Late winter and early spring are the perfect time of the year to start a raw food cleanse and help your body detoxify naturally. Healthy raw vegan recipes will provide you all the energy you need to thrive, while allowing your body to heal and replenish after all those holiday parties and gourmet dinners. These 3 extra tips (you can find the previous 3 tips here) will help you to maintain or achieve a healthy weight on a low or reduced fat raw vegan diet.
Tip 4: choose your fruits wisely
Not all fruits are created equal. The sweeter and riper the fruit, the more calories it contains. Use this basic rule to measure the amount of calories your fruit meals contain. 1 medium ripe banana contains more or less 100 calories. This is the same for other sweet fruits like mango, papaya or persimmons. Of course, you need to take the weight of a certain fruit into account too. If your mango weighs twice as much as your banana, it will contain twice as many calories. Less sweet fruits such as apples, pears and peaches usually contain about 75 calories per medium sized piece. Naturally dried fruits obviously contain the most calories per ounce. If you are looking to gain weight on a low fat raw vegan diet, try incorporating them into smoothies, dressings and desserts.
Tip 5: don’t eliminate all fats
We all need healthy fats to absorb nutrients, build muscle tissue, and ensure healthy brain development and functioning. Although the low fat raw vegan diet only recommends a daily intake of 10% fat, it is essential that you include this part into your daily diet. Having a hard time digesting nuts? No worries! There are several other sources of healthy plant-based fats. Try adding omega-3-rich plant-based fats such as hemp, chia, flax or pumpkin seeds to your breakfast smoothies, and see how that makes you feel. Add a little avocado to your daily salad, blend it into a creamy soup, or add it to your favorite salad dressing or pasta sauce. You can even experiment with young coconut meat in desserts, shakes and wraps.
Tip 6: don’t combine different kinds of fat
If even small amounts of healthy plant-based fats tend to slow your digestion, avoid combining different kinds of fat in one meal. Classic raw vegan meals often contain several kinds of fat at once, such as a combination of olive oil, avocado and flax crackers in a salad. Although many people thrive on a diet high in healthy fats, others will end up feeling bloated, sluggish or tired. If you’re one of them, stick to one type of fats per meal and always pre-soak your nuts and seeds for optimal digestion.
