Russell James : Recipes for Raw food
The Top 10 Mistakes
Trying to measure everything in recipes
This is a really practical tip and absolutely comes from my experience as a professional chef.
I’ve found people are so worried about getting things right, in terms of making food that they literally paralyse themselves either from getting started at all or from trying something new. Without trying anything new you’ll get bored very quickly and the whole raw food thing will lose its appeal very quickly, leaving you justifying your reasons (to yourself) for not being able to do it.
Start slowly and move steadily here. It’s OK to use raw food recipes to start, when you’re just starting out, making something new, or wanting to impress friends with something a little more decadent. But please don’t think you have to follow the recipes day to day, measuring everything out perfectly.
It’s a good way to learn but not a good way to live.
Start by throwing in the salt pinch-by-pinch, tasting as you go. Then do the same with things like lemon juice and herbs and spices. You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll build up an ‘instinct’ of how much salt you need in a dish, or how much spice, lemon juice, olive oil etc. you need.
Trying to copy the latest ‘guru’
We’re all different, there’s no one right way and trying to follow everything one particular ‘guru’ tells to the exclusion of everything else may mean that you miss out on an important message and information someone else has to share.
Approaching with a dogmatic attitude
It’s very easy to get ‘high and mighty’ when you first start eating raw food.
There’s a very successful organisation that used to have the slogan, “cooked food is poison”. They even used to have a book called How To Win An Argument With A Cooked Food Eater (I forget the exact wording in the title but it was very similar to this). If you’ve been into raw food for a while you’ll know the company I’m talking about.
I’m glad to say things have moved on now and that company and everyone involved with it is doing very well within a more tolerant mindset.
How do I know they had that book? Because immediately I saw the title I wanted to buy it. I was so disappointed to find that they weren’t printing and selling it anymore; I just wanted to verbally match the people that were giving me such a hard time at work and in my every day personal life.
I wanted to be RIGHT all the time and I wanted them to see how much better I was because I had this whole thing sorted out. Luckily that didn’t last too long and I quickly realised that there has to be massive acceptance of everyone and everything for me to be able to grow.
Closing yourself off from life & friends
Sometimes it feels like you’re the only person into raw food. Aside from people you’re friends with online (what would our world do without the internet?!!) it can be a very lonely place if you shut yourself off from your friends, family and life in general.
It’s a natural thing to want to be just, “left alone” sometimes because you’ve had it with all the questions whilst you eat(see my point about other people’s insecurities below).
I want to tell you’ve I’ve been there and I know that sometimes it’s important to honour those feelings and act on them.
But it’s also important that you surround yourself with loving people, even if their actions and words towards your lifestyle don’t always feel loving.
You can still be friends with someone who doesn’t want to eat grass with you J
Of course, if someone is consistently rude, derogatory and negative there’s going to have to be some decisions made about whether that person stays in your life or not. But what I’ve found is that even people that seemed rude to begin with ended up being very complimentary about my dedication to what I believe in, and they actually ended up getting inspired themselves.
Trying to be 100% too early
I’ve definitely heard advice being given to go 100% overnight because it’s the easiest way to do things. The thinking is that if you change everything massively right from the start you’ll take away any temptation that leads to a slippery slope.
It needs to be said that this ideal of 100% raw that so many people have in their heads as the hold grail, so to speak, is not actually a place where even the most seasoned raw foodists are. There’s absolutely no need to be 100% raw ALL the time in my opinion, if it’s hurting you emotionally to be there. What I mean is if 100% raw feels like deprivation for you you’re only delaying the inevitable slip, which leads to self-loathing and misery (see my next point).
For example, I’ve never said I don’t drink alcohol, but it just happens that on a day to day basis for weeks or even months at a time I just don’t drink alcohol. I don’t think about it, I don’t miss it, and I believe it’s because I’ve never told myself I can’t have it.
Being really open to the fact that you can have cooked food whenever you like, especially when starting out, may just pave the way to not ever really feeling like you want it anyway.
Giving yourself a hard time for ‘falling off the wagon’
I often say that raw food isn’t a diet, it’s a lifetsyle. The key word in there is ‘life’.
This is for life (or it will be once you experience how amazing you feel) so there’s no diet to fall off of.
Always remember that you’re only ever one meal away from being a healthy eater. That means you’re only ever one meal away form being into raw food.
The stress caused by giving yourself a hard time for eating something that’s, “not allowed” is far worse for your health than the actual food is. No matter what you just ate, raw food or not raw food, enjoy it and move on.
Spending lots of money of equipment that never gets used
This one is pretty self-explanatory and is linked closely to the next point.
Buying all the equipment in the world doesn’t make you a good raw fooder. Most raw people I know eat very simply, from day to day, make punctuating that with the occasional recreational raw food dish that might require some extra equipment.
Having lots of expensive equipment sitting out on your counter, or even worse in your cupboard, will only lead to feelings of disappointment and negativity towards your self and raw food ingeneral.
Thinking that you can’t do it because you don’t have that one piece of equipment
We’ve all done it, I’m sure. We have a story we tell ourselves in our heads. It’s the story of why we can’t go to the gym today; we haven’t got a clean towel for the shower, we haven’t got the right change for the car park, we haven’t got the perfect t-shirt to workout in as it’s being washed or it’s still dirty form last time, and it’s the only t-shirt that we can possibly work out in.
Or my personal favourite; at the point when the alarm goes off in the morning we don’t actually need to get out of bed for when we set the alarm, as we only really 13 minutes to get ready and scramble into work, not the hour we planned the night before. We know that because we did it yesterday. In fact, what were we ever thinking by setting the alarm that early? We DESERVE to stay in bed longer this morning and if we have breakfast on the way to work we can have an EXTRA 2 minutes 36 on top of the new wakeup time we just negotiated with ourselves.
I only know this because I notice these conversations happening all the time with myself. It’s s easy to let myself off the hook and not do what I’d planned to do.
In the same way it’s so easy to tell yourself the story that you can’t possibly do raw food without all the equipment. It’s so easy to say that without that dehydrator you might as well not bother. The slightly more subtle and refined version of this one is that you could do so much better if you DID have that Vita-mix, leaving you in that horrible halfway Raw Food house of convincing yourself you’re trying but you just can’t do it as well as you think you COULD.
My best advice here (and is advice I remind myself of regularly) is that I can absolutely do the best I can with what I have. I can move towards a better rawfood situation, in any area of my life, but for now, with what I’ve got I can make a massive difference and that’s just perfect.