Raw-Vegan Lifestyle:

Probably about 3 years ago, I was lead to do a spiritual fast. Let me tell you, first of all, that I am not a person of great discipline – not me, wish I were. However, I do have a strong prayer life and know that God answers prayers and the Bible teaches me that prayer and fasting is attuned to the heart of God. Daniel is a good chapter, but there are others. I inherently knew that considering the situation in which my husband and I found ourselves, we needed a huge miracle (I guess any miracle is huge) from our God. For that reason, and that reason alone, I was able to “fast” for 3 days. I began this fast with the very familiar Lemonade Fast made available to us all by Stanley Burroughs. As God often works, He wasn’t only answering my cries to Him, but He was also showing me even greater revelations of Himself in the areas of health and how to get from here to there and as always He had bigger answers for me than I could imagine.

Health? What does it look like? What doesn’t it look like? At the time, I was 58 years old, 20 pounds overweight, under-exercised, depressed, demotivated, lost in a world of “what-if’s” and on the road to no where. I had heart palpitations, looked awful, felt awful, and knew this wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I really cried out for a way to “feel” better. I never asked for a way to lose weight – frankly because I didn’t think God could/would do that for me – seriously!?

Fasting:

So – I fasted for 3 days and to this very day almost 3 years later, I don’t know how I did it. I don’t know that I could do that again. I've seriously tried several times. I know, I know, people do it all the time – but, hey, that’s not me! But – I did. I lost 7 pounds immediately. And let me just say, this whole story is NOT about losing weight. Okay – this story has to start at some level above that. I did though, lose 7 pounds. You may think that’s not much weight and truly it isn’t. I’m 5 feet tall (my husband would argue that with you and insists for some odd reason that I’m only 4’11”–what’s an inch? I don’t know).  And for this almost 5' frame, that's sort of a lot of weight. I’m “old” by definition (although I would vehemently argue that with you right now). My metabolism has NEVER been one that allowed for candy bars, popcorn, potatoes, white rice or anything fairly resembling decadence – did I say NEVER. Not since I turned 13 – this is true. I have pictures to prove it.

As they say, to make a long story short, I have had issues with losing and gaining weight since I was 13 years old – period. I managed to keep the weight off in my 30’s and 40’s by walking – a LOT. I didn’t eat a lot of the things I knew by history that I couldn’t – candy bars, rice, potatoes, etc. However, I was told in my early 40’s during a routine annual exam that my cholesterol was about 280 and my triglycerides were over 300 – this is not good. The doctor was amazed that this skinny, young-looking (he thought I was in my 20’s – seriously!) scrawny girl had imminent heart disease in the form of high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides.

Low Fat Diets:

So – in the early 1990’s what did they tell you to do for high cholesterol? Oh yes – that was the age of “LOW FAT”!! That’s when the entire population of the United States of America bought into the myth that LOW FAT was God’s answer for everything. The statistics prove quite clearly that the USA population from that time on shows a definite increase in total BMI for the entire population.

Books are the Answer!:

Being the anal-retentive person that I am, I read every book I could get my hands on about cholesterol, diet and exactly what should I do. I even enrolled in nursing school! I was told to help myself to bagels, rice, bread – all those things I knew from my past would make me gain weight. But – I was more interested in getting my cholesterol down than whether I gained weight or not.

30 pounds later: Yep, 30 pounds in very little time and I carried that weight for the next almost 20 years. I tried EVERYTHING to get that weight off. I should take a picture of my book shelves when I say EVERYTHING. None of which worked for any length of time, but I did learn a lot about the different and varying views of weight loss.  A lot of people have made a LOT of money over the past 20+ years writing about weight loss. Probably nothing else will bring about immediate and substantial sales on a new book release than the new and best way to lose weight.

What Did I Learn about Raw-Vegan?

In 3 short days, I learned that fasting cleans out my “gut”. It released toxins that hold onto fat. I learned that over the next 4 weeks I would lose an additional 20 pounds easily and without exercise. I’m not advocating no exercise – absolutely NOT. But I didn’t’ exercise and I lost the weight – yep, I had slack muscles that weren’t very attractive and won’t go that route again. I weighed myself daily to see what did or didn’t affect weight gain. I read every book I could get my hands on, signed up for every newsletter I could find on the internet and learned all I could learn about RAW and VEGETARIAN.  Why? Because when I ate those meals I felt good and I did have more energy, my mood was better, my skin was brighter.

Three Years Later:

Yep, almost 3 years later, I’ve learned more but actually gained a lot of the weight back because I tried out a pharmaceutical antidepressant that quickly put weight back on both my husband and me – plus almost bringing us to the point of not being able to get out of the bed in the morning.  We tried to find the “easy fix” of a pill to help us in our situational depression and it didn’t work for us. It truly did make things worse. That was our situation and it is NOT necessarily your situation and you do need to talk to a physician (and your God) who specializes in that area if you have depression.

What is the point of all of this? I’ve learned that RAW is without a doubt the BEST way to eat long term. If this shows up as salads, flax seed crackers, green smoothies or whatever, we will show you in this series how it is we found this to be true, what it is you can do to BE there and really how much fun it is to eat this way. It is so absolutely not anything close to deprivation! We were truly surprised at this. I have so many stories to tell you, but I’ve already gone on too long. I felt that this preliminary personal story was necessary for you to understand why I’ve come to the RAW/VEGAN mind-set. I'm not talking 100% - not there yet. The rebel in me says that’s not the way to health – for me anyway. But yes, a large portion of our diet should be and would be better for us if we did eat raw and vegetarian. We will give you recipes and research in the coming months to substantiate our personal experiences. We will also introduce you to the amazing “Raw Community” and all those wonderful experienced “Raw Fooders” who gave us the tools we needed to get from there to here.  And here’s to HERE! Nothing better than the present!

Thanks for listening!

Ann