I
wish I had heard about raw food weight loss before I wasted years
fighting an uphill battle with my gut. I spent so much precious time
and mental energy working to bring my weight down to a
reasonable 180, and I still had excess body fat.
I'm strong and lithe, capable of doing some
yoga asanas that leaves many gap-jawed. I run miles everyday with
nearly endless energy, my memory has improved four-fold, and I
could have imaged none of this when I was 17, overweight, depressed, and convinced
that genetics had cursed me.
The key to successin health, whether your
goal is an escape from pain and disease, finding more energy,
or dropping a few pounds, is simply to stop harming your body.
When you're eating a well-managed raw food diet and living a healthy lifestyle, the pounds will fall off rapidly.
Raw Food Weight Loss
and Responsibility
Whether you're looking to drop ten pounds or 100, the first step is to
take responsibility for your condition. It's nice to be able to
blame
fate. If you are "born into a fat family"
with "fat genes", you don't have to do anything to correct the
situation, because, after all, there's no going against genetics. You
might as well send up the white flag and seek solace in a bag of potato
chips.
I
indulged in this for years. My older brother was thin and handsome. He
could eat like a pig and not put on a pound. I was overweight by the
time I was in fourth grade and the situation only got worse as I got
older.
My brother took after the thin, English side of the
family, my parents reasoned, while I had the fat Italian genes. Such is
fate.
No!
Though metabolic rate varies from person to person, it's
up to you to take responsibility and live a healthy life.
Some
can pollute their body and remain thin, but they will suffer just as
much in the long run when disease catches up to them. It pays to eat
better no matter what your body looks like.
With
raw food weight loss and a diet centered around delicious sweet fruit,
you can trim your waistline and become the happy, energetic,
disease-free person that you've always wanted to be, regardless of your
genes.
Enacting Raw Food
Weight Loss
I saw few die of
hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand. - Benjamin Franklin
Weight loss is actually really simple, it's just that poor diets and
habits make it harder than it needs to be.
Whenever you burn more calories though living than
you take in, you'll lose fat. It's as simple as that.
There
are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat. If your goal is to lose a pound
of fat a week, which is a great rate to lose at, you can either burn an
extra 500 calories a day, eat 500 calories less a day, or meet
somewhere in the middle with perhaps 250 extra calories burnt off and
and 250 less calories taken in.
On a raw food weight loss diet
the pounds are likely to fly off of you, especially when you first
begin. The great thing about raw food is that you get to eat a ton.
It's
just that you're eating a ton of healthy food instead of a ton of junk
food. You'll probably be so satiated by your meals that you'll lose
your desire to snack.
There are two reasons for this. As Dr.
Douglas Graham explains in his book, the "80/10/10 diet," there are two
forms of satiation (1). The first is the feeling of a full stomach.
You'll be eating a considerably larger volume of
food to meet caloric requirements, and your body
responds to this by feeling satisfied. The second is that the bulk of
your calories come from fruit, which are rich in simple sugars. Your
blood sugar rises almost immediately, which tells the brain that you're
satisfied.
The traditional meal of steak and
potatoes lacks this simple sugar, which is why, no matter how much you
stuff yourself, you'll find yourself snacking after dinner, just
looking for a little something else else.
Desert
commonly follows a meal to meet his same need. The brain doesn't sense
much sugar in the potatoes, so now you're shoveling down pie.
The
great thing about raw food weight loss is that you're shifting the
satisfying "desert" of sugar-rich fruits to the main dish of every
meal. You can eat a lot, not feel guilty, and be filled with energy.
The Great Water
Weight Dispersal: Familiarize Yourself With The Bathroom
So much toxic matter is mixed into our food that the body has to
struggle to eliminate it. The arch example of this is common table
salt. You know that if you drink enough salt water you can die.
You
know that if you put it on a slug, the creature will melt. You know
that salt in a open wound burns. So why would you ever want to put it
in your food?
Our bodies must struggle to segregate and then
eliminate all the salt we shovel into it. It does this by surrounding
toxic matter with water, thus making it mostly inert until the liver
and kidneys can clean it out of the body.
Because a pint of
water weighs a pound, eliminating it can lead to the rapid loss of
large amounts of weight. To varying degrees, this sort of rapid loss is
common for everyone attempting raw food weight loss.
If an obese person starts eating a raw food diet
and living healthfully, it's not unusual to see them shed 25 pounds of
water weight in the first two weeks.
With
no more toxic matter coming in, the body finally has time to deal with
the backlog of work and eliminate the waste material as well as the
water. After this initial surge, most or all of the weight being lost
should be fat.
Practical
Implementation.
Raw food weight loss is not hard to understand or
achieve. You'll be getting your calories from raw fruits and vegetables. For a detailed overview of the
particulars of the diet, read up here.
You'll also want to make modifications to your lifestyle.Most
people struggle to eat enough calories when they first start off on the
diet, so overeating will be a problem for few. Keeping track of
calories is quite easy, though.
There
is no artifice in a banana or apple. You can easily figure out how many
calories are in each one and then just multiple that by how many you've
had. Compare this to a slice of frozen pizza, a dehydrated, denatured
mix of goo that is almost impossible to gauge calorically.
For
those wishing to track calories and figure out exactly how much they
should be eating for their desired pace of weight loss, check out my
detailed explanation on how to set up an individual
health plan for raw food weight loss.
Cravings During Raw
Food Weight Loss
The key to overcoming cravings is to eat more fruit.
Hungry? Craving Chinese foodor pizza?
Eat more fruit. Still
hungry? Eat more fruit!
The
problem for most people is that they don't eat enough fruit and so
they're hungry. When you're hungry, you're open to all kinds of
cravings. So when craving something, just cram down a few more bananas.
The sugars and bulk will satisfy you.
However, there are
also emotional cravings. Many use food as a numbing agent to deal with
emotional grief. Fatty, dense foods are especially good at numbing
because they need so much energy to digest.
This strain is mostly absent on fruit. You're
intake of fatty fruits and nuts will be minimal. On a raw food weight
loss diet,
there's nothing between you and reality. You're going to have to face
that reality without drugging yourself into unconsciousness with food.
If you say you're hungry, and I offer you some mangos,
you'll take them if you're really hungry.
If,
on the other hand, you tell me that you're not hungry for mangos, but
only want pizza, then you're having an emotional craving. You're not
hungry at all.
Satiating hunger and emotional needs are two
separate issues. Once you start facing up to your emotions and stop
hiding behind numbing food, your life is going to get a whole lot
better.
For more informatino about the mental and physical ways
to overcome cravings, read this
article.
So adopt a raw food weight loss diet, shed
pounds, find energy, and become the person you've always
wanted to be.
Sources:
(1) Dr.
Douglas Graham, "The 80/10/10 Diet," pgs 154-160.