In the Raw by Kate Swoboda
Six months ago, I decided to make one of the most radical life changes that I’d ever made—I decided to “go raw.” This meant committing to a lifestyle of salads, greens, and microgreens while eschewing some of life’s more amazing pleasures, such as pizza, warm bread, and gelato. “That sounds crazy,” one person told me pointedly, and I wondered if she was right.
Before officially going raw, I did my research, reading books on the subject as well as personal accounts of the process. It seemed that people went raw for one of three reasons: 1.) to lose weight, 2.) to make a political statement (eating raw means eating organic and unprocessed/unpackaged, which is inherently better for the environment), or 3.) for their health.
I’d been a vegetarian for years, and had spent most of my vegetarian life eating side dishes or picking meat off of things prepared by my mother. My family was never a “salad” kind of family—the only vegetables I saw were cooked vegetables from a can. When I moved out on my own, I didn’t know how to cook for myself. A typical day’s diet consisted of cereal in the morning, a (vegetarian) sandwich of some kind for lunch, and a pasta or pizza dinner, sans meat, usually microwaveable and processed. And, of course, we can’t forget my addiction to soft drinks, donuts, and chocolate, all of which I rationalized as being allowable since I ate such an otherwise “healthy” diet and ran twelve miles a week.
“…I was waking up every day feeling tired, achy, and perpetually on the verge of “coming down with something” that I faced facts—it was time to clean up my diet.”
It wasn’t until this past spring, when I realized that I was waking up every day feeling tired, achy, and perpetually on the verge of “coming down with something” that I faced facts—it was time to clean up my diet.
In the year leading up to my decision to go raw, I’d slowly been incorporating more salad and fruit into my diet—plus kicking the soda habit and taking regular doses of pro-biotics. For me, deciding to go raw was about health. Ultimately, I wanted to wake up every day feeling energized. Armed with Natalia Rose’s book, “The Raw Food Detox Diet,” I read up on the raw lifestyle and began my detox and raw foods transition.
According to Rose’s book and to some of the other “raw” literature out there, it’s really only necessary to eat raw 70-80 percent of the time to receive many of the benefits, and soaking/sprouting nuts or grains is completely optional. I also learned that food combining is an essential part of the raw foods lifestyle. To explain that, let’s try a metaphor, where your stomach is the stock room, and into that stock room goes the merchandise (food) that needs to be put on the sales floor for purchase (or, in this case, distributed to the body so that the vitamins, minerals, enzymes, proteins, etc., can all be utilized and help you stay healthy). There’s only one door with this stock room. If you put a bunch of stuff in the stock room, but before it can be put out on the sales floor, there’s another heap of stuff added to the stock room, it gets really complicated to distribute that merchandise. And if you get some of it, but not all of it out, and yet you add more to that stock room, then some of the stock is going to get pushed to the back, where it gets dusty and piles up.
Same thing with your stomach—which is why proper food combining is essential. If you eat certain foods and don’t give them enough time to digest, and then you add more foods on top of those foods, you’re piling one problem on top of another. In the short term, you’re likely to experience a range of digestive issues—from diarrhea to gas to constipation to other symptoms you might not even consider to be related to digestion—such as headaches. In the long term, imagine that all of that food is slooooowly making its way out of your digestive system, and bits of it aren’t even being thoroughly used by the body if it’s a particularly processed piece of “food.” Now the situation is more dire—waste builds up, and as it moves through the body bits of it gather in places such as your colon. In your colon, that waste can turn toxic and return to the bloodstream in varying amounts, and opinions vary as to whether this causes immune dysfunction. By eating foods that enter and exit the stomach quickly, you can avoid this kind of a backup.
There are hard-core raw foodists who adhere to a set of very strict guidelines around eating. But if you only want to take it to the 70% raw level, as I did, the rules get much simpler:
- Eat fruits alone and wait a few hours before eating again so that they can fully digest.
- Ditch anything processed. No dairy, breads, meat, soy, candy, etc. (Dairy and soy, especially, cause a lot of mucus to build up in the system).
- Eat mostly raw, unprocessed foods.
Most people ask me: So what do you eat, then? My typical day looks like this—fresh fruit for breakfast, nuts sometime in the hour before lunch, a huge (huge!) salad topped with my own homemade olive oil/balsamic vinaigrette (and let’s not forget carrots, tomatoes, avocados, celery bits, fennel…), and for dinner, a cooked vegetable with a whole grain—unless I’ve found something particularly tempting to eat from my raw foods cookbook, such as homemade basil pesto sauce over zucchini “noodles.” I also eat 70% cacao dark chocolate!
“…Whenever I ate raw, I felt amazing. Whenever I lapsed, it was a quick downward spiral to feeling exhausted (regardless of how much sleep I’d had) and anxious (regardless of the yoga I’d practiced) and heavy (regardless of whether I’d eaten anything ‘heavy’ that day).”
When I first started, I found that I’d stick to the diet for a few days or weeks and then I’d break down, eating pizza, ice-cream, burritos layered with sour cream and guacamole and cheese. What always got me back on the diet was this simple fact: Whenever I ate raw, I felt amazing. Whenever I lapsed, it was a quick downward spiral to feeling exhausted (regardless of how much sleep I’d had) and anxious (regardless of the yoga I’d practiced) and heavy (regardless of whether I’d eaten anything ‘heavy’ that day).
Finally, I realized that feeling better was a choice that I was making every day, with every meal. What did I want to choose?
As the months went by and the diet became easier to incorporate into my life, I found that I was more willing to spring for some of the fancier accoutrement that are part of a more dedicated raw-foodie’s lifestyle. The Breville Juice Fountain juicer was my first purchase. Now I begin every morning with “green lemonade,” something that I’d say is a must-have. Forget a morning cup of coffee—there is no kind of “awake” feeling quite like having live enzymes first thing in the morning. Later came a food processor, then, after buying the Café Gratitude cookbook (see www.cafegratitude.com for more information) I purchased a food dehydrator and a nut milk bag.
I also discovered that as I went deeper into the diet, I began to crave and look forward to salads—and the near-constant cravings for sweet baked goods that had plagued me in my pre-raw days were gone. It was no longer difficult to go to a party and watch as other people ate chips and cake. Late-afternoon energy slumps disappeared. I began to wake up with more vigor. And the times when I did really want to have pizza or cake? I ate them, but my digestive system had perked up, big time, and my body was able to pass those foods without depleting my energy. I never worried about counting calories—I could eat as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted, including olive oils and nuts, and on top of all that, my body was firming up and I lost a modest amount of weight. My acne-ridden skin began to clear.
When I tell people about raw foods, they often say, “I couldn’t eat that much roughage,” meaning—they get diarrhea. I’m not a nutritionist, but I’d urge those people to consider whether the issue is really the food, or (more likely) an imbalance in intestinal bacteria. I mentioned that I’d already been taking pro-biotics before starting this diet, and I believe that this is one of the major things that helped me to adjust to eating more fiber-rich foods.
If you’re interested in trying out a raw foods lifestyle, I strongly recommend talking to a nutritionist with a raw foods background as well as a book on raw foods such as Natalia Rose’s “Raw Foods Detox Diet.”
Is it a big adjustment? Yes. Is it sometimes work to plan meals? Only at the beginning. Was I sick and tired of feeling so sick and tired? Definitely. In the end, though, there’s really only one question: Has it been worth it? Absolutely.
(Photo Credit: Lorissa Shepstone)
