Ravishingly Raw

My name is Angela and I recently went back to raw and living foods.

I had a love affair with raw foods. The healing and transformation I received from being a participant in my own life was amazing to me. For so long before I was raw, I was on auto-pilot doing things that everyone does…living an unconscious life. Half alive and falling apart, I was struck with Lupus. There is no cure for Lupus and it is a life time of drugs and at times debilitation. After reading up on raw, I transitioned to a vegan diet and finally made the leap to raw. I trained at the Ann Wigmore Natural Health Institute for a month, and went on to work at Creative Health Institute in Michigan. From there, my husband and I ventured into raw catering and launched our gourmet raw food service “Ravishingly Raw” and taught workshops and classes as well. All was going well and then my health took a turn for the worse. I started to become partially paralyzed again, tremors and massive hair loss. The house we moved to had a huge amount of mold in it which was causing me to have a flare up of Lupus after it being in remission for two years. I was devastated. We didn’t know that mold was the culprit and because of my health we shut down our thriving raw catering business and I went back to cooked foods. I had it in my mind that I must have been kidding myself that raw foods put my autoimmune disorder into remission. We had to shave my head because my hair was coming out in clumps and I had to go back on high doses of medication to get my problem under control. I deteriorated from there and after moving out of the house we were in, and into a new house, I just stopped breathing. I was put into intensive care for a week and upon returning home, I went out into the garage where our furniture was stored and stopped breathing again. We rushed back to the hospital and the doctor told us that it most likely was the mold. This continued for another four years. I had an aversion to anything raw yet my heart was always aching to go back to that life. The final straw was this past November when we found out that the new house we were living in was contaminated with ten different types of mold…three of which were toxic. My husband put my kids and I on a plane for New Mexico (we had planned to move out there in Aug 09′) and with the clothes on our back we arrived in Albuquerque a few weeks before Christmas. We lost everything we owned. Everything. My husband had to continue working on the east coast, so basically I was alone with the kids until this May when he moved out here for good. After about a month of being out here, I started feeling better, by April I started seeing a lot of new hair growth, and in May I finally began to have those beautiful feelings and memories of what fresh arugula salad tasted like. Now I dream about it again…walking through the produce isle just smelling all the beautiful fruits. It’s intoxicating. Thinking about the time when we used to get durian that was busting at the seam and taking raw kimchi and nori sheets and rolling up some durian and kimchi. God I miss that! I’m glad my body is finally ready for the journey because I’m ready to be Ravishingly Raw once again!