100% raw vegan diet benefits and personal experiences? Raw processed foods?

[SquirrelSpider]

Hi, My wife and I are approx 85% raw vegans. We mostly eat:
1) Raw fruits or freshly made fruit juices
2) Salads (freshly made or pre-packed from supermarket)
3) Raw nuts (love them )
4) Below 38C/100F-dehydrated home made cakes and biscuits
5) Home made fruit ice creams
6) Nakd bars which are although processed food, most of them are said to be raw (see http://www.naturalbalancefoods.co.uk/nakd/ )
7) We also consume Sunwarrior ( https://www.sunwarrior.com ) raw vegan rice protein extract (we often do huge cardio workouts, I do lots of cycling etc. so it is probably useful for us to have a bit of extra protein)

Three questions regarding the above:
- Regarding point 5). Do you consider deep-frozen fruits (that are frozen on the field where they harvest them within 2-3 hours of harvesting) to be raw? We freeze or banana ourselves for the ice cream, but we often buy frozen strawberry, blueberry etc from the local supermarket.
- Regarding points 6) and 7). Do you consider these kind of processed, but never cooked/baked/boiled/etc products to be raw?
- I did not put it down as a separate point, but we also sometimes prepare food with nutritional yeast. Do you consider that to be raw?

Occasionally (once or twice a week) we also eat non-raw vegan food (I estimate these to make up approx 15% of all of our food intake) such as:
8) Rice or potato-based warm dishes
9) Steamed food such as steamed cauliflower of corn on the cob
10) Vegan pasta-based warm dishes
11) Soya/almond/rice milk, soya cheese
12) Chickpeas hummus
13) Roasted nuts
14) Non-raw salad dressings
15) Vegan bread or "taco-bread"
16) (Quite rarely) Pre-made vegan soups that you can buy in the supermarket

In the last 6 months we experimented with raw vegan diet twice, each time for approx 3 weeks. After 3 weeks or so we both felt some (gradually intensifying) craving for hot/spicy/cooked-or-baked-or-steamed food so we gave up both times and reverted to "regular vegan" diet. During those weeks or raw vegan diet, after approx 10 or so days I felt a bit more energy, although it wasn't a huge difference compared to "regular vegan diet". My wife didn't really feel any difference. We are pondering on soon going 100% raw vegan again, this time for a longer period of time. But first we are curious about a few things. I read many articles which state that raw vegan diet is so good for your body and loads of articles telling about people's experience, especially that they felt a huge increase in energy, that they felt more "spiritual" etc. Well, I would be curious about YOUR opinion and experience before going raw-vegan for months. So if you were (or are) a 100% raw vegan for longer periods of times (at least for a few months), here are some questions please:
- Did you feel any increased energy level? How soon after changing to raw vegan did you feel it?
- Did you sleep more or less as a raw vegan compared to "regular vegan"?
- Did you notice anything like "it's easier to focus on something" or "meditation is easier for me now" etc?
- Did you perform better or worse physically (e.g. when you jog/cycle/swim/play tennis, squash or similar/do gym exercises stb.)?
- Some say they had diarrhoea, some others say they had constipation... Did you experience anything like that?
- Some say they "just could not eat enough" and "lost weight although did not want that" and "were constantly hungry". Anything like that?
- Anything other, any difference, that you experienced?
- How much do you spend on your raw vegan diet? (Based on the 6 weeks experience it costed us approx £300 ($500 or €360) per person per month, approx 10% more than our regular vegan food spending which is approx £270 ($450 or €330) per person per month. (We buy organic or "fairtrade" whatever/whenever we can.))
- Plus: do you think that we gave up too soon before (2x 3 weeks) and that's why we didn't feel significantly more energised?

Huh, lots of questions Any opinion, experience, idea, info, advice is welcome. Thank you very much in advance!!

[khadagan]

Nice to see a thread about raw veganism!

I'm working on being more raw, but it varies very much for me which time of the year it is. I live in Montreal, Canada currently and the quality of fresh fruit and veg is awful in the winter, so I do rely a lot on frozen produce. In the summer I eat a lot more fresh, raw produce than in the winter.

I use a lot of frozen fruit and veg in the winter and these are not raw. I don't think anything that you'll find in the freezer section in the shops is raw, unless you buy it fresh yourself and then freeze it yourself.
Nutritional yeast is not raw. Still a lot of raw foodies use it to add extra flavour.

I've never gone 100% raw myself, but I feel a great difference when i eat more raw foods. I feel lighter, I retain my energy. I can eat a big dinner and immediately be physically active and don't have to veg out on the couch.
I have 2 small kids, so I have zero chance of meditating , in fact I sleep very little and very interrupted because of my youngest who is now 2 years old and I don't think I would be able to cope if I were to just have cooked foods and lots of bread like I had in the past. I think the partially raw diet is helping me cope better.
I definitely have more energy, I use spirulina a lot and that gives me crazy energy sometimes, but I'm always someone who reacts very sensitively to anything, so maybe that's just me. I do feel differences in different brands of spirulina, some make me feel very energetic and others just a bit.
I have no problems with my digestion, in fact it's much better since I'm hardly having any bread anymore. The only wheat I react well to is sprouted, but i guess that's just me.
I just eat whenever I want and whatever I fancy. I eat loads actually, but when I eat more raw I lose weight, but just a bit.
Food is very expensive in Canada, so probably not the best comparison with the UK where it's much cheaper and organic foods are much easier to find. I've lived in the UK for a while before I came here and didn't eat raw there.

I can't say much about if you gave up too soon or not. I have heard loads from people that they started to feel tired and lethargic about a week or so into the diet. They said it was because they were detoxing, I really wouldn't know about this, but there are loads of forums and websites on this on the net.

[SquirrelSpider]

Khadagan - Thank you very much for sharing!