The Fresh Network Blog

Sarah's "Extreme Green" Challenge

I have an announcement to make. I am about to embark on a nutritional challenge that I feel in my bones will be life-changing.

I am about to go WAY outside my comfort zone around eating healthily, and commit to staying there for at least a month.

But first, a confession.

I'm not proud to admit this and it's not clever, but...

I am a REAL baby when it comes to consuming anything dark green.

Sure, I can eat a mountainous spinach salad as long as it’s liberally adorned with guacamole or something similarly creamy and highly seasoned. I've long been adding a token handful of greens to my staple cucumber-celery juices. Thanks to these virtuous nods to the importance of mineral-rich foliage in the diet, I used to think I had the greens base fully covered.

But I recently discovered that what I considered to be copious quantities of greens was far from that. I first wrote about this topic here (it’s near the bottom of the entry), and ever since then the idea of experimenting with extreme amounts of green has been in the back of my mind. 

It all started when I was introduced to the work of the amazing David Rainoshek, promoter of the concept of juice feasting, and one of the world’s leading authorities on that and other super-nutrition-related subjects. David advises juice feasters to consume at least 2lb of leafy green vegetables each day.

That’s 900g, folks!

Bags of green leafies that you buy in the supermarket or grocery store are generally around 100g-200g. My “mountainous” spinach salads? Anything from 100g-150g. And that, bar the odd sprinkling of herbs here and there, would be it for the day.

Since I heard about this I have upped the green ante, but I am still getting nowhere near David's target on a daily basis. And I can't help wondering how different it would feel to reach it consistently. So....for the next 30 days I will be experiencing life on extreme amounts of green, by committing to meeting David's target every day (or at least having a darn good shot at it and getting there most of the time!)

So, to put this in context, you know the ginormous bags of spinach they sell at your local store? They're probably around 200g, so I'll be consuming the equivalent of 4.5 of those every day.

To do this will be to leave my comfort zone far behind.   

Like most raw food fans I habitually go heavy on the sugar and fat and light on the dark greens.

But my energy levels have been heading south in recent months, together with my concentration, plus I've been suffering from killer cravings. I can identify reasons for all of this, which I will go into in a later post, but for now, the point is: this is a GREAT time to experiment with the super-green, super-nutrient-rich way of eating.

I'm back - with my Raw Guide to Bali

Sarah here. As some of you have noticed, this blog has been dormant for a while. Rather a long while. I have had emails enquiring as to whether I am still alive, and if I am, whether I have decided to opt for a life of leisure. The answer to both questions is yes, but the latter was, sadly, over all too quickly ; )

If you are wondering why this post comes accompanied with a photo of a baby monkey, it's because I recently returned from three weeks in blissful Bali (and a day either side in skyscrapered Singapore). Sometimes a holiday's gotta be a holiday, so I left my laptop behind and re-charged my chi with 21 days of complete R&R. And let me tell you, after a particularly mad, manic and multi-tasking start to 2008, I slept for England.

But enough about England.

Bali: I fell in love with this Indonesion island the first time I visited it, in the year 2000. This latest visit was my third and, wonderful as it was from start to finish, I was in agreement with my five-year old son about the absolute highlight: feeding bananas to the impossibly cute wild macaques (a Balinese breed of monkey) in the Monkey Forest Sanctuary. If there ever was a real-life enchanted forest, this is it, as nestling among the trees and creepers is a lost city of ancient temple ruins. 

Bali... I celebrated my birthday at a beachside restaurant that was all candles, crashing waves and chilled music. No, it doesn't get much better than that. 

But is Bali a good place to go if you want a 'raw holiday'? Well, fresh juice is fairly widely available in restaurants and cafes (much more so than in the UK), within two minutes of where I was staying was a juice and smoothie bar (mostly raw), and across the road from it were two markets selling durian. Young coconuts (you drink the refreshing, nutrient-rich water and then scoop out the flesh) are widely available in swanky hotel bars and humble beach shacks alike.

Our location turned out to be about as ideal as it gets for the raw food fan, but as this is an island where neither juice nor durian nor ripe tropical fruit nor young coconuts are hard to come by, it is hard to go wrong. On the gourmet food front I was expecting slim pickings as I knew from past experience that it's hard to get a decent vegetarian, let alone vegan, meal in most restaurants on the island, whether western or traditional. On the whole, that hasn't changed.

Why I'm getting things done (plus random ramblings about Christmases past and present!)

I just love this time of year and always have. I enjoy the celebration, the get-togethers with loved ones, the excitement, the anticipation and (since Christmas 2002) the sheer magic of experiencing it all with a small child. And almost as much as all of the fun stuff, I enjoy the natural urge to take stock of the year that’s closing and to plan for the one about to begin.

But for me, until a few Christmases ago, my enjoyment of all of the above was curtailed by the fact I invariably spent this season in a junk food-induced fog. I’d exist on a diet based around canapés, mince pies, chocolates, cake, cheese, wine, champagne and more chocolates.

I’ve been ‘health conscious’ since the tender age of 14, but until my 'rawakening' I’d invariably assume a different personality over the festive season...one that wanted to consume its weight in marzipan and Milk Tray! Over the last six years that has all changed, and during that time I’ve been lucky enough to make many friends who have walked just the same path as I have, with the same happy results.

Like all of us, I also have a few people in my life who remain genuinely perplexed as to why I eat the way I do. I wish I could make them understand I’ve had hands down the best Christmases ever since I banished junk food from my life! The fog I used to be in for the whole of December and into the new year? I still remember exactly what it felt like... Yes, I had fun, but once you really experience that you can have all that fun and more without the negative side effects…well, why wouldn’t you?!!

How to have a happy AND healthy Christmas.

This is my sixth Christmas since I started experimenting with eating raw. First off, I am not going to tell you how to be 100% raw during the festivities nor even that you should try to be. A much better goal to have is to eat in the way that best serves you, wherever you as an individual are at this point in time physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and also geographically. I have never had a 100% raw Christmas and this is primarily because I live in the UK, where it is freezing cold at this time of year. I don't care what anyone says – this is a serious obstacle to being 100% raw, and healthy and happy with it! And it isn’t just psychological, or something you can ‘get over’. It’s actually to do with the fact that we are designed to eat seasonally, and ideally to eat what is growing in our locality at any given time.

With this in view, eating a plate of tropical fruit that had to be picked two months before it was ripe in order to be shipped half way round the world to you, where it is now snowing outside, suddenly doesn’t seem so natural! That's not to say there's no place for it in your diet during a cold winter; simply that you're unlikely to feel great if you attempt to base your diet on foods like this.    

This is a topic for another post, but I don’t believe we humans thrive in cold weather. It is not the climate for which we were designed and we have to go to all sorts of lengths to even survive in it: central heating, layers of warm clothing and, for almost all of us, including cooked food in our diet. While being raw through an icy UK winter is not something I aspire to, living somewhere warm and sunny most definitely is!

Don't get me wrong. The ideal diet for everyone, wherever they reside, will contain A LOT of raw food. But as I have yet to meet anyone who can happily get through a cold winter on fruit and salad, the question comes down to whether it is better to round out that lighter fare with large amounts of nuts, seeds and/or dried fruit, or with cooked vegetables, or with a judicious combination of the two. We're all different in terms of what works for us and what doesn't. Personally, I would go for either of the latter choices over the former any day.

This year, I naturally found myself in a period of eating 100% raw for quite some time until the nights got longer and the frost more frequent, and my body told me, in no uncertain terms, that it wanted something different for a while. One of my five-year old son’s favourite times of day right now is when we make vegetable soup together for dinner. I chop, he stirs, and as long as I manage to stay in charge of the seasoning too, between us we make a great team! I've spent quite a few evenings in London in the last couple of weeks, for Christmas parties, various get-togethers with friends, and, last night, the journalists' carol service at St Brides on Fleet Street. It's been bitterly cold the whole time but I've felt great on my high-raw-with-strategic-additions-of-cooked-whole-foods regime.

But to get to this point I tried it all! I’ve done many a Christmas on the standard diet and on the vegetarian version of the standard diet. Since learning about raw food, I've done Christmases where I based my diet around loads of fruit and salad and piles of nuts and seeds and dried fruit, and ended up supplementing that with whatever cooked food everyone else was eating because my blood sugar was completely out of balance. Some time later, when I worked out what would constitute a balanced raw diet that would suit my constitution, I simultaneously figured out that this was not going to sustain me through an icy British winter.

These days my December fare consists primarily of lots of green juices and raw salads, small amounts of fruit, and cooked vegetables in various guises whenever I desire them, plus of course some festive 'fun' foods, including raw sweets and desserts, and the healthiest cooked vegan indulgences I can find.

Could YOU be orthorexic?

Have you ever been, or are you now, a die-hard diet perfectionist? A nutritional nerd? A raw bore? Have you ever found yourself spending most of your waking hours thinking about what you're going to eat that day, agonizing over whether each meal is as well-combined and perfectly balanced as it could be? Have you had periods where strategising your daily sustenance took on the proportions of a military operation? Have you avoided social engagements so you don't have to compromise on the purity of your food? Or sat in restaurants where you pushed a lettuce leaf round your plate, worrying about the fact it wasn't organic instead of enjoying the company of your friends?

Did you know this behaviour has a name? Orthorexia nervosa. It is defined as an eating disorder, and as with any other eating disorder, hours are spent reading about food, shopping for food (all those labels to scrutinize), thinking about food, worrying about food, etc etc, ad infinitum.

Since the term was coined around a decade ago, it has appeared often in the mainstream media and it is broadly applied. In my opinion much too broadly. Meaning that anyone who is more health-conscious than is considered normal or decent is said to suffer from this problem. Yet you may have observed that unthinkingly consuming the traditional processed standard diet is itself highly bizarre eating behaviour and only not seen as such because so many people are doing it! 

In newspaper and magazine quizzes that purport to identify orthorexia, a criterion often included is whether you have cut out certain food groups. But when you get that we actually aren't meant to be eating anything and everything that doesn't kill us outright, that doesn't seem like such weird behaviour after all. Eating for health rather than pleasure is another supposed 'warning sign'. But if you've educated yourself about nutrition you know that much more human suffering is caused by the opposite problem.

But all that said, orthorexia does exist, it can make your life miserable and, if allowed to spiral out of control, it will cancel out all the good you are trying to do with your 'regime'. The line between being health-conscious in a positive way and a negative one is a thin line indeed and it can be hard to know when you've crossed it.

In my opinion it comes down to this: are you happy, at peace and having fun? If you are then it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about what you will and will not eat. If you are not, then no matter how healthy your food intake is, something much more important is lacking. So it is not about how strict someone is with their diet, but whether they are in the happy zone with it or not.   

Changing seasons

This year the autumn equinox 'officially' falls on September 23, which is tomorrow. It marks the transition between summer and autumn though of course this doesn't happen in a single day; it's a process which takes around 2-3 weeks. This whole period is one of the times of year when the body naturally goes into a super-powdered detox mode. Many holistic practitioners believe (from observation of their patients) that it happens more powerfully at this time of year than at any other.

What is actually going on? In simple terms, the external forces that usher out one season and bring in another cause a massive surge of internal energy. The body eagerly uses this for house-cleaning and this is why so many people come down with colds, sore throats and other acute illnesses at this time of year.

It is actually a good sign if this happens because unless yours has been a 100% healthy, stress-free, pollution-free life, chances are your cells contain residues that are better out than in. If the body can't muster the energy to cause some movement at this time of year it can be a sign of a very sluggish, clogged-up system.

I always get a sore throat around the time of the autumn equinox. This time it only lasted a day. Two years ago I had one that lasted for three weeks and made swallowing anything, even water, sheer agony. The fact I had done a 14-day juice fast that September after a summer of a little too much over-indulgence was surely not incidental to this!

If you are healthy and everything inside is flowing as it should be you will experience a cleanse at this time of year whether you do anything to help it or not. But if you choose to help it along that is better still. What to do? Eat lightly and get plenty of rest. Use the time to take stock of the season that is ending and get clear about your intentions for the new one just beginning. At the same time as your body is busy 'autumn cleaning' your cells you may get the urge to de-clutter your living environment and get rid of anything that no longer serves you; as inside, so outside. Go for a holistic treatment if you can: massage and acupuncture are both excellent choices at this time of year. But most of all go easy on yourself, sleep lots, and when awake remember to relax and smile : )

Supercharge Me! Day 7...

So....it's Friday evening and my week on liquid nourishment is drawing to a close... The good news is it's done the trick: I've been blitzing through my to-do list each day; in fact, I'd go so far as to say I've been on fire (wildly inappropriate metaphor, I know). The bad news is I've lost so much weight the juice party is over...for now. I'm planning to break my fast tomorrow....maybe even tonight actually, so I can go out tomorrow and not look all skeletal and underfed and like I'm hankering to join the "size zero" club and maybe even already a member.

I've done a fortnight on juices before and not fallen to the weight I am now...and I say that without knowing what weight I am now, nor what I weighed when I started. I'm gauging this by little clues such as the fact my jeans keep falling down (thank gawd I work from home eh folks!) and I see bones in places I shouldn't.

Supercharge Me! Day 3...

I'm juice fasting, I'm on day three, and I've decided to chart my progress here just in case anyone is interested!

First things first, though. Juice fasting is a great tool if you're in good health and know what you're doing, but if you have any condition you are on medication for or receiving treatment for, it might be contraindicated (and if you are pregnant or breastfeeding it is not advisable). Juice fasting can help many conditions, including serious ones, but it's essential to have professional supervision.

If you are overweight or have been eating a 'standard diet', supervision is also advised as you are likely to go through a healing crisis which at best will make you feel very unwell and at worst could be dangerous. Even if you are raw and in tip top condition you should seek the guidance of a professional if you haven't read up on how to juice fast safely and plan to do it for more than three days. 

I've juice fasted many times over the last six years and I've come to know when it's time for a few days or a few weeks on liquid nourishment. Once you're already reasonably sparkly inside there is no quicker way of supercharging your entire system and attaining the ultimate physical and emotional high.

Who am I?

In response to those of you who have been asking, this is just a very brief entry to introduce myself, rather belatedly perhaps, as the author of this weblog. My name is Sarah Best, I'm editor of Get Fresh! magazine and I also work with the rest of the team on many other things Fresh-related. As of March 23 this year all entries posted here, unless otherwise stated, are/will be by me. That's all for now but I'll be writing very soon about a great movie I saw yesterday so stay tuned......

Golden mango pudding...plus musings on the psychology of food shopping!

Although we live in an age when most fresh produce is available year round, there are still a few select fruits and vegetables that only make a brief, seasonal appearance in shops and markets. One example well worth knowing about is the Indian mango, also known as the Alphonso mango. It is in season from April for just two months – whatever you do, don't miss it!

If you haven't yet tasted one, head to your nearest Asian market or supermarket now. If you don't see them under either of the above names, they are sometimes called golden mangoes and you'll recognize them by the distinctive colour of their skin and their compact size.

The only down side is that once you taste this aromatic and ambrosial variety of mango, no other will ever quite pass muster! They are delicious consumed just as they come but I've developed a recipe that I believe improves on nature – if I may be so bold as to make such a claim! For the last couple of weeks I've been heading to the kitchen to whip up one of these mid morning, when hunger first strikes. The ingredients are as follows:

• 2 Indian mangoes (3 if feeling particularly hungry and/or decadent), peeled and removed from the stone
• Half a medium-sized banana
• One quarter of a medium-sized avocado

Simply place the above into a blender and whizz up into a golden cream. As is always the case, a high-speed blender such as a Vita-Mix will give the smoothest consistency, but if you don't have one, you can make a version of this with any blender and you won't be disappointed with the results.

The beauty of this recipe is that all you taste is the mango. You don't taste the avocado at all; that's just there to give it the delightfully creamy texture that somehow brings out the flavour of the mango even more. You don't taste the banana either and I haven't quite worked out what its role is, but I've tried making this without and it's not as good.