Hi Bene,
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Originally Posted by Bene  I would say cooked/processed food is even more difficult to quit than cigarettes although I've never smoked. |
I agree with you, and I have smoked. I quit smoking and I quit cooked food, so I can compare, and for me personally, the cooked food definitely was more difficult to let go of. I'm 100% raw vegan now, but it took me about two years to fully transition. I have even heard that it takes an average of seven years, so, don't beat yourself up.
In
12 Steps to Raw Foods, Victoria Boutenko wrote an entire chapter about how and why cooked foods are addictive. She talks about plenty of toxins and addictive substances contained in various cooked foods, for example opioid peptides and other stuff. Reading about it helped me a lot to understand why on earth I was feeling like a junkie. If you feel addicted to cooked food, I highly recommend this book to you.
Most people are addicted to cooked foods, it's part of our culture and considered normal, that's why they don't notice. You will hear all kinds of rationalizations.
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Originally Posted by Bene wow Nex that really makes me want to listen to my body instead of letting my brain decide. I think its called intuitive eating. |
I totally believe that our body is a fantastic system and that it intuitively knows what food is good for it - provided this food remains natural and raw. Our built-in food recognition system isn't designed to eat unnatural, cooked, and processed stuff. It just doesn't work anymore when we feed it such inappropriate things. That's why I totally trust my body when I feel like eating some specific raw foods, but I do NOT listen to it when it tells me to eat chocolate.
You can see it on other animals as well: as long as they eat their natural, raw food, other animals are great at picking exactly what they need. But when you give them addictive, unnatural, processed, human-made food, like sugar, this fantastic system suddenly doesn't work anymore. The horses in my childhood loved sugar, which is just as unhealthy for them as for us. As for the cat here, she loves chocolate. Chocolate is proven to be poisonous for cats. But she eats it every time she can. Her body is just unable to recognize it as a poison, because it wasn't made to deal with such "food".
Neither is ours.
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Originally Posted by Kasha A raw food diet can be very low in protein and carbohydrates, which are required to repair/maintain muscle tissue and to replenish glycogen stores which I believe give us energy (from research/education and intuition/experience). |
A raw diet certainly isn't low in carbs. What about fruit? As for protein, it might be low on it according to common standards, but we don't need as much protein as what they say anyway.