The First Steps toward Becoming a Raw Foodist

By Bob McCauley, ND

“Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man
should himself lend a hand.”

~ Hippocrates

I have found it useful to stop thinking about meals in the rigid way we traditionally regard them.  We are conditioned to build our day around three meals when instead we should only eat when we are hungry.  Your body will crave cooked foods less and less when it is provided with raw nutrients at a cellular level.  The constant companion of hunger will leave you.  We do not need the three meals we are accustomed to, rather, that is programmed into us, which is a central component of the obesity problem today.  We look at a clock to know if it’s time to eat instead of our stomachs.

We need to break our pattern and start thinking outside the norms we are accustomed to when it comes to food.  When we eat only when we are hungry, we begin to view food as a supply of nutrients we require to be healthy, not as something we need to do at a certain time of the day so our stomachs are always full.

An easy way to begin is by increasing the percentage of raw foods in your diet while shrinking the size of the cooked foods you consume.  The concept is simple.  Begin the process with breakfast and carry that sentiment throughout the day.  Start by adding a banana or apple to your cereal, for instance.  Increase the portion of fruit in the cereal each day without increasing how much you eat; this means that the milk and cereal portion will decrease.  Within a short time, you will have transitioned to an all fruit breakfast.  If it is complemented with 4 — 6 grams of Spirulina and Chlorella, you will be meeting all your basic nutritional needs and then some.  Your mornings will be full of energy when you eat this way.

Another approach is to start eating a salad with each meal.  Increase the size of the salad you have each day by 2% and shrink the amount of cooked foods you eat by a corresponding amount.  Following through with this will leave you a 100% raw foodist in less than 50 days.

Another transition is to introduce dehydrated foods to your diet, foods that have had the moisture removed from them.  They can be made into incredible raw food dishes such as sprouted bread, pizza, caramel apples, potato chips and many others, all of them raw and healthy.  While dehydrated foods are not as healthy as fresh raw foods, they are the next best thing.  They are an excellent transition food, but ultimately our goal is to consume 100% fresh raw foods.  The closer you get to that goal, the healthier you will be.

This monumental task that you have placed before yourself of changing a lifelong belief system must be done first in baby-steps that become bigger steps that turn in to leaps as your body cries louder each day for raw foods.  Your reward will be perfect health and a disease free body when the transition is complete.  Your body will punish you when you sometimes stray and revert to your old deadly cooked-food ways.  It is tough love because your body knows what is right.  The more you consume raw foods, the more traumatic this punishment becomes as you realize once and for all what poison cooked foods really are.

Another important step we can make is to begin moving away from pre-packaged processed foods to fresh cooked foods.  It helps bring us out of the repetitious habit of our daily lives that shackles us to the cooked world.  It is merely habit to come home tired and look for something easy to prepare for dinner.  There is nothing easier than something that is already prepared and simply needs to be heated.  Of course the ultimate fast food is a raw food because it is immediately ready to eat at any time.

The next step would be to begin cooking your vegetables less and less, whether it is steaming, frying or baking.  Start by steaming them only half the time your normally do, then reduce the time until you are merely warming them.  If you keep the temperature of the vegetables below 105°F, you will not destroy the enzymes and other chemical nutrients in the food.  Any raw food can be raised to a temperature of 105°F without the fear of damaging its nutritional potential.  Many people miss warm food when first moving to the Raw-food Diet and if it makes you feel better to warm your food to 105°F or less, you should do it.

Juicing is another side door to the raw food lifestyle.  Juicing is a world unto itself.  The human body is essentially a juicer in the sense that it is the juice from plants that contains the nutrients that the body must extract.  Anyone seeking to truly obtain Great Health must include juicing as part of their daily protocol.  There are many types of juicers.  Most separate the juice from the fiber, a valuable and necessary part of the food.  Other juicers grind up the entire food, including the fiber.  These are preferable.

You can juice any fruit or vegetable except those that won’t juice and must be blended such as a banana.  Babies can begin consuming raw juices once they are weaned.  And they will drink any fresh juice you give them, especially if it contains a little sweet fruit.  You can also put a gram of Spirulina and Chlorella powder into the juice as well.  A weaned infant can be treated the same as an adult in regard to their diet as long as it is comprised of raw foods.

I transitioned to raw foods by using rice as 20 — 30% of my overall diet for about a year.  You can do the same thing with potatoes or other starchy carbohydrates.  I used only brown, red and black rice because they contain fiber and essential fatty acids, and therefore are healthier than white rice, which is high in gluten and creates a lot of mucus in the body.  Rice also tends to cause a lot of gas, which is created mainly in the large intestines and is the result of undigested starchy carbohydrates.  Foods that cause these problems become their own reason for removing them from your diet.

I slowly removed rice from my diet over the course of several months until I was eating it only once a week.  Eventually, I got rid of it completely.  Only giving up dairy products did more to remove mucus from my body.

It was the last profound positive change in my health I experienced, for now I was nearly 100% raw.

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