My Vegan Journey
It has to be said that the only reason I became a vegan was because of my interest in Personal Development.
As just a regular guy eating what I considered to be a healthy diet: eggs, fish, a bit of meat, making homemade juice, limiting my intake of fried foods, I thought I was doing pretty well on the health front.
However, there is one thing that has always bugged me. I never really had bad acne as a teenager, but I continued to get spots in my 20s and I was still getting them in my 30s. Surely it was time to grow out of them. But it never seemed to happen.
Food is Medicine
Then I came across a forum on the internet, I can't even remember which one now. The premise was that eating raw foods could remedy all kinds of ailments. So I decided I had to find out more about how food could be considered as medicine by many and how a person could eat their way to better personally engineered health.
What I liked about this "raw food" idea was that it seemed to advocate juicing. This is something I've been doing for a while now and drinking a daily juice was (and still is) part of my routine. So I started thinking that a raw food diet was just an extension of something I was doing already.
Better skin was just one of the things that I was hoping to achieve. I also had high hopes that I'd get more energy and be able to become more athletic. Fortunately I have, but this has not all been down to the initial type of raw foods that I discovered.
It turns out that my initial discovery was what is known as "gourmet raw". This type of diet uses a dehydrator instead of an oven and while technically the foods eaten are raw, there was still going to be lots of time spent in the kitchen.
Dehydrator
A dehydrator is simply a hot box with a hot air fan that blows gently over the foods you "cook". But the temperature control allows us to set a low temperature of 104°F. Cooking at or below this temperature is said to keep the naturally occuring enzymes in the food alive which is better for us. The funny thing is that even though I now own a dehydrator, I rarely use it.
Instead, what I'm focussing on with regards to my vegan diet is eating high carbohydrate foods like bananas, dates, potatoes, yams and rice. I get my vitamins and minerals from juicing making things like apple, carrot, celery, spinach and ginger juice.
This is what's known as a green juice (because of the color), which comes in this case from the spinach. Reading a juicer buying guide will introduce you to the different styles of juicer currently on the market. If you want to make a green juice then you should research masticating juicers.
Vegan is Easier than Many Believe
It is surprisingly easy to eat a vegan diet. Being prepared is fundamental and this is accepted in many thought-based discussion articles on the topic.
Buying at least 10-20 bananas a day means I always have a stock of aged, ripe bananas that are ready for eating. Currently my diet isn't 100% raw vegan but it's definitely healthier than at this stage last year. Since I've started to eat this way, I've definitely grown as a person and this personal development of mine definitely is noticed by other people.
If you grew up in North America or Europe, no doubt you think that eating meat is normal. That's what I used to think. But when I started to investigate how people in other parts of the world eat, consuming such large amounts of meat and animal products started to look like the exception rather than the rule.