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:
Jim here... "Do I Need to Eat a Certain Percentage of Raw Foods to Call Myself a Raw Foodist " This seems to be a common question among some people interested in pursuing a raw and living foods lifestyle. I fielded such a question recently online, and thought I'd recap my own answer here, somewhat edited for enhanced clarity:
I know what raw foodism means. And, if you're here, you probably do to, or at least you're interested in it and know the basics. But, to the mainstream population, raw is absolutely unheard of, totally out of the box -- relatively speaking. So, let's begin by taking a look at who in the world has potentially heard of RAW. Let's start more broadly and then hone in.
Read more: Do I Need to Eat a Certain Percentage of Raw Foods to Call Myself a Raw Foodist?
Welcome to Day 2 of Pure Jeevan's "Salad Dressing Week"!? Today we take a trip across the Pacific to the land of the "Rawsing Sun." I've yet to meet any raw vegans from Japan, but would be highly interested in hearing about what it's like to be raw vegan there.
Today's video not only shows a tasty salad dressing recipe, but it's really a testament to bold improvisation in your raw kitchen. In order to create something new, you really have to be willing to experiment. Sometimes you simply fail!? But, more often than not, a recipe that you have not quite perfected just needs some tweaking.
If you ve been a Pure Jeevan family member for a while, you know we don t always focus on food in regards to health. Health isn t only about the food you put into your body; it s about so much more. We are mental, spiritual, emotional, physical beings who thrive best when we have a balance in all those areas of our lives. Humans are, for the most part, social beings. If we lack something as vital as social interaction, we become out of balance. As young children, our primary social interaction is through direct contact with our parents and close family members. As we mature, almost all of us develop friendships with individuals outside of our family s social circle. Friendship is essential in helping us maintain a healthy balanced life.
How we meet friends, and how we interact with them, has been changing over the years as online social media communities have been created. For those living a raw food lifestyle and using the Internet to connect with like-minded others, you have no doubt realized there is a strong and growing virtual raw food community online. It s a large tribe, of sorts, where we are able to wander from website to website, meeting others and creating friendships together. (Be sure to join Pure Jeevan s Facebook page to connect with other Pure Jeevan family members.)
Greetings, everyone! ?We've been away from regular blogging for what seems an *eternity*. When we left the airwaves, the raw food world was at total peace with itself -- bliss, harmony, sister- and brotherhood. Aside from rare, gentle disagreements among raw vegans on issues such as whether raw chocolate was mineral-rich or potentially taxing to your body's store of minerals, things were pretty much business as usual.
And then we moved away and took a little time off to regroup .. ?and NOW look at the state of the raw food zeitgeist: (1) long-term raw foodists just about everyhwere are now "eating a little bit of cooked food," (2) an enormous schism has emerged after the seemingly improbable development of many long-term vegans returning to meat eating, (3) informational summits and online meetings have been replaced by debates, and (4) let's face it, the supplements being discussed and sold are getting, well, much *weirder* than ever!
All this week on the Pure Jeevan blog, we'll be focusing on diabetes and the movement to naturally reverse it. We're working up to April 25th (my birthday!), which has been selected as the official Reversing Diabetes Naturally Day.
A warm, intelligent, and loving individual named Dr. Gabriel Cousens has been doing ground-breaking work and research on diabetes and diet. What he has found is so surprising that many people dismiss what he is saying, believing it to be false. But, I (along with many others in the natural health movement) am here to tell you that what Dr. Cousens has discovered is TRUE! You probably already know what he has discovered, of course: a change in diet (particulary including raw foods) can reverse diabetes!
Dr. Cousens did a small study on some diabetic individuals, documenting his work and findings. The resulting documentary is remarkable. We hosted a viewing of the movie at our home and the room was packed. Everyone sat silently, absorbing the truth of what they were seeing: diet CAN make a difference in a disease that is thought to be permanent and debilitating. Many of us had tears silently streaming down our faces, touched by the moving stories that were shared in the documentary. We were filled with a sense of excitement that there IS hope for those with diabetes!
Read more: Our Focus This Week: Reversing Diabetes Naturally
Jim here... I was listening to a radio commercial the other day that promised to reveal the "secrets that credit card companies DON'T want you to know." You hear that kind of rather manipulative marketing all the time, right? It's a psychological thing, I suppose -- filling your mind with intrigue almost instantly. My credit is pretty decent, but I was thinking, "Wow, I wonder what those secrets are?!" We humans are curious creatures, aren't we?
But then I started to laugh to myself, imagining a raw foods radio spot adopting that technique. "Buy our special report and learn all of the Secrets that Raw Foodists do NOT Want YOU to Know!!!" And then I laughed some more. Know why? Because, when you think about it, there are absolutely, positively NO secrets raw foodists don't want you to know! Isn't that stunningly cool? In fact, the entire message of the movement is conveniently included right there in the words "raw foods." It couldn't be simpler -- the cure for what ails so much of the planet, neatly summed up in two words.
For this Take the Time Tuesday, I'm going to do something different. I'd like to share with you some of my friends and family, people I'd be pleased for you to meet in person some day. They are all beautiful people, filled with love.
Take the time to meet...
Some of Pure Jeevan's Friends and Family!?
The birthday girl, Rhia, asleep on her beautiful Nani?
Jim here... Recently, a commenter on this blog, Lannette, mentioned being a cardiac rehab nurse. For some reason, reading this set my wheels spinning in various directions, among them onto the topic of meat consumption in the world. To begin, I'd like to recap something I'd said in response to her:
... it *astounds* me how people joke about heart health where I work. People around here routinely return from medical exams and actually adopt rather mischievous grins when they reveal how high their bad cholesterol levels are. It's like they're saying, "I know meat and dairy are bad for me, but I'm going to keep on eating it anyway. Isn't that funny ??!!!" Ummm, no. It's sad. They laugh it off as though there could be no possible future reckoning for them. It's reminiscent, IMHO, of Dr. Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning," in which he describes a psychological phenomenon he termed the "delusion of reprieve." For anyone unfamiliar w/ that, the term describes the phenomenon via which those faced with certain death (or near certain death) mentally construct some way out of it. They are deluded into believing that they'll have a reprieve from the inevitable. So, it's exactly the same to me -- these people see the heart attacks coming. They simply refuse to do anything about it, refuse to change their habits, deny what their blood work says to them. Why? Because they think "I'll be okay. Sure, this leads to heart disease in most people, but not in *me* because I'm a strong guy, I'm macho, I'm not as fat as some other person here, etc." Mostly, it's the meat, I think. It's got a powerful hold on our society...
So, today I wanted to write a little bit on the topic of meat consumption. This is an enormous issue, in my opinion. If you're reading this, it likely means you're already at least a vegetarian, so I do not need to quote you any saddening statistics on the horrors of the meat industry. In fact, before writing this, I decided to visit the PETA web site quickly in order to glean a few slaughterhouse facts. But, in no time, I became markedly depressed, so I'll largely avoid focusing on specific negative imagery here.
We've got three incredible posts coming your way this week, and we're going to get started right here and NOW with a one-hour interview with the incredible Kevin Gianni. As most of you know, we postponed our RV Tour recently.As part of that, we'd planned to stage a fun event related to the All Raw Directory.We'd planned to air this interview with Kevin (conducted back in December 2008) for that event.
Fast-forward to today and we realize that, like our raw RV Tour, our All Raw Directory promotion will have to wait. It's funny how things trickle down like that. But, all is not lost. This is still an incredible interview -- and guess what ! It's only part one of a two-part interview, as well as a special super-fun surprise we'll be announcing on Friday. We promise: No one in the raw food community will want to miss Friday's post. All we'll say now is that it's a truly unique, limited opportunity unlike anything you've seen here before! Trust us: You couldn't possibly guess what it is!
Read more: Part 1 of a 3-Part Series Profiling the Multi-Talented Kevin Gianni!
When you get into raw foods, one thing you're probably going to notice from time to time is that others are "concerned" about your health. This is hugely ironic -- not only because it's likely your own concern about your own health that brought you to raw in the first place, but because you most likely hold the conviction that the raw food diet (or some close variant of it) represents the most healthy dietary regimen available for humans.
Nevertheless, you'll receive a lot of concern. You'll receive it even when you have that "raw glow" and are looking and feeling better than you have in years! The main concerns:
A month has gone by since my last health update. At this point, I consider myself healed of lyme disease! In the past I asked the lyme specialist doctor if there's a way to test to see for certain the lyme is gone, but he said there isn't. So, I go on my inner wisdom, which tells me that it's gone and now I simply need to continue healing from all that the lyme brought with it.
We're still not comfortable sharing what we've been learning and doing to help move my body into an even healthier state, but it's obviously working. I've been able to go back to daily living, for the most part, without much assistance at all. I've organized the house again (Jim and KDcaT were busy caring for me and the house wasn't the top priority for the past half a year), caught up on all of the laundry, responded to all of my email that had been piling up, and I've been able to be more social again. The biggest improvements are that I can now prepare my own food without experiencing any pain, and I can dress myself with only minimal assistance at times! BIG improvements!