I've always been keen on health foods, and as a Vegetarian with a possible dairy/egg/wheat intolerance I decided to give 'The Raw Food Diet' a try. Although I had heard of it before, I knew very little about the lifestyle promoted as "the consumption of uncooked, unprocessed, and often organic foods as a large percentage of the diet" (or so a Google search told me).
The description sounded appealing and, upon further research, I discovered that mainly eating raw foods improves your general health and wellbeing as well as aiding weight loss; the perfect combination.
First of all, I bought a Raw Food recipe book from Amazon. It was difficult to know which to choose, but I eventually decided on 'Raw Food Made Easy' by Jennifer Cornbleet. One of the first books of its kind, the recipes are quick to make and super-easy too. I liked it for several reasons - the recipes were for 1 or 2 people so no changing the quantities and you didn't need any fancy equipment either.
Another bonus was that most of the ingredients are widely available in the UK, so I then went to my local supermarket to pick up items for my store cupboard and groceries for the week (using the handy list at the front of the book as a guideline).
I'm one of those people who has to snack throughout the day (another good reason to do the diet), so the next stop was my favourite health food store Planet Organic to select some raw food goodies to enjoy. I bought just about one of everything to try!
Finally, I started the diet itself. This was perhaps the hardest step of all having been on many 'fad' diets in the past, phases that lasted a matter of a few weeks (or sometimes days). However this was something that I really wanted to stick to, and still do.
For those of you who are thinking of trying the diet out for yourself, good luck and let me know how it goes!
