You are what you eat = towards raw diet?

Was staying at my parents' place for two nights and came back home tonight just to find out that there will be no gas for 3 days, which means no warm water, which in turn means no cooking and no showering. So I'll most probably go back to my parents' place for a couple more nights.

However, the fact that I couldn't cook anything for dinner tonight (was planning cousous with chicken and aubergine in coconut milk...) made me think about the raw diet concept.

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It's not the first time I've thought about it, although it's not been long since I first started playng with the idea in my head. The first time was when I met Maggie, who told me she had to adjust her diet while in Poland and eat 'normal' food, which made her feel worse and gain weight in no time.

I think she's the first raw-getarian I've met. 

I know a couple of vegans and quite a few vegetarians (a guy I was with for over 4 years has been vegetarian since birth), I've even been told by a friend that I'd go vegetarian myself one day, because "I had a vegetarian face" (love you, Chloe baby!).

The truth is I like meat and I never really had a bad conscious about eating it. However, the more I read about nutrition, health and the "quality" of food that we get fed with, the more I'm beginning to question every eating habit I have. And well, it doesn't look good.

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When asked about a proper diet and their eating habits, a lot of people use the excuse of a lack of time to convince themselves it's ok to eat the way they do, even though they know they should change it. I cannot be using that excuse now, as I'm free to cook every day (apart from the time they cut off my gas, but that's once in a blue moon) and for every meal. Why don't I then, why do I keep on eating the same low-quality foods all the time?

It's not really the question of f.e. eating less white bread or less sweets, 3 or 5 times a day, with or without breakfast. It goes way deeper than that. Mostly, it's about the type of products I consume (processed, not bio, cooked) and how much I consume of it (way more than my body actually needs).

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I go around telling everyone how people could use some more self-awareness in their professional and personal lives. How they should start asking themselves "why am I doing this?", find the true motivators behind their choices, or the lack thereof.

I think it's about time to start being more self-aware when it comes to what I fuel my body with and how I affect it by not giving much thought to my eating habits. Maybe not even that, but doing more research on the matter. As I've already mentioned, I never felt the need to go veggie but I always came to the conclusion that the veggie people I got to know where the most knowledgeable when it came to health and proper nutrition. Most of the people I met who did extensive research on how given foods influence our bodies, ditched meat and some other products at one point or another. They might be on to something...

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It's not to say that starting tomorrow, I'm completely changing my diet. However, I think I've finally matured enough to start consciously choosing how I'll reshape my eating habits.

Once upon a time I used to drink lots of Pepsi, Nestea and such. Now, I've a problem finishing a glass of soda. Once upon a time I didn't like drinking plain water. Now I don't really feel like drinking anything else (which many a time is very hard for people to understand, especially when we're out and everyone looks at me as if I'm crazy for not wanting a drink or even a cartonbox juice, opting for water instead).

I didn't use to like so many vegetables! But I made a conscious decision to change it and little by little, I've taught myself to tolerate, than like and finally enjoy the majority of those. 

So this is what I'll do - I'll start eating myself healthy, strong, active and happy. 

Still figuring out what the exact steps will be, so if any of you have some good reading material, I'd love for you to share it either here or on the fanpage. I know it'll be hard, 'cause I'll be fighting with 25 years of habits and the whole environment which doesn't really help the cause of healthy dieting. Also, I throughly enjoy the unhealthy and processed food, or so I think. 

Seeing how I used to love Pepsi and now barely can drink it, I think there's hope.

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A couple of cool sites I've come across, if you're interested in seeing what I'll be aiming at incorporating into my life:

Rawmazing - amazing how delicious those innovative raw recipes sound, can't wait to try them out!

Salad Pride - tens of salads 

Feed me better - healthy recipes in Polish

Dietetycznie w kuchni - a healthy way to prepare some well known dishes, in Polish

Dietetycznie siostro - two Polish sisters showing us how to prepare our fav dishes in a clean healthy way

Rawstaurant - vegan, raw and with videos!

Plus a short article, just to get your juices flowing in the right direction.

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Let me know what your views on a healthy diet are!

The appaling things we do to our planet

One of the jobs I've been doing lately is translating for an Australian company that runs rainforest conservation projects. I translated all the needed legals, the company mission statement etc. so I already knew more about how badly we need to start changing our carbon footprint but still, nothing hit base quite as hard as the statistics I've recently finished translating.

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Did you know, that:

* 55% of the world's largest rainforest stands to be severely damaged from agriculture, drought, fire, logging and livestock ranching over the next 22 years?

* 2000 trees, or the equivalent of 7 football fields, are being cut down every minute in the Amazon rainforest?

* only 4% of original forests in the United States remain, the rest are gone?

* the length of time carbon dioxide stays in the earth's atmosphere before it is absorbed into carbon sinks is between 50 and 200 years?

* in The United States, cars and trucks emit 314 metric tonnes of CO2 every year, and that is the equivalent to burning as much coal as would fit in an over 80 000 kilometres long train?

* an average tree absorbs about 20 kilograms of Carbon Dioxide per year. The average person produces 7 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide per year?

* in 2008 the arctic seasonal sea ice melt outpaced normal levels by 34% and there has been a 70% increase in the rate of Greenland's ice melt over the last five years?

* on average, the 140 million cars in The United States are estimated to travel over 6.4 billion kilometres in a day, and according to the Department of Transportation, they use over 200 million gallons of gasoline doing it?

* the consumption of oil in the United States and Canada alone is said to be close to 11 litres per person, per day. In other countries that are part of the OECD, the consumption of oil is 5.2 litres per person, per day. In other nations that are not part of the OECD, the consumption is as little as 0.76 litres per person per day?

* in 2007 $1.6 billion of jet fuel was burned by planes waiting in line to take off at airports?

* 1% of Australia's untapped geothermal power potential could provide enough energy to last 26,000 years?

* citizens in the United States spend $25 billion a year on lawn care. Residential lawns and gardens are doused with 80 million pounds of chemical pesticides and 70 million tonnes of fertilizers annually?

* only 1% of China's 560 million city residents breathe air that is considered safe by the European Union. Cancer is now becoming China's leading cause of death?

* very few oil spills are ever officially reported. On average there are 27 oil spills every day somewhere in the oceans of the world?

* with current human population growth and global warming, the world is going to be fighting over drinkable water supplies by mid-century?  

* by the time you finish reading this sentence, more than 50 000 aluminum cans are made in The United States?

* in The United States they throw away enough aluminium cans to rebuild their entire commercial air fleet every three months?

* the US, Mexico and China lead the world in bottled water consumption, with people in the US drinking an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 per cent of which will never be recycled?

* about 1% of U.S. landfill space is devoted entirely to disposable diapers, which take 500 years to decompose?

* for every single garbage bin that you take outside on garbage day, 70 equivalent cans of garbage were produced by all the various manufacturing processes that created the bin in the first place?

* if the entire world lived like the average American citizen, we'd need 5 planets to provide enough resources?

* cigarette manufacturing uses almost 6.5 kilometres of paper just for rolling and packaging cigarettes? That is one tree for every 300 cigarettes produced.

* there's a swirling vortex of waste and debris in the Pacific Ocean, which covers an area twice the size of the continental U.S. and is believed to hold almost 100 million tonnes of garbage?

* with the current levels of rainforest destruction many local species are going extinct at a rate of 100 species per day?

If you're one of them skeptics but with an open mind, a recource you might wanna check - Skeptical Science.

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As for me, I can already see a change in my behaviour when it comes to consuming some of the goods. More about that in one of the following blogs though, together with a couple of real simple pointers about what we can do that will slightly change how we live and mightly change the impact of our lives on the planet.