Raw food blog

The best way to have healthy, glowing skin is to start from the inside out. Eliminating caffeine in the form of coffee, tea and soda is one way to start. Caffeine dehydrates the body and skin and this lack of moisture is a surefire way to create lines and wrinkles. Caffeine is also a diuretic, causing increased urine output, again depleting your body and skin of the moisture it needs. You can try to combat this with moisturiser, but a better way is to put the moisture INTO your body, not on it.

Drinking pure water, unprocessed fruit juices or coconut milk will give your body and skin the hydration it needs. The colours in fruit juices are the colours of the earth and these colours will reflect themselves in warm and healthy skin tones.

The overall effects of caffeine on your body will manifest themselves in your skin and heavy caffeine drinkers can also experience osteoporosis, headaches, depression and sleeplessness.

When you replace cola, coffee and tea with water, fresh fruit juices, “sun tea” and coconut milk, you’ll soon start to feel better, have more energy and sleep better. Your skin will reflect the good health of all the organs and cells of your body; once you’ve kicked the caffeine habit.

Another reason for drinking pure water, juices and “sun tea” is that when you boil water, you lose oxygen from it, which important in keeping your body detoxified. When the body rids itself of toxins, they can pass through the skin (the largest organ of elimination). Raw food increases your detoxification rate and drinking water helps the body rid itself of these unwanted toxins.

To achieve a healthy complexion, drink plenty of water and eat plenty of raw food. What goes into your body is reflective in your overall appearance.

What’s the largest organ in your body? It’s your skin! It provides a protective covering for the other organs of the body, helps regulate changes to your internal body temperature, is a detox organ and it’s a good overall indicator of your health and well-being.

People spend thousands on skin preparations to make their skin look vibrant and glowing. They’re all topical products i.e. products that we put on top of our skin. But if we spent just a fraction of the money we spend on these preparations on RAW FOODS, we’d begin to see an immediate change in the texture and hydration of our skin.

When you eat raw foods, you put more of the essential vitamins and amino acids your body needs into it. You’re also adding moisture in a natural way. Raw foods have a much higher moisture content than cooked foods, simply because the cooking process dries food out, or leaches out essential nutrients.

Your skin is a mirror of what’s going on in the rest of your body. And when your organs and blood are fed the nutritients they need to function properly, that shows in your skin. Get your vitamins, minerals and water from foods like apples and carrots. When you do, then phrases like “inner beauty” and “inner glow” will apply to YOU. Your skin is presented to the rest of the world and trust me healthy, glowing skin makes the best first impression.

When you start eating more raw foods, things will just naturally fall into place. You’ll feel better, you’ll look better. People will react to you more positively and you’ll have so much more energy for your work, your friends, and your family. And this kind of energy is self-perpetuating. You don’t need self-help books, expensive moisturisers or plastic surgery. When your body and skin are getting their essential nutritients with raw, uncooked foods, you’ll look and feel your best, NATURALLY!

Because cooking takes so many nutrients and vitamins OUT of food, you automatically start feeding your body what it needs when you stop cooking food and start eating uncooked, nutrient-rich foods. A raw carrot has exponentially more nutrition than a cooked carrot.

Cooking also alters the chemistry of foods, often making them harder to digest. Why do we have so many digestive problems in this country? Because we’re putting foods into our bodies in a form that we weren’t designed to absorb. High fiber, high water content fresh produce abolishes constipation of the bowels, cells and circulatory system. Obstructions are cleared and blood flow increases to each and every cell in the body. Enhanced blood flow is significant for two reasons: as mentioned above, blood delivers nutrients and oxygen to living cells, and carries away their toxic metabolites.

Obesity is endemic in this country. The diet industry is more profitable than the oil companies. Why? Because the way we eat and prepare our food practically guarantees that we’ll overeat. Psychologists tell us that we overeat because our souls are hungry. But in reality, our bodies are hungry, even though we may feel full. When you start giving your body the nutrients it craves, overeating will cease.

Eating raw foods is a boost to your metabolism as well. It takes a little more energy to digest raw foods, but it’s a healthy process. Rather than spending energy to rid itself of toxins produced by cooking food, the body uses its energy to feed every cell, sending vitamins, fluids, enzymes and oxygen to make your body the efficient machine it was intended to be.

You’ll naturally stop overeating, because your body and brain will no longer be starving for the nutrients they need. A starving brain will trigger the thoughts that make you overeat. The brain and the rest of your body don’t need quantity; they need quality.

Have you started hearing about the Raw Food Diet? It’s gaining popularity and buzz, not just as a diet to lose weight, but a diet for a long and healthy life. We eat so much in the way of processed food that we don’t even stop to think about what we’re putting into our bodies, and how far we’ve come nutritionally from our ancestral, agrarian roots.

A raw food diet means consuming food in its natural, unprocessed form. There are several common-sense rationales for why this is a good idea. Processing and cooking food can take so much of the basic nutritional value away. Think of some of the conventional wisdom you’ve heard about for years, such as: If you cook pasta just to the al dente (or medium) stage, it will have more calories, yes, but it will have more the nutritional value in it than if you cooked it to a well-done stage. Or you probably remember hearing not to peel carrots or potatoes too deeply, because most of the nutrients and values are just under the surface.

The raw food diet means eating unprocessed, uncooked, organic, whole foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, dried fruits, seaweeds, etc. It means a diet that is at least 75% uncooked! Cooking takes out flavor and nutrition from vegetables and fruits. A raw food diet means eating more the way our ancient ancestors did. Our healthier, more fit ancestors. They cooked very little, and certainly didn’t cook or process fruits and vegetables. They ate them RAW. Their water wasn’t from a tap; it was natural, spring water. Maybe they drank some coconut milk on occasion.

Doesn’t it just make sense that this is how our bodies were meant to eat? It’s a way of eating that’s in harmony with the planet and in harmony with our own metabolisms. Our bodies were meant to work, and need to work to be efficient. That means exercise, certainly, but it also means eating natural, raw foods that require more energy to digest them.