Raw for Life

Grand Prize Winner of the Raw Foods Essay Contest

Recently I entered an online essay contest by the Creative Health Institute, in Union City, Michigan. Their criteria for selecting a winner weren’t based on writing skills, though. They were based on three parts: that the contestant took massive action to stand out, truly needed the help and would use it, and finally, would take action to spread the word about Raw foods. I was the grand prize winner! I won so much stuff! I won a free copy of the Dr. Ann Wigmore Raw Living Foods Home Study Program, valued at $700.00, a one-hour consultation with Dr. Jim Carey of the Creative Health Institute, a one year membership to RawDoctors.com, and much more.

A Raw Diet is Healthier than the Standard American Diet

The belief behind a raw diet is that by cooking our food we destroy all the beneficial nutrients. Man is the ONLY animal that cooks his food, and man suffers from a host of illnesses and diseases, that just don’t exist in the animal kingdom. Odd, because you’d think we were smarter than that! Most, if not all, of man’s current health concerns are diet related. We know that type-2, adult onset diabetes is caused by diet, specifically, drinking diet soda. We know that high cholesterol and heart disease is related to consuming fatty red meats, dairy products, and lack of exercise. Even cow’s milk – the wonder-food of the current “got milk” campaign, has been linked to allergies, headaches, muscle aches, arthritis, constipation, chronic fatigue, obesity, autism, prostate cancer, Chrohn’s Disease and heart problems!

I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by everything. There is just so much to learn all at once! I have been wanting to post about it, but I’m still a beginner. I’m just starting on this journey. I don’t have my “success story” yet. I can’t tell you yet how this has changed my life, or if it will change my life, but I do want to bring you along on my journey. For now, I’ll post updates of my progress on my blog, and the menus on my menus page. I’ll include how raw foods affect me, my husband, and my 2 yr old granddaughter, the queen of fussy eaters.

I should warn you though, that Raw menu Week One will NOT qualify for any government sponsored child care food reimbursement program. I am currently on such a program – I get reimbursed for the foods I feed my granddaughter on the days I get paid to babysit her. I am not sure what I’m going to do about that – as I am required to serve milk at every meal, and I’m not sure if they’d take issue with me excluding meats from a preschooler’s diet. I will probably have to drop the program eventually. For now, I’ll offer my granddaughter the required servings of “forbidden foods” as she transitions from the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) to totally raw.

Transitioning to Raw Foods, Take it One Step at a Time

The source where I got the week one menu did not serve the raw banana-avocado cream bars for Sunday’s brunch. This is a raw recipe I found in the Raw Living Foods Lifestyle Recipes book that came with my home study course. I’ve never these bars before – but they sure sounds interesting! It’s good that I actually like avocados. Looks like I’ll be eating a lot of them! In the raw menu, it is encouraged to mini-fast on Sundays, but this is so totally foreign to my family, that I didn’t want to push it. Our family tradition has always been to fast before Mass, then have a late, large brunch, often with hashbrowns, gooey cinnamon rolls, and even champagne. So I’m going to try to find ways to keep the tradition – eating brunch with family – while eating raw.

I’ve only listened to about a dozen of the 40+ CDs and DVDs I received. I want to get through them as fast as I can, so I can share all this great new information, but I also need to go through them slowly, carefully, so I can “digest” it all . For now, it looks like I’ll be eating a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, some nuts and seeds, and giving up all cooked foods, all meat and dairy products, all alcohol, and the hardest… Bigby’s Coffee. A year ago I had already given up all white flour, all refined sugar, all processed foods, all prepackaged foods, and (supposedly) chocolate bars. I cheat on the last one. Regularly. Ooops.

I can have raw cocoa. It doesn’t taste the same. You can guess what recipes I’m going to focus on! I learned to make “almond milk”, or sometimes spelled “almond mylk”. It actually tastes pretty good. Not like cow’s milk, and maybe you don’t know this about me, but I had a dairy cow on my homestead for four years. I milked her once a day, and let a calf suckle the rest of her milk. I made yogurt, sour cream, butter, ice cream, and even tried my hand at cheese. My family LOVES their milk! Giving up milk is going to be a really big challenge for us. But, my family is not particularly healthy, even though I raised my own bovine growth-hormone free milk, on a pasture-fed cow that did not receive antibiotics. In my immediate, milk-drinking family, we have the following: obesity, type-2 diabetes, high cholesterol, depression, hypothyroidism, arthritis and joint pain, food allergies, seasonal and chronic rhinitis, anxiety, and asthma. I think I got it all! Wow. That’s quite a list, and there’s just six of us that I’m counting. Myself, my spouse, and my four children who are all young adults now.

So, without boring all of you on how I’m going to turn into this wacky vegan, I’ll end for now. The main focus of my blog is still preschoolers and their families. The S.A.D. menus will remain posted, and I do plan to re-write them to include recipes for some of the menus that may not be commonly available.

for further reading, check out:
Going Raw
Is Cow’s Milk Unhealthy? Yahoo Answers.com
Kradjian, Robert M, M.D., “The Milk Letter, Dr. Kradjian Addresses Cow’s Milk,” Not Milk.com

Photo Credits:
Top: Creative Health Institute
Middle: MJorge
Bottom: faeryboots

Tags: Creative Health Institute, diabetes, feeding toddlers, feeding your preschooler, fussy eater, living food, preschooler, raw diet, raw food, raw kids