Bloom with your “Best Buds”

Buds blossom into beauty!

Grab your best buds and get ready to bloom into springtime!

Raw foods can do wonders for a little internal spring-cleaning.  Uncooked, the enzymes in the foods assist our bodies’ utilization of all the plant has to offer.  It makes sense that humans are the only ones in nature that cook what they eat, while the rest of the animals simply don’t.  This is one more reason that avoiding meat makes complete sense to me—we as humans need to cook meat in so that we don’t get sick.  However, if our bodies were meant to digest meat, we’d eat it just like every other carnivore out there—raw.

Throughout the years, I have learned much about food.  But the most important thing I’ve learned and that I want to share is to always listen to your body!  After eating strictly raw foods for just one week, I did not feel well.  I believe this is because I did not have all the equipment or time necessary to do it correctly.  I listen to my body and I know that it does extremely well on larger amounts of protein (I’ve come to know this after my earlier years of yo-yo-ing with various levels of vegetarianism) and so I fulfill my needs everyday with correct TYPES of protein and correct AMOUNTS of protein.  I personally do well on beans, nut butters, rice, and hemp protein but not tofu. With my attempt at 100% raw food for a week, my body was out of balance.  I began eating more “grounding foods” such as stews, hearty sandwiches, steamed veggie casseroles, and lots of beans.  AH!  Instant fix.  That is not to say that I like overcooked foods, because they are not good for you…but heat is necessary to utilize beans and break down the outer cell walls of the steamed veggies.

I have found my middle ground and this is where I’m at today; I eat about 40% raw foods.  The hibernation of winter is over and I’m shying away from the warming foods that I used with the snowfall. I celebrate Raw Foods Friday every week.  Spring time rolls around and I start eating a bit more raw foods, which makes complete biological sense; spring is a time of rejuvenation and awakening.    I started Raw Foods Friday as a personal attempt to learn new and different ways to prepare food in order to receive the maximum amount of benefits. Eating cooked foods, or overcooked foods, on a regular basis eventually leads to digestion difficulties.  However, eating raw foods all the time for myself personally, was also hard on my digestion.  Every Friday is the perfect way for me to give my body a little boost with 95% raw food and then keep the rest of my week in balance with whatever my body is telling me to do!

I’d encourage everyone to give this a try on Fridays.  Try my delicious Spring Rolls recipe.  It’s a bit more time consuming to make, but tasty when finished.  Other favorites of mine include The Raw Gourmet by Nomi Shannon and David Wolfe’s book, Eating For Beauty.

If you have a serious medical condition or colon complications, check with your health care provider first.  Raw foods can be disruptive to those experiencing ulcers, colitis, or IBS.  Never attempt a drastic change of diet without careful preparation and research.

“To improve one’s diet, is to improve one’s mind, which opens the soul.  To open the soul, one must improve the mind through improving the diet.”       -Tambra.