Eat Smart, Eat Raw: Creative Vegetarian Recipes for a Healthier Life - Softcover

Wood, Kate

 
9780757002618: Eat Smart, Eat Raw: Creative Vegetarian Recipes for a Healthier Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0757002617 ISBN 13: 9780757002618
Verlag: Square One, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

As the popularity of raw vegetarian cuisine continues to soar, so does the evidence that uncooked food is amazingly good for you. From lowering cholesterol to eliminating excess weight, the health benefits of this diet are too important to ignore. Now there is another reason to go raw—taste! In Eat Smart, Eat Raw, cook and health writer Kate Wood not only explains how to get started, but also provides kitchen-tested recipes guaranteed to delight the fussiest of eaters.

Eat Smart, Eat Raw begins by explaining the basics of cooking without heat. This is followed by twelve chapters offering 150 recipes for truly exceptional dishes, including hearty breakfasts, savory soups, satisfying entrées, and luscious desserts. There’s even a chapter on the “almost raw.” Whether you are an ardent vegetarian or just someone in search of a great meal, Eat Smart, Eat Raw may forever change the way you look at an oven.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Wood has been a raw food vegetarian since 1993, and has worked to strengthen the network of raw food advocates throughout North America and the United Kingdom. A former editor of the raw foods magazine Get Fresh, Wood is the assistant editor of Juno, a parenting magazine. She also runs Raw Living, one of Europe’s leading suppliers of raw foods, superfoods, and kitchen equipment. Wood lives in Brighton, England, with her husband and sons.

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Introduction

My Story

I first embarked on a raw food diet over a decade ago. I had found myself instinctively wanting to eat a lot of fruit and salads, and had heard from friends how health-giving an all-raw diet could be. As the kitchen of the house I was staying in was out of action for three months while it was being renovated, I decided to try it for myself. I took the plunge, and lived on fruit all day, with a big salad and Essene bread and tahini for dinner (neither Essene bread nor tahini is strictly raw, but I didn’t know that then). By the time the kitchen was back in order, I was hooked on my new diet, and have stuck with it ever since. Of course, I have had my ups and downs—it is a huge challenge to stick to 100-percent raw, 100 percent of the time. Raw fooders often talk in percentages, claiming to be “70-percent raw” or “90-percent raw” but just to achieve 50 percent long term can make a vast difference in your life.

Although I was convinced of the health benefits, and had experienced for myself how much better I felt, at first the idea that I would stop eating cooked foods altogether was too much, and I would binge on cookies and chips. But gradually, my body came to recognize these as the poisons they truly are. However much I would think that I loved a cooked treat, even one as harmless as apple crumble, when I indulged I would be disappointed, as the cooked dishes came to taste lifeless and dull to me. My body was adjusting to the new levels of energy and the sense of liberation that raw foods gave me, and cooked foods left me on a downer. I began to realize that of course I could eat whatever I wanted—but what I really wanted was to feel good all the time. The cleaner my system, the more cooked foods left me with a “hangover:” feeling sluggish and irritable. Gradually, the redundancy of cooking food became a reality to me, and the desire to eat it slipped away completely. Anyone who has become a vegetarian, given up smoking, or overcome any addiction in his or her life, will understand that feeling of a part of your daily living becoming an anathema.

Personally, I had experienced a very rocky relationship with food. Some people say that raw food diets encourage or even create eating disorders; for me it was the reverse, as discovering raw foods helped me to overcome my problems with food. Since adolescence I had been trapped in a binge-fast cycle, leading to periods of emaciation, and periods of being overweight. I believe this was due in part to my instinctive recognition that the foods I was eating weren’t right for me: I would reject them, only to be overcome eventually by hunger and greed, which would then be followed by repulsion at all the rubbish I had in my body. Raw foods were a revelation: at last I could eat as much as I wanted, and not feel terrible. Eating half a dozen cookies made me feel sick and tired; eating half a dozen apples left me feeling overfull, but not ill. Over time, as my body got used to being fed, nurtured, and respected, the desire to overeat slipped away. As food no longer disturbed my internal balance, my fear of it disappeared.

Now I am astounded at how little I need to eat. I rarely feel ravenously hungry, and am satiated after relatively small portions of food. Because on a raw diet all our foods are nutrient-dense, the body’s requirements are met quickly and efficiently. This in turn means that the body needs less energy for digestion, fighting toxins, and excreting poisons, so it is much less demanding in its requirements. If you want to lose weight then stop counting calories and start counting nutrients! Over-eating happens when the body is searching for nutrients—the brain is waiting for the signal to say that the body has what it needs, and it never comes, so you keep ploughing your way through that packet of cookies, unconsciously looking for the vitamins and minerals you will not find there. In addition, I used to find it very difficult to wake up in the mornings, and needed eight or ten hours of sleep a night or else I felt terrible. Now, because my body is working more efficiently, I don’t wake up feeling fuzzy, but fresh, alert, and ready to go.

When I adopted the raw food diet, I found, in common with many others, changes happening on all levels of my life. Primarily, I experienced a great leap in energy levels: my body was no longer expending such huge amounts of energy on digestion, and so I felt an almost immediate improvement in my vitality. Also quickly apparent was a greater mental clarity and focus. I felt sharper, more alert, and after a long time on the diet I am really conscious of having the resources to be constantly on the go without flagging. Along with these more obvious changes, I also became aware of changes on a deeper level; I am now much happier and lighter, as the positive energy of raw foods fills my being. I am less prone to bad moods and depression, and more satisfied and content. I have a greater tolerance of difficult people and situations, but at the same time know better where my boundaries lie, and what I am prepared to put up with. I notice things in nature that I never did before: the trees look more green and alive, and the changing of the seasons is more apparent to me. All these elements combine to increase hugely my zest for living, leading to a more positive and productive lifestyle. Because I am eating food that is pure and undamaged, I feel whole—more at one with myself and the world around me.

Over the years, I’ve experienced all the different angles on being raw. At the start, I dived straight in at the deep end, 100-percent raw, including a two-week apple fast just before one Christmas. Then Christmas came, and I went 100-percent cooked! After a few months I stabilized at about 50 percent, then gradually built it up over the next few years until I was 100 percent again. In the following year I did nine months on fruit only, which was amazing at first, but difficult to sustain. At the end of that year, I found out I was pregnant and it was back down to 50 percent again, gradually building back up to 90 percent where I am now, and I’ve never felt healthier. I have a fruit juice in the morning and a vegetable juice early evening. We have very little cooked food in the house—when I do eat cooked it tends to be on social occasions, if someone has made something specially, or borderline foods such as dried fruits. I cycle everywhere I can, do yoga every day, and swim once a week. I try to eat mainly between the hours of midday and 5:00 p.m. The body has natural cycles. Midday – 8:00 p.m. is the digestion cycle, 8:00 p.m. – 4:00 a.m. is absorption, and 4:00 a.m. – midday is elimination. When you eat during the absorption and elimination cycles, you are going against the body’s natural rhythm. For this reason, we have a light breakfast, and an early dinner.

Many leading raw foodists advocate 100-percent raw as the only way to go, but I believe this is too difficult for most people. Undoubtedly, the benefits of being 100-percent raw are huge, but we live in a world where we are constantly coming into contact with cooked foods, and to refuse them continually is both challenging and awkward. I believe it is as important to have a healthy mind as it is to have a healthy body, and the constant denial of other foods can be more harmful than the foods themselves. If you can maintain just 50- percent raw, you will experience a huge increase in your wellbeing. Try eating a side serving of raw food with every meal at first. Then when you are used to this, gradually increase the size of the raw portion to the cooked portion, until you have reached a level that you feel comfortable with (many people find this is around 70 percent). There are so many borderline foods (nuts, dried...

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Verlag
Square One
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0757002617
ISBN 13 
9780757002618
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
184
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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