EDITOR’S NOTE: This book is simply excellent with delicious and simple recipes. Saskia recommends that a raw food lifestyle is best combined with healthy cooked foods. These meals will help you to experience vibrant health, energy, calmness and a sense of wellbeing.
About Saskia
After a life changing accident in 2004, Saskia decided to leave behind the world of fashion to focus on healing her body, mind and spirit through raw foods. The powerful effects of her own healing journey ignited her passion for passing on this knowledge to those seeking deep physical wellbeing and a greater sense of purpose and connection in life. Through her work as a raw food mentor and life coach she has helped many hundreds of people to experience vibrant health, energy, calmness, intuitive focus and shining self-confidence.
In 2008, Saskia created Raw Freedom as a way to share her passion and knowledge about raw food. Through her coaching programmes, workshops, retreats and books she shows you how eating a high raw diet is not about denying your pleasures but about giving yourself the gift of good health, clear skin, shining eyes, a body to feel great about and loads more energy. Raw Food is an amazing catalyst for change on all levels, increasing self-knowledge whilst vastly improving your physical and emotional experience of life. Saskia is living proof of the power of raw food.
What’s So Great About Raw Food?
People have experienced a multitude of health and life-enhancing effects from eating a high raw, nutrient rich diet. A 100% raw food diet isn’t right for many people but, without being too extreme, eating an increased amount of cleansing and nutritious raw foods makes a world of difference to our energy levels, the strength of our immune system and the resilience and positivity of our emotional state.
Enzymes
According to research conducted by the renowned Doctor Edward Howell, enzymes play a large part in why raw food is so good for us. Food enzymes play an important role in the exchange between how much energy we get from the food we ingest, and how much energy it takes our bodies to digest and assimilate that food.
The theory according to Edward Howell goes like this:
There are 3 types of enzymes. Two of these are essential to our metabolic function: metabolic enzymes and digestive enzymes. We have a finite store of these enzymes, which become depleted as we age. This depletion of metabolic and digestive enzymes is one of the causes of the aging process.
The third type of enzymes are food enzymes. Food enzymes are the live magic that make fruit and vegetables ripen. These enzymes are only found in raw foods that haven’t been heated beyond 42 degrees centigrade or 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Cooking destroys 100% of food enzymes. As the name implies, these enzymes help our bodies to digest food. Digesting cooked food uses a lot of our body’s vital energy.
That’s why, after a big Sunday roast, you’ll feel sleepy. The body pulls energy away from your limbs and brain, channeling it to your digestive system to digest the heavy food that you’ve just eaten. When you use raw ingredients that still contain their food enzymes, these food enzymes help your body to digest. Your body doesn’t need to redirect energy from other areas to help with digestion, because there is already enough energy present. That’s why, when you eat a raw meal or snack, your energy rises afterwards, rather than making you feel sluggish or sleepy.
Book: ‘Raw Freedom’
SEE 4 YUMMY RECIPES BY SASKIA IN ‘Recipes’ SECTION