Get Started

My best advice is to approach vegan and raw foods with a playful, curious, and relaxed approach. Don’t create strict goals for yourself (“I’ll be 100% raw by the end of the month; “I’ll give up all animal products right away”). The transition to a plant based lifestyle can and should take a nice long time; it’s not like signing up for a 21-day fitness program. It’s a journey that moves incrementally, and always according to your comfort zone.

Envision the process in three steps.

Step 1: Add

If you’re trying to become more vegan or more raw, don’t focus on sacrifice. Start by learning to appreciate the foods you’ll be adding to your diet. Try a few exciting raw or vegan recipes (you can find tons on goneraw.com, vegweb.com, or goveg.com). Try eating more greens each day (check out my recipe for massaged kale salad, which is a fantastic way to start loving the taste of raw kale!).

And most of all, start drinking occasional vegetable juices. I cannot emphasize enough how much better you’ll feel once you’re in this habit! Vegetable juices are the freshest, purest, and most concentrated source of enzymes and nutrients you can possibly get. Enjoy any combination of flavors you like; those of you with a sweet tooth will appreciate carrot combinations, while those of you who are accustomed to greens may fall in love with cucumber, celery, parsley, spinach, and green apple—which is my personal favorite! You may also find juices even more delicious with the addition of ginger.

For total newcomers, I suggest starting with one vegan/raw or mostly vegan/raw meal each day. Lunch is an easy place to start. Devour a big salad with whole avocado. Bring a grain salad to work (I love quinoa with chopped veggies, tossed with lemon and flax oil), or a hummus sandwich on whole grain bread. Devour a tasty, warm, all vegan soup, or even try nuking one of Amy’s vegan options. Sunshine burgers are great on salads, on sprouted grain buns, or simply enjoyed on their own.

If raw is your goal, veggie sandwiches on Ezekiel bread are a great place to begin. So are sprouted wraps. If you begin feeling more adventurous, have a raw wrap made with collard leaves or romaine.

If it’s going well? Add another vegan or raw meal to your day, like fresh fruit or a smoothie in the morning.

Step 2: Subtract a little

Once you’ve started to see how tasty plant based foods can be, you can begin considering more dramatic dietary changes. At this point, it’s important to distinguish between foods that you should try to avoid entirely and foods that aren’t ideal, but are great for transitioning. Red meat, artificial sweeteners, and processed foods definitely fall in the former category. So begin avoiding them. This may be easy for many of you: my experience with the food blogging community suggests that many of you have already kissed processed foods and aspartame goodbye! It also seems as though many of you choose to forego red meat, which is another huge step. Keep it up!

The next food you’ll want to give up is cow’s milk dairy. I know this is a tough one. All I can say is that I believe dairy is truly at odds with a healthy diet: it’s acidic, it’s a common allergen, and it’s mucuous forming, so it backs you up. Bad news, especially for my ladies (and I know there are many of you) trying to deal with IBS.

The answer? Avoid the stuff. Instead, focus on nut cheeses, which are delicious (there are countless recipes online) or the incredible new Daiya brand of vegan cheese. For milk substitutes, try almond milk, hemp milk, or soy milk (though do heed my thoughts on soy, explained here).

Explore the wonderful world of high quality grains, like spelt, kamut, amaranth, millet, and quinoa, as well as sprouted grains. Ezekiel and the Alvarado St. Bakery Company make sprouted everything: wraps, burger buns, breads, bagels, etc. So if you love a bagel in the morning, don’t despair! Have a sprouted bagel with asome avocado. Or toast it and top it with mashed banana or yam and cinnamon. (For more breakfast ideas, check out this post.)

If you need animal proteins, try sticking solely to fish and organic eggs. Fish and eggs are more digestible than other animal products, which makes them a good alternative to poultry and meat.

How raw should you be eating at this point? The answer is, as raw as you feel ready for. This is a great time to try being “raw till dinner,” which is an approach that works for many newcomers. Then feel free to enjoy a healthy cooked dinner. If you don’t wish to eat raw till dinner, feel no pressure to — the important thing is to eat plant-based foods that boost digestion!

Step 3: Subtract a lot

If you’re experiencing success and good health with the steps above—as you should be—you’ll be ready to continue refining and simplifying your diet.

This may mean eliminating all animal proteins, or at least all animal fleshes. It may mean that you’ve adjusted to making raw entrees for dinner every now and then — how fun! It may also mean that you crave complex dishes a little less than you did before, and that you find yourself eating more simply and basically. This can also be a great time to explore food combining.

Keep eating the cooked vegetables, grains, and legumes you crave. Remember that being 100% raw isn’t the goal — the goal is to add more raw foods to your life, and to maximize the quality and simplicity of the cooked foods you enjoy!

Tips for the budding vegan:

Take it s-l-o-w-l-y! No one goes vegan overnight (well, some people do, but they’re not most people). My own transition to veganism was gentle and organic. Little by little, things I had once depended on were no longer important or desirable to me. Increased knowledge about the planet and health helped me take the final step and cut out a few things that I didn’t want/need.

Explore cookbooks! Vegonomicon, Eat Drink and Be Vegan, and Vegan Express are some of my favorites. The more you realize that a world of incredible food awaits you, the less you’ll think about foods you’re not eating anymore.

Try not to rely all too heavily on soy and meat substitutes. Tempeh, tofu, and edamame are just fine, but explore the wonderful world of veggies and grains in all of their tremendous versatility! You needn’t repilicate animal proteins: realize instead that you don’t need them the way you thought you did.

Tips for the budding raw foodist:

Don’t forget to keep it simple at all times. I can’t stress enough how much getting caught up in complicated recipes and time-consuming dishes will prevent you from enjoying an easygoing life. I recommend that you make one nut pate each week (I’ll be sharing my favorites on the blog), one small batch of raw soup, and one or two fun entrées. The rest of the time, play around with generous salads, dressings, dips, and spreads with raw veggies. Don’t get bogged down in meal planning. If you’ve had a long day and it’s dinnertime, do what you’d normally do: improvise! Throw together a big, fun salad, or shave some veggies thinly and toss them with a dressing as a “pasta” dish.

It’s hard to improvise if you don’t have a lot of raw foods handy. So if you’re serious about eating raw, I recommend you stock your kitchen with lots of produce at the start of the week. This way you’re never short on greens or a rich assortment of veggies when you need to put together a meal. Meanwhile, try to ditch some of the stuff that you’d like to forgo on your raw food journey: canned veggies, frozen meals, whatever. The less you have hanging around, the less you’ll be tempted to eat them.

Kitchen Equipment

It’s a myth that you need a ton of fancy gizmos to get started on raw foods. If you love eating raw and want to move forward with it, you might find that it’s worth investing in some new toys. But for the newbie raw eater, I just recommend three common pieces of kitchen equipment:

1) A food processor
2) A blender
3) A mandolin

Most cooks have the first two, and mandolins can be found for as low as twenty dollars. Over time, you may want to invest in a Vitamix for blending soups with tough vegetables (like beets) or making super creamy smoothies and sauces. I love my Vita, and I use it all the time. But I started eating raw with the oldest and cheapest blender in the Western hemisphere, and I did just fine for many months.

If you start getting really into it, you might think about getting a food dehydrator, which heats food gently at 118 degrees and can help you make raw crackers, burgers, and breads. These are great, but not essential. Dehydrating requires more planning and patience than I’ve got to give. I have an old, circular dehydrator that I use once in a blue moon, but I don’t urge you to invest up to $200 on the expensive Excalibur model unless you relish making raw crackers and desserts.

Finally, you might want to consider getting a juicer. This may seem like a huge expense now, but as you begin to relish veggie juice, it won’t anymore. I never thought I’d invest in a juicer, but as soon as I got hooked on green juice in the morning, I knew what a fantastic investment it would be.

Some basic raw dishes

Salads
Soups (check out this fantastic post for ideas)
Nut pates
Zucchinis or other vegetables sliced thinly to resemble “noodles,” tossed with sauce
Nut burgers (pates shaped like burgers)
Collard roll or romaine lettuce raps
Sushi stuffed with veggies or nut pates
And much more…