Day 29 of My Top 30 for 30:
Very often, someone interested in the benefits of a raw food diet will embark upon their journey by subscribing to a ready-made or popular approach to raw food. For many people who have started before them, the approach may be working well. You’d like to get the results they are experiencing, so you figure if you do the same things, you’ll get the same results. While this is often the case, it is not always the case. Or you may experience great results with your approach for a while, but then you notice that your needs may be changing.
My classic example of this is my own personal experience. When I started with raw food 30 years ago, my introduction to this lifestyle was the high-fruit low-fat approach. My primary goal was to address and remove the underlying cause of the fatigue that I had been experiencing. It worked! Within a short period of time my fatigue vanished along with a variety of other symptoms I had for years and I had more energy than I knew what to do with. I slept better, I enjoyed exercising, my digestion improved, and the nasal congestion that I had come to accept as ‘normal’ disappeared as well. I was so very happy with my results and thought that I had found ‘the answer’.
However, after a few months, I found that my skin started to feel dry, so I started thinking that my dietary approach might needs some ‘tweaking’ so I added some more nuts, seeds, and avocados into my diet and within a short period of time, my skin became soft and smooth, more so than it had been really been in my entire life up until that point. The change also brought about a greater sense of satiety and the abatement of cravings.
What it comes down to is that being flexible allowed me to feel even better on a raw diet, and if I had not given myself the opportunity to make some changes, I might have left raw food thinking it didn’t work because it made my skin dry.
The bottom line is that pre-conceived approaches to raw food may be a great start and may serve as a great healing diet. But what about when healing has been achieved? What is a good ‘maintenance’ approach to sustain those health gains over the long term or bring your health to an even higher level?
We’ll address this concept in further posts.
You can read the continuation of this article in our free eBook Our Top 12 Strategies for Long Term Success on a Raw Plant-Based Diet which you can receive by signing up for our email list at rawfoodeducation.com