Vegetarian/ Vegan/ Raw Transitions... Fun Times

Miss. Lidia has been very successful in being an “Eat to Live” vegan for the past month! Dr. Joel Fuhrman is an American physician specializing in preventing disease through nutrition. He wrote an amazing book Eat to Live which was actually the book that convinced me to become vegetarian in the first place!

The book explains how preventive nutrition can prevent and cure cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, obesity, etc. It focuses on the formula that Health=Nutrients/Calories. Ultimately that means that in order to achieve maximum health, you need to get the most bang for you caloric buck!

My favourite party fact from the book is that if you compare 100 calories of broccoli and 100 calories of steak (which obviously is a huge amount of broccoli and a small amount of steak), broccoli actually has twice the amount of protein!! And carnivores wonder where we get from our protein from!!

Anyways it is tough to be a vegan in the U.S., but luckily it is becoming more mainstream and NYC has a lot of great vegetarian/vegan restaurants. So good job Lidia... you rock!

I am trying to switch from vegetarian to a RAW VEGAN! Ahhh.. sounds scary! I have been doing a lot of reading about raw eating, and basically it focuses on the principle that heating food above 116 °F destroys a huge amount enzymes, vitamins and minerals. The enzymes are necessary for your body to easily assimilate food, otherwise your body has to work hard to break down the food on its own... ultimately a process that drains energy. I am no expert so I don’t want to make any false claims... but I am learning.

I have no problem eating raw until dinner as I usually have my green smoothie for breakfast :) and salads, fruits and vegetables throughout the day. The challenge is definitively dinner! Also cooked beans are not raw, but sprouted beans and seeds are raw and in fact have much more nutrition than traditional cooked beans. I really have no desire to “sprout” so I intend on just buying them at the organic store. Yesterday I made raw “vegetable fried rice” for dinner out of shredded carrot and cauliflower and many sauces. Tonight was raw zucchini fettuccini... a recipe I will be posting tomorrow.

So really raw just means that I have to get creative in the kitchen! So far so good!

For more info on RAW:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_foodism

http://www.welikeitraw.com/

http://www.rawfoodtalk.com/