It's an issue later than expected but out in the shops today comes Woman Diet Special magazine. Published four times per year, this is the Summer issue and features a double page spread on raw food with a beginner's menu plan provided by me. A basic piece but essentially good. (Click on the link below the pics to read the info in full as a PDf file)
Further to my article posted a few days ago, here is the video guide to sprouting beans, seeds and grains... and then, below video #1, how to take that one stage further and grow wheatgrass and indoor greens.
Here's to perfect sprouts every time!
Last Friday I filmed a few more videos for YouTube. It's been a while and I felt it high time to focus on the greens and sprouts, so here's the first...
From Successfully Raw Issue 92:
One of the most popular modules on my Raw Food For Beginners classes is undoubtedly the sprouting teach-in.
Whether I am lucky, have unrecognised green fingers or what, I do not know, but it seems that many people have struggled and continue to struggle with sprouting seeds, beans, pulses and grains successfully, and after a couple of failed attempts tend to throw in the towel and write the whole idea off.
Nooooo!
Don't do it!
Sprouting absolutely has to be one of the very most important raw food "tools" you need to have in your toolbox if you want to be as lithe, gorgeous and energy-filled as you can possibly be (my already abundant energy probably doubles when I bring sprouts into my daily diet). There's a LOT to be said for these apparently "insignificant" little creatures, and to ignore or exclude them from your diet is, in my humble opinion, one of the biggest mistakes you can possibly make.
So in my bid to have you sprouting successfully all over your kitchen, here follows my fool-proof guide to sprouting using my own personal favourite method, the jar.
What is sprouting?
Sprouting is an alternative term for germinating, although the sprouting process goes a little beyond basic germination and results in a partially grown or young plant. In a raw food kitchen we’re looking specifically at the sprouting of a nut, seed, bean or grain in order to render it edible or more easily digestible. Nuts do not need to be sprouted to make them edible, nor do some seeds but both benefit from soaking and sprouting as they become more easily digestible and juicier as a result. Other seeds, i.e. those that are supposed to be sprouted, plus all beans, pulses and legumes (with the exception of peanuts) need to be sprouted if they are to be eaten raw. Kidney beans should never be eaten raw and should be avoided. Grains should also be soaked and sprouted, although dry oats are an exception and can be milled down and used to make cookies successfully without being sprouted first. The sprouting process begins in water in your very own kitchen.
Why sprout?
When a seed, bean, nut or grain is soaked in water for a period of time, the plant’s enzyme inhibitors are removed. These enzyme inhibitors prevent a plant from germinating unless the right conditions for growth are met, and so once the seed comes into contact with water and the enzyme inhibitors are washed away the germination process begins. This process sets into action a whole chain of reactions enabling the plant to grow at a rapid rate. As it does so the vitamin content increases dramatically, to the point where the sprouted seed can contain hundreds or thousands times more vitamins than it did previously, and the protein, carbohydrates and fats begin to break down into a pre-digested form making for easier and better digestion and assimilation overall. The enzyme content of each seed, been, nut or grain also sky rockets making sprouts one of the most enzyme-rich (i.e. live) foods on the planet.
What do I need to sprout?
You don’t need any fancy equipment to get sprouting, although there are many pieces of equipment available to help you such as jars, trays, bags and even automatic sprouting kits. To get started you’ll need some seeds or beans for sprouting, a container to sprout them in such as a jam jar, and something to drain the water through, like a sieve or some netting or muslin secured around the top of the jar.
Best ways to get sprouting
Sprouting is actually very easy, but some seeds and beans tend to sprout more easily than others. The easiest ones tend to be mung, lentil, fenugreek, chickpea (garbanzo) and quinoa. These are all quick to grow (quinoa takes just 24 hours, the others take 2- 3 days on average) and mastering the sprouting of these will help you get more confident about sprouting other seeds and beans that take longer to grow or are slightly more tricky.
Continue reading "Sprouting: The Why, What and How To Do It Successfully!" »
Following on from my first coaching call with Gala Darling (left) of a month ago, below you will find part 2 (the final part).
In part 1 Gala was gungho about going more raw and our call focussed on fine tuning her diet, and amping things up. In this call a very different scenario with Gala, newly returned from a trip visiting friends and family in New Zealand, off the wagon and struggling to get back on and not quite sure why.
Karen Knowler
— Raw saint & genius. Behold her halo! We had our second raw coaching call last night & it was just as amazing, if not more amazing, than the first one. She gave me tons of useful prompts, questions & exercises to help make my transition easier (& as soon as I post this I’m going to do my “raw homework”!). If you’re going raw as part of the iTC or are just curious, check out her free resources (I especially recommend So You Want To Go Raw?) & books, DVDs & audio. Everything she does is infused with love & passion — she is the perfect raw guide. Bless. (Oh, & I will be posting our raw coaching call as an MP3 very shortly!)Part 2 of my NY weekend re-telling...
YAAAWWWWNNNNN... On Sunday morning I had a nice long lay in. A 3:30am bedtime and a very long few days prior certainly warranted it! And the bed was sooo good!
Penni and I had already agreed that we’d spend the day together as Penni was to fly back to Tulsa later that day and I was getting up at 4am the next morning to get my cab to JFK. So, after stretching out and having a lovely refreshing shower it was very much a case of - Let’s go!
Our travels took us first to Pure Juice and Takeaway; my second visit. I was so craving a green juice and a coconut water that I had both :) One big glass of each. Yum. And I tried some little cookie dough ball type things (I’m sure the real name is much more glamorous!), and although they were tasty I realised by this point that I was so craving fresh fruit and salad that I just couldn’t take one more “mock” anything!
We sat in the window and chatted away. Penni was well into her juice feast – about day 33 or more - and so was more than happy to slurp away! It was so nice to sit there like old friends (even though we'd only known each other about 36 hours!) and share so much about ourselves and our lives and feel so blissfully content. Friendships really are priceless and yet I have not made as much time for them, or family, over the past few years, not always finding it easy to find "my people", especially into raw. So finding Penni and others had been yet another wonderful aspect to the weekend that I had not predicted.
In many ways I found myself wishing I was also juice feasting; sometimes I wish I didn't have to think about food (totally ironically it has become such a small part of my own life!), and I could feel and see the benefits of juice feasting in both Penni and Philip, which certainly got me thinking...
Continue reading "Successfully Raw NYC - And More! Part 2" »
From Successfully Raw Issue 90:
This week in Raw Passion (one of the coaching groups I am running) I shared how our home is incredibly important in our raw food journey, for a number of reasons, but often we just don’t realise it. And yet it’s really big stuff!
In this week’s article I am going to share with you some of the key points we looked at on our call, and at the end you’ll find an exciting Coaching Challenge! Note, this is only for those of you who are serious right now about upping your game, inside and/or out. So if this isn’t you then you might want to print this out and file it anyway, because when you’re ready you can dramatically fast-track yourself by taking the challenge on - and I think you’ll love it!
So, on with the mini teach-in:
In my raw food coaching model “Ongoing Support” (pictured), YOUR HOME features bang in the middle of “The Seven Circles of Raw Support” series, as circle number four. This isn’t a coincidence. Our home is precious to us in so many ways, whether we are raw foodies or not, and it forms our safe haven from the rest of the world and physically speaking, becomes the centre of our Universe. However, the more raw you become the more you will notice, I’m sure, the more intense desire you have to get your home in order, in just about every way.
So why is this?
There’s a couple of main aspects here.
The first is that “as within so without”, which basically means that as you clean up your diet and body, you naturally feel the desire to make the same thing happen in your external world. It might start small scale with an increased desire to clean, move furniture, sort papers etc., but in no time at all you might find yourself radically de-junking your home, making big internal changes with furniture, organisation and/or decor, or even consider moving home completely.
This is so common that I hardly need ever ask anyone anymore if it’s happened to them!
The second reason is rather more subtle and I liken it to creating a “cocoon”. Just as a caterpillar spins a cocoon in order to turn to mush and then transform into a butterfly, we too on our raw food journey naturally are drawn to creating more peace, quiet and space for reflection and transformation, and sometimes much more – within our own four walls, our home.
As we do this we energetically and literally set the scene for these great changes to occur, and so it is that when you have a clean body AND a clean home space, some magic really can and does occur.
In fact, the more you look at this for yourself, the more you will probably realise that even when you are going well with your food you still might be holding yourself back by holding on to clutter in your home, because the Universe is guaranteed to bring you radical shifts when you clear both at once!
So, for those of you who are ready for this level of change, or if you would like to address your home and put your dietary shifts on the back burner, here follows my coaching challenge...
Continue reading "Why Your Home & Raw Journey Are So Connected" »
I'm delighted to announce that this week we welcome Katie Foster to The Raw Food Coach team. Katie is my new PA, working part-time from my office and part-time from her own. She steps into some of the shoes plus a few pairs more that Beth my former part-time PA filled and will be my full-time right-hand woman, handling all calls and emails.
I asked Katie to write an introduction so you can get to know her; some of you may have seen her with me in London last week at the Brian Clement event hosted by The Fresh Network. The picture above is one I took of her there, hence the busy background - the event was packed!
* * * * * * * *
Hi everyone, I’m Katie and I’m very pleased to meet you all!
I’m 36 years young(!) and live in Littleport, Cambridgeshire with my gorgeous husband Terry, the love and passion of my life, and my beautiful step-daughter Kayleigh. Terry and I moved to Littleport from London in November 2006 to live with Kayleigh and it was a move that both excited and terrified us but one we have never had any regrets making.
I’ve been a PA now for around 14 years (good lord is it really that long!), working for various types of companies but, with every one I’ve spent time at, I’ve become more and more disillusioned and frustrated with the way the majority are run and the impersonal way in which employees are generally treated. We spend such a large proportion of our lives at work that it has to be right, and I’ve personally now reached a point where I feel passionate about the need for my time to be spent making a real difference, not just to the people I work with but to the universe outside the four office walls!
So, I thought, it’s time for change and the only person that can make that happen is me!
I’d seen Karen’s shout out for her ‘Dream PA’ in her eZine last year but, through my commuter fogged brain (5 hours a day travelling to London and back was certainly dampening my Va Va Voom!!), I was too slow off the mark and missed the boat….gutted! However, knowing I desperately needed to quit the commute, I found myself a job in Cambridge working for another one of “those” companies (there were some very lovely people there though so all was not lost!). By the start of 2008 the fog had well and truly cleared and with that came a clarity that I had never experienced before. I knew in my heart and in my soul that this was my year for change, my time to start reaching for my dreams and living and breathing my own reality.
I've been back from New York for just two days, and still really taking in the enormity of what happened. Reading other people's blog posts about the event has been heart-warming. It really was incredible and I am so so happy to have been a part of it.
I typed up my New York trip notes on the plane home to England on Monday night. I got half way through and then my battery died. So part 1 comes today and part 2 later this week, stay tuned!
My trip to New York began early last Friday morning UK time. Once on the train to London Stansted I immediately met “interesting person #1” who came dashing onto the train having almost missed it. Without any prompting from me he proceeded to share with me how he’s a film set designer, has worked on all the Star Wars films and every year travels to Egypt to study hieroglyphics. And so my journey began. I knew this was a taste of things to come!
One hour later safely at the airport, I was queueing to check in when who should step into line behind me but a couple who live on the same road as me! Quite unbelievable, especially considering how few houses there are where I live! Already it was becoming clear that this was to be a serendipitous journey.
Once on board the plane bound for NY, I got chatting to the woman next to me. In actual fact originally I had been placed in the seat behind her, but as a husband and wife had been accidentally split by the airport staff I gave up my seat to the wife, we swapped places and I found myself sitting next to a lovely lady from Belgravia, London who just happened to have been in and out of raw foods for the past few years!
We got chatting, she took my card, and while reading her copy of Red magazine she found a small feature about raw chocolate c/o rawintent.co.uk which she promptly ripped out for future reference and will no doubt be purchasing from. Well it just kept flowing!
Once at NY, it was a very straightforward journey through. For the first time ever I didn’t get asked “purpose of visit”, I just cruised through passport control and out to the other side where the lovely, wonderful, truly gem of a guy Philip McCluskey was waiting for me.
Continue reading "Successfully Raw NYC - And More! Part 1" »
These days I actually do very little 1:1 phone coaching compared to one year ago as I am now focussing on many other projects. However, the networking fairies have been at play (well, one in particular who perhaps would not like being referred to as a fairy, hehe, but is perhaps more like an angel! You'll find out who he is as you go...) and so it was that two days ago I coached famous Australian fashion writer Gala Darling of www.galadarling.com and had a really great call with her.
Before you listen to the call (it's on her site and mine for the world to hear and is one hour long) you'd definitely benefit from reading one of her earlier blog posts just to set the context for this call.
Gala is a lot of fun as you will see/hear, her web site/ blog is simply beautiful and what's more she thoroughly loved the call.
From Gala, as per her blog entry about our call:
"I expected her to be useful but not THIS useful! The phone-call was a revelation — it was absolutely amazing. Sometimes when you’re having trouble with something, having someone else there to ask the right questions is all you need, & all of a sudden your problem starts to unravel & you realise the root cause of it. Well, Karen asked me some totally brilliant questions — & I came away from the phone-call with all of my problems solved!
"It was one of the most interesting phone-calls I’ve ever had, for sure. I just love getting to the bottom of a problem & gaining a deeper understanding of why I do what I do! I think anyone interested in going raw (or who is currently making alterations to their diet) will find this a really useful thing to listen to, because many of the questions she asks me you will be able to ask yourself."
You can read more at Gala's site and/or listen to the recording below. I hope you find something useful in there for you also!
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