If you're like the majority of the people in America a typical day looks like this.
Your alarm goes off and you fumble around for the snooze button hoping to get in just 10 more minutes of sleep before you drag yourself out of your nice cozy bed and into the kitchen.
You grab yourself a cup of coffee and head for the shower to get ready for today's work day.
You know you should eat something but that extra set of snooze button encounters put you behind schedule so you have no choice but to grab something on the way to work.
You know this isn't optimal for your body and you resolve to do better tomorrow.
Now let's rewind the morning and play it in a way that will make your body sing.
This time the alarm goes off and while you may not be jumping for joy you get out of bed instead of hitting that snooze button.
You mosey into the kitchen where there is an abundance of fruit waiting to be plopped into a Vitamix or other blender you might have.
You throw some strawberries in there, add a big handful of baby spinach, weird as it sounds but you can't even taste it, a banana, maybe some blueberries, water, ice and hit the high speed blend button for about 20 seconds.
For protein, because we all know it's been proven that protein helps us feel satiated longer, we can grab a handful of nuts to eat or toss some hemp seeds into our smoothie and breakfast is taken care of! Quick, easy, and very healthy.
Let's go into just a few of the benefits choosing lifestyle number 2 has over choosing lifestyle number 1.
In scenario 1 you start your body off dependent upon a drug to try and add some spring to your step.
While that may work temporarily, the effect of the drug has to wear off sometime and you'll be left feeling just as rundown as before.
Your brain will want more caffeine, or worse yet, sugar, and the cycle continues.
Besides that, when forced to turn to outside sources for our meals most of us don't choose with health in mind.
By the time we get to the destination we need to be we are famished and just want to fill our gullets.
Your body will be on this repeated roller coaster ride of energy and then no energy all throughout the day.
You won't be able to focus and you'll be hungry.
If only you would've taken a maximum of 5 minutes, start to finish, your temple would be a much more stable and happy place.
Scenario number 2 gives your body what it's asking for after a minimum eight hour fast.
During the night your body works hard repairing itself and doing its needed maintenance and cleaning to try and be at its optimal level for you to perform at your best the next day.
To do that it needs the right fuel filled with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, proteins and much more.
A raw food breakfast gives it just what it needs.
That 5 minute smoothie could be the most nutritious meal of the day, depending on your agenda.
Besides enhanced energy there are quite a few bonuses to giving yourself the best fuel you can.
Here are a few that I noted when I made the transition: I lost some of the extra fat I was carrying around.
Really no explanation, it just went away and I didn't beg it to stay.
I was able to think more clearly.
Previous to going raw I felt 'foggy', like things just weren't connecting the way they should.
I don't know if it was the absence of the processed junk or the addition of the raw foods, but something made my thinking clearer after I switched.
Inner healing.
Metabolism issues can be helped eating a raw foods diet.
With the exclusion of processed foods your blood sugars become more stable and all the hormones begin to regulate themselves and work in sync like they're supposed to.
Diabetes can be helped because your insulin is regulated and blood sugars drop and become more stable.
Can it 'cure' diabetes? Cure is a word people like to throw around quite frequently to try and convince someone to take a fellow stand on something.
I'm not going to use it so flippantly.
I trust that incorporating a raw foods diet has helped some people manage their blood sugar disorders on a large scale and in others it hasn't.
It depends on what type of diabetes you have, the severity, and how far you're willing to adhere to the lifestyle choices.
Better digestion and elimination is an added benefit.
Even if the scale doesn't reflect a change you feel slimmer because you don't have an intestine full of sludge in your system.
Due to the food having alkaline as opposed to acid based properties it is believed that a raw food diet lowers the risk of diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
The raw food diet contains fewer trans fats and saturated fat than the typical American diet.
It is also low in sodium and sugar and high in potassium, magnesium, folate, fiber, vitamin A, and health-promoting antioxidants.
One last benefit I'd like to mention is the ability to slow the aging process.
Part of the reason we age and 'break down' is because of inflammation in the body and the raw food diet is an inflammation reducer.
This is because it contains fewer advanced glycation end products and less of the other damaging compounds found in processed foods.
There are other benefits as well but the ones that I mentioned are the ones that came to my mind first and made a lasting impression on me with the exception of diabetes because I'm not a diabetic.
There are numerous testimonies on how the raw food diet has aided diabetics so if you want more information you won't have any trouble finding it.
I urge you to take hold of your health and explore the benefits that adding more raw foods into your daily choices has.
Your body will be very grateful.