Know Any Literary Animal Lovers?

Hi there PureJeevan readers! We wanted to let you know that Jim's new novel CHROO is available on Amazon. It's a crazy adventure involving a billionaire heiress, her Chihuahua BFF ("Chroo") and a host of human and animal characters. Find out more on Amazon! Here are some links:




All this month, Jim has been experimenting with a low-fat, raw vegan diet. He discusses his reasons for trying a low fat diet, and how he s been feeling with the changes, in his first and second posts so far this month.

Many of you have heard us mention the famous low-fat, raw vegan 80/10/10 diet here on our blog. Well, today I d like to highlight the individual behind that diet. So?

On special Mondays, you sometimes see a regular feature here on Pure Jeevan's blog called Makin' It Monday. We always have so much fun doing this series, and it's been a huge hit both here on our blog and on YouTube.

We thought of a way to make the special Mondays even more special! Guess how? By seeing YOU in our Makin' It Monday raw food recipe videos! So, here's an open casting call for anyone in the Pure Jeevan family (that's you!) adventurous enough to prepare a raw food recipe on video to be featured in our Makin' It Monday series!

EVERYONE LOVES RAW TACOS!!! So, this week, we're going to show you FOUR "Makin' It Monday" videos instead of just one. These were filmed in Berkeley, CA, at our dear friend Carolyn's apartment. We hope you love these recipes. We actually eat raw tacos quite regularly -- especially when tomatoes are in season.

Jim here... Since we posted Wendi's two-part series on pasta-making techniques (part 1, part 2) last week, I thought I'd follow up with an additional novel use for the spiralizer -- super-delicious, blazingly fast, ultra-low-fat sweet potato chips! We've done some really great things with sweet potatoes before. (Anyone signed up as a member of the Pure Jeevan family has likely already received our prized sweet potato pancake recipe.) But, these chips are amazing because they satisfy that unmistakable urge for crunchy, healthy snacks -- and in record time. Friends, if you have a dehydrator and sweet potato on hand, you could literally be enjoying these things in under three hours. So let's get going!

As Wendi demonstrated in the videos last week, you can easily make "rounds" using the spiralizer by simply making a vertical slice throughout your vegetable prior to placing it on the spiralizer. So, if we were looking down at the sweet potato, the cut (which goes all the way down the length of the vegetable) would look like this:

I'm excited about something that one of my friends has been working on. Melissa is gifted in so many areas, one of which is wild edible identification. She recently told me she was working on something that would help a lot of people and I was excited about her new project. Well, now it's ready to be shared with everyone!

Take the time to meet...

Here's a basic recipe that can be used to create any nut milk!

Nut Milk

1 cup of nuts or seeds?

"... a warrior's life is not about imagined perfection or victory; it is about love. Love is a warrior's sword; wherever it cuts, it gives life, not death."
~ Dan Millman, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior

During some "highway philosophization" (my term for pondering everything and anything while driving) this afternoon, I eventually began to think rather deeply about human aggression, and specifically about how people hurt other people. Mainly, I was thinking about individual aggreession, although, as a group, humans are unfortunately rather prone to it.Wikipedia maintains a list of ongoing conflicts (i.e., wars), in fact. According to that page, there are seven major wars happenning right now and 15 additional significant ones. Of course, there are scores of unlisted ones ongoing as well, most of which the average person has never heard about.

We now have two more raw food snack companies sharing some of their goodies for the retreat gift baskets! A special thank you go out to:

"Should you eat when you're not hungry "

That was a question I asked myself a lot when I was first transitioning to the raw food diet. Just about everything I ever read said that people shouldn't eat if they aren't hungry. We need to listen to what our bodies are telling us in order to be as healthy as possible.

What if your body is telling you it's not hungry, however, while your instinct is telling you that you still need to eat That's what was happening to me in the beginning of my raw journey. My digestion was very slow and food would sit in my stomach for most of the day, especially if the food I ate was processed or heavy. It didn't matter how much I ate, either. My portions were always very small compared to those that my fit-looking friends were eating. I always wondered how I was the obese one when my meals were so minimal in comparison.

In a recent post, I answered part of a message I received from Violet, one of our blog readers. Below is the continuation of my response to Violet (much briefer than my last one!).

Following my response to Violet is a response to Sarah, who has a fantastic raw food blog that I enjoy reading.

Violet's message continued:

For my Fun-Filled Friday and this entire weekend, I'm going to do something fun that I rarely get to do. What is it? It's nothing...literally NOTHING! What's the fun in doing nothing? Well, to be honest I think it's impossible to do nothing. If you decide to stay in bed all weekend, doing nothing, you are really doing something--staying in bed all weekend. Right?

So, what will my nothing include? Who knows! That's the beauty of doing nothing---I have no preset plans, no expectations of myself or others, nothing at all! I have lots of things to do, of course, but I'm not doing any of them this weekend (no working on Pure Jeevan activities, no cleaning the house or doing laundry, no working on the computer, no organizing future plans/activities, no fancy meal preparations, etc.).