Vol. 1, Issue 25: December 20, 2007

From The Desk of The Divas

So, how was your Christmas? As you may have noticed, we kept quiet around here, wanting to respect family and vacation time for you and for us. We hope that your Christmas was full of sparkles, warm smiles and fond memories spent with those you love. 

While the spirit of the season still lingers, we're getting all ready to pack up the Christmas decorations, put away the tinsel and prepare for the kick off of 2008. 

I absolutely adore new beginnings, a chance to clean the slate. It may be just a numbers game, but when the 1st of January rolls around, I can't help but feel like opportunity is in the air--a rebirth, a chance to start fresh and play a new game.

It's also time to reflect back on the things that have happened in 2007. Watch your inboxes on New Year's Eve as we send out a special gift to Raw Divas everywhere. The PERFECT tool  to help you prepare for 2008 with confidence and infinite possibilities.

At the Raw Divas, we're excited about what we've got up our sleeves for 2008, but nothing can compare to the excitement we feel about the fact that Amy will be bringing a little life into the world. So that's our top priority around here--making sure she's getting the rest, love and support she needs. Please send out your good vibes to her, because this first trimester has presented some tough challenges so far.

Here in Montreal, 2008 is the year that Tera turns into a social butterfly. That's right! We're committed to doing a lot more to create an active off-line community this year in the Great White North, and we're getting started on January 5th with a big adventure in the snow! 

We Canuck Divas laugh at the cold and delight in the sparkle of snow! That's why we're having a "Winter Wonderland Potluck Picnic!" Bring your family, your friends, your children and your CRAZY CARPETS, because we're heading up to Beaver Lake on the Mountain for hours of fun in the snow! 

After we play and oxygenate our bodies, we'll head indoors for a potluck picnic. Feel totally comfortable bringing fresh fruit and veg as it is, but if you want to prepare a dish in advance, be sure that no additional prep is required, as it is a "picnic!"

We're totally excited about this event, and so bring the kids and let's play Divastyle in the snow! Don't hesitate to contact Tera for more information.

As many of you know, the Body Enlightenment System will be starting up on New Year's Eve with our preparation week. This is going to be a special run of the BES, so if you're not signed up yet, you can do that here! We're putting a special emphasis on detox and simplicity to make up for the holiday feasts, and it's going to feel AMAZING! Get on board before registrations close.

Part of getting ready for this New Year's version of the Body Enlightenment System, I have been doing a lot of research and getting pumped up and excited about bringing in 2008 RAW and DIVA. So, I was going through some of the resources that inspired me most as I began this journey, and whatdya know! They inspired me all over again and I hope they'll do the same for you!

Recipes from The Diva's Kitchen

Take a perfectly delicate, jelly-like hatchya persimmon and just spend a moment looking at that perfectly constructed work of art brought to you by Mother Nature herself.

Then nibble on the end of it and let the sweet insides start to make their way into your mouth. If you must do this in a public place, do try to keep the noise down. There's no way a perfectly charming and ripe persimmon can keep you from squealing in delight when it reaches your lips.

The rest, dear Diva, is up to you as you lose and loose yourself in the explosion of perceptions and sensations of food at its very finest.

Contagious Lettuce Giggles

Preparation: This dish is much more effectively enjoyed after a good, long jog.

Directions: when your appetite is ripe, and you've just completed a good long run or jog, hit the local fresh food market and grab a head of Organic Romain lettuce. Clutch it in your hands and giggle as you walk through the market, grinning from ear to ear and crunching on your lettuce, realizing, perhaps for the first time, how incredible nourishing and flavorful simple foods can be when you're hungry!

p.s. If you giggle and smile enough, you'll start to notice a surprising amoung of people grabbing lettuce for their evening meal's salad. Pleasure is contagious.

Parfum de Muscat

Directions:

Wait until you're hungry! VERY HUNGRY!
Then grab yourself the plumpest, most beautiful bundle of muscat grapes you can find. And lose yourself, one by one, in the perfumed bliss of these tasty little morcels.

And just keep popping 'em in and revelling in bliss until their perfume starts to seem slightly less blissful to you. That's your body saying you've had enough.

Then stop, knowing you've had a totally satisfying meal. And go play with the day and the the world know how great life is.

The Low Down on Cooked Food: Get on The  Get You on The Raw Path for GOOD.
by Tera Warner

I will never forget the weekend I sat down for a conversation with a woman who was working on her PhD thesis in nutrition. She talked to me all about the project that she was working on. It had to do with feeding rats infant formula. She was very excited about how this information would revolutionize hospital food for people who were not able to eat solid foods.

I felt rather repulsed by the idea of it all, but smiled, acknowledged her communication, then asked her a question, that surely anyone with a PhD in nutrition would know.

I said, “Can you tell me how heat affects nutrients?”

She hummed and hawed then said, “Well, it activates enzymes.”

Huh!?

Anyone who has ever tried to plant or sprout heated seeds, knows that heat doesn’t activate enzymes it destroys them.

I couldn’t believe that after 6 years of full time study in nutrition there wasn’t an extensive study of heat and its affect on food. I mean, surely if there had been, we’d have a lot more raw foodists on the planet.

I have to admit, that generally I avoid writing or communicating in scientific nutritional vocabulary, but if you'll forgive a slight indulgence into some moderately scientific vocabulary, I thought I’d cover a few things that really empowered me to go full force as I started off on the raw food path.

If you already know these things, then great! Forward them on to someone who doesn’t. If you’ve forgotten, maybe this can be a refresher. 

If you're coming across this information for the first time,  then dive in and enjoy the adventure. We hope this information can inspire you to make healthier choices for yourself.

So why raw food?

Though there are countless reasons, let's look specifically at what happens when we heat food. So, more appropriately, why NOT cooked food.

We need to start with the understanding that nutrients are delivered to the body in three major categories:

Carboydrates (which can be simple (fruits, sugars) or complex (grains, cereals and starchy vegetables like potatoes,  etc.)
Protein
Fat

Carbohydrates, when subjected to heat, become water saturated. Just think of baked bread coming out of the over, giving off humitidy, or potatoes. When this happens, they become more difficult to digest. Inefficient carbohydrate digestion ultimately leads to fermentation in the gut. In case you don't know, thanks to the process of fermentation, we have 3 nasty by-products being produced in the body:

Gas
Alcohol
Acetic acid

Chances are good that you’re familiar with the effects of gas and alcohol. So let’s talk about acetic acid. I haven’t yet figured out why people continue to use vinegar, a diluted form of acetic acid, when the following is what you’ll find in a chemical laboratory, regarding it’s material safety data:

POISON! DANGER! CORROSIVE. LIQUID AND MIST CAUSE SEVERE BURNS TO ALL BODY TISSUE. MAY BE FATAL IF SWALLOWED. HARMFUL IF INHALED. INHALATION MAY CAUSE LUNG AND TOOTH DAMAGE. FLAMMABLE LIQUID AND VAPOR.  

Having acetic acid in the body is clearly an invitation for trouble.

When there is acetic acid in the body, it leaches phosphorus and ultimately causes stress to the part of our body designed to help us most during stress: our adrenal glands (the little glands on top of the kidneys that are responsible for our “flight or fight” responses). 

Taxing these guys means trouble in the form of body odor, mucus production, increased heart rate, headaches and lose awful dark circles you get under the eyes.

Most people who eat grains and breads have that infamous bulge in the belly and bloated feeling. These are the tell-tale signs of fermentation hard at work in the body. Most people experience a drastic difference in these symptoms after only 3 days on all raw foods.

So that's carboydrates. What happens when we throw protein onto the fire?

Proteins are kind of like lego, composed of smaller parts called amino acids, which are bound together with "peptide bonds" (a kind of chemical glue for these amino acids. When protein is cooked, the bonds between the lego (amino acids) become tight and tough to break down. The body reacts to these unbreakable lego much the same way it would a foreign invader and it increases the production of prostaglandins (hormone like substances responsible for creating inflammation and other pain-responses in the body). 

Many pain-relieving drugs like aspirin inhibit the production of prostaglandins in the body to reduce pain, inflammation and swelling.

For women with painful menstrual cycles, TAKE NOTE!

For YEARS I suffered with terrible menstrual cramps and PMS. During my university days, because this was really debilitating, I was prescribed prostaglandin inhibitors to help deal with the pain. Although I was a strict vegetarian and vegan for over 7 years, I never experienced and real improvement in my condition until becoming a raw foodist. it wasn’t necessarily any better. But being nearly 100% raw, I have NO PMS, NO CRAMPS, and totally normal, regular, healthy cycles. A BIG wow, because for a lot of years I was doubled over in pain for days.

Now I know why. Cooked proteins and prostaglandins!! More recent experiments on myself have proven that while my cycle is in progress, eating cooke proteins creates a nearly INSTANTANEOUS reaction in my body and within minutes I will start to experience mildly uncomfortable cramps! It was only this week, however, that I managed to make the connection to prostaglandins.

Eliminating cooked protein has been a huge factor in helping people overcome chronic conditions of rheumatoid arthritis, and other auto-immune diseases (conditions in which the body apparently attacks itself) involving pain and inflammation. The body, in these circumstances, is not actually "attacking" itself, but actually fighting to protect the body from the invasion of foreign particles (cooked proteins) which are not necessary for the survival and well-being of the body itself.

Another thing about cooking proteins is the fact that it alters specific amino acids which are necessary for the transport of oxygen in the blood. Hemoglobin (which is responsible for transporting oxygen throughout the body in the blood) simply cannot do its job as efficiently in the presence of cooked proteins, because it depends upon the specific location of sulfur found on amino acids, which is altered and damaged through the heating process.

So why is that important?

Well, anyone who has ever walked up a set of stairs, or been involved in sports of any kind knows that getting oxygen moving in the blood makes a huge difference in being able to perform well cardio vascularly.

We also know that cancer thrives in an environment that is anaerobic or (lacking in oxygen). So, getting oxygen traveling efficiently through the body is vital to maintaining overall health.

Okay, now here’s the nastiest one of them all: FAT! What happens when we cook fat?

If you’ve ever washed dishes after a fatty cooked food meal (and who hasn’t) then you’ve got a great visual of what is going on inside your intestinal tract and blood. Fats get sticky when heated, and just like cheese sticks to the size of the lasagna pan, cooked fats cause your blood cells to stick together and eventually form blockages which are major contributors to strokes and heart attacks.

Also, having that sticky stuff along the lining of your intestinal tract can make the absorption of nutrients through the intestinal wall, much more difficult.

Vitamin E and A, which naturally protect us from free radicals in the body, are destroyed by heating. When we heat fats, we dramatically increase the amount of free radicals in the body and are destroying the Vitamins that protect us from these free radicals.

The Best Nutritional Supplement EVER

All that having been said, don't forget that stress itself inhibits digestions and assimilation of nutrients, which leads to many of the above conditions as well. Let this information inspire you to take the next step forward in your health journey--not turn you into an introverted, food-obsessed paranoid who is terrified of steamed broccoli.

I can't count the number of people, raw food chefs, and leaders in the community who state very clearly that they are embracing a journey, and do not beat themselves up for compromises along the way.

I don't know where YOU are at in your journey, and but if you've fallen off the proverbial wagon, let this article inspire you to step back up to the challenge that fits with your lifestyle and circumstances.  

I don't believe that a degree in nutrition will necessarily bring you any closer to achieving your ideal health, informing yourself about the basics of physiology, so that you feel knowledgeable about what's going on in the body, is a very empowering thing and helps us answer up with confidence when people ask us why we live on rabbit food. I've noticed it also helps as motivation when walking past bakeries, chocolate shops, and New Year's Dinners.

Above all, keep your thoughts positive! Look out around you at that beautiful world we've created, take it all in and may your joy and thirst for life be your greatest nutritional supplement EVER.

If she can do it, so can YOU!

"There are no words that can adequately describe how much this Program has changed my life in ways I couldn't even dream of. And to think... I almost didn't spend the money! -Pam"

"I have just begun the most incredible journey as a result of the 30 day Body Enlightenment System.! This program has transformed my life in so many ways! Yes, it's about raw food with shopping plans and menus for the entire month and teleconferences, too! But the BES is about so much more!! -Denise"

Join us on New Year's Eve and make 2008 your best year EVER! 



"If you're interested in losing weight, gaining energy, feeling younger, or learning how to eat a healthy raw food diet, I highly recommend the Body Enlightenment System (BES).

During the 30 day program, I released 15 lbs. That's an incredibly fast weight loss for anyone, but truly amazing for me as a 49 year old woman who's been overweight for over 10 years. But that's not all, I've also reversed my acid reflux, gotten silky soft skin, stopped yawning all day long, drastically reduced food cravings, and feel as energetic as a 21 year old!-Kathy"

The votes are in! 
Toothsoap is a hit with moms and children everywhere!

"I really couldn't tell you how long I have been using Tooth Soap®, but I will guess at about 8-9 months.  Before using the tooth soap I had severe sensitivity and my gums were receding, slowly but too fast for my taste!! My gums no longer "regularly" bleed while brushing or flossing and have a very healthy pink color to them...and I might add the receding has seemingly slowed to a halt."

— Denise


"I've been using the Tooth Soap® for about three months now, and my teeth have never been this clean. And all the sensitivity I used to have is a thing of the past.  But the thing I like the most about it, and it was a result I got from Day1, is how clean & fresh my mouth is first thing in the morning when I wake up. No toothpaste or mouthwash ever did that for me, no matter what they promised in their adverts. So, yeah, I'm a convert now. and preaching the good news to all my friends."

Kind regards,
Grania Spingies

The Raw Divas recommend the yummy flavored liquid toothsoap for kids and moms who like fruit!

Contact us to put your great ideas here!

If you would like to send The Raw Divas feedback, suggest a "Health in High Heels Newsletter" topic, or ask a question that could be featured in a future issue of "Health in High Heels", please do not hesitate to send us a message customerservice@therawdivas.com. Please note that we are unable to offer medical advice.

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