Raw as I wanna be

So I have some friends who have been eating RAW for about a year now. They have both lost a lot of weight. Neither were heavy before but they look and feel great. Lauri decided to do kind of a support group so once a month she invites us to her house to share ideas and recipes. The first night was "Green smoothie night" You got it. We all tried green smoothies.

You start with a couple of large handfulls of spinace, chard, kale, romaine or leaf lettuce. I usually use spinach. Pour about a cup of water in the blender with it and add whatever raw fruits and vegetables you like. Since I have a LOT of frozen peaches from our tree I always use about a cup of frozen peaches and maybe half a frozen banana. The best flavor is to add the juice from one lemon and a little packet of Sun Crystals:

It's down below, it just wont move. Grrr Anyway that's like a spinach lemonade. Hahaha

It has the consistency of SLUDGE! Yum!

Not a bad way to start a day although you need to chew to blend with your saliva. I asked if you could just spit in it. I don't think the ladies liked my idea.

The next month we had a salad night with raw dressings. Y'all get salads. Nothing special but I learned to do a chopped salad with my ingredients chopped small. Its tasty and colorful. In this salad I have romaine, kale, spinach, cauliflower (one of my favorite vegies), tomato, mushrooms and yellow pepper. A colorful pepper makes the salad look festive and adds so much flavor. Then I top it off with, raw dressing? Heck NO! I'm as raw as I wanna be! I have discovered Wish Bone Olive Oil Vinegrette. It has 60 calories per serving which is half or less of a ranch or cream dressing. I'm sure I usually end up with 2 servings but YUM!

Now if you really want to increase your raw food intake try pulse. It's supposed to be in the Bible or something but you go to the health food store and get a plastic screen to go on your wide mouth canning jar. It's worth about 50 cents but costs $5.00. You have to use raw seeds and nuts so they sprout. I use sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, buckwheat choats and a little flax seed. I was told to use almonds too but They swell so big and don't distribute well so I do the sprouts and chop the almonds and add it in at the end. I put this on salad and in yogurt. By the way, these ladies are completely down on dairy but I am as raw as I wanna be!
Ahhh, here is that stubborn picture of Sun Crystals, it's a natural sweetener made from stevia. It's super sweet.
Last week we had a get together for raw desserts. Ya know, there is a limit to how raw I wanna be. The facebook group and e-mail group is called "rawaswewannabe" Thus, my constant reference/tirade. I go to get some healthy food ideas and I have come away with good ideas every time but I'm not going 100% on this. I disagree with a few of the ideas and I have not seen any of the references backed by a doctor so it's just a lot of peoples opinions but there is some good information. I'm eating less fried food and cutting down on sugar. I got a new knife just for cutting my vegetables and I enjoy apples regularly and salads all the time now.
The moral of this blog is try it!
Go chew some sludge today!