How to Continue Eating 80% Raw Food

by Yuri Elkaim, BPHE, CK, RHN
Author, Eating for Energy

When you start out on a raw food diet, or any drastic change to your lifestyle, there is always the excitement that comes with change, and for some people, it can be very easy to throw too much of themselves at this new endeavor, devoting all of their energy to it. In theory, this is great, the new excitement will make even the mundane parts of a new raw food diet into something more. But the down side is that this euphoric state of mind rarely lasts, and people who go into something with all their heart and soul tend to give up in exactly the same way.

That is why many raw food aficionados, at the start, will not simply begin eating nothing but raw items; instead they try to ease themselves into the process, and learn as they go. And once they get to a comfortable place, they stay there. For some people, that means never actually eating a one hundred per cent diet of raw food items. Instead, many raw food diet followers will follow the 80% Rule.

The 80% Rule says that out of all of your consumption of food, up to twenty per cent of it can be non-raw items, and yet you can still consider yourself a raw foodie.

This brings up three questions: Why do 80% when you could do 100%? How do you maintain an 80% raw diet? And is that really a raw food diet?

First things first: why not go all the way? What is wrong with ingesting nothing but raw? And the answer is, of course, that there is nothing wrong with it. But doing that is incredibly hard. Very few restaurants cater to raw food eaters, and for many of us, there is a food item or two that we loathe to give up. So, rather than putting yourself in a situation where you might have to “cheat” on your eating plan, you remove the negative stigma, and allow yourself a small portion of cooked items.

So what does 80% look like? If you eat the average three meals and one snack per day, that’s 28 meals a week. Following the 80% Raw plan, you should try to find uncooked options for 22 and a half of your meals, allowing you five and a half meals a week ñ or roughly one per week day.

The key to the 80% Raw plan is not to simply leave those “free cooked meals” open, in the hopes that you will only use what you need to. Instead, the success of this plan lies in your ability to do a little planning. No one is asking you to plan out every meal for the week, but take an honest look at your current lifestyle, and find out when you are likely to need to those non-raw meals, such as work lunches, family meals, and evening outings.

Is this really a raw food diet? You will be asked, and people might poke fun, comparing you to a vegan who occasionally eats meat. But the 80% raw plan is not about maintaining labels for yourself, it’s about maintaining your optimal health, with the best possible food, in a realistic, maintainable way.

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