Hey yall,
About a month ago, I discovered how healing raw vegetables are. I had been eating a whole-food plant-based diet for years, but all my food was cooked. When I ate completely raw, I woke up the very next day with so much energy!
I then learned a lot about how monkeys have nearly identical gut anatomy to humans and decided to eat almost all of my food raw.
The problem with that was that raw foods required a lot of nuts to be added to my diet (for calories), and nuts are expensive. Also, raw vegetables are bulky. I’m a pretty small person, and it was difficult to fit a couple thousand calories of raw foods in my stomach everyday.
After discovering these problems and learning more about the differences in monkey vs. human gut anatomy, I backed off the raw foods a little and added starches in instead.
Starches (like potatoes and rice) are cheap and calorie-dense (kind of). I can eat 400 calories of starch and feel comfortably full, but a 400-calorie salad (with a nut-based dressing) stretches my stomach and gives me a massive stomach ache.
After experimenting and tweaking, I came up with Monkey Diet 2.0!
These seem like some strict guidelines, but basically, eat almost exclusively whole plant foods, and eat as many raw veggies as possible.
I like to begin my day with a huge smoothie. It’s mostly berries, greens, and oats with some avocado and a handful of seeds thrown in. I also throw in anything that I have leftover or was on sale at the store. Then I eat a salad with dinner. The rest of the day, I eat whatever sounds good.
I will say, I probably only eat about 40-50% of raw foods, even though my diet chart says to eat 60% raw. Again, I’m such a petite person that it was difficult for me to eat so much raw food. If you can eat 60% (or even more) of your food raw, then go for it. However, if you just can’t eat so much raw food, eat as much as you can, and don’t worry about it. Stress/worry is awful. Laughter truly is the best medicine.
Frugal Treehugger 