“Jack up the raw” over the holidays…without giving up your favorite food or parties!

Make plans NOW to launch 2010 feeling great, not overweight, low-energy, or depressed. Use Angela’s easy-diet 6-week program to make it happen!

The “Four LGS Pillars” of Jacking Up The Raw

From personal experience looking for the easiest way to increase the amount of high-water-content, nutrient-packed raw and living foods in my diet — without making it too complicated or stressful from trying to make too much change too quickly — I assembled the following four basic principles that comprise the “Jack Up The Raw” program.

If you follow these four simple principles in the way that works best for you, you will radically increase the raw and living foods in your diet… without stress, without guilt, without frustration, and without too much effort.

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This is the approach that worked for me.

This is exactly the approach I followed to take myself from a 225-lb. size 20 body to a size 6 just seven months later. And while I was achieving that change in my life, I was not “perfect” with my diet. I had brownies. I had spaghetti with meat sauce. I even had pizza. I never apologized for it or tried to hide it, and I don’t try to hide these things now if I should ever have them.

Because see… we’re talking about a radical change here. And true radical change takes time to really integrate comfortably. So let’s just acknowledge that from the beginning and instead of taking a forceful approach, let’s take the gentle path. I promise you… it works.

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Dietary Change and CULTURAL Change

This change is not just a change in diet, it’s a change in culture. By switching from an orientation toward primarily cooked food to one that is oriented toward living foods, you’re actually inventing a new culture for yourself, a new way of feeding yourself and deriving nourishment, comfort, and pleasure from food!

Your emotions are affected by this change. And your sense of inner safety can be triggered by going too long without something you may have associated with stability and comfort your entire life. If you make a change that’s radical, and don’t provide an occasional “escape valve” of sorts when you need it, to allow yourself to adjust to the pressure of that change, at some point it’s highly likely that you will become frustrated with yourself and your inability to conform to the ideal that others have painted as being so wonderful. 

Some people make a change to 100% overnight and stay with it forever, no problem. But this program is designed to be flexible enough for EVERYONE, for the regular guy and regular gal who wants to jack things up but isn’t yet ready for an extreme immersion. And if that’s you… and you try to make too extreme of a change… you will become frustrated.

Who can live for long with that level of frustration? Most people will give up. But if instead one digs in and tries to force oneself to “be perfect”, does that really lead to a state of health?

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Doing Away With Food Obsession And Complex, Stressful Rules

We live in a culture that can be seriously obsessed with food and with dietary rules. From a young age, I struggled with eating disorders and thus know the intense frustration and self-loathing that can be invoked by attempting to adhere to overly rigorous dietary rules.

Personally, I regard stress and obsession over food as more toxic than the unwanted food itself. “Food” is intended to be the very thing that nourishes you and gives you a foundation of strength and calm energy. So let’s approach our food and our diet from that perspective.

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The Easy Road to Raw… or Rawish… Whatever Is Best For You

These four principles make living with food and jacking up the raw so easy, all you have to do is focus on adding as much of the good stuff as you possibly can, and the rest… the rest you don’t have to worry about. It will sort itself out as you continue to adjust to the changes you are growing into.

I hope these principles help you as much as they have helped me, and that they introduce a stress-free, guilt-free, enjoyable journey for you into a more vital lifestyle.

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The “Four LGS Pillars” of Jacking Up The Raw

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Pillar One

Replace the bad stuff with good stuff.

• White sugar → Natural sweeteners: Raw cane sugar (rapadura or palm sugar best, turbinado better than white); raw honey, agave nectar
• White salt → Quality natural salt (salt that hasn’t been demineralized – does not include kosher!): Celtic sea salt, Himalayan Crystal salt, Redman’s, RealSalt
• Corn/Canola/Seed oils → Cold-pressed Coconut Oil or EVOO (and margarine → organic butter)
• Canned/Packaged/Frozen foods with additives → Natural/Organic canned/packaged/frozen goods with “cleaner” ingredients list (nothing with MSG or “hydrolyzed” anything, no hydrogenated oils, or scientific words you don’t understand)
• GMO foods → organic equivalents (for example, if you eat any corn or soy products whatsoever, buy organic… tortilla chips, taco shells, protein powders, energy bars, etc.)
• Bottle, cooked vinegars → Raw, unpasteurized Apple Cider Vinegar
• Soy Sauce → Unpasteurized Nama Shoyu soy sauce
• Bottled Salad Dressings → Simple raw homemade salad dressings
• Salt-cured, or salty brine-cured olives → Sun-cured olives(then marinate in good salt and good vinegar and herbs yourself)

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Pillar Two:

Drink THREE blenderfuls of Live Green Smoothies every single day.

• Can’t do THREE? Do TWO.
• Can’t do TWO? Do ONE.
• Missed a day? Start again first thing tomorrow…

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Pillar Three:

Replace two of your three main meals with RAW and LIVING food…or a “Rawish” meal.

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Pillar Four:

Build the first three Pillars nice and strong… and don’t worry about the rest!

• If you have replaced all the food ingredients in your diet (AT LEAST AT HOME) with ingredients that create well-being rather than havoc and imbalance, AND…
• You are drinking THREE BLENDERFULS of LGSs every single day, AND…
• You have replaced at least TWO of your three main meals of the day with a RAW or RAWISH meal…
• THEN… your diet will likely be at least 75% “raw”, with your body immersed with living foods (it could be also lower than this, depending on the choices you have made). This is considered “high-raw”, and is enough for someone to experience a dramatic change in energy, health, and well-being.

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The “Roof” On Top Of Those Pillars…

Over-arching these four principles is the #1 most important principle of all: Follow Your Own Instincts. Become Your Own Expert. Pay attention to what feels good and right in your own body, and eat more of those things. What doesn’t feel right… minimize that.

I can’t stress this enough. Without learning to become sensitive to what your body — your entire constitution, really, which can also include elements of your personality and your emotional self — needs, you will open yourself up to confusion, self-doubt, and stress because there is dispute over virtually every piece of information pertaining to nutrition and diet. Not unlike religion and politics, with diet everything can be debated and argued… and it most certainly is.

Take the attitude of having full personal responsibility for your choices. Trust that you can sense what you need and what doesn’t suit you. Listen, pay attention, and make choices accordingly. And it will all come together for you.
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My recommendation: Aim for 85% “high raw”, which in my experience is the cusp of “the magic zone”.

If you change your habits to live most of your days in the 85-100% zone, the way you feel will RADICALLY change. And of course that will carry through to every aspect of your life.

And until you are ready to make further changes, whatever makes up the remaining 15% need not concern you.

(Although, of course… choosing foods that are higher in nutrition, life force, and easier to digest will always serve you better than foods that will turn to glue, inject your system with additives, or sit undigested in your system for ages.)

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How To Hit the 85% MAGIC ZONE:

To hit that “magic zone”, you could aim at making ALL THREE main meals RAW or RAWISH, with a combination or raw and non-raw snacks in between.

What I do to stay comfortably at that level is to aim for 100% raw every day, and then I include only just enough of cooked food or my favorite treats “to take the edge off” and keep myself comfortable, satisfied, and stress-free. That approach, perfected, can actually bring you and keep you very close to 100% raw. And that’s a big deal.

If you step away from that edge (or even plummet to a cooked food lifestyle again for a time)… so what…? Tomorrow is another day. ENJOY YOUR NOW, and whatever you do, don’t stress or punish yourself! Just pick up where you left off putting those LGS Pillars into place, and you’ll be back on track!

If you’re ever ready to take a leap into a more extreme lifestyle, it should indeed be because you are ready for it and you want it. And then… change occurs naturally.

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Summing It All Up

As I’ve said, this is the best way I have found to introduce a high-raw lifestyle without creating stress and frustration. 

What I’ve described here is the best way I’ve found to approach “living with living food” in a harmonious, happy, stress-free way, while making massive HEALTHIFYING, HAPPIFYING change at the same time!

I hope they serve you well, and I look forward to helping you explore how to apply these principles in your own life![/private]