My Transition to Low Fat Raw Vegan: Part I

*What’s New: EBook Update

* Feature: My Transition to Low Fat Raw Vegan: Part I

EBook Update

Just one quick update for you guys on “21 Days to Conquer Your Cooked Food Cravings” on the launch:

The program will be released either later this week or early next week!  This is perfect timing for those of you dreading the rapid approach of the Holidays and all the cooked food temptation they bring.

And for anyone who missed my email last week, there will be an awesome, 2-part sale for the first 7-days!

Don’t worry, I’ll bombard you with lots of email reminders during the launch to make sure you don’t miss out.

Hope everyone had a nice, cravings-free Halloween,

Swayze

My Transition to Low Fat Raw Vegan: Part I

I honestly cannot believe it’s November already.  It seems that just yesterday I was devouring a delicious bowl of strawberries and anxiously awaiting April and the arrival of Ataulfo mangoes.

Crazier still is that it has now been over 4 MONTHS since I started this blog and “21 Days to Conquer Your Cooked Food Cravings” will be released in about one week!

And there’s yet another reason to be excited about today’s date, despite the impending cold weather.

November 1st is my 2 year anniversary of starting my journey on a low fat raw vegan diet.

Some of you have inquired about my personal pathway to raw and so what better time to begin my transition story than today!

A Little Bit About Me

I want to preface my story with the following statement: I am NOT  a compulsive person.

Before starting anything new, I generally spend a lot of time researching.  Once I feel knowledgeable about whatever it is I’m contemplating, only then do I give it a go.

My decision to go raw was completely different.

Like many people who make the switch to raw, I was struggling with health problems.  My anemia was seriously becoming a problem for me – not to mention my work as a pet sitter – and I could not function with the constant fatigue anymore.

And the worst part of all was that I was already consuming the supposed best diet ever…a cooked vegan diet!  And I don’t mean one full of processed junk vegan fare.  I mean one loaded with whole, raw fruits and veggies, as well as cooked produce, grains, and legumes.

And yet I still felt like crap!

My anemia wasn’t a life threatening illness by any means, but it was enough to get me thinking about other alternatives.  I literally heard about raw, threw up my hands and said, “Why not?”

It seems my blind faith paid off!

Well, Not Exactly…

My first introduction to raw was not low fat, high fruit.  Instead, it was the fatty mainstream diet I’m always talking about.

I bought a couple of raw un-cook books from Amazon and began experimenting.  The meals took too long to prepare (longer than my “healthy” cooked vegan dishes), they didn’t taste that great, and they left me constantly hungry.

And one of the books I consulted is still considered one of the simplest raw recipe books available!  As I’m always saying, I’m so lazy that even the “super simple” recipes in this book for just too much work for me.

Plus, I had long known the value of a low fat diet and 600-800 calories of fat PER DAY was just ludicrous to me.

And no, I was not just calculating the fattiest recipes I could find.  I actually relied upon meal plans provided by the author!

Luckily, this did not throw me off of raw for good.  I was still eager to learn more and so I just kept researching as much as I could.  One day, while lurking on a vegan bodybuilding forum, I came across a post in the raw foods section of the forum.

The post, from long-term fruitarian Richard Blackman, said, “Here’s what I ate today” followed by 3 pictures…all of fruit!

My first reaction?  This guy’s a nut!  You can’t eat that much fruit!  Where do you get your protein!

My second reaction?  Hm, it would be nice to eat juicy, delicious fruit all day…and really easy, too!

I already loved raw fruit – thanks to Dr. Fuhrman and his book Eat To Live – and a truly whole, fruit-heavy diet made a lot more sense to me than one full of low calorie veggies, high calorie nuts, and dehydrated “raw” foods.

But I definitely wasn’t ready to make the jump yet.

The concept stuck with me for a few weeks until I finally came across Frederic Patenaude’s The Raw Secrets.  Once I was introduced to the truth about protein, fat, and carbohydrates (among other nutritional concepts), I knew that a low fat raw vegan diet was the ultimate way to go.

However, I was still worried that the diet was too radical.  It just seemed so kooky and out of reach to little ole’ me, a college student living with her parents in the BBQ capital (one of them, anyway) of the world.

I dabbled in it a little bit, having fruit for breakfast and lunch and then cooked for dinner, but I just wasn’t comfortable doing any more than that.

Then I stumbled upon this blog on October 31, 2007 and everything changed…

Halloween Candy, Pizza, and Going Bananas

Sarah’s blog Going Bananas really sealed the deal for me.  Her honest, humorous, and detailed posts about doing 80/10/10 in Texas added that human touch that I had been looking for.

Finding out that “normal” people living in “normal” locations with “normal” homes and “normal” levels of physical activity – as opposed to my mind’s own image of “radical” raw food athletes living in perfect, tropical climates and eating their weight in fruit day in and day out – gave me the confidence I needed to do this on my own.

I literally read every one of Sarah’s posts that night and made up my mind to go 100% 80/10/10 the next day for a 30-day experiment.  I even started my own blog, which I called “raw food and me,” to document it.

To celebrate, the rest of my night was dedicated to Halloween candy, pizza, and scary movies.

Gotta start things off right!

Next Time

I think that’s a long enough post for now.

Next time I’ll talk more about my first few months transitioning, including a quote or two from my old blog (yep, I still have all my old posts), advice I would have given to my past self, the main factor that helped me stay raw long-term, and how this might relate to your own transition to raw.

Go raw and be fit,

Swayze