1 – Many raw fooders do not eat enough greens.
Solution: regularly consume energy soup or green smoothie to guarantee the proper amount of greens.

2 – Many raw fooders do not consume enough fiber, soluble and insoluble.
Solution: Drink more smoothies or energy soups instead of juices.

3 – People on raw food often consume too many fats. When they try to imitate cooked dishes, they substitute starches with nuts. For example, when making raw cakes, they mimic a wheat crust with a nut mixture.
Solution: use nut pulp left over from making nut milks, use more seeds and less nuts, and use more fruit and vegetable pulp from juices in your mixtures, to minimize the consumption of nuts.

4 – Raw fooders commonly try to become too perfect too fast. They don’t give their bodies a chance to adjust to such a radical dietary change.
Solution: gradually adjust and purify your own individual diet to help you ease into the healthiest diet for you.

5 – When people change their diets, they usually decide the other components that make up health are no longer important, such as: sun bathing, exercising, proper rest, fresh air, etc.
Solution: practice a well-rounded healthy life style. Continue Reading

This is one of the most frequently asked questions about eating raw. People commonly believe that without a bowl of cooked food on a chilly winter day they would not be able to stay warm. I know many persons who quit the raw food lifestyle because they were afraid that they would become too cold during the winter.

Let us take a closer look at this situation. Would a quarter pound of rice physically keep a 160 lbs body warm? In order to get warmed by it, one would have to fill a bathtub with warm rice and sit in it for 20 minutes.

So why do we feel warmer after consuming cooked food?

A hot meal, a cup of coffee or an ice-cold shot of vodka warm our body in the same manner. When any impure substances get into our blood through the walls of the intestines, they irritate our adrenals, the endocrine glands located above the kidneys. The adrenals immediately begin to produce epinephrine, norepinephrine and a variety of steroid hormones. These hormones stimulate our sympathetic nervous system, which is why we feel awake at first. They also force our heart to beat faster and to pump larger amounts of blood through our body, which makes us feel warm. This feeling doesn’t last long and we pay a high price for it. After 10-15 minutes our body gets exhausted from performing extra work, the heart requires rest, the nervous system becomes inhibited, and we feel tired, sleepy and even colder than before. However we remember only the feeling of getting warmer after eating cooked food and repeat such stimulation again and again. This harmful practice wears the body out and by the end of the winter many people feel exhausted and depleted.

Continue Reading

I have received several e-mails from people asking if it’s okay to drink hot tea while on a 100% raw food diet. Here is Victoria’s answer from a past teleconference.

VICTORIA: I’d like to say that hot tea is okay because it doesn’t trigger your appetite for cooked foods or any food addictions, but you wouldn’t want to drink a lot of it because you only want to consume highly nutritious substances. We’ve been malnourished for generations and we don’t want to waste any energy on our digestive tracts. We only want high quality nutritious food in there. Teas are usually not of high quality. They have bleach in them and outdated herbs, although you could collect the herbs yourself. When you make tea, you boil out the nutrition. They are okay, but not the most nutritious. What Ann Wigmore did was make “Sun Teas,” where she would collect herbs herself, and put them in cold water or outside in the sunshine for five or six hours. It makes for nice, flavored water.

My friends,

On this Thanksgiving day, I would like to let every one of you know how grateful I am for the love and support I feel from you all.

I thank you for the many kind words you’’ve said to me, and especially for your honest feedback.

I thank you for enjoying my books, and making green smoothies.

I thank you for your many questions, which have inspired me to deepen my research.

And most of all, I thank you for your quest for truth.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sincerely, and with love, 

Victoria

Victoria often receives emails from people who feel better on the raw food diet, but have a hard time staying raw. She believes that it is impossible to avoid eating cooked food for significant periods of time through will power alone.

Over the years, Victoria has been exploring the topic of how to stay off cooked foods. She has come to the conclusion that cooked food is highly addictive and observed that most people are unaware to what degree they cannot manage their eating habits.

Below is a simple test which  illustrates Victoria’s view.

Please answer the following three questions honestly, yes or no:

1. Have you ever overeaten?

2. Did you like how you felt after overeating?

3. Can you promise here and now to never overeat again?

Based on your answers you can conclude whether or not you are able to control your eating habits. The raw food diet has proven to have colossal values for physical health, however, many people cannot stay on raw food. They blame their lack of will power, yet if cooked food was not at all addictive, they would not even need to exercise their will power.

Victoria believes that recognizing the addictive potential of cooked food has helped her to create multiple coping techniques that enable anybody to be strong on the raw food diet in this “cooked” world.  She says that we live in a very stressful environment, and as a result of this, we often become unable to relax. When we feel stressed, we cannot feel joy and happiness. To numb our stress, we have created countless ways to escape. Food is the most common form of escape because it is readily available and affordable. Sometimes our lives get so stressful, that food becomes the highlight of each day. At this point, food gradually begins to push the most meaningful aspects of our life to the secondary place. Victoria is sure that the awareness of how cooked food can run our lives will prompt even more people to consider the raw food lifestyle.