Raw Food Diet
Interview With Angela Stokes

Raw food diets are increasingly popular. In this interview, Angela Stokes (in the picture below) tells her personal story about losing weight through a raw food diet as well as giving us a great explanation on what the diet is really all about.

From a weight of nearly 300 pounds she managed to overcome the weight challenge with a diet of raw foods - and is now advising others in the raw food concept.

We strongly encourage you to visit her well updated and informative site, www.rawreform.com. It is a truly a must-read for those that are looking for a healthy approach to a sustainable natural weight loss.

The Raw Food Diet Philosophy

1. Angela, your website has gained quite a few followers and you just released your last eBook “Raw Emotions”. What is the philosophy behind Rawreform.com and the type of diet you talk about there ?

RawReform.com shares both MY remarkable story of weight loss and renewed health, plus offers guidance to others too, who are looking to lose weight, feel healthier and eat more raw. I released around 70kg of excess weight and saw my morbid obesity reverse by adopting a raw food lifestyle.

I eat mainly vegetables, seeds, nuts, fruits, seaweeds and other unprocessed, uncooked foods, straight from the Earth. This is the lifestyle I help others to embrace via my website and work. My website has been up since Jan 2004 and has helped literally countless thousands of people to realize there are natural ways they can reclaim their health. I am delighted to be able to share in this way.

2. What can the readers expect in your latest eBook ?

'Raw Emotions', my latest ebook, is all about exploring our emotional connections with food and eating. Most of us have VERY strong emotional ties to food - we eat because we're happy/sad/celebrating/lonely and so on - rarely simply to fuel the physical body ;)

My intention with this book is to help people restructure their relationships with food IF they feel that the way they are living and eating right now is not serving them so well. The book is packed with tips for helping people deal with cravings, emotional eating patterns, overeating, compulsive eating and so on. The reviews and feedback so far has been phenomenal :) It is very rewarding to see.

3. You have an incredible personal story to tell, going from being very active as a young girl to a weight of 294 pounds at the most – down again to below 140 through a raw food diet. Can you share with us the five most important steps you consider towards your successful weight loss ?

Mmmm, great question ;) I would sum up the five most important steps in my own weight loss journey as the following:

i. Realisation - for me (as with many 'addicts') it took hitting rock bottom in terms of my health and well-being, before I realised I couldn't go on like I was. I used to eat countless thousands of calories a day - mainly junk foods - and I was destroying myself. It took a diabetes scare at the age of 21 to help me realise I could benefit from changing my habits ;)

ii. Willingness to Change - once I had realised and acknowledged what I was doing, I became WILLING to make different choices, to get different results.

iii. Raw Foods - I was introduced to the concept of eating raw foods, straight from nature, just like all other animals do - and it TOTALLY resonated for me as truth - I decided to start the very next day.

iv. Persistance - once I was on the raw food path, I could easily feel it was the best thing for my healing, yet many around me were not very supportive of what I was doing. I persisted, despite their comments and jokes, as I felt this was best for me. Once others around me began to see my weight loss and happiness, they let go and let me get on with my choices more easily ;)

v. Maintenance - it took about 2 years for me to lose the 70kg of excess weight and since then, my weight has been more or less stable, for nearly 5 years now. MOST people on the other hand, who lose weight, re-gain it again. I feel that this is a HUGE advantage of being a raw foodist - this is the natural way for the body to be fed, so the body takes care of itself optimally, with the best nutrition. It is not challenging to maintain this level of health now and I feel very blessed.

Major Obstacles to Sustainable Weight Loss

4. You advice quite a bit of people through your raw food diet site. What do you consider to be the major obstacle to sustainable weight loss ?

I sense that social issues are one of the main things people struggle with, when adopting more raw foods for sustainable weight loss. Simply put, a raw lifestyle is very different to what most people are used to and this can cause rifts, confusions and complications for people socially.

There is also not much infrastructure yet for people to easily be raw foodists in most of our societies...getting hold of good quality, organic, fresh raw foods is not always so easy. I guide people to do their best to be prepared - don't try to just 'wing it' and expect to find foods that you want in places - be kind to yourself respect your choices and bring things with you that you genuinely want to eat.

I also recommend 'being the change' in terms of social tensions. Just do what you're doing, enjoy it and let people come to you as and when they are drawn, to ask questions. Enjoy what you're doing and others will see the changes in you and want to know more ;)

5. Recent research has shown that overweight has a genetic variable to a factor of 0.6-0.7. This is in fact higher than such as high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Has anyone in your close family experienced similar weight problems and what is your take on genetics & overweight?

Yes, a few of the other members of my family were/are overweight. Mostly though, the other young women in my family are very slim (models, air hostesses, dancers etc). I am not very much drawn to modern 'Western' science or research - I find 'left-brain' approaches don't really appeal to me.

I don't dismiss the idea that overweight/obesity issues may be related to genetics. I also sense that many people grab at research results like this to 'justify' their situation, which in all honesty could be resolved very simply and effectively if they just ate raw/living food from nature, like all other (wild) animals do. One does not see obese zebras, for example, waddling around the plains after just eating some pizza, commenting that 'it's in their genes' ;) lol...I like to keep things simple and refer to nature, rather than scientific studies.

The Difference Between a "Vegeratian Diet" And A Raw Food Diet

6. In the story you share, you talk about doing a mostly vegetarian diet in an Eco village/Iceland before going completely raw. I am sure many of our readers who are looking for a healthy way of losing weight have this question as well : what is the difference between a raw food diet approach and a “regular” vegetarian type diet?

The main difference between eating a 'standard' vegetarian intake and being a raw foodist, is that raw foodists do not eat cooked/processed foods (plus many are vegan - no animal products whatsoever).

Many 'standard' vegetarians do not actually eat very healthily and may have many health issues, as they often stop eating meat/animal products and replace them with things like more bread, pizza, pasta and so on. Many prefer to this way of life as being a 'junk food vegetarian', as those are precisely the kinds of foods that are THE most damaging and unrecognisable for the body.

Raw foodists do not eat processed/cooked foods, so things like bread, pasta, potatoes and so on all leave the table, replaced by fresh, living, vibrant fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and so on. It can be a BIG contrast in intake, from Vegetarian to raw, depending on how someone has been eating

7. You have walked a long path towards a lighter life. If you had one sentence to sum it up, how would you describe that walk ?

I feel extremely blessed to have been shown the raw food path to more vibrant health and I am delighted to be able to share that message now with other

Angela, thank you for summing up the raw food diet in such a motivational and clear way.

We wish you all the best with future work on your site and promoting the healthy way of losing weight through the raw food diet.

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