Raw Food Diets for Eating Disorders

It is a sad commentary on our culture that so many women have eating disorders.

When my daughters were in high school, many of their friends had eating disorders already. When my older daughter, now 25, was in college, all her female friends had eating disorders. My daughters have luckily escaped because they eat like line backers.

One of my older daughter’s best friend lives in New York and is an elite social butterfly. She is beautiful and has always had eating disorders and always been sick frequently. The girls my older daughter socializes with now are all models and of course anorexic and bulimic. They all have affluent boy friends and eat in great restaurants, so they meet in the bathroom afterward to lose their dinners.

One of the beauties of a raw diet is that real food has very few calories.  When the body receives real food over a period of time, it recognizes the food, knows it won’t starve and convert the calories into fuel. The body finds no need to store the calories as fat. The enzymes in raw real food are calorie burners. They digest the food and convert it to fuel. Eating fruit and vegetables provides fuel and no fat. You can eat them both all day by the bucket load. Add some protein with brown rice, beans, peanuts, humus, chia or hemp seed, or lean meat and you have a sustainable diet.

If anyone eats all real food, their body will start releasing the food encapsulated in fat. When I was eating raw for four months, the weight started dropping off so fast it almost scared me.  I was hoping it was the food and that I hadn’t developed a disease. I lost 20 pounds if four months and decided that was enough for the time being.

The great thing about a raw diet is there is very little digestion required. I no longer needed my afternoon naps. Your energy increases geometrically because digestion requires more energy than any other bodily process. It takes over the blood and oxygen supply and robs the brain of oxygen it needs to think actively.

Eating real food or raw creates a situation where you never feel full. You are always a little hungry. That is why you have so much energy to think or work. Avoiding sugar, flour, and bad fats give the system tremendous relief.

If children could learn to eat raw or real food early, they might never have the need to get rid of food in order to stay lean. They would be lean as possible already. I was as guilty as any parents in introducing my children to the world of fast food. This is the world of sugar, fat, salty, and greasy. It’s addictive.

But, eating real food becomes addictive. Once you eat clean you don’t like the taste of salty, sugary, fatty, or greasy. I don’t even like my favorite pizza that I always thought was the standard by which all pizzas should be measured.

When I eat in a restaurant to break the monotony, I can taste such a difference in foods prepared in vegetable oil and from refined products. When I make brownies as one of my desserts (I only believe you have to eat 85% clean) the vegetable oil I have to add makes me sick.

So once your body starts to eat clean, bad foods become distasteful and your body is telling you it doesn’t like them. How about that for a switch?