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I was speaking to my friend Louisa today about women and our collective obsession with food. In many respects, it’s impossible not to have a food obsession. We eat several times a day. When we are not eating, we are shopping for food, preparing food or cleaning up after a meal. Maybe women are genetically programmed to be more sensitive to food than men because we tend to be in control of what our family eats, we are the gate keepers of nutrition so to speak. Perhaps this is why we gain weight more easily than men or why if we go on a diet with a man, he wakes up ten pound thinner the next day and we, well, we don’t. We need to be more careful about what we eat so that we feed ourselves and by extension our family and the world better food. Too many of us, however, eat processed no-calorie, no nutrient crap while trying to impress upon our children the importance of a good diet. That was me and it made me crazy.

My personal food obsession hit an all time high after I gave birth to my first child. Suddenly, I keyed into the idea of food and its power to build a human. Previously, although I had dabbled in healthy eating, I never really made the connection between what I ate, and how I felt. Food was my pleasure gateway and that was all. Even as I micromanaged everything my child ate, I still did not immediately make the connection that perhaps I should be a bit more discriminating about what I ate myself.

Then, I became too sick with a painful genetic disease to properly care for my son. With no medical cure on the horizon and in total desperation, I switched overnight from the standard American staples of meat, potatoes and ice-cream to a completely raw vegan diet. And it changed my life. Pretty much immediately. I lost the extra weight, my energy skyrocketed, my mood improved and my symptoms lessened. The results came quickly and for the past year and a half, the raw vegan lifestyle has become my new obsession.

What is the Raw Food Diet?

People on a raw food diet eat mostly fresh uncooked fruits and vegetables, including lots of greens as well as nuts, seeds, sprouts and oils. The premise is simple. When foods are cooked, they lose a great deal of their nutritional value as well as creating many additional toxins that the body has to expel. Why not give our bodies optimal nutrition by eating nutrient dense food (fruits and vegetable) in their natural state? Even the often misguided FDA recommends five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. I never ate that many serving before I changed my diet. Maybe I had a salad twice a week or an occasional piece of fruit.

Eat Only Food

One of the great benefits of being a raw fooder is that you eat no processed foods whatsoever. As the seminal food journalist Michael Pollan says: “Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too much.” Processed foods (anything in a box or package) contain non-food additives that at best just sit in the body taking up space and at worst mess with our chemistry. I see it in my own son. When he eats natural sugars like honey or fruit, he is happy and content. When he eats a processed candy bar, he is off the wall, up and down like a moody drunk. People joke about sugar being a child’s first drug. Well, ha ha. Maybe we should stop giving our children drugs?

How Do I know if Raw Food is Right For Me?

For most of my life, if a person told me they were a raw vegan, I would have assumed they were a bit odd, it being so outside the realm of mainstream American culture. It is not the diet for everyone. People usually come to it because they need to lose weight or are desperate to improve their health, like I was. That said, we all benefit from adding more fresh fruits and vegetables into our lives. In other words, raw vegan food should make up a large par of just about everyone’s daily intake.

My life has been so dramatically transformed by discovering a diet that works for me, that I want to spread the word. The quickest way to improve your life, your day, and your state of mind is to eat well. In future articles, I’d like to share with you my experiences of healing myself through diet, what I feed my family, and how to create delicious, easy healthy recipes for yourself.

For those of you anxious to get started right away, there are numerous fantastic raw food resources on the web.

For a dramatic story of weight loss try rawreform.com.

For practical advice on how raw food can improve both your physical and spiritual health visit therawfoodcoach.com

For access to thousands of raw food recipes, check out goneraw.com

For inspirational before and after pictures visit rawfoodinfo.com