Prep techniques that ease your raw transition!

 Hey everyone! Back again with more strategies for making your raw transition easy, comfortable and fun!

If you’ve read my article about Enzymes and my page on Why Raw, then you know that one of the most awesome benefits about raw foods is that they ease the burden on our digestive system and our enzyme pool. By making life easier for our digestive system we increase the amount of energy our body has to do other things from healing to having fun!

 This is awesome, but for a lot of us our body may need a lil’ help getting back in shape for breaking down fiberous eats after years of cooked food.  Have you noticed that you or people you know have that experience when they jump on the healthy eating bandwagon and hit the salads hardcore that they can often feel bloated, gassy and just blah and you’ll usually hear them say things like “Health food just doesn’t agree with me.” ?….Well they’re partially right.  Their bodies certainly want those healthy eats, but they may be suffering from a lack of Hydrochloric acids and healthy sodiums that our body uses to break down the tough fibers in some raw foods…especially greens!

 This lil’ issue can often discourage many from following through with adding more fresh foods to their life, so I want to share what this is all about and some of the foods that can get your tummy pumped up for breaking down some raw goodness!

1~ Blending!  One of my favorites! This easy raw food prep technique turns tough raw foods (such as greens) into tasty and outrageously healthy green smoothies, blended soups, and tasty dessert smoothies.  Blending makes the texture of some foods more palatable and allows your body to access nutrients that may have taken quite a while to chew out of the. Blended food also gives your body chance to gradually increase it’s stores of digestive acids as it practices on these lightweight pre-broken down goodies!  I found this particualarly true when I began drinking green smoothies on a regular basis.  Prior to rockin’ the green smoothies, I maybe ate salad once a week as part of my raw transitional diet (and certainly didn’t crave it!) , but after about a month of drinking about 32oz of green smoothie a day, I found myself eating the greens out of the colander before I could even get them in the blender!  I was originally bewildered by the claims of long term raw foodies that they adored greens, but I now find myself with the same “affliction”!  I want to note here that my first batches of green smoothies had much more fruit then greens, but the number of greens quickly went up!  The point is..start with what feels right to you!  This way you’ll be more likely to want to follow through with your raw adventure!

Soaking nuts and seeds~ Many nuts and seeds (with the exception of hemp seeds) contain enzyme inhibitors to prevent premature sprouting in their natural habitat and potentially to prevent animals from fully digesting them (in hopes that they will later be deposited elsewhere ..complete with free fertilizer!).  These enzyme inhibitors can also make them not so easy on our stomachs.  Amanda and myself experienced a bad case of bloating after preparing a raw nut based pate recipe we seen online that used unsoaked nuts….from then on we started soaking our nuts!  I have recomended soak times for nuts and seeds in my ebook “Gettin’ Raw with Rawdawg Rory” but, I’ll break down a bit of the basics here.  Nuts with a lot of tannic acid and taste a bit bitter such as almonds, walnuts and pecans should be soaked for about 6-12 hours and then rinsed off before using and seeds such as pumpkin and sunflower can be soaked as lil’ as 2-6 hours.  This will leave your raw nuts and seeds more biologically active, cleaner, easier to digest and tastier!

3~ Marinating…oh yes!  I loooove marinated veggies!  Using salty or acidic marinades we can create numerous tasty dishes, such as softened veggies for wraps, mock stir fries, and raw dishes that have that same wonderful texture as if they’ve been cooked!  This not only makes them more tasty, but waaay more digestible!  I like to shred carrots with a julienne peeler and toss them with a lil’ salt and garlic powder, allow them to soften, and toss this tasty shredded carrot filling in a romaine leaf wrap and dip ‘em in a mock peanut sauce!  Shredding and massaging tough greens such as kale with lemon juice and a lil’ salt can transform it inton a delicious salad base!  You’d be surprised at how many veggies that were tough to eat raw and un-prepped can easily become something that’ll have  you lookin’ forward to your raw dinner!

4~ Lastly, but not leastly… juicing!  I saved juicing for last as it’s pretty much a no-brainer. Juices are a super digestible and totally easy way to give your body a blast of nutrients, phytochemicals and minerals.  Depending on your juicer and or juicing technique, the finished drinks will have lil’ or no fiber and your body has lil’ or no work digesting it.  This is awesome, but I would highly reccomend that you are bringing in fiber in a blended form (especially green smoothies!) as these pre-broken down fibers are needed to carry out the toxins and wastes that your body is going to be releasing as it uses those awesome raw goodies to do some house cleaning!

 So rememember if some raw foods don’t seem to agree with you, then consider these prep techniques to allow your body the training time it needs to work up to it’s full digestive strength!  As a bonus these prep techniques also make the nutrients in your awesome raw eats more absorbable…so you get more out of your food!  There’ll be more to come about particular raw foods that help the transitioning process be super smooth…so see ya then! :0)