Ok, for several years now I've felt called to make a shift towards something radically different and exceedingly healthy; a raw vegan lifestyle akin to fruitarianism, which is sort of what it sounds like. Fruitarians tend to eat, surprise, mostly fruit, lots of greens and veg, some nuts and seeds (usually soaked for maximum digestibility) and very sparing and infrequent grains like millet, quinoa, amaranth. But things like meat (incld fish/chix/pork, etc), sugar, wheat, dairy and obviously junk foods are out.
I looked towards the booming raw food movement and found all kinds of recipes and meals that were much too tedious and ambitious for me to want to bother with, but I gladly picked up overpriced raw meals from Whole Foods and various LA raw restaurants just to have these EXTREMELY HIGH FAT recipes like raw lasagna, burgers, burritos, even a raw croissant. They are all made predominantly with nuts, coconut, etc and are typically about 80% fat. I found them tasty, but nearly impossible to digest even with enzymes being taken to assist. I'd feel sluggish, tired and bloated after eating them but believed that it was just detoxing and adjusting. That's what the raw foodies told me, so I believed it. Well, that might be true for them but my body was having no part of it. I felt even more acidic, heavy and unhealthy then before and stuck with it long enough to have seen that it wasn't detox.
Then I looked into what sounded absolutely perfect for me...Dr. Doug Graham's 80/10/10 plan and upon reading this sensational book I felt SOOOO vindicated! In the raw community here when you question the logic in giving up cooked foods to replace them with faux versions of the same thing, you're pretty much a pariah just for pointing it out. But for me, with my history of bulimia, binging without purging and candida diagnoses eating high fat raw lasagnas just triggered my cravings and made me feel awful. Dr. Graham's logical and scientific explanation of why high fat is far worse for candidiasis and blood chemistry in general really hit home. The whole book is fabulous but when I put his plan into action there were a couple of snags, and this is where even the greatest books need to be absorbed with a grain of salt and adjusted to your own beautiful body's unique situation.
I LOVED his simple smoothie made with romaine lettuce and bananas! It was one of the tastiest things I'd ever had, made me feel great in the moment and introduced me to adding greens to a sweet smoothie. Just lettuce, fruit and water was so satisfying! But what I wasn't getting yet was that too much banana sets off my asthma later on, and he really pushes massive banana consumption in his book because it works so well for him and most folks. I figured out this banana-asthma connection while reading Dr. Batman's (abbreviation of his name) books about hydration, where he points out that high intake of potassium has an adverse effect on asthmatics, so intake of small amounts of pure sea salt with water is very therapeutic. I tried it, he was right! Another step towards putting the pieces together...
So I knew I was on the right track with living foods, which is what I call it rather than "raw" because to me "raw" represents the community with the major recipes and high fat foods. Living Foodists seem to embrace the simplicity of enjoying fruits, greens and veg in their natural, perfect state. Dr. Graham generally advocates making an ample meal of just one type of fruit or veg whenever possible to really appreciate its flavors and to allow the body to easily digest it all.
I found that eating just fruit was fine in the short term as a great cleanse (and man, I was pooping about 5 times per day when I did that for 2 weeks), which is what fruit really seems designed to do, but I was having a tough time working in the greens I needed. With salads, I really only love them when they are served with dressing and even my favorite, Annie Natural Goddess dressing is pretty high fat. Then I tend to want to add things like nuts, goat cheese, avocado, and suddenly a nice alkalizing bowl of easy to digest greens becomes a high fat digestive nightmere for me. How to address this?
Enter Green Smoothies! I'd enjoyed Dr. Graham's romaine and banana smoothie, and even still liked it when I nixed the nana and added apples, dates, etc, but it never dawned on me to add things like parsley, spinach, kale, chard, etc. While I was checking out some pages on Facebook with raw communities that seemed to be more akin to my ideas about living foods I saw a page totally dedicated to Green Smoothies. I went there, read recipes and testimonials and found myself practically drooling at the descriptions of these simple but fabulous drinks.
Lately, I'd been teetering back and forth between days where I'd sip Master Cleanser lemonade all morning for alkalinity and hydration, then drink 3 liters of water, have organic yogurt, salads, sprouted grain sandwhiches...then I'd swing into total junk and fast food binges for days. Couldn't seem to overcome them and it wasn't pms or any such thing. Last night, all I could think about was wanting some good pizza (mercifully, that's hard to come by in LA, and being a Chicago gal crappy pizza won't do!) or a tasty fast food burger. But I felt so acidic, lethargic, achey and spacey from all of the binging lately that I couldn't even indulge those cravings. I felt too awful. The paradox in getting healthier and cleaner on the inside is that you can tolerate far less when you do stray. So while my slips weren't bad by average standards, for my body they were dreadful.
I went to the store last night, loaded up on greens and fruit, went home and prepared my first official Green Smoothie, inspired by some very creative and fun recipes I saw online. They were still simple enough for me, who HATES cooking and preparation along with the cleanup afterwards. But this is as easy as it gets; throw the ingredients into my fabulous blender, add a touch of water, blend, sip, wash out blender. Voila!
Here's what I made last night when all I kept thinking about was mac and cheese, pizza, burgers...
Green Smoothie #1
3 full stalks of romaine lettuce
parsely
fresh mint leaves
half a lime, squeezed
raspberries
half a banana (just to see how it goes)
one kiwi (no skin, can't go there yet)
water, about 1/2 a cup to blend easier
Mother of God, that was fabulous! Very tart, not too sweet, super refreshing and wiped out ALL of my acidity feelings in about 20 minutes flat. I also found that suddenly, all of those cravings were gone gone gone. I wanted nothing else to eat! I sat and waited for hunger or cravings to hit...never happened. I did, however, keep getting whifs of my empty glass and the remnants of the smoothie, which smelled incredible from the mint and lime, and wanted more, but I just sat with my tummy full and let it be. Incredible.
I'd read reviews for a book people rave about on amazon.com by Victoria Boutenko called "The Green Life", which I ordered, and saw someone describing a very similar issue around overwhelming cravings for junk and fast food finding that with the smoothies those were just suddenly gone, like a light switch had been flipped to the "off" position. That resonated, and last night I felt that myself. How amazing! That by giving my body the minerals, amino acids, phytonutrients and alkalinity it really needs and wants, the random cravings for crap and "comfort foods" vanished. Poof. Just like that.
This morning I am enjoying a variation with young coconut water, kale, romaine, blackberries, raspberries and half a banana again along with parsley and mint. Not as flavorful but quite lovely and I am chewing on it right now (berry seeds). I feel great. Satisfied, no cravings for the ubiquitous sugar and junk in this office. Ideally, I'd love for these to constitute 2 meals per day with the third being either a living foods sandwhich or some cooked veg. This weekend I am going to see how it feels to do ALL Green Smoothies for a good kickoff into this as a lifestyle. I absolutely love it. This feels like the missing link for me. I don't have to prep, cook or worry about complex recipes, it's satisfying as could be, easy clean up...perfection!
If anyone else is struggling with a transition to a living foods lifestyle and finds the complex raw foods recipes that replicate cooked dishes to be too much...don't be discouraged. There's a formula and a way to embrace this kind of eating for life force if you really want to find it. I might be fine tuning this as well, and expect that, but I'm one step closer to my nutritional dream.
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