Why Raw Foods?

So many people give me that look when I tell them I eat my foods raw. That look that says, “wow… are you crazy woman?!” I can also almost see those thoughts running through their minds eye.. “hmmm carrot sticks.. salad overkill… ummm yuck.. how awful and boring!”

In reality though, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I have so many amazing foods on a day to day basis, I LOVE what I eat now and wouldn’t trade it for anything! Check out my facebook page to see some of them!

See Raw Dedication on FaceBook 

So why choose to eat foods raw anyway?

Well, firstly lets talk about what happens when we heat foods past a certain point.

Past about 40 degrees Celsius, heat will destroy about 85% of the foods goodness, ie. Nutrients, enzymes, essential amino acids etc. Some of those are digestive enzymes, which get totally destroyed when cooked.

Essentially speaking, cooking our food kills its life force, as well as those vital enzymes.

This means the digestive system has to work longer, and much harder to get whats left of nutrition & energy from the foods we eat when they are cooked.

We’ve all heard the phrase “You are what you eat” in light of that, consumption of the energy of "dead foods" (ie. cooked foods) makes both our physical and mental state feel heavy, stagnant and bogged down. This is even more true when it comes to consuming dead animals.

If we eat too much overly-cooked, microwaved and processed foods, it can clog our colon, which may lead to a whole host of problems, including, cancer, heart-disease, diabetes and many other degenerative diseases.

Raw foods, or rather “Living Foods” which is what I eat.. are 100% plant based, ie. Fruits, vegetables, nuts & seeds, and never ever heated above 40 degrees C/ 105F

Some raw foodists like to push the line out at 115F or 45C, but I prefer the school of thought that says 40C/ 105F.

Raw food is extremely easy for our body to digest and provides the maximum amount of energy with least amount of bodily effort.

One of the first things that I noticed, and it tends to be the consensus across the board with people changing to a raw food lifestyle, is that there is a massive increase in energy levels. This is simply because your body is getting everything it needs, with a fraction to the effort to get it.

So much of our cooked and processed foods are simply just empty calories, devoid of the nutrition that our bodies are crying out to be nourished with.

When we give our body back the nutrients it craves, in a form that is easy to assimilate, it is amazing how it can heal itself and start to function how it was meant to!

A Long Time Coming part 2

Ok so hopefully at this point you have all had a chance to sit and read Part 1, about my past and where I came from health-wise.

I am going to back track just a little to about 2007, towards the end of the year, I couldn’t give you an exact date as I was pretty messed up then… and I don’t remember too many fine details about dates and things, this unfortunately was another of the issues I was having... short term and long term memory loss/ issues.

It also wasn’t a split second decision nor something I jumped straight into, so I think it would have been over a period of several weeks that I came to a massive turning point in my life, on a lot of levels.

Firstly I decided that I had had enough! I was tired of everything, tired physically, mentally, emotionally and also spiritually.. I was just absolutely weary to the bone from everything.

I had had enough of being told that there was nothing much I could do about my situation apart from taking more and more medications, and possibly surgery.

I was tired of constantly going on radical diets and getting no where in an attempt to alleviate some of the issues created by the massive weight gain from the lack of mobility coupled with the crazy concoction of medications I was taking.

I knew I had to do something, myself... something, anything.. because no one else who was meant to care about my wellbeing (ei. Doctors, physicians care givers etc.) Seemed to have any answers much less any interest in getting me better apart from treating me like some interesting specimen in a petri dish, simply because my “case” was “so unusual” and they wanted to study me!

I was sick of the side effects of the drugs and sick of being mis-diagnosed and given drugs I shouldn’t even have been on.

I was soooo disillusioned with medical practitioners, even the specialists, no one seemed to have a clue about what was really wrong with me and then what to even do about it apart from throw more tablets at me.

I was also sick and tired of constantly being in financial distress because of massive medical expenses that I simply couldn’t keep up with.

So it was time to take matters into my own hands, I started to research into things. First I found out as much info as I could about the illnesses and issues that I already knew I had.

And then I did more research, and some more, I read sooo much stuff about all of it, and one common thing I kept coming up with, was nutrition. I read an article about sugar and how it can cause all kinds of health problems as well as exasperate existing problems and make them worse. I read so many articles and watched so many videos, and documentaries. I found out that 85% of the worlds illnesses have a basis in nutrition.. I read that todays doctors and physicians only get about 4hrs of training/study in nutrition in their whole entire 6yrs of study, if even at all.

I started looking at labels at the supermarket… I was taken aback to find that half of the ingredients list of just about every product I picked up was just a bunch of numbers that I had no clue about, that’s even if I could read the rest of the names on there anyway much less understand what those things were… When I looked into them, I found out that the majority of the additives or items that were just “numbers” were substances that came with warnings and had significant side effects if consumed regularly or over periods of time, which in most case is a given when eating our every day supermarket items.

I decided that in order for things to change for me I needed to change.

So I decided based on everything I had been reading that I needed to remove some things from what I consumed on a day to day basis, and if what I was reading was correct, I should feel a lot better!

So I did three things, very simple on some levels, but in some ways quite drastic and not that easy.

I decided to stop eating sugar, bread & pasta.

That’s all I did. All of a sudden I discovered just howwwww many foods (what I classed as food back then) were just FULL of sugar! And full of gluten.

One of the biggest things that totally floored me, was the misconception about low fat or fat free food items as opposed to the full fat option. The fat free or low fat items had soooo much sugar in them!!! I couldn’t work this out at first, ok so our body turns the sugar we eat into fat especially when the sugar is excess to what our body needs to use immediately.. so what on earth is the point of the low fat or fat free diet foods? Our body is just going to turn all that sugar into fat stores… back to square one on the dieting!

So I decided from then on to never go for anything that was “diet” or fat free/ low fat… I was just going to have full fat items.. for example full cream milk etc.

I started to watch everything I ate, in the sense that unless it was the sugar naturally occurring in fruit or veg, I wasn’t going to touch it.

The hardest one was not having sugar in my coffees anymore, but it wasn’t long before I actually enjoyed my coffee more, with no sugar.

I figured that if I didn’t know what was in my food and I couldn’t ascertain whether it had sugar or gluten in it (I had found out pretty quick from cutting out bread and pasta that I was gluten intolerant) then I didn’t want to eat it. No more processed foods for me!

I also decided that I was going to give myself the choice to have or not have something and not beat myself up about it if I did have something with sugar or gluten in it, or anything that was really bad for me. But with that choice came the knowledge of what it would do to my body and my health if I did have it. So it wasn’t so hard in that light to say no to things.

Its amazing how much your perception of things changes when you become educated on the truths about things, and become very frank and honest with yourself.

So all of a sudden, with next to no exercise, weight just started to drop off of me, I wasn’t even dieting, or restricting how much I ate, in fact at times I ate much more than I previously would have.

I had my full cream milk, the skin on my chicken, butter on my potatoes etc etc. And still the weight kept dropping.

Of course this helped my back as I wasn’t carrying so much weight anymore, as well as that my self esteem rose too. Within about an 8-9 month period I lost a total of about 50kg (110lb)

For the first time in a long time I started to believe in myself again.

I knew that I was headed in the right direction. I gained back my social life, a renewed energy for the things I had always loved to do but had put aside because I was too sick to even care about them.

For the first time I had the brain space to actually deal with and sort through some of the things that had happened to me which I hadn’t been able to deal with because I was so clogged up with everything else, and so caught up with simply surviving from one day to the next. Finally I was starting to be at peace with myself about a lot of things.

I was feeling good about myself again.

Moving forward a few years, even though I had lost all the weight, I looked better, felt better, was better able to cope with things and was back in the social scene, my back was a lot better, but I was still on so many prescription drugs and still in and out of hospitals and Dr. offices because even though I was much better for having lost the weight and changing my eating habits, and I seemed to never get the flu anymore or stomach bugs and common ailments etc.. I was still essentially very unwell, i was still suffering from some massive illnesses. I was just managing myself better and doing just ok.

Being that I was constantly looking into things, I would spend a decent amount of time online, researching, looking into my illnesses, trying to find ways to cope better or make my life easier for me, or less painful.

And that’s pretty much what I did, I  managed my illnesses and I managed my pain, I tolerated it because I simply had to. I didn’t get a choice in that one. The pain was always there to a certain level no matter what I did.

So I managed to cope.

Last year all that changed.

A pretty monumental discovery had me doing what I would never in a million years have considered, and had you told me the previous year that I would be disease and illness free & medication free in 2012, I would have laughed at you.

So during one of my “sitting on my laptop checking out stuff online” sessions… I quite accidentally came across something I had not heard of before. It was something called “Raw Vegan”  at this point I didn’t even know what the difference was between vegetarian and vegan, simply because it was not something I was into nor looked into.

What I read and discovered about the raw vegan lifestyle totally blew my mind. I just HAD to try it… surely it was going to help my situation, even if was just a little bit, surely with everything I had learned about nutrition and also already put into practice, surely if that helped then this would too.

When I decided to jump head first into the world that is “Raw Vegan”

I had no inkling of just HOW massively this was going to impact on me and totally transform my life and way of living.

So I had done my due diligence and like I do with everything these days, I thoroughly researched the Raw Vegan lifestyle, (for about 3mths!) and on the 16^th of October 2011 I jumped off the deep end…

I had removed everything from my kitchen and pantry that did not sit in line with a Raw Vegan way of eating. It was actually very liberating.

So began a new chapter in my life, a truly amazing one.

I have learnt so much its insane, about not only my physical health, but also my emotional, mental and spiritual health. Its all linked together.

One thing is certain... I was very wrong, changing to a Raw Vegan lifestyle didn’t just help me a little bit, it not only eradicated all of my illnesses one by one, but I am officially not on any medication at all anymore, and these were things I was supposed to be taking for the rest of my life! Even my misshapen pupil from the iritis has corrected itself!

From day one I felt a shift in my energy levels, and I just kept feeling better and better. I was getting so much energy it was crazy! It’s been a great adventure of discovery and renewal.

I have never felt more alive and awake. My body feels “clean”.

I sleep like a baby, I have such mental clarity its unreal… and that’s just a couple of the massive positive changes. Absolutely every aspect of my life has improved, from the Physical, all the way to the Emotional, Mental & Spiritual etc.

I will never look back, except to draw from experiences and move forward, I’ve got a totally new perspective on life, a new hope, a new drive, my future is a bright one, full of promise, hope, love, peace…

My whole focus in life has changed, I still love to do those things that I enjoyed over the years, and in some ways am even better at them now than i used to be, but mostly my drive now is to help others, I want to be able to give back to the world where I have gained.

I believe everyone should have a chance to live life to the fullest, to be educated in truth, to understand and to know what is real.

~ namaste ~

A Long Time Coming Part 1

I almost couldn’t believe it when I sat down to work out the times and dates of my personal story for a talk I was doing on Health & Nutrition… I counted the years again, goodness me! Over 20 years! Wow it’s almost unbelievable that it was that long, but you know, looking back, I count myself extremely fortunate, to have had the journey i have, and to have been able to learn from it, as I know of others who have suffered longer, without ever finding a way out.

Over the last 20 plus yrs or so I’ve endured an enormous amount of pain & suffering, to varying degrees from all kinds of health issues, illnesses and injuries. For soo many years I was at a point where I really didn’t have any quality of life at all. I spent so much time in & out of hospitals, Doctors surgeries, Specialists offices and even specialist hospitals.  If there was a way to get poked and prodded by some sort of medical physician, I was there!

A diving accident at age 15 saw me with my first set of head injuries and brain trauma. I’m not even going to go into all the other regular illnesses and injuries that we all go through from time to time as we walk through life, I had those as well.

The diving accident (dove into a river, hit a rock head first) left me with permanent back and neck injuries, as well as ongoing symptoms such as sleep paralysis, dizzy spells, massive migraines, short term memory loss, insomnia, hypersomnia and a number of other symptoms that appeared over time and gradually got worse and worse.

I was diagnosed with endometriosis in my later teens, even though I had suffered with the symptoms since about age 16, it also turned out that I was suffering from polycystic ovarian syndrome, during the surgery I had for the endometriosis, I had to have cysts removed and a couple of other un-expected procedures done as well.

The Endometriosis and PCOS had a massive impact on my day to day life on a number of levels, if I didn’t suffer with enough pain already from my back, neck and head injuries, this took the pain issues to another level as well, not to mention a whole lot of other things that this created as well, from massive fatigue to uncontrollable bleeding and internal tearing.

Over the years I learned to live with the pain, to block it out on a mental level at times, but it was still always there to some degree, even at times painkillers did absolutely nothing. Sometimes the pain was so severe, from one thing or another that I would become very nauseous, at times actually vomit from the pain, or I would simply pass out because my body couldn’t handle it anymore.  At times I was also hospitalised because of the severity of my symptoms.

I was constantly in a state of fatigue, mostly from the physical & mental exhaustion associated with dealing with so much pain all the time.

Not long after I had finished high school and started working, I found out that I had an auto immune deficiency, something I had apparently been born with or rather without as I had something missing from my auto immune system. This caused a recurring condition known as Iritis or “uveitis”. It is extremely painful and highly damaging to the eye/eyes affected. It is basically an inflammation/ arthritis of the iris of the eye. Untreated it can cause permanent damage to the eye including blindness.

 This turned out to be something I suffered with regularly and more frequently as time passed. I ended up with damage to my left eye which I was told was permanent and not likely to get any better.  

I ended up with a white haze across my vision in my left eye as I mostly had iritis in that eye. Also, from massive pressure and constantly having my pupil stuck to the lense of my eye during bouts of really aggressive iritis, I ended up with a miss-shapen pupil, it looked like an upside down tear-drop. Short of surgery I was told this was not going to go back to normal. Iritis is not curable and the only treatment for it are steroid drops and atropine drops (atropine dilates the pupil so as to stop movement, pain and further damage) extensive use of the steroid drops can cause cataracts.

Prior to being diagnosed with iritis I was also involved in a vehicle accident, which caused more head injuries and brain trauma. I won’t go into the details but suffice it to say this was not helping things, and exasperated the problems I was having from my head, back and neck injuries due to the diving accident.

Fast-forwarding a few years, brings us to a severe bout of viral meningitis, where I was miss-diagnosed by 4 different GP’s as having a severe case of the flu, and told to go home, rest and drink lots of water etc etc.  Eventually I got so sick, my sisters stepped in taking me to their family doctor who promptly sent me to the hospital.. This was not only more brain trauma, but also the procedure I had to have (lumbar puncture) was performed incorrectly and caused a hematoma and further damage to my spine.

Fast-forwarding again a few years, I was involved in an extremely abusive & violent marriage, where I sustained more head/brain trauma amongst a whole host of other abuse related issues.

After extricating myself from the situation, I began to suffer from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and severe depression.. which saw me spiral rapidly downwards.  I had massively put on a lot of weight from the cocktail of meds I was on plus not being able to do much with a back and neck injury. Being so overweight I developed plantar fasciitis which is extremely painful.

I was spending about 80% of my time either bed ridden or unable to do much because of pain, nausea or extreme fatigue which was totally debilitating.

This affected my work, as of course I was having soo much time off I ended up losing my job, and every subsequent job never lasted long because I simply couldn’t be at work long enough for any company to warrant my employment. Eventually I couldn’t work at all.

Friendships and family relationships suffered and most of the time I felt like I was constantly making excuses as to why I couldn’t do things or get involved in activities. And I was constantly justifying myself. Eventually I withdrew from everyone and everything, I had little to no social life, and in reality I knew my doctors better than my close friends and at times my family.

I had spent a lot of years with doctors telling me that a lot of my extreme symptoms were nothing and that the tests I was having were clear, yet I still suffered greatly on a day to day basis.

Finally one day whilst struggling to make sense of an extreme bout of iritis, a specialist Neuro ophthalmologist found irregularities in my optic nerves which turned out to be the key to a lot of my issues. It turned out I had what is called Benign Intracranial Hypertension (BIH) in simple terms this is pretty much high pressure in the brain caused by spinal fluid that was un-able to return back thru brain ducts into my spine. This was pretty much a result of all the brain trauma I had sustained over the years.

Left un-treated this would eventually cause irreversible damage to the optic nerves resulting in permanent blindness. There are pretty much only two things that I was told would help the situation as there is not really any known cure for the condition. 1 have surgery to replace the ducts, and have a shunt put in place, which means surgery every few years to replace them etc, its not a cure only a bandaid. 2 was to take a medication to relieve the pressure, one of the medications I had a reaction to, so I was left with the only other choice and that was to take a medication that had a lot of fairly severe side effects, and hope that it worked.

I started taking the medication and from day one it actually made a massive difference to my migraines and a few other things, BUT all of a sudden I started to get all kinds of other things happening, my hair started to fall out, I had constant pain in my extremities via extreme pins and needles, any time I got sick with anything I got REALLY sick and it took twice as long for anything like antibiotics to work, my depression got 100 fold worse, I had moodswings and I had a constant feeling like I was drugged and not quite with it. I had bouts of unexplained nausea, would start crying at the drop of a hat, started to bruise really easy, my skin got really thin and dry and I injured very easy and that’s just a few of the issues I got from taking this medication. It even altered my taste buds and a lot of my foods and drink started to taste different.

Although I knew that taking this medication was saving my eyesight as it was staving off most of the intracranial pressure, the side effects were extreme and I was looking at taking these for the rest of my life.

Quite literally my life was a total disaster zone, on every level.