My Patterns
I look back in shock at my typical food intake before going raw – my day started with 2 rounds of toasted cheese and ham sandwiches, biscuits mid-morning were followed by a huge cooked lunch – at least two plates of something like pasta or pizza, then something sweet. In the afternoons I’d snack again on biscuits and huge bowls of hot chocolate before an evening meal like soup and sandwiches or pasta bake, followed, inevitably, with something sweet and often late-night snacks – crisps or biscuits. My calorie intake must have been enormous, but I had no concept of limits, I just ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I ate an incredible amount of unhealthy carbohydrates, sugars and fats.
These days, thankfully, things are very different: in the summertime I tend to start the day with fruit – currently maybe apricots/cherries/peaches, or watermelon on its own. I have only fruit or fresh (green) juice until ‘lunchtime’. I would heartily recommend this approach to anyone starting out on this path, as it rests and cleanses the system, reintroducing foods gently back into the body after the ‘fast’ of sleep. Lunch is usually the heaviest meal of the day for me, so that I have the rest of the waking day to digest and use those foods. I might have some nori rolls, a blended salad, a fresh salad with a lovely dip or a seaweed-based meal. Greens are a key component of my intake these days (both fresh and powdered) and are involved in almost every meal I consume. Snacks for me these days tend to be fresh fruit, hemp seed with pollen or goji berries. In the evenings I tend to have green juices or smoothies and perhaps a light meal. I try not to have too many fats late in the day, as I find them hard to digest.
I do not eat before around 11.30am in the morning in general and tend to stop eating around 7-8pm in the evening time. This allows my digestive system time to wake up in the morning and shut down quietly in the evening, rather than on a full stomach. Fresh green veggie juices have become very important to me in terms of my nutrition and I consider them like my daily ‘medicine’, alkalising and balancing my system. I tend towards an abundance of greens these days, little fruit and a moderate amount of fats. I am careful about food combinations and space my meals well apart, eating perhaps 4 or 5 times a day, lightly. My recipes tend to involve a minimal number of ingredients – I find that I tend towards simpler and simpler things as I move along this path.
For the first couple of years on my raw path, I was about 75-80% raw. Now I have been 100% raw for about three and a half years and I find that the quantity of food I consume is much smaller than that which I was consuming even a year ago, as my assimilation of foods is now so much more efficient – I simply do not need big quantities of food to provide my body with the nutrients it requires.
To read more of Angela's thoughts on how to go raw successfully, happily and for the long-term, see her books HERE.