The Raw Road to Health & Happiness
There is a lot of unhappiness in the world right now and a lot of people are looking to improve their lives.
One of my favourite quotes is that everything affects everything and I believe this to be true.
So the troubles in the outside world could be seen as a direct reflection of what is going on inside a lot of people right now.
Inside every single one of us there lies an amazingly complex cellular world that is ultimately dictating our health and hence our ability to be happy.
Internal stress caused by improper lifestyle choices or from living in stressful external environments is therefore expressed back into the outside world in various ways mainly through emotions such as anger and hate which creates a vicious circle.
When done correctly changing your diet has the potential to improve your internal environment and therefore potentially improve your health and therefore potentially improve your chances of being happier and therefore have far more capacity to be friendly and more helpful to others and make them happier too.
I discovered a way of eating that promises to improve your health like nothing else.
The raw food diet involves eating food as it was originally intended, uncooked.
For some people simply switching to a raw food diet has enabled them to beat medically diagnosed diseases that conventional medicine had given up on.
Having said that unfortunately it doesn't work for everybody.
Health is always more complicated than most people want to imagine.
Happiness is also a complex thing and doesn't just rely on any one factor for you to experience it long term.
If you are one of the many people who begins to believe that raw food holds ALL the answers then like a lot of people you too may begin to run into emotional problems somewhere down the line despite all your efforts to do raw right.
The number of people feeling unhappy due to poor health is incredible and I think frightening.
When you are sick then you don't have the same capacity to be calm, understanding nor the energy to help others as you would like so your health affects the happiness of those around you.
This is why more and more people are turning to things like raw food to improve this situation.
The pursuit of happiness is at the heart of how we live our lives, and even if right now you don't believe that life is about being happy, you have to admit that it's a pretty important factor and does a certain amount to steer us in the various directions we go through life.
When I talk about being happy I don't talk of that kind of annoying "Polly Anna" happy that some people have that try to make out that they are always happy and make out that nothing is ever bad.
Life is full of good and bad but someone who is genuinely happy is able to still focus on where they would like to be and can get themselves back on track easier than someone who only sees the bad and is unhappy at heart.
Being happy is not always easy and largely depends on who you compare yourself with.
If you are constantly comparing yourself with people who have more than you then you may feel unhappy with your life.
Shifting your focus onto people who are less fortunate than you, may then instantly allow you to feel happier.
Happiness is a state of mind that requires constant work in the same way as health requires constant daily practices in order for you to maintain it.
Happiness should not be confused with pleasure.
The things that bring us pleasure can often be short lived and have longer reaching consequences that can lead to unhappiness such as eating our favourite junk food, taking drugs, gambling and having sex with someone who you shouldn't have had sex with.
Do we turn to raw food to make us happy or is it to make us healthy, which is an important part of happiness? Happiness has many different factors that all have to be met in order for us to truly experience happiness.
Health is just one of those factors and many people begin experimenting with raw food to improve their health.
It is far easier to feel happier if you have your health, but people who are sick and dealing with terrible things that many of us would consider something that would make us very unhappy, can still be happy with their lot.
Happiness therefore is a state of mind as much as anything else and the number of people I have met following raw food who still don't seem really happy are testament to that.
You also have to look at many happy people who do not eat particularly healthy diets and yet are happy and doing extraordinary work helping make the world a better happier place who still experience good health as long as some people who are unhappy and following supposedly extraordinarily healthy diets.
When your top priority becomes to be 100% raw at the expense of your emotional happiness then I believe it can become detrimental to your health instead of doing you good.
On the same token if you are solely focused on pleasure then your health can suffer and consequently your happiness may suffer too.
It is such a complex subject and behind it all is the desire to know what we are meant to be doing? Is life all about being healthy and living naturally, or is it about doing what makes you happy, or is it all about balance and doing what feels right to you? Raw food can lead to unhappiness when you focus too much on all the confusion within the raw food world and try to buy in to other people's ideals of what being raw is all about.
The desire to be happy becomes overlooked and the pursuit of being all raw takes over in the belief that it will lead to solving all your problems.
No quicker way to become unhappy than not being true to yourself.
Is raw food all about getting back to nature? Our primary instinct is survival so in nature we would do what was required in order to survive even if it meant eating something that wasn't on our ideal healthy eating list.
Yes we should return to eating to feed our body and reduce the eating for pleasure mentality but turning back our diets may not be right for everybody as we may have begun doing things to our food in order to survive in different colder climates.
Is wearing clothes unnatural? As humans started to inhabit colder places on Earth so they started wearing clothes to stop freezing to death, a natural thing to do.
The definition of the word natural has become so confusing that I think it's unnatural to try and be "natural".
If you are having to think about something you aren't doing what comes naturally.
We definitely need to start eating cleaner foods but is going all raw virtually overnight a bit like suddenly wearing no clothes, even if you are living in a cold climate? Can suddenly going all raw have a similar effect on your insides as suddenly wearing no clothes would have on the outside if we don't allow enough time for our body's to transition and acclimatize? Becoming overly obsessed with raw food is always a danger and can lead to unhappiness in the long term due to problems like social isolation and stress caused by all the confusion as to who to believe and how to do it right and then you add this to the effects you being raw has on all the people around you and the effect this has on you.
Research carried out on happiness found that people who do live in social isolation are far more likely to have coronary problems and is linked to research carried out that suggests that people who are angry, stressed, sad and lonely who are more likely to suffer far more health problems than those living in friendly, relaxed, fun, supportive communities.
One of the basic principles of survival is to form a community and have friends and family around you to increase your chances of surviving.
So while raw food can be helping balance your internal body chemistry, enabling it to produce happy hormones and helping your physical body to function better which improves your chances of being happy, it cannot do anything to improve the other important emotional and environmental factors that also need to be in place for you to experience true long term happiness.
True happiness then is found when all the various aspects of happiness are addressed and are in balance.
Raw food plays an important part within achieving that balance but if the focus becomes too focused on it then it can lead to problems.
If being 100% raw makes you happy then that is great, don't feel anything less than happy if you are anything less than 100% raw.
I have invented a new label that allows me to follow this philosophy everyday after I became frustrated at the label raw fooder and the implied fact that you have to eat all raw food all of the time.
I now refer to myself as an Accepting Conscious Eater (A.
C.
E.
) I accept that there are things we are yet to discover that ultimately decide our true state of health.
I accept that some days I may eat for emotional reasons and not for health reasons in order to remain happy.
I also accept that those actions may result in me feeling less than happy the next day but accept that it was my decision and that I will learn a lesson from the experience and so don't beat myself up about it.
I try to make conscious decisions about the food I do eat and try to make the best decision I can where ever I am as much as I can.
Then when I have made that decision I just eat it and am thankful that I am able to eat food when ever I want to, unlike some people around the world.
This approach has helped me feel much more happier on the raw road to health and happiness.
One of my favourite quotes is that everything affects everything and I believe this to be true.
So the troubles in the outside world could be seen as a direct reflection of what is going on inside a lot of people right now.
Inside every single one of us there lies an amazingly complex cellular world that is ultimately dictating our health and hence our ability to be happy.
Internal stress caused by improper lifestyle choices or from living in stressful external environments is therefore expressed back into the outside world in various ways mainly through emotions such as anger and hate which creates a vicious circle.
When done correctly changing your diet has the potential to improve your internal environment and therefore potentially improve your health and therefore potentially improve your chances of being happier and therefore have far more capacity to be friendly and more helpful to others and make them happier too.
I discovered a way of eating that promises to improve your health like nothing else.
The raw food diet involves eating food as it was originally intended, uncooked.
For some people simply switching to a raw food diet has enabled them to beat medically diagnosed diseases that conventional medicine had given up on.
Having said that unfortunately it doesn't work for everybody.
Health is always more complicated than most people want to imagine.
Happiness is also a complex thing and doesn't just rely on any one factor for you to experience it long term.
If you are one of the many people who begins to believe that raw food holds ALL the answers then like a lot of people you too may begin to run into emotional problems somewhere down the line despite all your efforts to do raw right.
The number of people feeling unhappy due to poor health is incredible and I think frightening.
When you are sick then you don't have the same capacity to be calm, understanding nor the energy to help others as you would like so your health affects the happiness of those around you.
This is why more and more people are turning to things like raw food to improve this situation.
The pursuit of happiness is at the heart of how we live our lives, and even if right now you don't believe that life is about being happy, you have to admit that it's a pretty important factor and does a certain amount to steer us in the various directions we go through life.
When I talk about being happy I don't talk of that kind of annoying "Polly Anna" happy that some people have that try to make out that they are always happy and make out that nothing is ever bad.
Life is full of good and bad but someone who is genuinely happy is able to still focus on where they would like to be and can get themselves back on track easier than someone who only sees the bad and is unhappy at heart.
Being happy is not always easy and largely depends on who you compare yourself with.
If you are constantly comparing yourself with people who have more than you then you may feel unhappy with your life.
Shifting your focus onto people who are less fortunate than you, may then instantly allow you to feel happier.
Happiness is a state of mind that requires constant work in the same way as health requires constant daily practices in order for you to maintain it.
Happiness should not be confused with pleasure.
The things that bring us pleasure can often be short lived and have longer reaching consequences that can lead to unhappiness such as eating our favourite junk food, taking drugs, gambling and having sex with someone who you shouldn't have had sex with.
Do we turn to raw food to make us happy or is it to make us healthy, which is an important part of happiness? Happiness has many different factors that all have to be met in order for us to truly experience happiness.
Health is just one of those factors and many people begin experimenting with raw food to improve their health.
It is far easier to feel happier if you have your health, but people who are sick and dealing with terrible things that many of us would consider something that would make us very unhappy, can still be happy with their lot.
Happiness therefore is a state of mind as much as anything else and the number of people I have met following raw food who still don't seem really happy are testament to that.
You also have to look at many happy people who do not eat particularly healthy diets and yet are happy and doing extraordinary work helping make the world a better happier place who still experience good health as long as some people who are unhappy and following supposedly extraordinarily healthy diets.
When your top priority becomes to be 100% raw at the expense of your emotional happiness then I believe it can become detrimental to your health instead of doing you good.
On the same token if you are solely focused on pleasure then your health can suffer and consequently your happiness may suffer too.
It is such a complex subject and behind it all is the desire to know what we are meant to be doing? Is life all about being healthy and living naturally, or is it about doing what makes you happy, or is it all about balance and doing what feels right to you? Raw food can lead to unhappiness when you focus too much on all the confusion within the raw food world and try to buy in to other people's ideals of what being raw is all about.
The desire to be happy becomes overlooked and the pursuit of being all raw takes over in the belief that it will lead to solving all your problems.
No quicker way to become unhappy than not being true to yourself.
Is raw food all about getting back to nature? Our primary instinct is survival so in nature we would do what was required in order to survive even if it meant eating something that wasn't on our ideal healthy eating list.
Yes we should return to eating to feed our body and reduce the eating for pleasure mentality but turning back our diets may not be right for everybody as we may have begun doing things to our food in order to survive in different colder climates.
Is wearing clothes unnatural? As humans started to inhabit colder places on Earth so they started wearing clothes to stop freezing to death, a natural thing to do.
The definition of the word natural has become so confusing that I think it's unnatural to try and be "natural".
If you are having to think about something you aren't doing what comes naturally.
We definitely need to start eating cleaner foods but is going all raw virtually overnight a bit like suddenly wearing no clothes, even if you are living in a cold climate? Can suddenly going all raw have a similar effect on your insides as suddenly wearing no clothes would have on the outside if we don't allow enough time for our body's to transition and acclimatize? Becoming overly obsessed with raw food is always a danger and can lead to unhappiness in the long term due to problems like social isolation and stress caused by all the confusion as to who to believe and how to do it right and then you add this to the effects you being raw has on all the people around you and the effect this has on you.
Research carried out on happiness found that people who do live in social isolation are far more likely to have coronary problems and is linked to research carried out that suggests that people who are angry, stressed, sad and lonely who are more likely to suffer far more health problems than those living in friendly, relaxed, fun, supportive communities.
One of the basic principles of survival is to form a community and have friends and family around you to increase your chances of surviving.
So while raw food can be helping balance your internal body chemistry, enabling it to produce happy hormones and helping your physical body to function better which improves your chances of being happy, it cannot do anything to improve the other important emotional and environmental factors that also need to be in place for you to experience true long term happiness.
True happiness then is found when all the various aspects of happiness are addressed and are in balance.
Raw food plays an important part within achieving that balance but if the focus becomes too focused on it then it can lead to problems.
If being 100% raw makes you happy then that is great, don't feel anything less than happy if you are anything less than 100% raw.
I have invented a new label that allows me to follow this philosophy everyday after I became frustrated at the label raw fooder and the implied fact that you have to eat all raw food all of the time.
I now refer to myself as an Accepting Conscious Eater (A.
C.
E.
) I accept that there are things we are yet to discover that ultimately decide our true state of health.
I accept that some days I may eat for emotional reasons and not for health reasons in order to remain happy.
I also accept that those actions may result in me feeling less than happy the next day but accept that it was my decision and that I will learn a lesson from the experience and so don't beat myself up about it.
I try to make conscious decisions about the food I do eat and try to make the best decision I can where ever I am as much as I can.
Then when I have made that decision I just eat it and am thankful that I am able to eat food when ever I want to, unlike some people around the world.
This approach has helped me feel much more happier on the raw road to health and happiness.
Source...