Time to continue with the Top 100 Weight Loss Tips. Here’s article 61 in the series that is designed to bring you one hundred ways to approach your own desire to lose weight. This one is going to focus on the raw food diet plan and see how useful it is as a legitimate means of shedding a few of those unwanted pounds.

Raw Food Diet Plan

Well, first off, what exactly are we talking about when we say a raw food diet plan? Well, don’t get too worried its going to be something that you’re not going to like the look of. It does not mean taking a totally raw steak and putting it on a plate with a raw carrot, some raw potatoes and a bunch of raw asparagus spears! Or taking a raw lump of chicken breast and eating it as is with a plate of uncooked chips. That would be disgusting as well as potentially dangerous with all the modern strains of harmful bacteria that exist, especially in some meats.

What a raw food diet plan entails is much more appetising, as well as being, well, edible!

We’re talking about making use of fruits and vegetables as nature intended them, uncooked and full of all the goodness and nutrients that cooking robs them of. So you take those vegetables that you can safely eat raw and preparing them in a way that makes them more appetising and even delicious because you may have never had them served up quite like that before and its a real treat for the taste bids!

Take carrots, which are traditionally chopped and boiled ending up as insipid chunks or orange on the plate and are often left uneaten. So let’s change the rules.

Carrots taste great when grated raw into salads, or as a side dish mixed with a little coriander and black pepper to spice them up. Try it, you’ll surprise yourself! Have you ever stood there in the kitchen shelling peas only to dump them in a pot of boiling water to end up with bullets? Then serve them up raw instead! They actually go great with grated carrot…

Use your imagination here. Cabbage is one thing that kids hate to eat because the pile of stewed mush on their plates just does not look like something they’d want to eat. So change the rules. Try fine shredding raw cabbage together with grated carrots (those again) mixed up with a little cider vinegar and black pepper. Or mix them up with freshly made mayonnaise to make a coleslaw.

Salads are a great way to include more raw foods. Don’t just make them with some limp lettuce and a tomato, get creative! Add some fresh watercress, chunks of avocado, grated carrot (oh yeah, how versatile is that vegetable!) shredded cabbage, chunked peach, apple and apricot (never be shy to experiment with adding fruit to salads as they taste great too), chopped raw spinach, chopped nasturtium leaves (and use the edible flowers as decoration) sliced cucumber, celery, radish, grated kohl rabi… the list goes on.

You can try Chinese vegetables like pak choi, bean sprouts, all the differently coloured lettuces, grated raw butternut squash and grated raw sweet potato too.

Meat is best not included in any raw food diet plan, but you can include some raw fish, Japanese style if you like it. If not, then don’t!

The idea of eating a diet of raw foods is to improve your intake of dietary fibre as well as all the goodness and nutrients that are retained in fruits and vegetables that are not cooked. This works to improve your metabolism and aid in elimination, sort of like a detox.

You have to make sure you drink plenty of plain water with this kind of diet to help your digestive process run smoothly and with any diet, you must also get some daily exercise, because you still have to burn off calories to lose weight!

100 Weight Loss Tips number 60 follows in the next post!

Weight Loss Tips

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