The Raw Food Detox Diet: The Five-Step Plan for Vibrant Health and Maximum Weight Loss

The Raw Food Detox Diet: The Five-Step Plan for Vibrant Health and Maximum Weight Loss | Natalia Rose | Great information!

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The Raw Food Detox...

	The Raw Food Detox Diet: The Five-Step Plan for Vibrant Health and Maximum Weight Loss Natalia Rose Collins Living, 2007 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 142 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Refreshing Common Sense

I really enjoyed this book even though a lot of it was reiterating things I've always known - fresh vegetables and fruits are healthy for you, and make you feel amazing. However, it was very smart of the author to include meals that help you progress to eating more raw meals gradually, since cold turkey diets set people up for failure so often! I thought it was very helpful the way the digestive process was described, and it was very readable. I'm definitely recommending this read to some of my friends!

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I love this book! It's my new Bible for health and healing. I am not new to healthy eating, but this just ramped it up a notch.

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A Mix of Good and Bad Advice

This book has a really unusual mix of advice - some good, some bad - so if you decide to buy it, read it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The author really shines in advising you how to make the transition to a more or entirely raw food lifestyle, and her recipes are tailored to raw food for busy people. Because of this, they place little emphasis on sprouting and dehydrating. A common frustration for people trying to get into raw food is leafing through their raw "cook" book for a recipe for dinner, only to find that they needed to sprout something 3 days ago, or dehydrate something for 12 - 24 hours in a dehydrator - not useful if it's 7PM and you're hungry NOW. If you continue to pursue a raw food lifestyle, you'll learn to adapt to this mode of food preparation, but at first it can be a real barrier. These recipes focus on quick preparations, and so sidestep these common pitfalls.

The author is not so great at explaining the detoxification process, and she makes some pretty dramatic claims (implicitly and explicitly) without any citations to back them up. She appears to be a believer in the idea that mucoid plaque builds up in the intestines, and that soy is poison; however she doesn't explain how she arrives at these conclusions, and she doesn't point the reader to any source to find out more. Consequently as a health guide, I find those claims dubious at best.

Her recommendations for monthly colonics and/or regular enemas strike me as reckless and quite possibly antagonistic to the process of truly detoxifying your body. Improperly administered colonics and enemas can introduce foreign bacteria and toxins directly into your colon, and make you sick. If you have any disorders of the intestinal tract, such as diverticulitis, colitis, ileitis, crohn's disease, ibs, or intestinal permeability ("leaky gut") you will definitely want to talk to your physician before starting any type of colon therapy. If you don't suffer from any such ailments, consider whether your money might be better invested in a really good juicer or a vitamix! ;) Even the food combination rules are questionable at best, so read them with a healthy dose of skepticism.

There are other examples of just plain bad advice in the text. The author suggests that you won't need to be concerned about hydration or sunscreen on a raw food diet, for example. If you're trying to detoxify your system, you would do well to drink plenty of water and use sunscreen. Proper hydration will help you eliminate toxins and help you regulate your appetite, and since your skin is your body's largest eliminative organ, you should protect it! An EXCELLENT guide to the detoxification process is "Internal Cleansing" by Linda Berry. It describes sources of toxicity, and provides a very holistic approach to eliminating toxins from your food, environment and body.

If you think you may be heading toward an eating disorder (anorexia/bulimia), or if you already have one, you'd do well to consult with a counselor or medical practitioner before making a switch to ANY structured eating plan, since it's possible to go overboard with the food rules and use them as an excuse to deprive yourself of nutrition. Especially if your body has already been compromised by malnutrition and/or abuse of laxatives, work with a nutritionist, naturopath or physician who is familiar with eating disorders and can help you develop a healthy and lasting lifestyle change.

If you want to make a lasting change to any aspect of your life, take your time, be gentle with yourself, focus on the process, and pay attention to triggers that cause you to lapse back into unwanted behavior patterns. You'll also want to pay careful attention if you find yourself getting too fixated or rigid with your diet. This book does a good job of gently guiding you through the behavior change as long as you're careful to avoid some of the bad advice served up along the way.

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