As part of an effort to change my life through healthy eating, I decided to do a raw cleanse. I think cleanses are great, despite there being many naysayers toward them. I’m getting married in just a couple of weeks, and I’m changing jobs, and both of those things are huge stressors in life. While I expect a little bit of mental and emotional stress, I wanted to eliminate – or at least try to reduce – the stress symptoms from my body.

To do that, it has to be strong, healthy, and balanced. I have done a lot of research into healthy eating and nutrition (it’s actually kind of a research obsession of mine), and one thing that I believe in but have never tried was a raw food diet.

The notion of raw food diets interest me, so I signed up for the Young and Raw 21 day raw food reset, after hearing a lot about Young and Raw from various people around me.

I’m in the middle of the cleanse right now, so I can’t really comment on the outcomes until it’s over, but I’m not so sure that raw food diets are sustainable for the average North American.

What is a Raw Food Diet?

Raw food diets are simple, and just as they sound. They eliminate all processed and cooked foods, so you are only eating raw, natural food.

Raw food diets are generally pretty vegan friendly as well, because you can’t eat meat, fish, or many animal products without cooking it. The cleanse that I did has no animal products in it at all except for honey.

Instead of oatmeal or bacon and eggs in the morning, raw foodies eat smoothies and drink vegetable juice. Instead of cooking beans and legumes, raw foodies sprout them.

Why raw food? Well, it’s not just for fun. Cooking food above a certain temperature (many sources will cite 115 degrees) can ruin some of the nutrients and enzymes in your food. As a nation, we are already pretty nutritionally deficient so we don’t need any less!

Raw food diets encourage a high volume fruit, vegetable, and seeds diet, and luckily, all of those things are packed with vitamins and minerals.

Raw food diets are often credited for curing some minor diseases, clearing acne, restoring youthfulness, energy, and brain clarity. All good stuff.

Impracticalities of a Raw Food Diet

Despite all of these benefits, I’m not sure that it is practical for most people in the developed world to consider staying on a raw food diet for an extended period of time. Heck, for me it’s been difficult enough for just a week!

There are a few things that make it unsustainable:

The Prep Time

Raw food really doesn’t keep for very long, so you can’t make all of your salads and juices ahead for the week like you can with cooked food. No, each and every salad has to be made individually. You have to wash and dry that complicated juicer every single time you need a juice.

This has probably been the most painful thing for me to adjust to.

Being Social

I think I could be a raw foodie during the day, almost every day (except when travelling), because it’s easy enough to just bring a big, juicy salad for lunch, and have a smoothie in the morning, and fruit and juice as a snack. I mean, it’s a lot of prep, but it’s doable, and totally worth it. I could probably even swing a few raw dinners a week! But it all falls to pieces when I’m invited for a BBQ or my fiancé wants to take me for dinner or somebody’s birthday happens and there’s a dinner for them.

I can’t fathom opting out of all social gatherings that happen around dinnertime, nor could I imagine completely, 100% giving up the restaurant junk food.

The Cost

Raw food diets are expensive! Fresh produce is quite costly to begin with and you need a large volume of it for a week or month of eating raw. Rice is nice and cheap, but you can’t eat it on a raw food diet, and there is no real cheap equivalent except for maybe bananas.

 

I enjoy eating raw, natural, healthy food (even natural healthy food that isn’t raw is fine by me), so I will sustain that for hopefully my entire life, but for those three reasons I don’t think I’d be able to sustain a raw food diet for longer than the cleanse.