Staying Warm During Winter
Moving away from cooked foods can be harder than leaving animal products. This change is more radical, and it eliminates the physical and emotional comfort that comes with warm foods. It is one of the hardest steps in the transition to a fruit based diet.
The transition is especially challenging if we live in cold climates. In those cases, it is essential to pair up the process of eliminating cooked foods, with an increase in physical exercise.
Most people don’t realize how much heat is created with movement. They use cooked foods to warm up instead of using their own body’s self-warming system. The irony is that the body uses energy to digest the cooked foods we ingest. We might feel warmth when we first ingest cooked foods, but in time, our bodies waste energy digesting this food and instead they cool down.
A better option is to do movement practices in the morning, throughout the day, and in the evening before going to sleep. Five to ten minutes of jumping, pushups, or running can do the trick. You can also do breathing exercises, or practice with programs like the Wim Hof Method. These tools will train your body to endure cold weather, regardless of what you are eating.
If we are still felling cold on a raw vegan diet, there are other strategies we can use to keep ourselves warm. We can put on more layers of clothing, spend more time inside during colder days, find someone to cuddle with, or turn up the heater at home, even better, add some logs to the fireplace.
There are herbs and spices, such as ginger, cinnamon, and pepper, which are also useful during colder months, due to their warming properties. Sometimes a cup of tea makes all the difference.
Previous Section:
Next Section:
Acknowledgments
