Developing Your Raw Food Diet Plan

Before getting started on your new eating adventure you’ll want to have your raw food diet plan in place and ready to be followed. If you don’t normally eat a lot of raw foods already, gradually switching raw for cooked foods over a few weeks or more may be necessary for your plan to work out.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to try to help you do here…

Small changes can add up to big changes and changing everything all at once can be tough to do. So, begin by understanding your current food habits by asking your self “What raw foods do I already consume” and make a list. This is the first step in creating your raw food diet plan.

Once you have the list for your raw food diet plan the next step is to analyze what raw foods already in your life and the quality of them. Can they stay or do you need to replace them too?

Here’s an Exercise for Developing Your Raw Food Diet Plan:

Let’s say that you wrote down that you already ate salad. That’s good right? Not so fast – depending on where your salad comes from and how it’s made, it could be downright bad for you. From food borne illness bugs like e-coli and salmonella to pesticides and preservatives lettuce and complete salads alike can be good or bad for you.

So, how do you know what’s good or bad? The fact is that if you did not personally grow, harvest and prepare your own salads you can truly never know for sure. Another fact is that few people are going to do that so you have to a find a balance of a little bit of education and trust.

Commercially prepared and package lettuce and salads are not going to cut the muster. Neither are fast food restaurant salads. So, back to your list for your raw food diet plan; you’ll need to cross off all salads that are not made by you or someone you highly trust to serve clean healthy food.

Do this with all raw foods already on your list. It will reveal what habits you already have to assist you in making the switch to your raw food diet. The key is to continue with what you already like while you start to turn non-raw food versions into more preferable raw versions.

Changing Over From Cooked to Raw Food

Let’s say that you love and eat salsa regularly but you always buy it in a jar. To fit into your raw food diet plan you can easily make drop-dead delicious salsa fresh at home with very little fuss.

You can still have it – just scratch the salsa in a jar from your list and add in your easy to make and fresh raw food salsa. After a few times of making it you’ll never want to go back to that disgusting jar stuff ever again. Fresh made salsa is awesome.

Plan your switch to a raw food diet carefully and start changing your foods out gradually over time. Start with replacing just one meal a day or declare one day a week as a nothing but a raw food day. This will help make implementing your raw food diet plan a successful one.

Shopping For Your New Raw Food Diet Plan

As you begin switching out the foods you eat from cooked to raw, you will want to pay close attention to your shopping habits. But just because you’re changing over to raw, it doesn’t mean you have to find all new places to buy your food. You just have to start changing one or more of the items you buy.

Many stores today carry lots of organic fruit and vegetable choices now and as popularity has been growing, the prices are coming down to reasonable levels. Organic used to be very pricy when you could find it but today many farmers are helping to fill the gap by making organic produce more widely available.

One of the best ways to buy, and frequently at a lower price, is at a local farmer’s market. Here you’ll be able to find some of the freshest locally grown food and support local farmers as well as local small local business owners. Some areas have weekend only farmer’s markets and others are open every day of the week.

Another great way to eat super fresh and save a little money at the same time is by visiting a “pick your own farm”. These are great places to take kids along to teach them the value of harvesting your own food. The farmer gives you a basket; you pick the food from their field and pay a small price in comparison to a grocery store for the basket you just filled up.

Pick your own farms are a great money saver, they’re educational, good for a little exercise and can be lots of fun for the whole family. And so can your own personal backyard or sun porch garden to replace a portion of your grocery store list.

Don’t forget about shopping online either. You can find deals and a wide variety of raw whole food items by shopping on the internet – just be sure you do your research and do business with a reputable companies and brands.

Kitchen Technology for Your Raw Food Diet Plan

If you want to go on a raw food diet but can’t see yourself eating certain items cold and completely raw you can do add a little bit of heating to your plan. No cooking allowed but a quick blanch can change things up for you in a good way.

Take broccoli for instance. If you despise having to eat it cold, boil some water, drop the broccoli in, give it a stir and say out loud “this is going to be great” and quickly remove from the water. Season it with a dribble of olive oil, black pepper with a tinge of sea salt or lemon juice for a surprisingly good taste and texture.

That’s a raw food recipe that can work with a number of vegetables to spruce up the flavor and texture while taking the “boring” out of it.

Other than those typical kitchen items a juicer is a nice addition to your raw food diet plan. You’ll want a good quality juicer that extracts the most amount of juice possible out of the produce you put into it and it must be easy to clean. If it’s a pain to clean then you’ll likely use it less often.

When using a juicer with fruit you’ll want to pay attention to calories as the juice contains a concentration of sugars. An apple may only be 90 calories but when you juice four of them for some fresh apple juice they can add up quickly.

Don’t through all those valuable fiber leftovers from the juicer away either. And that brings us to the next piece of raw food diet kitchen technology – namely, the food dehydrator.

What you do is take the leftovers from the juicer; in this case it’s apple, mix in a little ground cinnamon with a tiny bit of stevia for a sweetener mixed in. Next, flatten it out, dehydrate it and break up into smaller pieces that are not only delicious but really good for you too.

Dehydrators are great for all kinds of uses. You can turn a seasonal trip of farmer’s market great buys into a years worth of dehydrated apple slices. From apple wafers or slices to homemade fruit roll-ups, a food dehydrator is a valuable piece of kitchen technology for the raw food enthusiast.

To wrap up our kitchen technology here, a blender or food processor for making smoothies, meal replacement shakes, salsas, slaws and other raw food recipes gives you a large variety of choices when preparing your meals.

Make Your Raw Food Diet Plan a Reality

Going on a raw food diet is a lifestyle change that everyone chooses for different reasons. And in these days of an over processed food supply, raw whole food is something your body can identify with in a historical and intimate way.

Whatever your reason for going raw; better health, more energy, weight loss, mental clarity and focus, you can do it by creating small steps in your raw food diet plan. Just take it slow at first and do small manageable steps that you can deal with one step at a time.

Focus on one raw food item or meal at a time and before you know it, your raw food diet plan will be complete. So go back to “The Pathway to a Raw Food Diet” to read it again if you need to, then start writing down your own plan and take your first step to a healthier life.

Most people, men and women alike have heard about all of the great benefits of the raw food diet, but many people are still not sure to exactly what it is and how they personally benefit from eating raw foods.

When you are first considering getting into eating a raw food diet, you’re probably at a point in your life where you’re feeling a little sluggish or that something in your body is feeling “off.” The fact is that we’re tired, overweight, burnt out and feeling stressed.

A key problem here is that we aren’t getting the proper nutrition and by you looking at a raw food diet now is your body telling you it is lacking important nutrients that it desperately needs.

A raw food diet doesn’t mean you have to go all out vegetarian either. Many raw food eaters will even go as far as eating raw meats and dairy products but this can be a bit risky so we’re just going to stick to the safer fruits and vegetables here.

Great Benefits Obtained on a Raw Food Diet

When you go grocery shopping you might have all of the right intentions in the world of buying good and healthy vegetables and fruits, thinking you’re getting a decent variety of the right vitamins and minerals your body needs. Then you bring your bounty home and destroy those beneficial nutrients by cooking them to death.

The way you prepare your foods can actually destroy most of those valuable nutritional benefits that you so proudly loaded into your grocery cart and brought home. Vitamins like Vitamin C, important for boosting your immune system and Vitamin B which provides you with energy, are drastically reduced by heating and cooking your food. If you must cook them a quick blanch is recommended for the best nutrient preservation.

Losing Weight on a Raw Food Diet

Raw food diets can help you lose weight too. Fruits and vegetables in general are very filling but even better at satisfying our hunger when eaten in their raw state as opposed to cooking them.

Within reason, you can have an unlimited amount raw fruits and vegetables that are full of fiber and provide you with a positive catalyst for losing weight. And all that fiber and the naturally occurring digestive enzymes make a great colon cleanser which in its own is a strong helping hand in maintaining a good healthy weight.

Gaining Energy with a Raw Food Diet

Another benefit of eating a raw food diet is energy gain. Most raw food lovers will choose a wide variety of foods to implement into their diet. The best thing that you can do is to try to incorporate every color of the rainbow that you can to maximize your exposure to vitamins, minerals and phyto-nutrients.

Typically, the larger variety of colors you choose, the larger the number of fatigue-fighting nutrients that are available to your body.

Slowing down aging is another perk to eating your food in the raw. Anytime we alter our foods by cooking, even cutting, their natural benefits begin breaking down. You simply can not get any better food than picking it raw off of the plant and immediately eating it. Once picked from the plant the breakdown of nutrients begins. So the fresher picked and the faster eaten once cut up or juiced the better off you are.

One common benefit that people come to realize is all those antioxidants and anti aging rewards you get when consuming raw food. You can actually see these benefits occur in health of your skin. Shortly after you begin your raw food diet you’ll likely start to notice improvements to your skin and you can trust that similar benefits are happening inside your body as well.

Dangers of Pursuing a Raw Food Diet

A true “hard-core” raw food diet isn’t only about vegetarian diet with fruits and vegetables, nuts and grains. It also involves the eating of uncooked meat, fish, unpasteurized milk (and other dairy products), and raw eggs.

With proper food handling, this is usually not a problem for most people, but for people who have medical issues, pregnant or a weak immune system, a raw food diet may do you more harm than it does you good.

If you have any medical issues it’s a great idea to your medical go-to professional and ask them if a 100% raw food diet would help or be bad you. The last thing you want is to pursue the health benefits from a raw food diet and end up making a pre-existing condition worse.

There are also certain things you’ll need to keep in mind when eating raw foods. For example most people don’t know that the eyes and green patches on the skin of a potato hold toxins and need to be discarded. And that all fruits and veggies need to be washed well before consumption.

Tips for Scrubbing Your Raw Food Clean

Fill a 32 oz spray bottle with white distilled vinegar and dissolve ¼ cup of regular table salt to create a chemical and pesticide stripping solution that also does a wonderful job of killing many harmful microbes. Simply wash your veggies and fruits with clean water – spray the vinegar/salt solution on the produce using your hand to do a “soft scrub” – then re-rinse with clean water. This does a better job for less cost than many store bought solutions.

You’re after an improvement to your health and energy level and the last thing you want is some nasty bug or chemical residue to send you down the wrong road. Obtaining fresh ingredients from a reliable source is very important for your produce but even more so if you’re going on a full blown raw food diet.

Raw Food Diet Food Sources

There’s nothing quite like raw food that’s pulled right out of your own organic garden and eaten instantly after being washed. Next in line is organic produce grown by others locally followed by trucked-in organic produce.

Further down your list of choices is raw food that’s been grown by others using pesticides, irradiated killing good and bad microbes, or had chemical preservatives and shellacs added to them so they stay fresh and looking pretty on the grocery store shelf. These need to be cleaned thoroughly before consuming using your vinegar/salt solution above.

There’s no doubt about it that the absolute best way to ensure you’re eating the healthiest raw foods possible is to grow and harvest your own product, raise and butcher your own meat and gather your own milk and dairy items.

The thing is though, not everyone’s able to do that. Most of us are too busy earning a living and need to rely on others to grow and raise the food we eat. In this case the best thing is to find a local farmer’s market where the food is generally raised in the local area.

You just need to be a smart about the food you buy and insist on freshness and quality as much as you possibly can. Fresh is better than frozen but frozen is better than canned, steamed, smoked, pasteurized or processed foods because they all fall out of the raw food arena. So, be sure to buy accordingly and read “Starting Right on a Raw Food Diet Plan” before you begin.

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