Defining Raw: Carly Brien for Food and RMS for Beauty
True story: A writer sits down next to another writer on a flight from New York to Los Angeles. They pop open their laptops, each ends up peeking at what the other one is tapping away at, and a few hours later they’ve mutually inspired each other to make major life changes. Sounds like the premise of a Lifetime movie, right? But it’s actually the story of how one intrepid EcoStiletto editor discovered activist/dietician Carly Brien and her amazing blog, which chronicles her personal mission to create a healthier lifestyle for herself, her clients and her mother, who’s battling brain cancer.
Carly’s switch to a 70% to 80% raw food diet was inspiring to the ES team, who thought raw food only meant salad. We were intrigued by Carly’s description of raw food as a lifestyle—rather than a diet—that resulted in boundless energy and effortless weight loss.
Let’s repeat that in case you didn’t read it the first time: Boundless energy and effortless weight loss. What’s not to like?
According to Carly, the idea is simple. Raw foods are super easy to digest. When your body uses less energy to move food through it, you retain more energy from that food. But she’s not about telling us to fast or avoid fish or meat every once in a while. You just have to eat more raw foods, and learn how to incorporate these three concepts into your life:
1. Understand food combinations. Mix veggies with anything, but keep starches and flesh foods separate from one another. This means you can eat a potato with veggies or a piece of fish with veggies, but not fish with potatoes. Hold the hash browns with your egg white omelet, and opt for greens on the side instead.
2. Be careful with fruit. Most people think that eating fruit along with their main meal is a good way to stay healthy, but when fruit is digested along with other foods it causes fermentation. You should always eat fruit on an empty stomach, and after eating it wait at least 30 minutes before eating any other food, as it takes that long to digest. Don’t mix fruit with any other food—yes, that’s right, no more strawberry cheesecake or fruit with cheese.
3. Drink fresh vegetable juice at least once a day. According to Carly, this is the most important step of all. Essentially, fresh juice delivers the enzymes and nutrition of the vegetables straight into the bloodstream. It detoxes the blood and cleanses the body without activating the digestive system. The biggest mistake that people make when they try the raw food lifestyle is to forgo the juice. This is the key element to benefiting from the power of detoxified, raw living.
Once you’ve made these lifestyle changes, Carly recommends experimenting with goji berries, raw cacao, blue-green algae and other superfoods like raw honey, which are packed with minerals and vitamins.
And, she says, you can eat whatever you want and as long as you follow the three guidelines listed above you won’t gain a pound—if anything, you’ll lose them.
This raw food concept is so hot, it’s popping up everywhere from baby food to beauty products. Celebrity makeup artist Rose-Marie Swift just launched her all-organic RMS Beauty line, which is not only chemical free but also depends on cold-pressed raw, food-grade ingredients that are never heated to high temperatures, a commonplace practice which strips away nutrients that are beneficial to the skin. The Un-Cover Up concealer is especially awesome as it covers dark circles but never cakes up.
Not that you’d have those circles if you were eating raw in the first place. Anyone up for some blue-green algae?
