Karen Knowler * The Raw Food Coach

Sprouting: The Why, What and How To Do It Successfully!

From Successfully Raw Issue 92:

One of the most popular modules on my Raw Food For Beginners classes is undoubtedly the sprouting teach-in.

Whether I am lucky, have unrecognised green fingers or what, I do not know, but it seems that many people have struggled and continue to struggle with sprouting seeds, beans, pulses and grains successfully, and after a couple of failed attempts tend to throw in the towel and write the whole idea off.

Nooooo!

Don't do it!

Sprouting absolutely has to be one of the very most important raw food "tools" you need to have in your toolbox if you want to be as lithe, gorgeous and energy-filled as you can possibly be (my already abundant energy probably doubles when I bring sprouts into my daily diet). There's a LOT to be said for these apparently "insignificant" little creatures, and to ignore or exclude them from your diet is, in my humble opinion, one of the biggest mistakes you can possibly make.

So in my bid to have you sprouting successfully all over your kitchen, here follows my fool-proof guide to sprouting using my own personal favourite method, the jar.

What is sprouting?
Sprouting is an alternative term for germinating, although the sprouting process goes a little beyond basic germination and results in a partially grown or young plant. In a raw food kitchen we’re looking specifically at the sprouting of a nut, seed, bean or grain in order to render it edible or more easily digestible. Nuts do not need to be sprouted to make them edible, nor do some seeds but both benefit from soaking and sprouting as they become more easily digestible and juicier as a result. Other seeds, i.e. those that are supposed to be sprouted, plus all beans, pulses and legumes (with the exception of peanuts) need to be sprouted if they are to be eaten raw. Kidney beans should never be eaten raw and should be avoided. Grains should also be soaked and sprouted, although dry oats are an exception and can be milled down and used to make cookies successfully without being sprouted first. The sprouting process begins in water in your very own kitchen.

Why sprout?
When a seed, bean, nut or grain is soaked in water for a period of time, the plant’s enzyme inhibitors are removed. These enzyme inhibitors prevent a plant from germinating unless the right conditions for growth are met, and so once the seed comes into contact with water and the enzyme inhibitors are washed away the germination process begins. This process sets into action a whole chain of reactions enabling the plant to grow at a rapid rate. As it does so the vitamin content increases dramatically, to the point where the sprouted seed can contain hundreds or thousands times more vitamins than it did previously, and the protein, carbohydrates and fats begin to break down into a pre-digested form making for easier and better digestion and assimilation overall. The enzyme content of each seed, been, nut or grain also sky rockets making sprouts one of the most enzyme-rich (i.e. live) foods on the planet.

What do I need to sprout?
You don’t need any fancy equipment to get sprouting, although there are many pieces of equipment available to help you such as jars, trays, bags and even automatic sprouting kits. To get started you’ll need some seeds or beans for sprouting, a container to sprout them in such as a jam jar, and something to drain the water through, like a sieve or some netting or muslin secured around the top of the jar.

Best ways to get sprouting
Sprouting is actually very easy, but some seeds and beans tend to sprout more easily than others. The easiest ones tend to be mung, lentil, fenugreek, chickpea (garbanzo) and quinoa. These are all quick to grow (quinoa takes just 24 hours, the others take 2- 3 days on average) and mastering the sprouting of these will help you get more confident about sprouting other seeds and beans that take longer to grow or are slightly more tricky.

Why Your Home & Raw Journey Are So Connected

From Successfully Raw Issue 90:

This week in Raw Passion (one of the coaching groups I am running) I shared how our home is incredibly important in our raw food journey, for a number of reasons, but often we just don’t realise it. And yet it’s really big stuff!

In this week’s article I am going to share with you some of the key points we looked at on our call, and at the end you’ll find an exciting Coaching Challenge! Note, this is only for those of you who are serious right now about upping your game, inside and/or out. So if this isn’t you then you might want to print this out and file it anyway, because when you’re ready you can dramatically fast-track yourself by taking the challenge on - and I think you’ll love it!

So, on with the mini teach-in:

In my raw food coaching model “Ongoing Support” (pictured),  YOUR HOME features bang in the middle of “The Seven Circles of Raw Support” series, as circle number four. This isn’t a coincidence. Our home is precious to us in so many ways, whether we are raw foodies or not, and it forms our safe haven from the rest of the world and physically speaking, becomes the centre of our Universe. However, the more raw you become the more you will notice, I’m sure, the more intense desire you have to get your home in order, in just about every way.

So why is this?

There’s a couple of main aspects here.

The first is that “as within so without”, which basically means that as you clean up your diet and body, you naturally feel the desire to make the same thing happen in your external world. It might start small scale with an increased desire to clean, move furniture, sort papers etc., but in no time at all you might find yourself radically de-junking your home, making big internal changes with furniture, organisation and/or decor, or even consider moving home completely.

This is so common that I hardly need ever ask anyone anymore if it’s happened to them!
The second reason is rather more subtle and I liken it to creating a “cocoon”. Just as a caterpillar spins a cocoon in order to turn to mush and then transform into a butterfly, we too on our raw food journey naturally are drawn to creating more peace, quiet and space for reflection and transformation, and sometimes much more – within our own four walls, our home.

As we do this we energetically and literally set the scene for these great changes to occur, and so it is that when you have a clean body AND a clean home space, some magic really can and does occur.

In fact, the more you look at this for yourself, the more you will probably realise that even when you are going well with your food you still might be holding yourself back by holding on to clutter in your home, because the Universe is guaranteed to bring you radical shifts when you clear both at once!

So, for those of you who are ready for this level of change, or if you would like to address your home and put your dietary shifts on the back burner, here follows my coaching challenge...

The 10 Magical Steps To Making Your 2008 Vision Come True

From Successfully Raw Issue 76:

Following a raw food lifestyle to any significant degree guarantees (assuming you are “doing it right” and are essentially healthy) that you will have more energy than often you know what to do with. Thus, having a vision, a compelling, larger than life picture of what you want for yourself and your life becomes an absolute necessity – otherwise, where will all this energy have to go?

The VISION aspect of the Successfully Raw Pyramid is at the top of the pyramid for a myriad of reasons: it’s the “summit” of the raw food lifestyle, it’s visionary, it’s aspiring upwards and everything really does literally and figuratively point towards it. Eating great food, getting and giving support, taking great care of yourself... all these things are purely foundational when you really think about it, for... creating a great life. And that’s why we’re here isn’t it?

So having a great life is, well, great! BUT... did you know that you have more power available to you then you ever thought or believed? Did you know that having raw energy coursing through your veins gives you the energy clarity and courage to go after what you really want? And I mean REALLY want?

Untold experiences of my own and those shared with me have illustrated that this really is the truth, and I believe the only way we can truly stay on the raw food path is when we keep our vision higher and bigger than we already are. Quite simply, when we get bigger than our vision we are automatically subconsciously drawn to shrinking down, and this is when the dead foods come into play or other self-sabotaging activities in order to make us fit. Yes, it cuts both ways.

But of course the Vision cannot exist in a vacuum, and the food, self-care and ongoing support absolutely must remain in place for this to be so. So in future issues our focus will continue to move between all these different aspects so that you are constantly buoyed up in each area so that you can keep your vision alive. But for today, let’s get this vision topic addressed once and for all so that you can print out and keep this inspiring and useful guide to how to make your dreams come true – and how it all fits together in the bigger, whole Universe picture.

How To Create a Raw Lifestyle Vision Board

From Successfully Raw Issue 76:

In my current coaching program the homework of the moment (I prefer to call it play) is to create a Vision Board for 2008.

When I first introduce the concept of Vision Boards, typically half of my audience have heard of them and only a third, or less, has actually created one. Assuming roughly the same figures here, I’ll briefly explain more about what a Vision Board is, how you create one and how you can turn it into a Raw Lifestyle version if that’s where your focus is right now. (Trust me, this is GREAT FUN!)

A Vision Board essentially is a pictorial representation on card, paper, wall or board of what you would like to have show up in your world in the next chapter of your life (for this activity we’re talking twelve months). It can be literal (like a picture of the car or new home you want), ethereal (like a sense of the mood or theme you want your year to show up like), suggestive (a rough outline of something you know you want but the details aren’t so important – like a photo of a sandy beach or an attractive wo/man) or symbolic - like flowers for beauty, clouds for space, a Buddha for peace. It really doesn’t matter what other people might interpret it to be, what matters is that it means something to you (a LOT to you) and that you believe you can attract/ create your vision and are open to receive it.

The Biggest Secret To Staying Raw

From Successfully Raw Issue 71:

It has always fascinated me as to why some people seem to get into raw foods and stay there while others yo-yo for months, years or even decades. The conclusion I have come to after much observation, thought and reflection is that quite simply some people have a lot more incentive than others. They have an exceptionally BIG WHY.

For some – a very tiny percentage it seems - it just resonates so completely and deeply with them from the get-go that no matter what life may bring or what others might say, there is simply no room for manoeuvre, and this, I feel is pretty amazing - respect!  For others besides, their health dictates that raw food is the only food their body will tolerate, period, and so eating anything else is not an option unless they want to feel extremely ill and suffer accordingly. For others even less physically well it may even mean the difference between life and death.

It has been my reality and the majority of my clients that, sporadically, and even to this day I have to keep almost constant vigilance on my thoughts and feelings to stay with raw food when it would be so much easier sometimes not to. As soon as I find myself thinking “non-raw” thoughts, even though they are rare and while I don’t give myself a hard time about it like I once used to, I do find myself feeling frustrated that it even crosses my mind when intellectually I know all the reasons why I shouldn’t, physically my body simply does not respond positively to cooked foods and spiritually I know that raw food is the perfect fuel for me at the highest level. Which only leaves one thing, right? Emotions!

Yes, most of us are emotional eaters whether we realise it or not. We are largely far more sensitive creatures than we realise and while women are typically more prone to comfort eating than men, there are many men who also reach for bread and cheese or chocolate chip cookies when life gets them down – and how!

A clue to the Biggest Secret that I speak of lays in the last few words of the last line above: “when life gets them down”.

What Do You Need To Believe?

From Successfully Raw Issue 60:

Belief is one of the most powerful, if not THE most powerful, internal drivers in existence.

When we believe in something, both our head and our heart are engaged, and taking action becomes easy because we are already in alignment.

Belief also rides side-by-side with imagination, meaning that even though much of what we believe may not be visible to the physical eye, we can have such a strong faith and a passion in what we believe that the path ahead, although not always clearly visible, is nonetheless compelling, exciting and perfectly beautiful to us in our mind’s eye.

Natalie (name changed) came to our coaching call on Monday frustrated because despite being somewhat into raw foods she just couldn’t fully embrace it. Her main reason was already known to us both: Her health situation had brought her to raw because quite simply it was the only thing that had helped ease her issues, and yet she had found herself really struggling with going raw despite regularly surfing the web for inspiration, enjoying some of the recipes and knowing intellectually that it is what she needs to do.

This was the challenge that was presented to me during the short 15 minutes that we had together: How can I stop fighting the raw journey and learn how to love it and not resist it?

Endless Energy...?

From Successfully Raw Issue 59:

Eating raw food but still haven’t got that “boundless energy” that many raw foodists rave about? Or perhaps you’re new to raw foods and want to be fast tracked to energy central (like yesterday)...

Wherever you’re starting this article, currently featured in the latest issue of Get Fresh! magazine, will shed some light on how to get and keep the energy you seek...

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When Marion telephoned me I already knew from a previous email that her main issue was energy – specifically, lack of it, in spite of the fact that she had been “healthy eating” for 4 or 5 years, dabbling with mostly raw food for a few months to varying degrees of success and had a clean bill of health from both her doctor and naturopath, so had no underlying health issues to speak of.

What Marion went on to describe to me at the start of our call was not dissimilar to anything I had heard before, with phrases such as “lacking oomph”, “tired in the morning, tired by 9pm”, “no bounce”, “no energy to spare” – i.e. about 80% of the UK population’s major health issue - pure and simple lack of energy.

“But I’ve been eating mostly raw foods for over four months now,” said Marion. “Surely I should be feeling better by now?”

A good question, of course. And an obvious one too. With the promise of “vibrant health” and “boundless energy” at the heart of the raw food promise, it’s only natural to wonder why it’s not happening so fast and furiously as we would expect.

I began by asking Marion one of the most important questions of all: “What exactly do you eat?” Important because, at a time where raw food menus can be as diverse as cooked ones, to say you “eat raw” is simply by no means enough information!

Marion went on to describe a typical day’s eating:

Fresh fruit or fruit smoothie for breakfast (porridge or muesli in the winter)
Lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrot, avocado and olive salad for lunch with lemon and olive oil dressing
Flax crackers and raw hummous or Avocado-based soup for dinner

Snacks included goji berries, cacao nibs, dehydrated cookies, nuts and raisins, raw chocolate bars, other raw bars or more fresh fruit.

Drinks included various smoothies, the odd cup of tea or coffee, the occasional glass of wine and spring water.

On face value, looking at Marion’s diet it seemed generally very good overall, but a few things sprung immediately to mind:

Being Raw & Sunshine

Here in the UK we’ve actually had some really lovely weather for the past three days (that means up to 24 deg C in my part of the world, not a common event – woohoo!!) – great timing as it’s been a national Bank Holiday, so we’ve had more time to enjoy it than usual…

For my part I’ve been out and about – to the beach twice, to the zoo as well with Boy Wonder (a.k.a my son Luke, 5 next month) and have even enjoyed sunbathing in my very own back garden, a lovely place to be if ever there was one!

I have to say, since being raw I have definitely noticed that I “feel” the sun on my skin differently than pre-raw. In my childhood I distinctly remember getting very agitated when I got too hot, to the point where it would put me in a bad mood and I’d be very “ratty” with people and just want to go indoors, be alone and cool down. Since raw I genuinely feel as if my skin is drinking up the sun – like the nutrient it truly is, and it’s a lovely feeling, like absorbing heat, light and all round good stuff into my skin - quite blissful! I also tolerate heat and cold better, and this is very interesting as, according to Dr Doug Graham, your basic body temperature drops by 1 deg C when you go/stay raw. Certainly something has happened!

Of course, you can overdo the sun. More is not necessarily better. Someone started the myth that if you’re raw you can’t get sunburned. Definitely not true! Too much sun is too much sun. It’s like saying you won’t get sick if you eat or drink too much raw food… your body will reject whatever is surplus, period. While plants will thrive in sunlight, if they get too much they too will become frazzled and wilt into nothingness...

Yet another great reason to go raw – you get to drink the sun, and not just thorugh wheatgrass : )

Are Your Raw Blocks Simply All In Your Mind?

From Successfully Raw Issue 58 (Friday 24 August 2007):

I love the way that synchronicities occur in life and also in my coaching. Only yesterday I coached three different people around the concept of mind-over-matter and I just had to expand upon some of the issues raised for this week’s article.

To put this in context, generally speaking I very rarely talk about the mind when coaching raw foods. I have found that for most people the issues around going raw or staying raw are usually to do with either practical issues (not enough variety, don’t know what to eat, what not to eat, that kind of thing), or emotional stuff – anything from binge eating, to emotional cravings, food-related memories, eating for comfort and so much more. As most of my clients are women, it is definitely the exception rather than the rule that “head stuff” comes into the equation.

But today I recognised within one client in particular that the language she was using about going raw was a dead giveaway for where one of her main “problems” was…

During our session we discussed how she was “mostly off raw” at the moment. As she talked I realised that in her mind “raw” was “out there” – specifically speaking, it wasn’t within reach right now, not even close. In actual fact she saw raw food as being not just “out there” but “up there” – i.e. somewhere far away AND high up, like a mountain to climb or a tower to ascend and break into. As soon as she said this it became completely clear to me – and indeed to us both - as to why raw food was an on-off affair for her, quite simply in her mind’s eye it was, for right now at least, a journey apart.

Too far away. Not possible. Too much of a struggle. Required too much effort. Only for the brave few perhaps?

Bottom line: Internally, it wasn’t owned and savoured within her; externally, it wasn’t even truly visible, let alone reachable.

At that moment I realised what has to be true of us all: How successful we are at going or staying raw is, as far as our mind is concerned, all about where we see raw as “sitting” in relation to ourselves. Quite simply if it’s “out there” it’s not “in here” and for us to be raw, or to have anything show up in our lives of our choosing, we have to feel we are either sitting within it, or it is sitting within us (or, ideally, both). We have to own it. Embrace it. Even better: Meld with it. So when she elaborated some more there was a massive “aha” all around – both for her as the client and me as the coach – and not just for her personally, but for many of my clients and readers who seem to be on and off the raw wagon.

The Eye Of The Needle

From Successfully Raw Issue 55:

The following article is one I've been meaning to write for a long time. Exploring the concepts of "extremism", freedom, contraction and expansion, the "eye of the needle" is the perfect metaphor for the way we approach, experience and come out the other side on our raw food journey.

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I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that my dietary beginnings were just about as broad as you can get. There wasn't a lot that was considered off limits for me eating-wise - except to say vegetables, rice and nuts, which I hated with a passion! (Rather ironic to say the least, non?!) As I grew older the diversity grew as I did. In came more junk, more meat, more sweets, more crisps, more fizzy drinks, and then of course in came the alcohol at 18, as well as the Saturday night take-aways and goodness knows what else!

From this perspective we can liken the breadth of foods eaten by me then to the wider edge of a triangle or funnel, where pretty much anything goes.

The next stage of my food journey (January 1992) was my venturing into piscetarianism. That is, not eating meat any more but still eating fish, and a fair amount of it at that. And with this of course came the "loss" of burgers, sausages, various pies, steaks and more, and in its place came rice, some vegetables, more salads and other comparatively-speaking healthier stuff.

My first move in towards the eye of the needle had begun!