Starting A Raw Food Diet

What are your goals?
So many times I get the question, "so how do I go about doing this sort of thing?" or "how do I start out eating a raw food diet?" Just today I got to talking to somebody in the gym about that. I think the first question to consider are what are your goals? What do you want to accomplish? Do you want to just be more healthy or do you want to live until you're 120? Do you just want to overcome candida or do you want to simply lose a few pounds? For me I'm in it not only to NOT get cancer and heart disease but to radically become something totally and 100% different than what other people are. I want to somehow (by daily disciplines over time) become the best that I can be. Some people call it their archatypical form or in a christian sense an imitation of christ. So first start out by figuring out what your goals are.

How raw do you want to be, and how fast do you want to get there?
Have you figured out your goals for why you want to eat this way? okay, good. Now that you have that figured out, now you can determine how quickly you want to become, however much raw you want to become. For some people 50, 60 or 80 percent is where they want to be and that's great. For some people it's in their destiny to become 100%. Personally I want and am 100% raw and it took me about 5 years go get there. For some people they do it overnight and that works for them. For me the best thing I ever did was to be gentle on myself and give myself time. Think about it, say you're 30 years old and are just starting out. You're trying to change 30 years of toxins, poisins and bad habits in a matter of days, weeks or months? The faster you make that change the more detox symptoms you will experience but the greater the immediate highs also. So now that you have that determined let's move on...

Strategy
There are 3 very important things to always remember:

• Be kind and gentle, soft and allowing on yourself, ALWAYS!
  
• Always add foods in, never take away
  
• Remember you have a lifetime to get better and better at it. This is a lifestyle

So the foods you want more of are obviously fruits, nuts, seeds, vegetables, seaweeds, superfoods and herbs. Now you have to determine how you're going to incorporate them into your daily routine. Don't worry about the pizza you had for dinner or whatever else. Here are some disciplines you might want to consider:

• Have a salad a day
  
• Have a smoothie a day
  
• Have some fruit everyday
  
• Have a liter of water a day
  
• Have a green juice a day
  
• Have an herbal tea a day
  
• Have a superfood chocolate smoothie a day
  
• Have some enzyme suppliments with each meal a day

Pick any one of these little things and make it a daily habit and work from there and DO NOT worry or beat yourself up about the other stuff you are eating. So many people think that if they have pizza for dinner it somehow cancels out the salad their having with it. This should be fun not about deprivation. Plus studies have shown that when we eat cooked food we get an immune system reaction from it. But if we have alkaline vegetable salad with the meal then it cancels out the white blood cell immune system response from the cooked food we are eating. So ADD ADD ADD.

How fast did I make the transition to raw foods?
Personally I read Fit for Lifeand it rocked my world. Amazing book to start out with. My first discipline was fruit for breakfast. But even that was too much. I used to eat a couple bowls of cereal with two peanut butter pieces of toast. I went down to 1 piece of toast for a while. Then none. Then I switched from milk to rice milk, then stabalized. Then I went down to just one bowl of cereal with rice milk. Then I was able to go to the fruit. That process alone took me a few months. Like I said, going slow was the best way for my body to do it. I'm so glad I transitioned that way.

One day you'll start adding in so many good things in your diet that it crowds out the bad. Personally if I want to have pizza one day I will. But as time goes on and on, I don't even crave it any more. The more you put restrictions on yourself the less fun you'll have and the higher the chances are that you will not stick with it.

The technique I uses is, if I want something bad say, a veggie burger or something. What I'll do is before we go to the restaurant I'll make a super filling chocolate smoothie. I'll be sucking down the final gulp as we walk out the door. What happens is, that I'm so full at that point I just end up getting a salad and I'm done.

So there are some tips I've learned and experience about going from SAD to raw. It's a journey and it opens things up inside you you never thought were there and it's so much fun.

If any of these tips helped you out, just let me know!