Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Raw food all week, gourmet style

In the past we were able to pick and choose our foods. If I ate cheese last night, then got sick, there were two options, I either had rotten cheese or my stomach was telling me I did not like cheese. Today, everything we buy, from food to furniture, is already prepared. We never see the ingredients in our food, we only know it tastes good.
Going through the cleanse process was not an easy process. The hardest part was figuring out which process worked for me. On the first day (Wednesday) I tried the lemonade and cayenne pepper diet. That failed miserably.
 I am an active person and burn a lot of calories in the day. When I decided to go out to Burbank to browse around IKEA I realized by 5:00 p.m. when I was loading all our finds into the car that this diet was not going to work for me. The next day I woke up (Thursday) and thought, “this next week is going to be aweful if I don’t think of something else.” Luckily I had promised to write this next blog post so I kept going. I then though, “well I guess I have this goal to remove the gluten from my diet, while I’m at it lets see if there are any other allergens I can work out of my diet.” So I said, “why not do the raw diet.”
At first, eating only raw fruits and vegetables sounded disgusting. I imagined myself eating raw broccoli all day. But I actually found that I was feeling better and making better food choices. What I liked about the raw food diet was that the food I picked up had less steps in processing, therefore, I had less need to look up the ingredients. I was also finding that cooking fruits and vegetables often masked the flavor of the fresh produce rather than improves it. Not to mention that produce loses a significant amount of its nutritive value when it is cooked.
Despite a few setbacks, (I have a weakness for cheese), I am on my way to my gluten free diet. I decided that, starting today, I will allow myself to have cooked fruits and vegetables as well as fish to my diet. But I will continue trying to eat raw when I can. I discovered a great cookbook for the raw food diet. It’s called RAWvolution by Matt Amsden. Don’t be put off by his bizarre writing style, these recipes are delicious and fresh! You can find more recent recipes he’s posted: http://www.thedailyrawcafe.com/2010/03/matt-amsdens-recipes.html
That’s all for now folks. Next week I’ll be back with some more stories. In the meantime, you can add me on Facebook “Nogluten Trip” where I post interesting articles and more resources for living healthy and gluten free.
See you next Wednesday!

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