How do you get a variety of foods only eating vegetables and fruits?

In the beginning you may get bored eating just fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. But that is because your body is adjusting. The truth is that you get bored and need variety only when you are starving, even slowly starving, on a typical cooked, processed diet. Your body knows what it needs nutritionally. After decades of not getting adequate nutrition, your body is desperately looking wherever it can to find something nurturing to eat, so you get cravings and a desire for a lot of variety.

 Conversely, after years of eating raw, whole, nutritionally dense foods, your body starts enjoying everything you put in it immensely. Everything tastes wonderful! In addition, you lose the cravings and the need for a lot of variety. You only desire what you need and you enjoy that more than enough to satisfy you. Its called intuitive eating or conscious eating and comes for most people after many years of cleansing and eating only whole, raw foods. Until then, during the transitional period, there are lots of things you can to that are not difficult to make whole foods more fun and appetizing and feed your need for variety. Preparation is the key to variety and taste. This recipe book describes how to change the textures and tastes of vegetables using your blender, food processor, dehydrator and juicer and by using herbs and seasonings. The variety of dishes that can be made from simple vegetables is only limited by your efforts and creativity.

How do you get your protein?

   When you mix two or more seeds or nuts together you usually get a complete protein. Many grasses and leaves, such as wheatgrass, have complete proteins. Thats why elephants get so big. They dont need to eat cows to do it.
   Combining any two of the following raw proteins will give you a complete protein: pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, pistachio, sesame seeds, almonds, walnuts, Brazil nuts wild rice (soaked), pecans, raw red potatoes, black ripe olives, beet tops, steel cut oats, buckwheat. Bee pollen, brewers yeast, dulse, egg yolks (raw organic free range), raw cheese (goat) and mushrooms.

   You can also get some of your protein from raw organic food supplements in powder or tablet form - such as super green powders. If you use eggs in your diet, its best to get eggs from free-range chickens that have not been fed chemicals. Avoid eating the white of an egg raw. Its not digestible unless cooked. Some raw foodists continue to eat fish, especially during their transitional periods. If you choose to do that, get wild fish, not farm breed. You can soak the fish (dont use shell fish) in cold pressed oil and apple cider vinegar overnight (wild sockeye salmon is recommended) with cayenne pepper with other spices and a touch of tamari sauce. It will resemble and taste like cooked fish. You can use it for a sushi dish. If youre going to eat cheese use raw goat food products. Goats cheese and milk is easier to digest than cow products which are notorious for creating allergic reactions.

What about sprouts?

   Sprouts can be useful, particularly during a cleansing program, due to their dense nutrition and live enzymes. However, most mammals in nature do not eat sprouts that are grown in water in a jar. Also, many young sprouts, especially alfalfa, have toxins in the seed to protect them. As the sprouts grow, their toxicity becomes much less. Many prefer to grow and eat young greens, like buckwheat greens. They are almost like sprouts, but grown in soil and harvested while still very young.

What about tofu?

   Tofu is a cooked product and difficult to digest. Fermented soybeans, like unpasteurized miso, are great, however, because they sit in barrels for two years where they are left to ferment. This type of soybean is predigested and is an excellent protein.

What about legumes like lentil or beans?

   Raw legumes are very hard to digest. They also have a high concentration of protein that makes it difficult for the body to cope with. Soybeans can have 20-28% protein. Seeds or nuts are around 10% protein. Oats are around 10% protein. Other grains are around 12%. Some legumes, like mung beans and lentils, can be sprouted and are delicious.

What do you think about food combining?

   Food combining is based on two important concept: enzymes and transit time. Transit time refers to how long it takes certain foods to pass through the stomach. It turns out that under ideal conditions, all the food groups digest a little better when you eat only from one group or a couple of compatible groups. That is because they all use the same enzymes for digestion. So veggies digest better with other veggies, while fruits like to be with fruits. Then there is the issue of the transit time. Fruits digest faster than proteins. If you eat them at the same time, the fruits will sit in your stomach too long, until the proteins are digested. This is a recipe for autointoxication. Essentially, your stomach becomes an alcohol still, with the mixture of carbs, proteins and sugar fermenting into alcohol while you wait for digestion to complete. This is generally not a good thing hence we try to combine food properly, which is too long a subject to cover here. However, lots of info is available online.

   Food combining is less of a problem for beginners or people who are not 100% raw. For them food combining is sort of like fine tuning. If you are just starting out on a whole, raw lifestyle, there are more important issues to deal with so dont let the food combining issue get in your way.