Carol Kelly - Raw Food Recipes: Raw Food Diet Recipes in a Raw Food Cookbook

Raw Food Recipes

Raw Food Diet Recipes in a Raw Food Cookbook

Carol Kelly and Anna Robinson

Copyright 2013 Carol Kelly and Anna Robinson

All rights reserved.

You may be wondering, why eat a raw food diet. The answer involves several things. It depends on what you are after with your health. The raw food diet is beneficial as a detox or cleanses diet, where it cleans the toxins out of the body. Or the raw foods diet can be great for weight loss. Raw fruits and vegetables are high in fiber and this accelerates weight loss. Or it can be just because you want to be healthier.

Another line of thought is that if food is cooked it loses some of the enzymes that naturally occur. These enzymes are supposed to help with digestion. When going on a raw food diet these enzymes are consumed and helps with the body detox. The enzymes help to treat some digestive issues and help the body to absorb nutrients better.

Let's look at each reason to go on a raw food diet individually. First health. Raw foods contain all the nutrients in their whole forms. When you process or cook foods some of the beneficial nutrients are lost. The best way to gain the full spectrum of the nutrients found in fruits and vegetables are to eat them raw.

The next reason for going on the raw foods diet is the full body detox or cleanse. Normally this means you must eat a diet that has 3/4 of the full day's foods to be raw. It helps you to swallow the raw foods if you can combine with your favorite cooked foods and you receive the best benefits if you can keep the cooked portion to 1/4 of your daily foods. The best deal of all is that you can detox the body while you still enjoy your desserts. Check out the recipes in this book. Eat the raw food diet for about a month to six weeks to gain the full benefits of a good detox.

Weight loss happens easily simply because you are eating whole nutritious foods. Plus the fact that at least 75% of these foods are raw you have a lot of fiber. You will feel full faster and all this raw food will act to scrub out your digestive system, making weight loss a no-brainer.

If you wish to try the raw food diet, do yourself a favor and wean from the junk foods first. You do not want to sabotage your diet by cheating with junk food, especially if you are trying to detox. You also want to have an easier time with it so wean from the junk foods before starting the raw food diet.

Give yourself a good three weeks or to wean from the junk foods because it takes the body three weeks to break a bad habit. Count how many times a day you eat junk food. Divide that 21. For example, say you eat junk food three times each day, so 21 divided by 3 is 7. Take 7 days to wean from each time you eat junk food. Replace the first junk food snack with a healthy snack for 7 days, then do likewise the 2nd and 3rd. By the end of the three weeks, you will be free of the junk food addiction. If you eat junk food 5 times a day then you'd want to replace the junk food every 4 days.

Also, add water to your daily routine, especially if you are trying to lose weight or doing the detox. Water is vital to your health; even if you are not on any specific diet you should drink plenty of water each day. The general consensus says to drink 64 ounces of water a day, that's 8 cups a day. But really you should drink an amount according to your body weight, because people weighing more will need more water and people weighing less will need less water. A good formula for figuring out the amount of water you need each day is to take your weight in pounds and divide by two. The answer to that formula is the amount of water you need to drink in ounces. For example, if you weight just 110 pounds, divide that by 2 and you have 60. A 110 pound person needs to drink 60 ounces of water a day. If a person weighs 200 pounds, divide that by 2 and you have 100. A 200 pound person needs to drink 100 ounces of water a day. Another rule of thumb is to drink an extra 10 to 12 ounces of water for each day you exercise at least half an hour.

Speaking of exercise, you need to be physically active in order to be healthy. Exercise works wonders for the body in terms of strengthening the muscles, raising the metabolism, adding more energy, and helping to lose weight. If you can exercise every other day or just three times a week for a half an hour at a time then you are giving your body an added boost to good health. Exercise need not be too difficult. You can do something as easy as walking. Or you can join a gym and go all the way with strength training, aerobics classes, and exercise equipment. Whichever you choose make sure you spend a few minutes stretching all of your muscles before and after each exercise you do. And remember to drink that water to replace the fluids you lose when you perspire.

Before you start on the raw food diet, make an appointment with your health care provider and let them know of your plans. They can help you to decide if the raw food diet is good for you to try or not. Ask them for advice about exercise too. They can advise you on your health and let you know if you have anything going on that needs extra attention. Any diet should be cleared with your health care provider first, whether it be the raw food diet or any other you may have considered.

The raw food diet is rapidly gaining in popularity, both as a short term cleanse and as a lifestyle. In any major city (and quite a few mid-sized cities as well), there are several raw food restaurants to choose from, exposing ever more people to the benefits of raw foods as well as educating the public that a raw food diet doesnt have to mean being consigned to glumly munching on salad after salad.

As youll learn in this cookbook, you can enjoy a widely varied raw food diet, although it does take some creativity and a willingness to do a little bit of work. You will have to do a lot of your own cooking, but raw food adherents are more than convinced that the extra time spent in the kitchen more than pays for itself in the form of better health.

One of the scientific concepts underpinning the idea of eating raw is that the process of cooking most foods destroys much of their nutritional content. Even heating most foods to relatively low temperatures of around 120 degrees Fahrenheit is enough to cause the enzymes that they contain to break down and for that reason, many people choose to reap the maximum nutritional content of the food that they eat by choosing not to cook it. While you will see many recipes in this book which call for warming or wilting various ingredients or entire dishes, this is done at very low temperatures of 100 115 degrees Fahrenheit in order to prevent the ingredients from losing their nutritive value.

Youll probably notice that many of the recipes here can be made using a dehydrator; if youre serious about eating a raw food diet for the long term, this is a kitchen appliance which you may want to invest in. In every recipe which calls for a dehydrator, however, weve also given alternate directions for how to prepare the ingredients or dishes in a conventional oven instead. However, you may want to get a dehydrator in any case, since its not terribly energy efficient to run your oven for many hours (sometimes as long as 8 to 12 hours).

Planning ahead is an important part of eating a raw food diet. Many of these dishes take many hours to prepare. Of course, you wont have to spend all that much time actually cooking its more of a matter of patience waiting for your food to slowly dehydrate or warm in the dehydrator or oven. You may find that eating a raw food diet helps you to make your meal plans in advance, since many raw food recipes take a fairly long time to make they arent the kind of thing that you can whip up on short notice if company comes, for instance.