WHy I follow a low fat raw vegan diet

I wanted to share with you all a little bit about my dietary lifestyle. While I don’t let a label define who I am, my food choices fall into the high raw low fat vegan category. After almost two years of research on nutrition, I find this to be the ideal lifestyle for not only a healthy lifestyle, but also for fueling the body with optimal energy so that you can take on all that you desire in all areas of your life.

While it’s taken me about a year of trial and error and finally the last 5 months of finally getting control over this lifestyle (and getting to now 55.5lbs lost), I feel that everyone must find their own path to of what “comfortable” means for them. Before, food was a vehicle to some underlining issue I was trying to numb out. After years of numbing out, I lost all perspective of what real food really was. Ridding my diet of all the highly processed and highly addictive food, allowed me to gain back the sensitivity to know what it was my body was asking for.

After making many choices in the right direction, there was one last choice that I needed to make that kept pulling me back to old habits. I started out by cutting out gluten, processed foods and refined sugars. This seemed to work well for me, and I was able to loose about 35 lbs on this lifestyle. However, the more I researched nutrition, and more importantly, the more I cut the “junk” out of my diet, meaning all that highly addictive chemical processed food, the more I started to listen to my own body. Having substituted the gluten with large amounts of produce, I realized that my body was really craving this new source of nourishment more and more.

When emotional ties associated to my food choices were removed, what my body really craved was fresh raw fruits and vegetables. I then came across the raw food lifestyle, and I made the great big leap in one go. After about a month I started to feel incredible changes. I gave up coffee, yet I had more energy than ever before. My acid-reflux had disappeared instantly. I used to have visual migraine auras at least once per month and sometimes up to once per week, which seemed to also fade away. My skin started to glow, and I started to feel an inner sense of joy and peace that I had never really experienced before, and little by little, I started noticing myself smile more and just be happy for no apparent reason.

The one thing that always pulled me back, was the social drinking with my friends. I would eat healthy all day, and then I would go out and have some crazy night out, and my frontal lobe would just go on binge feasts that would make my progress seem futile. I didn’t want to do harm to my body by getting super clean with my diet and then getting super toxic by going out drinking. So I decided that maybe going vegan rather than raw would be better for me.

Somehow, the food on the plate had changed, but my habits were still pretty much the same. Eating really healthy vegan meals (still high raw) and then going out 3-5x per week and having a few drinks and my diet became vegan à la bar menu, which could consist of about 5 martinis and a large plate of french fries or some vegan nachos. I hated myself the next day, and I could hear this inner voice pleading me to stop. Problem was I never wanted the party to end.

Going out, socializing and drinking was my way to relax and let go of all the stress I had going on. I was so concerned all the time with all the things I “had to do” or the person that I “had to be” that when I went out, all that went away as well. It wasn’t as though I needed to drink, I had gone months before without drinking just to see, but it was more like that’s when I felt like I was really “living it up”!

I realized that in order to change my lifestyle, I needed to change my social group, and so I set out to meet more people that were into the raw food lifestyle. One way that I did this was by attending the Woodstock Fruit Festival. While at the festival, I was having a conversation with one of the pioneers, Freelee (The banana Girl), and I asked her how I could still have a social life and have this new lifestyle. I candidly told her about my issues going out with my friends and trying to maintain this lifestyle, eager to hear the answer as to how I was going to be able to merge my two lifestyles, I was shocked when she just came back to me with a question.

She asked me how old I was. Something I was completely NOT expecting! Maybe because deep down I knew that while this may have been ok to do in my early 20s, it was not ok to do in my 30s. What would my life be like in my 40s? If I didn’t change my path would I still be out at bars at the age of 50? This realization really scared the crap out of me. I realized there, in that moment, that life was about soooooo much more than the “never ending party” LIFE was the party, and I was missing it!

From that day on (August 2013), the lifestyle became intuitive for me. I continued to set out to find the real me that I had buried deep down below so long ago. I thought about the person I wanted to be… that day… ten years from then…20 years from then. I knew that my weight wasn’t just about physical appearances, it was something that was holding me back from doing all the things in life I wanted to achieve. I wanted to be athletic, and to surround myself with people who were thriving, and I wanted to become the best version of myself that I could become in ALL areas of my life, and I knew that I needed health and vitality to do that.

August 17, 2013 was the last time I had a drink with my friends (or at all for that matter) and to tell you the very truth, I haven’t missed it one bit. What I’ve gained is immeasurable! The day I made that decision, was the day that my dietary lifestyle finally started to “click”. It was no longer a conscious thing of having to eat a certain way, or not eat “this”, or only eat “that”. I gained the control I had struggled to find before. I was eating the food that my body was asking for, and for the first time in my life, I could hear what my body was calling for loud and clear.

I knew that I felt my absolute best when I was eating a diet high in raw fruits and vegetables, and because I was getting a large amount of my calories from fruits (sugars), I knew I had to keep my fat intake low (~10%). I won’t lie, there are still times when my body wants to just eat something outside of the LFRV (80/10/10) plan, and when that happens, the first thing I do is to try and understand what it is that my body really needs. If I can get it from my LFRV food then I do- If I crave something savory – I’ll make a HUGE bowl of salad, If I want some fat- I’ll have some guacamole, If I need something sweet- I’ll munch on some dates, but there are just those times when it’s our subconscious mind that wants something “bad”. So when this happens, you know what I do??? I have something “bad”, but not without first understanding WHY it is I want it. I take the time to explore my subconscious. There is usually some emotional reason that has NOTHING to do with the food AT ALL! So after I’ve identified what this is, acknowledged it, and make the CONSCIOUS decision that I still want to “be bad”, I allow myself to do that. The thing is that NOW my definition of “bad” is A LOT healthier than anything I would have eaten before.

Bad for me now might mean a bowl of quinoa or wild rice made into a vegan vegetable paella. Maybe a hot homemade lentil soup, or some hummus made from real garbanzo beans (not from a can and no oil). Or if I really want to veg-out (irony I know) I will make a plain bowl of popcorn on the stove. AND if I’m REALLY REALLY REALLY needing something super bad – I will go to Chipotle and have a vegan bowl with black beans, brown rice, veggies, pico de gallo, corn, lettuce and guacamole which is 555 calories, and me at my VERY worst. I want to stress that I don’t eat like this often. On a day-to-day basis I am pretty much eating VERY high if not ALL raw, but once in a blue moon, I will say F@^% the label and give my body what I think it needs, and I find by the next meal my body is lusting after a green juice.

Again, the important thing is to LISTEN to your body. Don’t just go numb it out by going into some food coma. Learn to have a good relationship with your mind and to identify what are the non-food habits that cause you to eat out of your healthy conscious food choices? When you start to identify these- two things will happen- first, you will have less and less cravings as time goes on because as you identify and deal with your emotions, you won’t need to numb out with the food, AND more importantly, you will find that your “diet” will be the best therapy for all other areas of your life because by eating clean you will be able to better identify the triggers that make you reach for the bad food that keep you at your best. You will find that your mind and your body will start working together rather than against each other. You will find that other areas of your life begin to change as well, and as long as you keep being honest and true to yourself and cut out the processed foods and toxins that dilute the real message that your body tries to give you, that inner bliss within you will start to grow.

You will come to realize that food is nourishment for your body, just as love, and sleep, and peace of mind. You will want to nourish your body more and more everyday, and with each day, you will see it blossom into something beautiful. This is what comes from eating clean living food, and this is why I strive to stay crude!

You have to understand that it's not profitable for people to eat this way-- it doesn't help the pharmaceutical industry nor the meat or dairy industry and so there's no money being put towards researching this.

It helps the vegetable and fruit industries...they aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. Wouldn't you think they'd put money into researching it?

Meat isn't bad but excess animal protein is. Heart disease is the #1 killer and just reducing the amount of animal protein can help lower the risk of heart disease.

Scientific proof, please. Not YouTube videos.

Besides, I thought it was saturated fat that was "bad"? Or was it dietary cholesterol? How much, exactly, is "excess" animal protein?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3849684/

I did have detox in the beginning, but that was not one of the symptoms for me, but everyone has different detox symptoms.

Wow, I am a vegan and your attitude and dietary choices appear way too way too extreme. For me life is too short obsessing over food. Eat raw if you want, but some foods are better cooked (like spinach). I hope you have some interests other than worrying about the kind of foods you will be eating! Please don't let your life pass you. Live a large life if possible.

Ha! I don't obsess about food at all. It's the same effort going to the store to buy fake "meat and dairy" vegan food than it is to buy fresh produce. I just eat the food that tastes good to me. What I eat is not an interest, it's what I eat, but it has helped me become more fit and so now I have more interests than ever before: running, boxing, yoga, hiking, salsa dancing, not to mention all the other non- active things that I do. This is what's "normal" for me now, so to be honest I don't really thing about it that much.
It's the food I shop and keep in my house, so it's the food that I eat and makes me feel good.
Last Friday night I had a girl's night at my house and we had Mexican night, and Saturday I had a raw vegan potluck. Both were with 10+ people (different people too) and both nights everyone loved the food- especially Mexican night and they weren't even vegan.