Following Your Intuition About Eating to Be Healthy

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Angela Stokes shares on her motivation for going raw and dealing with weight loss plateaus as she lost 160 lbs.

Renegade Water Secrets with Angela Stokes, raw foodist, teacher and expert on raw food weight loss.

KevinLet’s just start briefly for those people who maybe have never heard about you, let’s give a brief introduction to your story. Then let’s get right into the questions that we got today.

Angela: Sure, yeah. So my name is Angela and I’m from England originally. I went raw six years ago in May 2002. I was living in Iceland at the time, not the most obvious place to go raw but that’s the way it happened. I was nearly 300 pounds at that point and my life was, as you said, miserable. I was always ill. And then I went raw and released about 160 pounds, so more than half of myself. And my life just transformed in every imaginable way. Now I very happily and gratefully share my story with others.

Kevin: It’s quite an inspiration and I was saying before you had gotten on that, to lose 160 pounds anyhow, for anyone, is a remarkable accomplishment. And what it actually talks about, or talks to, is the fact that you somehow must have found some motivation throughout that experience. And that was kind of the first question, is how do you find the motivation to begin your weight loss journey?

And that question obviously is going to lead into, how do you find the motivation in the middle, and then towards the end as well? Let’s talk about that. Let’s get into detail there because I think that’s probably one of the biggest issues that people deal with when it comes to any sort of weight loss.

Angela: Sure. Well for me the motivation in the very beginning was the fact that I was so ill. I really was in that situation where I’d hit rock bottom. I was always ill, one illness to another to another. I actually had a diabetes scare. I pushed my body to such a difficult space. And then when I heard about raw foods it was just one of those light-bulb moments. It was just “Wow, yeah, this makes sense and this is exactly what I want to do.” It just felt like there was nothing to question about it. And so I started to do it and because my body was in such incredible condition at that point, I had so much weight to lose, it was literally like you could see the weight burn off me. And to me, that was the motivation in the beginning. It wasn’t like I decided to do this and two weeks down the line I’d lost one pound. You know?

Kevin: Right, right.

Angela: It was massive, the transformation, because I was just coming into alignment with nature. I was stopping eating the things that had been poisoning my system for so long and my body finally got the chance to let go and start releasing all that crazy, old waste. And I could just feel that this was absolute truth for me. This was the path I wanted to be on. From the very first moment as I would read about it, it just resonated with me as truth and this is something that I want to do. And seeing the changes every day in the mirror, it was phenomenal to me. And that’s what kept me motivated, just seeing the changes and enjoying that so much.

Kevin: Somewhere in the middle there must’ve been a point where you hit some sort of plateau. Correct?

Angela: Yes. For sure.

Kevin: So why don’t you talk about maybe a plateau you hit and how you broke through it because I know about five or six of the people who asked questions wanted to know how you deal with plateaus.

Angela: Yeah, for sure. What happened for me, in the first couple of years I didn’t actually go completely raw. I’m 100 percent raw now, but I was about 70 or 80 percent raw for the first couple of years. And I still lost weight. I lost like 105 pounds in the first year of doing this. Which is like, some people weight that much, right? It was a huge amount to lose. I was 70 to 80 percent raw and I hadn’t cut out completely the things that were the most toxin-ridden to my body. So the processed starches and refined sugars, I hadn’t completely got those out of my system. And that really for me was a big stumbling block. You know, I’d cut them out a lot but I’d then have these kind of crazy binges and I would just go and eat those things because it was like I was so addicted to them. I hadn’t completely removed them from my system, so my body was still physiologically addicted to those things and psychologically my patterns were still there with those foods and it was easy for me in times of feeling stress or anticipation, nervousness, to just go back to those foods, because that’s what I’d always known.

And so the real, stepping into the next phase for me came at the point at which I released those foods completely and just realized I can’t handle those foods. I don’t handle those foods well. If I thought I could eat those kind of things, I’d just binge on them. It just doesn’t work for me. I started to get into recovery work and I removed all of those kind of foods completely from what I was taking in.

And then, once I got to that point, it was like I could take things to the next level because I was no longer stuck in this circle, this grip, with those kind of foods that were so toxic to the body and so highly addictive.

Kevin: Now when you first started raw, what kind of approach did you take? Did you just eat whatever it is that’s raw, that’s okay? Or did you take a more regimented, like 80-10-10, or some sort of approach like that?

Angela: No, I was just a bit random. I was living in Iceland and I was out in the countryside and the village with like a hundred people. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was just kind of making it up as I went along. I made some horrible recipes in the beginning. I didn’t know what I was doing. I ate pretty much whatever I could get my hands on because there wasn’t that much around. So if I got my hands on something and I thought, this is raw, then that was it. I just went with it. I wasn’t following any particular structure. And I still don’t now, really. I just kind of do what feels like that’s what my body would like the most at each moment. I just follow the intuition of my body.

Kevin: And do you feel that it’s changed at all? Do you feel that you maybe eat less fat or more fat or more fruit or less fruit or anything like that? Are there any periods of time where that changes? Or just whatever goes?

Angela: Yeah, it’s changed a lot.

Kevin: Okay.

Angela: Really. It changes so much. It changes all the time. I actually write a blog and I write it about every other day. And every day I keep a food log on there of exactly what I eat.

Kevin: Okay.

Angela: And it’s so interesting to me just to go and look to see what did I eat six months ago from today? And it’s totally different. It’s always changing because I’m in different places at different times, eating different things in different places. Some times I’m eating more fruit and some times I’m eating more fat and I’m in a colder place and I want more fat. I don’t want so many light foods. Different phases. Right now I’m actually, I’m not having any fruit or any dried fruit because I’m in a sort of parasite-cleansing stage right now. So I’m mainly having greens and fat. And that feels really good. And yet six months ago if you’d asked me to do something like that it might’ve felt totally inappropriate. So I just go with what feels good at different stages.