Raw vegan weight loss reddit

I also made sure I got outside in the sunshine as often as I could to soak up some vitamin D which is important for bone strength and tooth health. I specifically asked my dentist if he saw any evidence of excessive enamel erosion, or any signs of trouble. He shook his head and said that my teeth were perfectly fine.

He says that the cause of blood sugar imbalance is not too much fruit in the diet but too much fat! That was a big challenge when I was on the typical high-fat raw diet. I used to eat a lot of raw desserts which had an unhealthy combination of concentrated sweeteners like agave nectar and lots of nuts. I would end up eating lots of fat AND sugar together which is a health disaster waiting to happen. I used to drink a gallon or so every day, but I was drinking maybe half that, even on a hot summer day.

I got plenty of distilled, nutrient-rich water from all the fruits and vegetables that I ate. This felt especially true for low fat, raw vegans. I definitely noticed that my comfortable temperature range shifted. Graham does not advocate the use of supplements and superfoods in his book.

After reading his thoughts on the subject and taking a good look at my nutrient intake, I agreed with him to a degree. I stopped using raw cacao and other popular raw vegan superfoods. I felt that if I did need to buy expensive superfoods in order to be healthy, then the whole raw food diet concept was flawed, as Dr. Graham states in his book. Where I differed, however, was with with his take on supplementation — particularly with vitamin B12 and iodine.

There is no vegan source of vitamin B12, so vegans need to supplement, and not wait to see if their levels drop. They will! Also, Dr. Graham mentions sea vegetables as an unnatural food for humans we are not sea creatures, so we should avoid eating things that come from the sea. Eat your sea veggies dulse and kelp, especially! Vegan women who get all of their iron from plant-sources need 33 milligrams per day, which is a tall order.

Anybody who is on a strict raw food diet will know that it is difficult to eat out at restaurants. It can be awkward to eat at family functions. Ironically, I found it difficult to eat at raw food potlucks because so much of the raw dishes were loaded with nuts and oils. Raw desserts are pretty much fat-laden gut bombs.

It was interesting to watch as people filled up large plates full of low calorie greens and then pigged out on high calorie and high fat raw desserts. The vast majority of their calories came from agave nectar, cacao, and other highly processed nuts and seeds.

Most of the raw food restaurants in Chicago where I lived at the time served the high-fat, raw gourmet dishes that are heavy in nuts and oils. I stopped hanging out at coffee shops and started hitting up the juice bars although drinking too much fruit juice IS bad for you and your teeth.

Eventually, I made some concessions and relaxed my diet enough to enjoy an occasional veggie burger on a whole wheat bun that I could load up with veggies. I wanted to maintain my social life, and for me, it was more important to be able to enjoy the occasional veggie burger or hummus wrap at a bar with friends than it was to uphold a strict ideal about the human diet that would alienate me from my friends.

I enjoyed cooked quinoa, brown rice, and steamed veggies. I just stayed in the produce section and filled my cart.

I bought a ton of fruit and vegetables every week. It felt a bit strange rolling my shopping cart to the checkout with 6 pineapples, 4 large papayas, 6 cantaloupes, 12 bunches yes, bunches! As far as cost, I would say I spent about the same on groceries that I spent when I ate the high-fat raw diet with superfoods like Goji berries, cacao, and maca. What I used to spend on expensive, organic raw nuts and superfoods went toward purchasing more fresh, organic, and ripe fruit. So I turned to supplementing my raw diet with low fat, cooked foods like quinoa and brown rice to provide concentrated calories without adding excess fat.

I felt more balanced eating a cooked dinner, and having some wiggle room for social or family situations. You might have heard me say that you should get your blood tested periodically to see if you are deficient in anything. My total cholesterol was 50 points lower than than it was when I was 22 years old! At that time, my HDL was flagged as high.

My family has a history of high cholesterol. The only thing that came back abnormal was that I had low creatine, which underscores the importance of ensuring that you meet all of your essential amino acid requirements, not just your protein requirements in grams. Evidently, I had neglected to keep up on my methionine intake despite exceeding the daily overall protein intake recommendations and I think that it likely played a role in my low creatine. I resolved this by doing a 5-day creatine load 5 grams of creatine monohydrate for five days and I was and still am extra vigilant going forward to track both methionine and lysine, two essential amino acids which are easily deficient in a vegan diet if you are not careful.

Everyone is different based on your age, gender and family history. Fermenting or juicing raw foods also can make some nutrients more available, but that shouldn't deter from the fact that cooking is an ancient craft that makes some foods more digestible and nutritious. As for the concept of life energy in raw food, this is a spiritual belief beyond the realm of science, so debating its benefit, let alone existence, would be futile.

This one is absolutely true, but it doesn't matter. Yes, heat destroys enzymes. But humans make their own digestive enzymes to break down large food molecules into smaller ones. The raw-enzyme logic itself breaks down when you consider that most humans cook food and that most humans are digesting that food reasonably well.

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Only a few make it to the small intestine. Fermented foods such as sauerkraut can carry enzymes into the gut. Their contribution to digestion is not zero, but it does appear to be minimal. The enzyme theory for raw foods dates back to Edward Howell, a physician who published a book on enzymes in the s, primarily citing research from the s and 30s. We now know, however, that almost all nutrients are absorbed in the small intestine and that digestion at that stage relies almost entirely on human-generated bile and pancreatic enzymes.

A corollary myth is that humans have a finite number of enzymes and that, once they are used up, these enzymes are gone. This idea, too, was hatched by Howell. But where would this packet of enzymes reside? Howell never said. But in reality, humans make new enzymes throughout their lifetimes. Usually, two organs are cited as needing detoxification: the liver and the colon. In reality, toxins can accumulate anywhere in the body, particularly in fat and fatty tissue, but also in proteins and bone. The colon is surprisingly low in toxins, however.

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As for the liver, the confusion is that this organ "filters" toxins and must therefore, the reasoning goes, be loaded with toxins. But the liver is more of a chemical-processing plant than a filter; it breaks down toxins as they pass through. That is, the liver doesn't have extra toxins by virtue of it being the body's natural toxin-neutralizer. Another argument is that burning fat — in this case, on a raw vegan diet — would release toxins from the body. But fat cells don't burn up, as if into ashes, liberating their contents.

It is unclear how much of a toxin, if any, would be set free if the fat molecule it is attached to is burned. The toxin is now free to attach to other fat molecules. In short, there are no foods or herbs that can magically bind and pull toxins from your blood or organs.