Hi - I have been trying to eat mostly raw for the last week and a bit. I am guessing that it will take a while to get the swing of and I am not being completely paranoid about it when I go out for meals or anything like that.

My question is - is it normal to feel slightly sick in the afternoon when I am having fully raw days? I have found that my stomach is not feeling quite right on the days when I only eat fruits/vegies (and some nuts and seed)...

Thanks!

Ellie

Hi There!

I'd like to second what Sheryl said and point out that *any* time you improve your diet in any way that you're likely to run into the paradox of detox. This is where if your body has been struggling to throw out all the junk you've been throwing into it and the sense of what's not helping you has become dulled from overuse, then the moment that you DO improve your diet, you'll nearly always feel worse - at first - as your body takes the chance to do some spring cleaning and also to adjust to where it gets its energy from. It's been shown that dogs (which are omnivores - or can eat both meat & veggies) who have been brought up on a diet of meat, take about a week after being switched over to vegetables before they create the digestive enzymes to properly digest the vegetables. This happened going the other way to meat, too.

Now obviously humans are a different animal, and in my experience it took me a couple of days to get over the first detox and then a couple of months to get to the next level.

You can have a pretty good idea if it's detox or not by the fact that when you eat something healthier you feel worse, and then if you keep going yo fel even worse until suddenly -WHAM!- you feel great! The challenge comes when people use short term results to gauge what's good for them, start eating well, out come the stored poisons for garbage collection, they feel not so good, so they stop eating well, the body stops cleaning out and just piles up more and more junk until one day it hits overload with some major "incurable" "mysterious" disseise. Of course In reality there’s pretty much always a series of "minor" overloads first, for example "getting" colds, flu's and the like (for us these invariably only occur if we've been eating garbage, or not sleeping enough!)

Anyway, in short, you're on the right track, just try it for at least a week and also where possible use foods (at first) that your body is used to you giving it to make it easier to digest. As Sheryl said, if you continue to have challenges consult a healthcare professional - preferably one with more than the handful of hours of nutritional training our medical GP's normally get!

Viva La Raw!

Piers