raw foods: I have been eating really unhealthily since the summer started, and it makes me tired and bloated. I wanted to try a raw fruits and vegetables diet.. Has anyone ever tired it? How does it work? Is it healthy? Feedback please!!|||A completely raw food diet is NOT advisable at all. Most raw foods have anti-nutrients in them and are best eaten after cooking. The trick is to not over cook your food. A good example of this is broccoli that has lots of goitrogens in it and if you eat it raw, it will affect your thyroid gland negatively. If you cook it under 191 degrees F for less than 30 minutes you will get rid of the goitrogen problem and break down the fiber in it and it will be far more digestible for you. If you steam it for a couple minutes, you will find it is far more nutritious for you. What happens if you cook it too long at a high temperature is something called digestive leukocytosis and this is a reaction in your blood where the chemistry actually changes and is not a good thing. Some foods like milk should not be heated, but drunk raw. The problem is that you should not drink pasteurized milk you get from the store because it comes from very sick cows they are feeding grains like corn. This makes the cow sick and the milk sick as well. You need to get milk from GRASS FED cows and drink it raw. Most fruits should not be cooked or heated, but eaten raw. Making soups from vegetables is an excellent way to get your vegetables & minerals. Just don't heat the soup too hot for too long. It's also important to realize that your digestion needs to be in good working order as well. Plant foods are digested in the small intestine and rely on your pancreas to be in good shape to provide good enzymes. Your stomach is where proteins are first digested using hydrochloric acid to break them down into smaller amino acid complexes and then the pancreas provides protease to break the proteins down further. Plant eating animals do NOT have hydrochloric acid in their stomachs, but just before the small intestine they have a gland that produces HCL to sanitize the food before entering the small intestine. Humans and all meat eating animals have HCL produced in the stomach to sanitize and break down proteins like meat, primarily. Plant eating animals are much more efficient at eating plant foods than humans. Look at the old dried grass cows can eat and remain very healthy. If a human tried to do that, they would not survive. There are many reasons for becoming tired and bloated, but it all has to do with digestion. I suggest you find a good certified nutritional therapist that can help you develop a good eating plan that fits your goals of what you want to accomplish. good luck to you|||Eat LOTS of fruits and vegetables per day, and maybe a few nuts and seeds here and there. Fruits are the most digestible food around for mankind, and vegetables only come in second in digestion compared to fruits. So one banana per meal is not going to cut it. 4-6 bananas in a meal is better. If you don't eat enough fruits on the diet, you will lose muscle and you will get anorexic. That is why it is SO important to eat 4-6 fruits per meal, 3 meals daily. Eat when you are hungry Don't fill too much up on any kind of berry, because they are extremely low in calories. You need high calorie fruits like apples, bananas, oranges, melons, mangos, peaches, pears. Don't forget protein from green leaves like spinach, kale, swiss chard, romaine lettuce, parsley, cilantro. Cucumbers are good for skin, carrots for eyes. Almost a pound a day of fresh salad is good to keep you healthy In order to fill up on any kind of berry or vegetable, you would need 5 pounds of that kind of berry or vegetable to sustain you. We are not herbivores, but frugivores-which means we are supposed to mainly eat fruit. Yes I have tried it, for 5 days. I couldn't afford it though, it was just too much. The thing is you can either eat a lot of nuts, or you can eat a lot of fruits. Its either one of them to be a staple food. Vegetables are too low in calories to be a staple food. So it is important to have all three kinds of food groups in your diet, but fruits or nuts as your staple food. The first day was very easy. Instead of going to the bathroom 1 time per day like I normally do, you would go 4 to 5 times per day with the raw food diet. It makes your bowel movements better, and your overall health better. Fruits have the highest vibrational energy out of all three food groups, so they are the path to healing/consciousness/spirituality. DO NOT eat raw potatoes like I did, they are toxic, no matter cooked or uncooked. I tried having them on raw food diet to be the staple food, but they made my bowels look like crap after I went to the bathroom.