How I Got Started with Raw
Now that I am back home, wow, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day between walking/running the puppy:
Don’t ya just love how she always sticks to the white line (something my puppy pal, S pointed out to me with her own white canine on the same walking track!)
Watching the planes fly overhead whilst out on the walk:
Doing my duty at a local charity Halloween celebration for us kids who never want to grown up:
Doing my veggie baths here:
Making Green Smoothies here:
This one was zuchinni, cabbage, kiwi, banana, flaxmeal, Vitamineral Green and a handful of dates blended with water. DELISH!
Chowing down on my new favourite quick snack (thanks Fitnessista for the idea!):
Almond Butter on Banana
Feasting on delicious and nutritious:
Papaya
Discovering these in the freezer of the local supermarket. Oh yeah. Good quick snack options for food on the fly.
Making the crew some guilt free lunch at work (just need to get them out of the feta obsession!)
Mine is the one to the top right – minus the cheese.
Entertaining some friends for afternoon snackeroonies:
Brown arabic bread, crudites, hummus, green olives and Tuscan Sundried Tomato Pesto.The chocolate biscuits on the top left are Tim Tams (an Aussie treat that I brought back from New Zealand on request). They are sooo NOT guilt free. Do you recognise the Tuscan Sundried Tomato Pesto in there? Thanks Kristen! This is a never fail hit – unless you ask the caterers to make it at work and they come out with this:
How could they get it soooo wrong???
Came home to the dog and cat eating out of the same bowl (happily!!!):
Then Lucy crawling up next to me on the couch:
My little snow fox.
Making these delish raw veggie vietnamese rolls (recipe tomorrow!!)
On another note recently one of my friends sent me this email this week and as I get asked these questions quite often, I thought I’d answer them for everyone’s benefit. Hope you enjoy
I‘m really curious on your raw lifestyle, so I have a few questions.
Where did your motivation come from and where did it all start?
I have always been interested in diet (well at least from around 22 – I am now 32) but to be honest, it was initially inspired by a desire for weight loss. Working in an image conscious profession only added to my acute body awareness. Over the years, I suffered from the YOYO diet syndrome, culminating in using diet pills (that might I add were definitely not recommended to anyone other than morbidly obese individuals – not me) working out 4 hours a day and hardly eating a thing. But I felt like crap. My skin was breaking out, I was either up all day and night, or sleeping for 3 days straight. This led me to seek out a more holistic approach, concentrating on a TOTAL health outcome, as I just wanted to feel good again. I felt if I started to be kinder to my body then it would repay me by getting to it’s appropriate size and shape that was right for me, however I had now decided, how I looked was secondary or even non relevant. I just wanted to feel better.
I picked up the book Skinny Bitch, and from there I googled Raw Food and came across Kristen’s Raw. I immediately contacted her (she has been my Soul Sister and Guru ever since) and purchased her recipe books and started to experiment with raw dishes, but I didn’t have much spare time as I was flying a lot and I couldn’t afford a lot of the kitchen gadgets (of which I thought at the time was necessary), so I left it on the back burner for awhile, until a year later when I had more spare time, more money and more desire to make it happen. My weight had ballooned and all I wanted to do was SLEEP all the time. A hangover from the days of taking the diet pills.
As I got further into the Raw lifestyle, I realised you don’t actually need ALL the time and ALL the kitchen gadgets to succeed. You just need to have an open mind and be prepared to experiment and have fun in the kitchen. When you first start eating more RAW food, it is natural to want to eat more complicated and gourmet foods, but usually as time goes by, more simpler and easy to create dishes (and even just a simple piece of fruit) will begin to satisfy you.
You look great – do you feel better?
I feel better than I have ever felt in a long time. And it only gets better. Anytime I slip up from my High Raw All Vegan diet, I pay for it, either with skin breakouts, lack of energy, dry skin, bloating, cramping and more. It is only when you feel truly healthy that you realise how unhealthy you have been in the past. The primary motivation for me now is the way I feel and not how I look, but I now know that they work hand in hand. When you treat your body with more respect and love, then it will pay you back by feeling stronger, healing quicker from ailments and sometimes not even getting sick when those around you are, and dropping unwanted weight without even trying.
As with anything that is a change to your normal everyday habits, it is an adjustment, however I see the rewards are more than worth the ‘sacrifice’ of treating yourself with respect and love. In fact for the first time in years, I can eat food, REAL FOOD, tasty food, and as much of it as I want, without having to count calories or feel GUILTY. How liberating is THAT????!!!!
Does anyone else have anything to add to this? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Raw or even Vegan way of life?
See you all tomorrow bloggies 
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