Everyone that I’ve talked too that’s tried sticking to a raw, and living foods diet has stopped because they didn’t like being cold all the time. It’s extremely discouraging when your hands feel like ice and you can’t wiggle your toes for fear that they’ll break off! I’ve found myself getting cold just trying to stay raw until dinner. That’s right, just a few hours of detox leaves me searching for answers on … Google!
That’s right. I queried “How to stay warm eating raw foods” to see if I could find some help. Knowing that there are some foods that provide more of a cooling affect on the body and others that give off a heating sensation, it must be that I’m consuming too many cooling foods that has thrown me out of balance.
Even though the people I’ve talked to believe that the only way to stay warm is to eat some cooked foods, I have to say that there is precedent for staying warm while staying raw. About nine months ago, I came across the following video of Matt Monarch where he interviewed a couple outside in cold weather. He dressed lightly compared to the people he interviewed and he didn’t turn blue!
Note that this video was posted in November and there are no leaves on the trees. The episode is also called “Who Says Raw Foodists Can’t Handle the Cold???” He makes his comment 2:45 into the video where he asks the people that he’s interviewing what temperature it is. They say it’s in the 40’s. Matt’s comment is that he’s not cold.
I’m sure the video doesn’t show ALL the truth, but I have no reason to believe otherwise. I would seem that he’s found some way to stay warm in just a t-shirt and light pants.
Yet, I’m not raw and I’m sure that I haven’t cleaned out all the toxins from my body. Maybe that’s way I’m … cold. Lol.
I figure that there might be something else to it. Maybe it’s the type of foods that I’m eating that’s causing a cooling affect rather than a warming affect on my body.
So, now back to the Google query. One of the first articles that I read (after the query) was titled Body Warmth on Raw Foods and it’s on the Raw Living Food Success website. The article is in response to someone complaining about getting cold when eating raw foods. Here is a bit of it:
CORIN’S RESPONSE:
In the first few years raw, I too used to get cold. This is common when you are detoxing and cleansing, and is mostly a circulation/lymph issue. Your body will be detoxing for the first year as the blood thickens and the circulation slows, and there is an increased flow of blood to the internal organs that are finally getting a chance to try and heal. My experience now though is that I get colder when I eat a cooked soup or steamed vegetables because it somehow makes my body more sensitive to cold. Amazingly, by eating all live “cold” food, and after being balanced with many years with the lifestyle as well, I am much less sensitive to extremes in weather and adapt faster than I ever did as a cooked-foodist. I feel like a superhero who can withstand any temperature now, and my fitness abilities have also gone way above and beyond what they used to be. I remember always being cold as a cooked-foodist, as many women often are. Now though it is the opposite, I am either on the warm side or totally comfortable most of the time, even in cold climates. I love it!
I find it truly amazing that she states something similar to Matt. And, I have to admit, the logic behind it does make sense. That is, the slow moving lymphatic system has to clean out. If it’s full of half digested proteins or broken sticky molecules, it may take a long time to drain. At the same time, if the body is so toxic that it has wrapped everything in fat molecules, all those fats will need to find their way out and, in the process of doing that, the toxins that they encapsulated will run their full cycle as they leave the body.
In the article, Corin goes on to say:
If you are still having a problem in the heart of winter in a cold climate, then what you are lacking is your Omega Fatty Acids and other healthy fats.
…
You need to get David Wolfe’s Sunfood Diet Success System, and study his Sunfood Triangle. In it, you will learn that your Cholorophyll:Sugar:Fat ratio needs to be around 20:40:40 if you are eating to warm the body. Fats and Potassium rich foods warm the system, which is why you crave fish/flesh because it is a high potassium, high fat food. More heat is produced upon the breakdown of fats then with the break down of carbohydrates, but there are many fruits that are very rich in potassium. Nuts and seeds like macadamias and sunflower seeds are both rich in fat and potassium! The warming, high-potassium fruits include avocados, dates, durians, persimmons with seeds, prunes, pumkin, raisins with seeds, and sun dried apricots.
Finally, sulfur-residue foods warm the body. These include cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, garlic, onion, and durian fruit. David says that by eating a meal rich in sulfur, potassium, and fat, you will notice a heating reaction within 45 minutes, and will become greater as you become more purified on the diet.
So, it’s a Chlorophyll – Sugar – Fat ratio that needs to be looked at…. hmmm…
I figured that before really doing anything else, I’d take a couple of the food sources that she mentioned, add them to my diet and see if I could keep from getting cold. This is where the incentive for the Red Bell Pepper Hummus recipe that I posted the other day came from. It had a mildly warming affect on my afternoon, but I’m looking for something a little hotter!
Thus, I poked around a bit more on her site to see what she had to say about fats. As it turned out, she’d got an article titled Choosing Healthy Fats. Her list of Healthy fats includes:
List for Choosing Healthy Fats
• Avocados
• Raw Olives
• Cacao Butter
• Coconut Butter
• Soaked Nuts
• Soaked Seeds: Pumpkin, Sunflower, Apricot Kernels, Flax, Chia, Hemp, and Sesame.
• Virgin Olive Oil
• Tea Oil from China
• Coconuts
• Raw Extra Virgin Coconut Oil
• Raw Extra Virgin Palm Oil
• Hemp Seed Oil
• Flax Oil
• Borage Oil
• Evening Primose Oil
• Black Currant Oil
• Any Raw, truly cold-pressed Vegetable/Seed/Nut Oil
• Virgin Grape Seed Oil
• Vpure Omega 3 Vegan DHA from algae
I’ve bolded the items that went into the Red Bell Pepper Hummus. Cacao butter is also pretty amazing, but simply too expensive to live on. Soaked nuts are ok, but they generally don’t rock my boat.
Did a quick Google search for “Plant foods rich in Omega 3 fatty acids” and found the following:
• Canola oil
• English walnuts
• Flax oil*
• Flax seed (ground)*
• Hemp beverages (hemp “milk”)
• Hemp oil*
• Hemp seed / hemp nut (ground)*
• Olive oil
• Leafy green vegetables (small amounts, but a good omega-3 to omega-6 ratio)
• Pumpkin seeds
• Soybeans
• Soybean oil
• Supplements
The two things that look interesting to me that I haven’t really done much with are Hemp and Flax seeds.
The experiment:
In an effort to stay warm, I’m going to eat more fats from the lists above. This last weekend, when shopping at Costco, I picked up a bag of ground flax seed. I’m going to be making dehydrated crackers before too long. I’ve also picked up more oils – coconut and olive. I’m going to make sure I get a couple tablespoons a day. If I get ambitious, I might even try some chia seeds.
Another thing that I found was that spicy herbs help give the sensation of warmth. Ginger is in that list. Turns out that these roots are not all that expensive. I picked one up the other day and started adding it to my evening vegetable juice. That juice has been something like: 6 large carrots, 1 med beet, 2 small apples, ½ inch ginger and a small slice of kohlrabi.
I have to say that it really does give the sensation of warmth – for a while. It doesn’t last a long time. But, that’s ok, for a little is usually all I need to get me over the hump of the chill.
Oh, I also found a great lunch treat that leaves me warm all afternoon – Raw Coconut Cream Pie! I’ve posted that one before. You can find it here (Raw Coconut Cream Pie). I’ve now started making this one in a cheese cake mold so as to be able to make it with more filling. The filling is where the fat is. I took an extra large slice today and found that it really did last me hours! When I came home at dinner time, I wasn’t starving and, well, I wasn’t cold!
I also bought David Wolf’s book The Sunfood Diet Success System and expect it here within a week. I’m going to figure out the details to this 20:40:40 diet and see if I can give it a real go.
All the while, I’m going to monitor my sensation of being cold. The results, I’ll blog about for everyone to see!
Eat healthy and stay warm!
