Raw Food Diet - Will I lose a lot of weight on a raw food diet?

Raw food diet is fast becoming a new buzz word everywhere. Some are embracing this new lifestyle because they have no choice. They're sick and they've heard that it can heal their bodies. Others try it because a lot of famous celebrities are openly admitting that raw foodism is much better than plastic surgery when it comes to making them look a lot younger. And of course, more and more people are seeing that eating raw food is one of the best ways to lose weight.

Why is it that adopting a raw food diet will cause you to lose a lot of weight very quickly? 

1. A raw food diet is naturally healthy and nourishing.

2. Raw foods do not contain man-made toxins

3. Raw foods help to make your body more alkaline.

Let's look at each one of these in detail:

A raw food diet is naturally healthy and nourishing.

Uncooked fruits and vegetables are naturally low in calories, high in fiber, and low in bad cholesterol. Time and time again, you've heard that that's the kind of diet that's ideal. When you eat a pineapple for example, you know that there's a lot of fiber in there, it doesn't have animal fat, and considering that there are no added sugars, you know that it's naturally low in calories. And since raw foods are not heat-treated, they retain their enzymes.

When we eat foods that have no living enzymes in them, our body has to use up some of its own enzymes to digest our food. Now this is not good at all. Our bodies need those enzymes for other functions. This means while we are trying to digest our enzyme deficient food, our bodies would have to stop doing other critical functions like detoxing and healing simply because the enzymes are preoccupied with digestion. This is the reason why some people feel sleepy after eating a heavy meal. Your body needs to stop its other activities just to attend to the task of digesting all of the enzyme-deficient food that you just ate.

Raw foods do not contain man-made toxins

Think of french fries and donuts. When carbohydrates are heated at really high temperatures (such as when you fry them), acrylamides are formed. This is a toxin as far as the body is concerned. And here's the bad news - this is not your typical garden-variety toxin. New research shows that acrylamides are carcinogenic! When we take in acrylamides in huge doses, we are actually putting ourselves at risk of getting cancer. And when we eat too much, the enzymes whose job is to detox our bodies can't do their job precisely because we've stuffed so much food into our system. 

With a raw food diet, we don't have to worry about ingesting things like acrylamides and other substances that our bodies were never designed to live on such as high fructose corn syrup and aspartame.

When we eat raw food, we give our bodies the rest that it needs to recover from all the work that it had to do to clean up our bodies.

Raw foods help to make your body more alkaline

Just a simple chemistry lesson: our bodies are either acidic or alkaline. When we eat a lot of sugar and meat, our bodies become acidic. This is the perfect environment for all sorts of diseases to develop in our bodies. When we eat uncooked fruits and vegetables, our bodies become alkaline. When our bodies are alkaline, we start getting healed, we start losing fat, and we start to slow down the rate by which our bodies break down and grow old. Acidic - not good. Alkaline - good. That's a simple rule to remember.

When you start eating more uncooked fruits and vegetables, and eat less meat, processed food, canned food, fast food, and manufactured food, something magical happens to your body - you start losing weight! And this is the kind of weight loss that doesn't make you look like you haven't eaten or slept in days. This is the kind of weight loss that gives you a lot of energy and makes your more youthful.

Some people are hesitant to make the jump to eating 100% raw because they think they'll miss all the good food that they love so much. But whoever said that you have to be 100% raw right this moment? Introducing a fruit into your diet today is a great first step. Eating a fresh leafy green salad instead of mashed potatoes with your steak is another great step. Take small steps. Taking small steps is much better than not taking any step at all.

In the next few days, we'll talk about more baby steps that you can take to successfully transition to a raw food diet.