I cut open a bunch of oranges to make juice this morning. One orange is NOT organic. Can you tell which one? 
Look at the difference in color! That is a major difference in how many nutrients you are getting! Not to mention the flavor! These are the same oranges from the same store. Same brand: juice oranges.
The benefits of going vegan and raw that I personally experienced over the years are:
Just to name a few!
Here is me cooked:
Here is me raw:
I discovered the raw food lifestyle (truly a LIFE style at that!) back in the summer of 2002. I was about 5 months pregnant with my daughter, Sonja. I was curious about this place I kept driving past called The Raw Truth Cafe & Juice Bar. Little did I know that walking in there would forever change my life! I went raw that day! Immediately! 100%!
I ended up staying raw for about a month after that and feeling better then I had felt in my entire life! I never gave up on the idea of being raw but for many reasons I ended up going back to what is termed SAD: the Standard American Diet.
After my daughter was born and things had settled down again I decided to go vegetarian. I was still eating eggs and cheese and milk, not that I drank milk by itself or anything- that was gross! But that didn't last very long and soon I was vegan. She must've been about 3 months old by then. The first thing I noticed was that suddenly Sonja's colic disappeared as well as the persistent yeast infections she kept having! Apparently the animal foods were affecting her through my breast milk. I now had a healthy normal baby!
I was reading a lot at the time about diet, health, nutrition and of course raw foods. I decided to go raw again! I was raw 3 months this time. I lost all my pregnancy weight and returned to my normal size, I was up over 210 pounds at the end there! I felt fantastic! My skin was clear and I had lots of energy! Life was good! At least it was after the initial cleansing crisis I had to deal with! I was detoxing all the dairy and ended up with a horrible double sinus infection so bad I couldn't function for like a week! I seriously though I was going to die! I ended up taking some liquid vegan probiotics and it went away by the next day.
Well... I ended up being tempted by cooked foods after three months of raw and I gave in to it.
Over the next few years I went raw off & on the longest being 6 months on. During those 6 months I ended up re-growing a chipped tooth I had had since I was a child! I was shocked! I didn't think that was possible! I ran around showing my family the day I noticed it! They were pretty shocked too! The only things I can attribute it to was the change in diet, raw foods have the most nutrients, and also to the toothsoap I had switched to! I had read somewhere that toothpaste was made from sugar, sand & chemicals and that most toothpaste had glycerin in them which coats the teeth for up to 12 hours and prevents them from re-mineralizing. So I switched to Perfect Prescription Toothsoap and also started brushing with a natural bristle toothbrush. So I suppose it was the combination of things that healed it.
Last year in fall of 2005 I took my first bite of meat in years. Salmon. On a salad. I told myself it was ok to have this one meal, it was a special occasion blah blah blah. Anyway... it set me off on a mission to eat all the things I had 'missed out' on for those years. I justified everything! Soon I was back to eating fast food even! I gained back so much weight over the next year that I was the biggest I had ever been in my life. Bigger then when I was 9 months pregnant!!! I stopped looking at the scale after it hit 230lbs. It was too depressing and that only caused me to eat more from the stress. I started feeling really bad right away but it just kept getting worse. Soon I was spending a big part of my time online at the computer because I was too sick to go out in public much. I lived in a constant state of anxiety and had panic attacks everyday. My skin looked awful and I was HUGE! I felt greasy. I got sick with a cold for the first time since I had gone vegan years ago. That was a big wake up call for me. My sinuses would bother me off & on as well. I had a sore throat and an earache too. It was getting ridiculous and I had to do something! This was not me! The person I saw in the mirror looked nothing like me at all. What had I become? Why did I do this to myself?
I tried to go raw during that year a bunch of times. I would start another food journal on my Empowered Eating board and things would look good for a minute. Then I would give in to temptation or not be able to get to the store and buy raw foods. Or I would buy some and they just didn’t look like food to me. I just couldn’t seem to commit to eating better.
I prayed and visualized what I intended for myself and just kept trying to be raw whenever I felt I could. I started listening to RawVeganRadio and came across an episode that just totally clicked for me: Dr. Douglas Graham (Episode 21). What he said clicked big time for me! He talked about how eating fruit for breakfast, fruit for lunch and fruit before dinner of greens with some nuts & seeds eliminates cravings & that back & forth stuff! Which is exactly what I had been going through! The cravings, the back & forth stuff! I tried it that day and here I am a couple weeks later all raw and enjoying it! No cravings! I’m not even doing it perfectly! I sure don’t eat enough fruit yet or even at all on some days! I always loved the greens & fats. I’m positive that’s why I gained on raw in the past before I gave up and went back to SAD. When you stop and think about it humans are really designed to eat mostly fruits. Look at our hands. Fruit was the key.
