Finished the Raw Food Class and Trying the Recipes

Hi,

I am really glad I took the raw food beginner class that my doctor (Dr Lisa Robbins of The Robbins Health Alliance, Stone Mountain, GA) held last Saturday. There were four of us in the class plus our illustrious teacher and we got lots of special individual attention and tried out each other's concoctions as we learned to make them. We broke up into two teams of two people and each team would make a recipe and then we shared with everybody, so we could all taste all of them.

The first thing we made were green smoothies. I was glad for this opportunity because I had never tried one before the class and had wondered what all the hoopla was about. They always looked unappetizing to me when I would see them on TV. I was just not really interested in them, even though I had begun to notice that in the raw food realm there is a lot of smoothie making going on. We had a choice of making fruit smoothies or savory smoothies and since all of us had either diabetic or weight issues, we all decided to try the savory ones.

I was completely surprised, not only by the good flavor, but by how they completely filled me up almost instantly. I think I need to point out, though, that I was in an emotional state of anxiety when I attended the class because I had found out the day before that my next tier of unemployment was only 14 weeks and not the 26 weeks I had been expecting. I had been thrown completely for a loop with that one. Since then I have gone to the DOL website and now know what to expect in the not too distant future. When I get like that, my appetite shuts down. I have been known to go for entire days without eating. Fortunately it does not happen often. So I kind of think that that may be part of the reason they filled me up so completely, on that day. I have noticed since then when I have made the green smoothy that I have more "room" for it, and can drink the whole recipe in one sitting without much trouble.

As to the taste. Well. I think you may have to let yourself get used to it. They don't taste especially bad, they are just a little unusual, but it is not too far from the flavor of salad, so it is not completely unfathomable. The texture is like a nice thick soup, but it is uncooked so it is room temperature. The one I have been making at home was the milder of the two recipes we tried, being made with red leaf lettuce, part of an avocado, a little onion, lime juice, celery and basil, and a couple of cups of water. I did not have any basil, but poured in a little of my homemade curry powder. It did not seem to affect the flavor very much, so perhaps a little more may have been in order.

One of the things we were able to experience in the class was using a Vita-mix heavy duty blender to make the smoothies. I don't have one of those, but I did purchase a Ninja machine off of the TV a few months ago and mine seems to work great for making the smoothies that I have tried so far. When I made my first one at home, I was out of celery, but the Ninja easily made liquid of the rest of the ingredients. Today I was able to put in the celery and it chopped all but one piece of it up very nicely, so I am pleased with my Ninja and am not planning on getting one of the big expensive machines (which I cannot afford anyway). I suppose I may run into something that it may not "blend" but it would have to be pretty dense to not succomb to the two levels of knives in the Ninja. I'm thinking carrots. I might try some when I get the chance.

There was one recipe that everyone in the class thought was absolutely superb. It was a kind of mock spaghetti. Instead of pasta noodles, thin curly strips of raw zucchini were whirled off of a spiral cutter and then left to sit while the sauce was made in the Vita-mix. The marinara sauce was raw and uncooked but tasted every bit as good as real spaghetti sauce to me.  Here is the recipe in case you would like to try it:

Marinara Sauce
2.5 C roma tomatoes
1 jar of sundried tomatoes marinated in olive oil (about 8 oz)
1/4 C of olive oil
4 cloves garlic
3 dates (dried) pitted and soaked in a little water to cover
2 TBS parsley
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp sea salt
(I thought it needed a little oregano, too -- perhaps a TBS)

You just put everything in your food processor and blend until smooth.

When you have the above raw marinara sauce made, then pour it over the zucchini strips and serve. We all loved that one and had seconds, too. The original recipe as listed in our books had used 12 sundried tomatoes, soaked -- but the bottled sundried  tomatoes was our teacher's preference. She said we could use 1/2 the bottle or all of it and we chose to use all of it in our sauce.

There was one other thing that our teacher made for us, which was excellent as far as flavor and texture goes, but I would be reluctant to start eating it on a diabetes reversing diet. She soaked a few dried dates in water for about 30 minutes and then sliced up an apple. On each piece of apple she squashed a soaked date and handed them to us, telling us they tasted like caramel apples. She was right. If I had had a blindfold on, I would have sworn I was eating a bit of caramel apple. It had the exact same flavor and even the texture was the same. She did not know who had thought that one up, but it was tasty. Of course that is way to much sugar for a diabetic, so I am not planning on making those unless I have company and also have the ingredients because I don't think I could eat just one and let it go at that. I think the eating machine would gladly turn on for those little guys. I am better off, just leaving them alone.

All in all, I thought the class was good and I'm glad I did it, but the price was very steep for me and caused my budget to get out of whack at the end of the month, so no more classes like that for me. I am glad I did it because it has opened up a whole new area of raw foods for me.

I want to say something here, too. I don't think I would be in a place where I was trying out the raw food program if it had not been for "The 30 Day Diabetes Cure" program that I had previously done (which is how this blog got started.) What the program did for me, was take me by the hand, and help me to make the day by day changes that I needed to make in order to get me to the point where I could actually see myself doing the raw food program. I think the raw food program is the logical next step to what is taught in the book. So. If you have been reading about the raw food program but the change is just too drastic for you to make all at once. If it is just too hard to go from eating cooked comfort foods like meat and potatoes to eating a raw vegan diet, "The 30 Day Diabetes Cure" will help to get you down the road to a place where you can make that change if you actually want to. And you don't need to make the change to raw foods if you don't need to. I needed to make the change if I was ever going to actually lose weight, but maybe you won't have to. You won't know until you do it.

What "The 30 Day Diabetes Cure" does is begin to get you off of sugar on the very first day. That alone is a big step for someone living on the standard American diet and suffering from diabetes or prediabetes. You have to start with the worst thing in the diet and get rid of it first -- and that is table sugar. You only commit to doing it for 10 days, so it is an easy step and once you are off of it, why would you want to go back? Your 10 day experiment soon turns into a real commitment without it being a big hairy deal. During the next 10 days you learn about all the bad things in artificial sugars and soon don't want to eat those either. You begin trying Stevia, and whether you start using it or not, suddenly you are more open to trying new things. Which leads to getting rid of the rest of the processed foods which is also a major culprit in the SAD diet.

You get to make the changes with someone holding your hand and helping you every step of the way. At least that is how I felt on the program. I would read the content for the day and do what it said. You can read my blog, I was not perfect at it. I shared what was hard and what was easy, and sometimes I was completely embarrassed to let you know what else I had done that day that was wrong. But here I am, eating mostly raw foods and really enjoying the foods and how they make me feel.

I now know I can make the changes and not die. I know that may sound funny, but I think that is how we relate to what we eat. We think if we have to stop eating our favorites foods and start eating vegetables instead, we might die.

Guess what? If you are now eating the standard American diet (or even the slight variation of that which is the standard diabetic diet taught by the present medical community and dietitians) and you don't make the change to eating living food you will die from what you are eating -- a lot sooner than you expected.

We cannot eliminate death, but we can sure make the latter part of our lives better by eating healthy living food and reversing diabetes and avoiding its complications. I can hardly believe I have made the change. I had no idea this is where I would end up -- and I am still going down the road.

A lady at church, yesterday, told me she could tell I was losing weight. I was surprised that anyone could see that I had lost only 11 pounds, it usually takes about 30 before anyone can see it on me, but she could see it and her sister agreed. That made me feel good.

I still struggle, but I am glad the Lord has made me able to make the changes, and is walking with me, wherever I go. Thank you Jesus.

Be back soon -- Lord willing!

--Marcia