Usually, my bodily constitution gets comments like You are skinny and You must eat nothing. While on the other hand, the volumes of my meals get comments like It’s too much food and Where does it all go?

What’s my secret?

I stick to a few basic principles, which are enjoyable and provide that I get to enjoy both food and being fit, and these principles are:

• raw vegan diet
• digestive rest in between meals
• daily exercise
• enough sleep

And while all of these principles are important, in this blog post I am explaining the first one.

My diet consists of fresh fruits and vegetables, with small amounts of nuts and seeds. My main source of calories is whole, fresh, ripe, sweet fruit and it makes up the majority of my diet. Fruit is followed by easily digestible vegetables, plus small quantities of nuts and seeds. The fact that my source of calories provides extremely clean fuel – mostly simple sugars – gives me the opportunity to enjoy quite some volumes of meals while easily maintaining a lean line. My meal volumes are actually normal on a fruit diet, but they just look big from the standard diet point of view.

Fruits and vegetables are rich in water, so, as I like to explain it picturesquely, calories are diluted, so it takes more bites to get in the same number of calories as in a smaller number of bites of a food that contains less water. Furthermore, fruits and vegetables contain lower amounts of fat compared to all other foods, and fats are the most caloric of all macronutrients.

Let’s just take an example of this meal from the video: here we have 2kg / 4.4lbs. of bananas – 650g / 23oz of peels, that is 1,350g / 48oz of the edible part, which comes down to 1,200 kCal. As I eat twice a day and my daily caloric needs are around 2,000 kCal, this is a proper meal for me.

And those same 1,200 calories are found in only 450g / 16oz of chicken wings and french fries.

But, what is unfavorable in those 1,200kCal chicken and french fries is over 70g / 2.4oz of fat, many of which are saturated, and all of them are heated, which makes them carcinogenic. While in 1,200 kCal bananas we have only 4.5g / 0.15 oz of fat.

Why is this important and how does it affect your metabolism and body line?

A study by the Committee of Physicians for Responsible Medicine in DC clearly showed that fats slow down the metabolism. Which is not surprising if we take into account what physiology tells us: fats in the diet increase blood viscosity, and thus slow down the uptake, transfer and delivery of oxygen from the lungs to the cells, and without oxygen, the ability of cells to burn fuel from food is lower.

But that’s not the end of the story! Let’s compare the profile of vitamins and minerals from these two meals, which are equal in terms of caloric values.

• Beta carotene 9 x more in bananas.
• Vitamin C 4 times more in… well, of course, bananas again.

And let’s look now at the ratio of essential minerals:

• Magnesium: 3 : 1 for bananas
• Potassium: 2.7 : 1 for bananas

Although, does this make sense at all? I mean, how useful are cooked minerals at all?
But that is a topic for another occasion.

The message: if you want to maintain a lean bodily line without dieting, stay away from fatty foods, and the most popular fatty foods are foods of animal origin. So, say no to meat – (fish is meat as well), milk, cheese, eggs… and stick to fresh fruits and vegetables!

I hope you find this video and this blog post useful.

Keep glowing,
Marina