone is killing themselves with a food habit it doesn’t directly in a scientifically measurable way affect your air. But you may have to watch the destruction of a person you love and their habits can turn into your habits, there is a spread the way smoking spreads. And all the sudden we wake up and we realize we came up Short. And by the way I don’t appreciate the newspaper article’s anti short flavor, how do we say it, it is not ageism, or sexism, it is heightism. It seems like a false correlation to equate all tallness with good health.
Can you imagine having to have a photo id to buy certain highly addictive unsafe for your health food products? What a strange world, we humans are pretty out there. Occasionally I like to refer to G.K.Chesterton’s likening us to very odd creatures and he compares us to other animals and offers yes birds are impressive, when they start building condos I will really have my head turned though.
Inspired the following recipe by Charlie Trotter and Roxanne Klein’s book Raw:
3 cups chopped fennel
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 Braeburn apple, skin on, cored
1 cup freshly squeezed grapefruit juice
I didn’t have all the ingredients so I made this delicious juice instead:
2 heads of fennel juiced along with their green tops
2 grapefruits juiced
2 oranges juiced
2 beets juiced
5 carrots juiced
4 Gala apples juiced
I have to say I think I am having fruitarian leanings, if I had more time to study it I would. It is so easy when you are eating mostly raw to get attached to fruit. For example today, so far and it is only 4:30 pm I have had half a mango and half an apple in a green smoothie, two apples, one grapefruit, about 25 cherries, a banana, and a nectarine. I had massaged greens (see recipe in this blog) for lunch and am craving a salad with tomatoes and avocado for dinner. I could see having another grapefruit and/or mango…That would be like 10 fruits or something in one day.
Where ever you draw the line you then wish you had more from that point. Wishing mind will arrive at the door. And if you say well you can have all this than it is the next thing that is wanted. You love what is needed, or what you feel is needed.
When I weighed 165 I was still wanting more, the line was just drawn in a different place and I felt less comfortable physically than I do now at 140. Now at 140 I still want more than where the line is drawn I am just lighter.
What I am trying to say is if you are going to suffer from wanting mind why not also get to be thin? I mean either way you are going to suffer and have to look beyond the line you have drawn. Why not also get to enjoy all the nice things you get with thinness. Social benefits, physical benefits, according to a some study white women earn more if they are thinner (apparently that did not apply so much if you were a man or even a woman of color) – how annoying!!
One advantage I have is that I realize (at least on some level) that just because you lost weight does not mean you’re done thinking about it. That is how all that weight just sneaks right back on. You turn your back on yourself. Right now my lifestyle has changed slightly so I am not biking to work these days. It is one small change after another then the ball begins to slow in its rolling.
So the point is we all draw the line somewhere. How do we keep finding where the line works best at the moment and keep checking in with yourself as your life changes?
Life has been a rushed tangle the past 3 weeks of house buy/sale transactions, moving, a funeral, two lost cats and a grad class starting. I am still reading my favorite blog, Valerie’s GreenSmoothieExperiment and enjoying the addition of a morning green smoothie a day (~60% fruit + ~40% green leaves in a K-tech blender or Vitamix). Our dog, Gertrude, is also enjoying some left over green smoothie. This weekend we are going to a catpalooza at the Human Society so we may be able to add some cat bowls of smoothie soon.
The smoothies are still enjoying extreme simplicity and include no more than a couple fruits and a green (parsley, kale or lettuce). Eventually we will experiment more with soaked flax seeds, vegetable juices, peppers, mint leaves, kiwi, etc. Right now we are just settling into the routine and keeping it simple is just the way.
What a delicious passion this raw food blog has added to my life, I really encourage everyone to start a blog on anything that interests them and just see what happens.
After making a green smoothie every morning for weeks now in my K-tech, I finally found a recipe worth documenting, I thought this one was especially tasty. Still waiting for Green for Life to arrive in the mail.
In a high speed blender (I don’t know if a regular blender will really blend the kale smooth, I have seen a smaller, even cheap blender have success with a spinach soup so who knows), mix the following:
1 1/2 cups of water
1 mango
1/2 cups pineapple
1 peach
4 cups of kale
My impression so far is that the goal of a green smoothie is to increase your green intake and not gross you out. If you don’t put enough fruit in there you may succeed in grossing yourself out. Another problem I have found is smoothies that gel, ugh. I think that is a two mango spinach product that gels, ugh. I also really just don’t like spinach as much as kale in a smoothie. I can add a lot more kale and still like it than I can spinach. Parsley and mint are fun and tasty greens to add. You can toss in an entire bunch of parsley with any fruit. We have liked apples, pears, pineapple, mango. Oranges get a little too sweet…if you need it sweeter, adding agave nectar is a nice option. The ripeness of the fruit you are using has a huge affect on the outcome.
Two really cool things about smoothies, they are very fast to make and clean up after and you can drink them while running around getting ready in the morning.
Do you have a tasty simple (I am keeping them simple for right now) green smoothie recipe?
Wiki Wakame “[A compound in wakame,] fucoxanthin induces expression of the fat-burning protein UCP1 that accumulates in fat tissue around the internal organs…[wakame] was nominated one of the 100 worst invasive species in the world…Wakame is a rich source of EPA, an ω-3 essential fatty acid. At over 400 mg/100 cal, it has one of the higher nutrient:calorie ratios, and among the very highest for a vegetarian source.[1]” wikipedia.com
1 ounce (use a scale to weigh) dried wakame seaweed, soaked for 20 min in 5 cups of water and drained (keep three cups of the water).
For Matt Amsden’s Rawvolution Octopus’s Garden Seaweed Chowder. This is a delicious soup.:
In a high-speed blender, combine 3 cups of this seaweed water with:
1 cup raw pine nuts
3 cloves garlic (optional)
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
garnish this white creamy soup with soaked wakame
For Charlie Trotter inspired Wakame Salad (great as a side or wrapped in a nori roll):
2 tbl. green pepper, chopped
4 tbl pineapple, chopped
1/4 cup soy sauce
6 tbl rice wine vinegar
4 tsp. sesame oil
add the wakame you just soaked
sesame seeds and cucumber are popular optional additions
mix all in a bowl let stand for an hour and drain
I was glad to find these two in combination, because Matt’s soup is tasty yet he really didn’t have a plan for the wakame and Charlie’s wakame salad is really delicious and versatile and keeps well.
“Kiwifruit is a rich source of vitamin C. Its potassium content by weight is slightly less than that of a banana. It also contains vitamins A and E. The skin is a good source of flavonoid antioxidants.
Raw kiwifruit is also rich in the protein-dissolving enzyme actinidin, (in the same family of thiol proteases as papain), which is commercially useful as a meat tenderizer but can be an allergen for some individuals. Specifically, people allergic to latex, papayas or pineapples are likely to be allergic to kiwifruit also.
This enzyme makes raw kiwifruit unsuitable for use in desserts containing milk or any other dairy products which are not going to be served within hours, because it soon begins to dissolve milk proteins. This also applies to gelatin based desserts, as well, as the actinidin will dissolve the collagen proteins in gelatin very quickly, either liquifying the dessert, or preventing it from solidifying. However, the US Department of Agriculture suggests[1] that cooking the fruit for a few minutes before adding to the gelatin will overcome this effect [by killing the enzymes].” Wikipedia.Com
It is a testimony to the power of live enzymes in digestion.
The Recipe:
Avocado makes it creamy. Kiwi adds a little grit and spice somehow, especially when you toss them in unpeeled, I like it better that way.
Serves 2 easily
Toss in a high speed blender:
2 cups of water
2 Kiwi Fruits
1/4 cup of banana
1 mango
3 cups of kale
1 avocado
For people who just are not green food crazy and are not going to eat it otherwise, this is a really great way to get started with a huge bank of enzymes.
If your avocados are too hard for mashing, slice the avocados up tiny on the cutting board then they are easy to mash.
If you like spicy food, store a bunch of habaneros in vinegar and water 1:1 ratio and they will keep well so they are always on hand to toss into anything.
2 limes juiced
1 habanero
2 avocados
1/2 cup tomato, chopped
1/4 cup red onion, finely chopped
Grab a spoon or a veggie and watch for your whole body tingle from the spice! Delicious.
Once a habanero is cut on a particular cutting board, future foods can be spicy from that same board even after it was washed. It takes a few minutes after washing your hands for them to let go of the spice.
What is it about? Part of me wants to consider the possibility that it is sometimes more a craving for what we are using bread as a vehicle for. Recently I tasted bread after not having it for a long time and thought this is cardboard! Why would I have been so crazy about card board?
Whether you are crazy about bread or not, it was the first thing to leave my diet when I finally started making some headway towards losing weight. I first got it down to only craving one slice a day, then poof it vanished. There are still momentary arrivals…most importantly it has been removed from the queen’s seat, this craving at the moment is somewhere buried in an old shed thankfully and I hope it will stay there.
Now I am finally spontaneously experimenting with other things as vehicles for pates, spreads, etc. Today I used sun chokes and apples, yesterday I used celery…for some reason it has been harder to do that in the past, almost like this is some sort of ritual…if you are going to eat that it has to be with bread or maybe with a spoon while standing at the sink.
What I found is that vegetables are going to add a flavor to the spread and they are just so many new combinations for me. The good thing is I got to eat the spready thing I love, whatever that is at the moment and I got the nutrients from a raw plant at the same time. So I begin to wonder if I am more craving the spread. Unlike some, I never really enjoyed bread plain that often, even my favorite seediest hardest breads.
One large slice of rye bread is 83 calories according to fitday.com. That is a lot of calories if you allow its main objective as: the largest real estate for an even more caloric spread.
08-02-2006 15.05.09, originally uploaded by robysaltori. One of my favorite blogs, MyMoneyBlog.com, just did a piece on Kiva.com. I once saw a documentary on Kiva, I just had no idea it was so easy to participate. You get to loan 25 bucks to a low-income entrepreneur in a third world country, interest free. That is essentially like the charity you give, the interest you might have gained on your 25 otherwise. The person borrowing does pay interest of 10%, that is much less than they would otherwise.
Just made an exciting discovery of another treasure on the web, a Raw Article Collection by In the Raw. This link includes an article by Victoria Boutenko with her favorite green smoothie recipes. Hooray for this site! Enjoy.
Yesterday I craved greens and I had more than my usual amount of greens. Started with 4 cups of spinach in a smoothie with banana and apple, then had about 6 cups of Massaged Greens (see recipe), then ended the day with a 4+ cup salad of mixed greens and a tomato. That was about 14 cups of greens. Snacked on things like guacamole, nuts, grapefruit, hummus…
Can I afford to eat like that? It definitely seems more expensive because we are not used to eating that much of that or this. Though think, things I don’t eat are pretty expensive (meat, dairy, cheese, chips, cookies, ice cream, prepared frozen foods, soda, beer, wine, candy, pizza). I rarely buy packaging.
Whether it is cheaper depends on what habits you might let go of over time and what habits you might gain. I am not certain if it is cheaper for me, although it definitely seems cheaper and I have read that it is for people in general. It first felt expensive to buy 3-4 avocadoes, now I found a place I can get them for about 59 cents each and I buy 4-6 a week. It felt expensive because I used to think even one avocado was a splurge. Even if you are paying 1.39 each for your avocado, my gosh think of what you are no longer buying once your cravings switch.
It seems amazing to me that a plant spends a portion of its life making this incredible fruit (really its like a miracle), many hands spend hours growing it, picking it, hauling it and living off of that could be cheaper than living off mass manufactured product. Is it cheaper, it has to do with what you would do otherwise.
I now have an embarrassing number of raw recipe books all full of post its, all include drink/smoothie recipes, none include dump 4-8 cups of spinach into your high speed blender and something else for a great tasting smoothie.
I was surprised, I just can’t find this recipe and I need help. This morning I tried my 4+ cups of spinach with a lemon and some fresh orange juice, that was fine, I just feel like I should not have to reinvent the wheel. Does anyone feel committed to this green smoothie tastes great and has tons of green in it?
I think spinach and banana doesn’t really work to well…I tried spinach with apple that is fine…I love how pretty they have all been although they get really frothy and in kind of a weird unmanageable way if you let it sit. I end up with this huge green mustache…
I just started a new blog, not at the cost of this one, more likely it will enhance this one. Blogs are the most fantastic thing for people who love to write, I encourage everyone to start a blog about anything you want to learn about, if you like to write. It can be like reference-able notes and I think you don’t even have to publish it.
by will_1520 via flickr.com
