Raw Food Diet - Wild Edibles!

We try to live our lives as simply as we can. We don't buy things we don't need, we go through and clean/de-clutter our home every six months, and we are constantly looking for new ways to have less physical things so that we can live in the moment, taking responsibility of all aspects of our life. In other words, we do not believe that things in life "just happen" and there isn't anything we can do about it. We believe that our actions are directly related to the events in our life, so we keep our home and bodies as clean as we can manage.

Now, I, for one have not been living like this my entire life. When I met Anthony, he introduced me to The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (she recently came out with The Power and it has been too intense for me to get through so far...). She teaches the Law of Attraction and I have since made great strides in my life. One day we will get into it more, but for now, I will tell you why I have even brought it up.

I am a worrier. I have been for as long as I can remember, and though I have gotten a little better at it, I still worry a considerable amount. My daughter is the number one thing I worry about, day in, day out, but a close second is Money. I worry about money a lot. I shouldn't as I know negative feelings bring negative affects, but sometimes I lose track of myself and end up focusing on the lack of money. Coincidentally, this worry comes around about once a month...if you know what I mean. I work as a nanny 24 hours a week, and run my small business 54 hours a week, but I am still growing my business so I do not take money from it, I work for free. This means that I live off of a part time job, supporting my daughter and myself (Anthony and I do not share finances, we split bills and other home expenses like food).

Anyway, most of my bills are due all at once at the beginning of the month which leaves me strapped until the end of the first full week of the month. This is when I usually look for ways to save money. Living a high raw diet (meaning a high amount of raw food, very little cooked food - we eat brown rice and cooked beans a few times per week) is EXPENSIVE. A head of organic broccoli costs more than a cheeseburger at McDonalds, that is how sick the food system is in America. One way I have found to save money is my subscribing to a year-round local produce delivery program. In our first month of being raw, we spent over $1000 on food (again, split between Anthony and I)! The delivery program is $140 per month and includes produce that would probably cost over $200 per month to buy at the natural foods store or supermarket, so we are saving money there.

I then came across TeraWarner.com and her Wild Edible Course with Sergei Boutenko (who's diet consists of about 80% raw, wild edibles). Their sales page was telling me that I could forage around in my local parks and forests (not hard to come by in Seattle!) and find FREE food. Needless to say, I had to learn more! I enrolled and the program starts today. It is a 17 week course and I intend to follow it closely. I am also going to include Ella in the course and track our progress by blogging about it here.

If you also enroll, leave a comment and we can track our progress together. I am so excited to share this journey with you!

Welcome - An Introduction

Hello! Welcome to our corner of the blog-o-sphere. We aren't sure how you stumbled upon us, but we are so grateful that you are here. :)

We are a small family of three: Myself, Steph, my daughter, Ella, and my other half, Anthony. We live in a suburb of Seattle in Washington state and one day dream of relocating to a Tropical Paradise where fresh food and bright sun are abundant. In the meantime, we strive to live as close as possible to Mother Earth.

 This is us at Great Wolf Lodge, March 2011, pre-raw.

We are starting this blog to share how we live a healthy, minimalist, natural life, but most of all to document our journey from the SAD (Standard American Diet) to a high, maybe even 100% raw diet. Today, we are four weeks and a couple of days into our newest lifestyle. We are are vegan, about 75% raw and have been reading anything we can find on the raw lifestyle.

We came to know about raw foods in a very 'round about way. I was watching a news program one night and saw a segment about vaccinations. I had seen an article about vaccinations a few days earlier on Facebook, and went back to read it again. The article was on NaturalNews.com, a website I had only heard about, but never looked at. I began reading various stories, mostly about foods in America, and noticed that the author kept mentioning raw foods like fresh, organic fruits and vegetables. I looked up what a raw food diet was. I knew I had heard of it before, but when I did, I was deep in my SAD days and thought that people who followed that diet were "too healthy for me" and that there was "no way I could give up _________" (fill in the blank: meat, cheese, bread, ice cream, ect). What I found changed my...our lives.

I found blogs, stories, and entire communities of people who were raw foodists. There were informational sites, recipe sites, and sites that appeal to me most - Raw Moms. I discovered why certain foods, including meat, dairy, grains, and all cooked foods are avoided with this way of eating and it was a huge light bulb moment. I felt like I found the lifestyle *I* want, and type of people I want to be like. Just having knowledge about this way of life led me to feel immediately closer to nature. I quickly began searching for raw food diet starter guides and planning out what we needed to buy. We went out that night and got a few things for breakfast and lunch the next day, then went to our local Co-Op to stock up on what we needed to start with.

I went crazy in the kitchen, and I wish I would have taken photos of the change. I started by throwing out anything expired. There was A LOT. Next, I got rid of anything that had specific ingredients in it: corn, soy, and canola. That left us with...well...not much! We kept a few things for Ella - cereal and other grain-based snacks, and we had some veggies, but not much. We did, however, have a blender which, I had come to find, is an absolute necessity with the raw food diet.

It had been a few days since our last shopping trip, and we had a better idea of what we liked and what we should always have on hand, so we made another trip. This one was much larger than the previous two, and gave us a better idea of what this kind of lifestyle was going to cost us. I had read that it is expensive, but I also read ways to help keep the spending in line and the budget manageable.

Over the past four weeks, we have been learning more every day. We have purchased a few films, read through some books, and visited hundreds of websites with raw foods and natural living as the topics. Ella has come a very long way, but still has much more to go. Anthony and I ride the waves of cravings, though they are becoming less intense and more manageable. We are feeling relief from some other detox symptoms now and are more able to focus on helping Ella to kick grains and consume more fresh fruits and vegetables.

With this blog, we plan to focus on the raw food lifestyle with a little natural living thrown in. We will start out explaining the raw food diet, and then dig a little deeper to learn what raw foodists need to watch for and, of course, the all magical SuperFoods. We are excited to share our story, make new friends, and spread the word about this amazing way of life!

We welcome all comments and would love to answer and questions as best as we can. Again, welcome to our blog!