Tuesday, February 28, 2012

[Article] Cravings

Cravings are real and powerful. Just about everyone gets them, and many of us struggle with them. I have struggled with them personally my entire life.

Often we call our cravings "hunger" but that isn't really true. When you're "hungry for pizza" but want nothing else but pizza, that is a craving.

Cravings are a design of our mind that is intended to help us seek out foods that benefit us. Unfortunately (as the videos I posted below explain), our cravings can not direct us accurately because our body is not designed to handle processed complex foods.

Animals in the wild each large meals of one whole raw food at a time. A bunch of leafs and fruits from a single plant, or a bunch of worms together, or lots and lots of grass or grain together. They do not mix nuts, fruit, meat, diary and vegetables all in one meal, and many common dinners do include all of these.

Growing up, dinner looked like this in my household:


  • 1 cooked vegetable (frozen peas, canned corn or string beans were common options)
  • 1 bean dish or pasta dish (buttered egg noodles, re-fried beans with molasses, chili stew or lima beans)
  • 1 meat dish (pork with sauerkraut, ham with applesauce, steak with carrots, hamburger with bun and tomato slices, etc)
  • 1 bread-type item, potatoes or starch (squash, baked potatoes, spaghetti with store-bought sugared sauce, etc)

And sometimes this was followed by a rich dessert loaded with white sugar, fruit and white flour. You'd never, ever see an animal in the wild consume a meal that loaded with sugar, that devoid of nutrition and fiber, or that complex.

Our bodies are not designed to handle this type of food, physically or emotionally. Cravings are a way to tell us what we need, but our cravings system is broken.

I've created a one-page Cravings Reference Chart for figuring out what your cravings really mean and what you can eat to help combat the craving and get what you really need. The causes are often both physical and emotional, which is why I've included both on the chart.

I recommend printing the chart out and hanging it up somewhere where you can review it daily when you're having a craving. You could keep it folded up in your back pocket and refer to it any time you're feeling that "need" for a fatty food or a sweet food coming on.

My goal is to empower you with information so that you have the strength to fight your way to health.

Also, check out the following short videos. Each one is only a few minutes long, and each one gives you an interesting insight into ways to combat and understand cravings and where they come from:

Dr. Ritamarie explains the basic principle of cravings and why they happen:




Motivational speaker Markus Rothkranz explains why it is okay to cheat on your diet when you have cravings:





And, for a very creative idea in fighting cravings:



Why is sugar, in particular, so addictive? This video explains:





Thanks so much for stopping by! I hope you've learned something useful on your journey to healthier living.

Love,

Raederle

Sunday, February 26, 2012

[Blog] Awesome Things Are Happening

Hello friends, family and fans!

I attended a raw potluck and presentation tonight that had over fifty attendees! It was one of the largest raw potlucks I've ever attended. Photos, as always, will be posted in my facebook albums, which you should be able to view even if you are not 'friends' with me on facebook, and, if you are not friends with me yet on facebook, then friend me already!

 And whether you want to friend me on facebook or not, it'd be super cool if you visited my facebook fan page for "Chef Raederle" and clicked the little "like" button.

In exciting news, my husband and I, after saving for months and months (since around September 2011) have finally bought a professional camera. We're very excited about this. Over the next couple months you can expect more and more incredible food photos, as well as other photos as we are going to be traveling!

The trip is only made possible by a lot of financial help from various family members and friends, all of whom we are very grateful to have in our lives. We'll be traveling by car through Kansas, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina. After approximately two months we'll be returning to Buffalo, New York to get planting in our garden. We were able to grow quite a bit of food last year and are looking forward to seeing the herbs we planted last year come back.

As some of my readers may remember I used to use what I call my "Musings" blog my "Travel" blog. That blog is essentially for everything I want to share with the world unrelated to food, fitness and healing. It does cover the topic of becoming emotionally healthy and happy from a mostly mental perspective however. In any event, it will once again my travel blog while we travel. I'll write about interesting things I notice or see on the trip that don't have to do with food there.

In other interesting news, I've started making hand-crafted versions of my recipe book.

The recipe book contains thirty pages of "getting started" information, 22-days of nutritionally complete days of recipes, Nut-Free Raw Recipes (my first recipe book), thirty pages of nutritional charts (completely unique)  -- all of which are included in my "Mastery Deal" which can be bought digitally as .pdf documents (which you can print out for your own use at home).

These unique hand-bound editions however are more than just the content. They're works of art. Each one has a unique theme and flavor, and my poetry and artwork are included as well as hand-written uplifting messages. I've made five thus far, each taking about seven hours to create.






In the above photo I'm holding the edition that is themed "Kittens and Puppies." The white spots on the left-hand page of the right-hand photo are bits of my poetry. The cover of this particular edition is made with very heavy weight high-quality semi-gloss colored card-stock.

Each page is cased in a sheet protector so that you can use these in your kitchen without staining the recipes!

What the heck am I going to do with these time-intensive works of art?

I'm not honestly sure. At the moment, they're only available if you make a bid or if you run into me in person and I have one on me to show and sell. I'll probably only make a total of twenty or thirty of these in my lifetime.

In other recent exciting developments, I was fortunate enough to serve fresh juice at a screening of a documentary about the horrors of the fur industry at a local book store. I honestly cried and cried throughout the film. I always have been into veganism for health and nutrition. It was a matter of "meat is inefficient in nutrition" and "animal fats have toxins" and "cooked animal protein is hard to digest" and so on.  Sure, I've known that animal torture happens and I'm against factory farming of course... But to actually see the suffering that many animals go through day after day... So that we can wear fur? It's wasteful and needless.

In any event, it was great to serve lots of people who are in the process of "opening their minds" fresh juice made from celery, carrots, cucumber and lemons.




Speaking of juice, I recently posted a page full of juice recipes that are great for a masticating juicer which was inspired by someone asking me a question about the "nutritionally optimal juices" they could make with that kind of juicer.

There are more juice recipes on my Food Pyramid page as well.

And, in a last bit of news, my facebook group Raw Foodies is a great place to share your favorite raw recipes, health articles, and ask health questions and get good answers. Anyone who has a positive attitude is very welcome to join!

The divine being in me recognizes, loves and accepts the divine being in you,

~ Raederle Phoenix

PS: And I almost forgot to mention this(!!!): My husband and I have started a radio show! Unfortunately, we won't be able to record more episodes until we're back from our trip, but these first two episodes are really jam-packed with information. Enjoy!

[Article] Raw Food Testimonials

Raw-Food Testimonials


New! (2012) I've compiled a bunch of "before and after" photos of raw vegan transformers. You can check them out on Raw Vegan Before & Afters Pinboard. (The site I put together the 'pin board' on is essentially a photo-gallery tool that I highly prefer to any photo-gallery tool I've ever used before.)



Dave: Lost over 200 pounds, cured his diabetes and more by going raw!

In 2008 Dave weighed over 430 pounds.  He was taking over 25 prescription medications and suffering from colon cancer, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, failing kidneys, and a myriad of other health ailments. He could literally feel that he was dying, and he began to resign himself to that dismal fate.

Dave was introduced to raw foods; to green vegetable smoothies in particular.  With guidance Dave was able to lose over 230 pounds in less than one and a half years. And in fact, after only four days on that diet, he was able to stop taking all of his diabetes medications! Today, Dave is healthy, happy, and only taking one prescription medication (which he plans to stop taking soon!)

And besides that, if you watch any of his videos or visit his site, it's quite obvious that Dave is having fun and living life to the fullest.




 Rawkin: Lost 62 Pounds by going raw.

  "I spent the long winter of 2007 feeling sad and depressed... And no wonder! I was eating junky foods and drinking a silly amount of beer, gaining a bunch of weight, and experiencing all sorts of physical and emotional manifestations of pain. After a long and dark 5 month period, something in me finally said ENOUGH, and that is just what I'd been 'dying' to hear. Through support, determination, and a whole lot of reading and researching, I managed to transition painlessly into healthy living, returning to the (mostly) raw lifestyle I was enjoying before I rudely interrupted myself."

A lovely woman who calls herself "Rawkin" on her blog, shows her photos of her progress into raw foods on her blog, displaying her loss of 62 pounds!



Tim VanOrden is a raw vegan and is one of the top mountain runners.

He says;

"Moving to a raw vegan diet was the best choice I've ever made as an athlete. My endurance has dramatically improved, and I recover from hard training and races in less than half the time. I've had to stop doing upper body workouts at the gym, because I now build muscle too quickly, which slows me down as a runner. My asthma is gone and I'm no longer troubled by joint pain."



Bob Mionske is a former national champion cyclist. He stopped eating meat as a teenager and later in his life he removed chicken and fish from his diet. Later he switched to raw foods and described “raw foodism as a natural progression on the ladder of healthy eating.”

Some of his accomplishments include finishing fourth in the Seoul Olympics at the Olympic trials in Spokane, WA and winning the 1990 National Road Championships in Albany, N.Y. He also competed in Barcelona in 1992 as a teammate of Lance Armstrong.



"I had an amazing epiphany. I think that I'm just coming to a real awareness of what the Raw Vegan Diet is. It really did not matter that much to me in my twenties. I felt fine but everyone around me felt pretty good also for the most part. I kind of coasted through my thirties with no real awareness or connection between the Raw Vegan Diet and my over all health. My forties were pretty much the same I just felt really good, but for the most part I was focused on my art career. It wasn't until I hit my middle fifties that I began to realize that something really strange was happening. I became a Raw Vegan in 1972 and after my initial excitement the novelty wore off and because I was catching so much heat from everyone around me I just stopped not only talking about it but even thinking about it. I just mainly did it out of habit.









"Now that I'm in my 57th year I'm really starting to think that maybe this Raw Vegan Diet might be the fountain of youth. Scientists will tell you that there is no scientific basis regarding any of the claims made by Raw Vegans and in a way they may be right. But in order for them to do long term testing if the Raw Vegan Diet is valid or not it would take anywhere from 50 to 100 years of testing groups of people and animals. In short all of us would be dead before the verdict was in." ~ Storm










Jinjee, 7 months pregnant with Adagio - Jinjee with Adagio, 10 days old


"Living food is the yummiest food on earth. It is where all the other flavors come from. It is what they use to spice and season the cooked stuff. It is impossible to top! The basic flavors were given to us by the natural kingdom that also gave us the basic colors, musical tones, and amazing scents. All of these things have something divinely perfect in their essence. And they seem to me to have been provided as building blocks for us to work with, to be creative and fill the world with all kinds of beauty. We have done amazing things with colors and tones and scents. And I think that with the advent of the raw-vegan culinary arts we are coming into an age of sumptuous orchestrations and true masterpieces to please not just the palate, but to invigorate the whole being – palate, mind, body, and soul!" ~ Jinjee



"My long time friend was on his deathbed. He walked out of the hospital 7 days later after I started bringing him food and telling the hospital to stop feeding him. This "miracle" if you can call it that is because of your [Markus Rothkranz's] book. Your book gave me the specifics I needed to be fully educated. Fully aware. My friend is alive and active as ever. Cancer is not a disease, it is a direct result of our toxic environment and poor nutrition. I know this now. Knowledge is power!

"Please allow me to sing your praises just one more time. I am a window washer by trade and am around the affluent and middle class in their homes all day every day. One lady was dying of cancer. She kicked it about 4 times prior due to western medicine's nuke treatments and chemicals. Gee, whattayaknow? It returned... again and again and again. She read your book cover to cover. 3 weeks later she canceled her chemo appointment and prepared to hang up her wigs forever. She is now cancer free and has a new lease on life. She's got a cute little spiky haircut now and jokes to me when I do her windows. You know what still makes her upset though? Still makes her buckle at the knees in anger and tears? That her husband died 3 years ago of the same ailments.

"He'd probably be alive today if they'd have known."

-- Terry Kannedy, Terry's Window Washing Laguna Niguel, CA



"Over 3 years ago I never thought I could be a size 4 again. THAT to me was an absolute miracle." (Lost 60 pounds by going raw. Her blog is a great read.) ~ Miranda Martinez

"As of August 10, 2009 I have lost twenty-six pounds eating raw! I never considered myself heavy, but my midsection has disappeared. At age 43, I now weigh exactly what I did in college over twenty years ago, 150 pounds!" ~ James Reno



James Southwood is a Salvate expert (French kickboxing expert). He has been on a raw diet since 2004. He needs no introduction among the martial arts crowd and burst onto the scene in 2006 when he won his first international bout in the World Savate Assault Championship. He was also undefeated in the British rounds for the entire year of 2006. About the raw diet he states, "Being raw is a light, clean and pure way to live. Exercising and competing in this physical state is the only way I would choose to do it."















"I have not had any money except for the daily money the hotel owner gives me when I work here, which is not much. When I do get money, I have resignedly been spending it on fast food, just to quickly and easily survive. Tonight is the first night I have gotten good raw food from the store in a very long time, and it really does make a difference. Already, my attitude is much more optimistic." - Andy Pope



"Raw! It’s a powerful word in the world of food." - William Rice


















I like to stress that it's not about how long you live, but how well you live. If your life is long, but full of miserable aches, pains, illness and inability to do the things you love, then it's those extra years are just more years of suffering. But what if you lived a very long time and lived very well.

Take raw foodist, Bernardo LaPallo who celebrated is 109th birthday August 17th 2010.

This blog post about him says:

At 107, Bernardo LaPallo is a vibrant, articulate, inspirational centenarian and the author of “Age Less/Live More: Achieving Health and Vitality at 107 and Beyond.” In this slim volume, he passes on the wisdom he learned from his father, a physician, who set him on his course in life that has lead to both longevity and a very high quality of good health. And while it’s true that both of his parents lived long, Bernardo cautions against complacency – “Good genes can only take you so far,” he says confidently. “You also have to take good care of your health; that’s your responsibility.”

The news report says;

Bernardo looks younger than most people I know in their 70s and 80s! He is a living example at just how powerful diet and a positive outlook in life can be.
109 years old! Let's put that into perspective. Birth year: 1901. Bernardo is still very much alive and kicking, and was born before Lou Gehrig, Charles Lindbergh, Bob Hope, George Orwell and 13 years before World War I.








Praise for Dr. Fuhrman's "Eat to Live" which advises a primarily raw food diet, with no dairy or meat:

"Before I read Dr. Fuhrman's book I weighed 205 pounds and had diabetes for seven years. The information enabled me to lose 60 pounds and get rid of my diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol without medication. My LDL cholesterol went from 168 to 73 in five months, and I successfully dropped my weight to 143 pounds. The most amazing thing is that my ophthalmologist had told me that I required laser surgery to treat diabetic retinopathy, but after changing my diet he found that the damage was no longer there and I didn't require surgery." -Martin Milford, Santa Rosa, California

"I was desperate when I went to see Dr. Fuhrman. I had been diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis and had suffered from open skin lesions and full body itchiness for years. I followed his advice to the letter. He put me on a special eating plan, and, after about three months, I started to get better. My legs and arms cleared up first. My body healed from the extremities inward, and six months later my psoriasis was totally gone. My doctors are amazed. Today my skin is completely clear with no itchiness or blotches, and I have no more arthritic pain. Recent blood tests show I no longer have the blood test markers that show inflammation." -Jodi O'Neil, Cary, North Carolina





Karen Knowler looks unbelievably younger at age 34 than she did at age 25. We’ve seen it time and time again that eating a primarily raw food diet can change the course of your aging. There are hundreds of videos, photographs and live people to testify to this.

Knowler is now a raw food coach and chef. She is teaching others how lose weight, get healthy, and improve their energy levels by eating a raw food diet.



Markus Rothkranz: 100% Raw Food-Vegan, Age 46 in this photo

Markus eliminated his allergies, his need to wear glasses, began building muscle and feeling great by switching to a fully raw food diet.




"Not only have I dropped some excess weight, my energy is through the roof!"

Kathleen Gage, The Street Smarts Marketer



In praise of a Raw Foodist named Yuri's book on raw foods:

"I was about 100 lbs over weight from stress and lack of exercise. I thought I was eating healthy and juiced occasionally. However, your well-researched book showed me otherwise. I am trying to do at least one green juice a day.

Within the first week, people were commenting to me that I had lost weight. Also many women are telling me how beautiful my skin is. Now I am doing two juices a day - one fruit and one green veggie and have discovered that I am not as hungry.

Part of your program is helping me reduce time spent in other areas. For instance, I am juicing more which means less cooking and more time for exercise and other activities. I never thought about it before but my vita mix is really my stove.

I know that once my results are significantly better, people will ask “how did you do it?” Weight Watchers? Atkins? South Beach? None of the above - I am going to shout Yuri's Eating for Energy! I feel great!!

Thanks so much for your book."

Martha Vaughan (Morehead City, North Carolina)



"I started at 195 lbs and am down to 183 lbs already and feel great. I have been at this weight since my last child was born 12 years ago and have been trying everything. In my heart I knew raw food was the way to go but didn't know where to start."

Valerie McNally (Oak Park, USA)



What Dr. Fred Bloem has to say:

A healthy diet is essential for optimal health. If you are not currently experiencing the level of health that you desire, are suffering from fatigue, weight gain or other health concerns, chances are you can significantly improve your life by learning to feed your body the foods it is best designed to handle.

How would you like to get healthier while eating delicious, satisfying foods? You can accomplish this by bringing the healing power of raw and living foods into your life.



Notice in this paper about one medical practice that fights cancer and tumors, removing meat and fluoride from the diet is a must, and eating all raw fruit and vegetables is part of the regime.



Do you want your story on this page? Contact me any way that you choose and give me a one or two paragraphs telling how much of your diet is raw (60%, 90%, 100% or whatever it is roughly), how long you've been on your diet, and the results you've seen, or any incredible experience you've had related to this subject that you want to share. Provide a link to a page or site about you or your cause that you want to have linked, and please include your real name.