Christian Bates

Archive for the ‘Raw Food Tips’ Category

This blog post has been written exclusively as a Guest Blog for The Edible Goddess. Read the full post.

“Hi Edible Goddess fans! This is Bethanne’s love, Christian Bates.I love boosting my health through therapeutically nutritious elixirs, superfood drinks, and tonic herbs and occasionally doing a fast or cleanse on them, and I really hope you do to or will start to today.

Christian and Bethanne

And yet I see so many people doing the second best thing, which is trying get their trace nutrients from green vegetable juice only.

May I be frank and bold? There are countless…..”

Read the rest here!

Raw cacao is considered by some the best food ever, by others a stimulant not part of an optimal diet, and by others the most nutritious food ever but they don’t eat it because its too stimulating in their experience. It’s so funny how things in the raw food world are seemingly conflicting, but of course there is truth behind it all. I’d like to appeal to everybody here and show you what I do with cacao that cancels the stimulation side and turns on the balancing side. If you have sworn to yourself that you are done with cacao, or if you are currently eating bags of cacao every week, either way this is the blog for you.

Tonic herb ice cube tray nougats drenched in blue green algae chocolate

My technique of eating cacao without the stimulation is a new way of looking at chocolate that is also the ancient South American way of looking at chocolate: eating cacao with an abundance of tonic herbs and other superfoods.

Blueberry pie with chocolate-shilajit seed crust

So, next time you make an all raw cacao drink, chocolate ice cream, hard chocolate, fudgey pudding, chocolatey bliss balls, cacao-containing energy bars, chocolate pie, or any other raw recipes you enjoy, consider ammending those recipes with the rich earthy flavors of these tonic herbs and superfoods (each ingredient is a link to a source of the ingredient I really like):

Internet orders + blender + cacao + herbs = gourmet cacao without the stimulation

~Astragalus Powder

~Blue Green AFA algae

~Chaga Mushroom powder

~Cordyceps Mushroom powder

~Ginseng Bude Blossom Crystals

~Goji berries (Up to you to decide whose goji’s you like best)

~He Shu Wu extract powder

~Host Defense multi-mushroom mycelium powder

~Lion’s Mane mushroom extract

~Mucuna powder

~Noni powder

~Pearl Powder

~Reishi Mushroom extract powder

~Rhodiola extract powder

~Royal Jelly (Sean Lee Gardner’s Organic Powder)

~Shilajit powder

~Spirulina powder (“Azteca” and “Manna“)

~Tonic Herb Tea (Bethanne’s blog shows you how to make this; this tea is perfect to make as part of the nut mylk base for the cacao drink! We get all our tea herbs from Mountain Rose Herbs)

~Vanilla Bean powder

I am going to request that you let loose some ideas you might have about your chef skills and realize that you are ALREADY a deeply skilled master alchemical chef ready to whip up a cacao recipe with this technique – even if it is just simply bliss balls (bunch of coconut flakes, hemp seeds, cacao, a couple teaspoons of tonic herb powders and sweetener mashed and rolled into small balls!). Another simple quick recipe is to mix raw cacao powder with melted coconut oil, some sweeteners, pinch of salt, and your choice of herbal powders, and then put into ice cube trays and chill.

My very Edible Goddess sipping a reishi "hot" chocolate

There is one more variable to the situation of how stimulated or balanced you feel with cacao and that is the quality, processing temperature, and sprouting of the cacao. Sprouted cacao (hardly available on the market today, but will be available soon) will likely be the ideal cacao as the spouting may lower the theobromine content and boost the more calming constituents. We will see, and you can bet I am really excited to see, if a sprouted cacao revolution comes about. Of course, if the cacao has been pressed or even secretly roasted despite being labeled “raw,” then that can also mess with the desired more balancing effects of cacao. We hope that truly raw heirloom and wild quality cacao will only grow in the market and that all the sources will get much better at consistently having the best ever cacao beans, powder, butter and paste – all made with integrity and love.

For now, don’t fear cacao. Eat as much cacao and herbs as you can handle so that you can enjoy the best health ever with therapeutic amounts of minerals, antioxidants, amino acids and spirit-boosting effects contained within all of these superfoods and herbs.

Colon hydrotherapy is one of the most important practices to add in on your health journey, and we do ours with a special superfood touch. We make ours so delightful, that if you are already seeing a colon hydro-therapist for colonics, you may wish to stay home now and do our version of a deep cleansing “superfood” enema. Enemas are the process of oiling up your behind, laying in the bathtub in preferably a warm comfortable candle-lit bathroom, gently inserting into your rectum a tube that is attached to a bag or crock of warm water, and letting gravity slowly and gently fill up and drain your colon several times until your whole colon has been cleaned of all matter.

Clean, serene, warm, ideal setup for an enema

In this process, two things are accomplished. First is that with every colonic, you have a chance at knocking out any intestinal plaque that might be gummed up in the folds of your colon. The exit of this most toxic debris that was continuously poisoning your body for who knows how long, is absolutely key to restoring the integrity of your body’s health. Intestinal plaque tends to be something along the lines of 10 year old pizza putrefying with heavy metals and parasites. These pockets of waste never should have been there in the first place, but because of a past of eating aberrant foods, having a stressful lifestyle and getting constipated, weird things can happen to your organs.

The second huge benefit of a deep enema is that it makes room in your intestines for an accelerated dump of waste from all the cells of your body, speeding up both short term and long term healing. If you are already healthy, but feeling a bit sluggish one day, try doing an enema our way and it can turn your energy around and give you that “edge” again as a short term healing. If you have a small or big pooch in your belly, do an enema today as part of your long term goal to flatten your abdomen and attain excellent digestive and metabolic health.

How we do enemas at our house: Instead of using a one gallon or smaller enema bag, use a 2 or more gallon jug or crock with a spigot. Slide the hose off your current enema bag and stretch it over the spigot. If it slides off a tapered spigot, wrap one or two rubber bands around the connection to keep it on, being careful not to pinch the hose. Fill your enema container up almost all the way with spring water. Prepare a pot of tonic herbs tea (Click here for a great recipe from my girlfriend The Edible Goddess’s blog). Fill the pot of herbs up with some of the enema container water with the hose. Brew until it begins to boil, then strain the tea into the container. If your tea pot is small, fill it up with the container water again and rebrew. Repeat the process several times if need be until the container water is quite warm and deeply tea colored. Add in MSM only or add in shilajit and/or fulvic acid. We are currently avoiding combining MSM with high mono-atomic mineral containing foods like shilajit to avoid the potential sulfuric reactivity of the combination. Also its an excellent idea to add in coconut water kefir, or probiotic powders of your choice (with MSM or shilajit is great.) You can also add organic coffee for great liver cleansing effects and zeolites for their heavy metal, viral and volatile organic compound pulling effects. Bring your enema container into the bathroom and place at least 3 feet above the floor on a stable counter, stool or table so that the hose can reach well into the bathtub or shower stall.

Crock full of enema superfood spring water

Warm up the bathtub or shower stall by blasting some hot filtered showered water. We also use a space heater blasting in the direction of the bathtub, keeping it away from any water, and leave it on during the 30-45 minute enema experience. Lay a towel down in the tub for your back and some folded towels for your head and neck. We prefer enemas laying on our back with our legs up, rather than face down on all fours. Light some scented organic beeswax candles and play some music or inspirational audio. Take your pants off, put coconut oil or any organic raw oils around and in your bum and all over the enema hose insert nozzle. Stir the enema container one final time to make sure no mineral-rich sediment is stuck on the bottom.

Lay down and slowly let the water fill you up until gentle tension (no extreme pressure holding, be gentle with your intestines), then let the water go out down the drain. Ideally you take your time with this and eventually get the water to go up your descending colon, across your transverse colon, and down your ascending colon towards your cecum where your small intestines dump into your colon. This means that quite a bit of poops and not-quite-fully digested food particles will have exited you many times. You might not be able to go this deep every time, so do a series of enemas (e.g. an enema every other day for 2 weeks) so that you are more likely to tone and cleanse your ascending colon at least some of the times.

Doing an enama our way eliminates the fears associated with enemas. We boost the probiotic content of the gut with the coconut water kefir amendment, instead of stripping the colons Bifidus-dominant colony. We keep the experience in the bathroom warm and nurturing so that you finish feeling more comfortable than ever, rather than cold or invaded. We make your body feel nourished with the uptake of the water amendments (tonic teas, shilajit, fulvic acid, etc.) so that you finish fairly balanced out, instead of deprived or dizzy. However, every enema is different and just know that the discomforts of purification will pass. Hydrate well after an enema, and then consume something light and nourishing, preferably full of your favorite superfoods.

My disclaimer on enemas: Please take responsibility for your own health and health protocol. Please seek the advice of a professional colon hydrotherapist before embarking on your own enema project. Do your first enema/colonic with a colon hydrotherapist before taking the leap to do it yourself. Do not let the water fill your colon forcefully. Be very gentle with yourself and take your time.

If you are reading my blog then you have probably dabbled with certain superfoods, or you might be well on your way to incorporating a whole superfood program to your best-ever fun and healthy lifestyle. We can make a difference in our health by trying all the big superfoods out there (raw cacao, blue green algae, maca, goji berries, marine phytoplankton, etc.), but I want to talk about 4 of them that you might not have realized can change your life, your body, the radiant vital health of your tissues….if the dosage is high enough!

MSM Powder

MSM (Methylsulfonylmethane) is an organic sulfur molecule that is found in plants, in rain, in your body, and just about everywhere but the Standard American Diet. Most people are seriously deficient in sulfur and suffer the constipating impermeability of their cells and tissue as a result of such deficiency. Taking MSM not only plugs sulfur in where it is biologically needed, but greatly opens up your body from the inside-out, detoxing you and allowing more nutrition of what you are already eating to go deeper into you cells. This promotes more vital tissue function, flexibility and growth, including having hair and nails grow in stronger. MSM can reverse allergies and speed up recovery after exercise, but most importantly it simply is key to going to a newer level of health. We go on MSM programs of having a daily half gallon drink of water that contains over 10,000 mg of MSM (1 tablespoon of MSM powder, 1 heaping tablespoon of MSM crystals). When one first does MSM, spread your daily dosage out over the whole day not having more than a couple thousand mg at once, or it might feel detoxingly-weird. Then within a month, full dosages start to feel really good. We use OMICA’s new MSM Crystals.

Shilajit Powder

Shilajit is a resin found in the Himilayas where it oozes out of walls of rock. It is the product of eons of the Earth pressing plant and soil matter, creating an edible coffee-tasting concentrate of minerals and fulvic acids. Considered the best “herb” of Ayurvedic medicine, the fulvic acid content can pull out heavy metals even when one is already taking zeolites. We recomend getting it in powder extract form. You can blend in 2 tsp of it to a sweetened nut mylk for the best “latte” ever! Again, you gotta do this one everyday for days in a row to push the best health ever button and experience the results!

We have already had half of this batch of coconut water kefir in the last 2 days!

Coconut kefir is a drink made from taking coconut water and kefir grains and fermenting them for two days into an effervescent sugar-free probiotic-rich soda. We recommend taking 3 large packs of ONE brand coconut water (word is this product is the best quality and is pasteurized at a raw temperature below 120*F) and mixing the coconut water with a small bag of kefir grains (purchase kefir grains organic and vegan from eBay), let sit in a towel-covered lid-open gallon glass jar in warm area. When done, blend the kefir with some vanilla and stevia to make the best soda ever! This substance makes me smile with my first sip as my ecosystem of good bacteria in my body light up as new friends come aboard. We need a lot of probiotics because we are supposed to have pounds in our gut, and we all come from a toxic background where everything we ate had some antibiotic poisonous bad-bacteria and yeast promoting trait. Taking small probiotic capsules usually aren’t enough, and to take an efficacious amount of capsules is not a good bang for your buck. Doing a daily regimin for weeks at a time with coconut kefir can reverse the sad symptoms of residual vitamin B deficiency and probiotic deficiency, as well as boost digestion to no end! If you have any yeast issues, your solution may center around coconut kefir.

Amla berry extract powder

High Vitamin C Berries: These berries include Camu, Acerola and Amla. The tissue-healing, immuno-modulating, feel-great qualities of taking these daily in large dosages is perhaps necessary for health. Just having the vitamin C from eating oranges is really only enough to prevent scurvy. We want to have wild amounts to get the results we are looking for. Daily blenderfuls of water, couple teaspoons of camu or amla powder or a couple tablespoons of acerola powder combined with a pinch of salt and stevia will get the job done.

Now if you can somehow get all 4 of these substances in large doses most days for the next 3 months, then your next level of health is imminent and uncapped. Stay tuned: Bethanne and I are creating a tonic elixir recipe ebook soon that will show you how to make high dosage drinks with these superfoods in the tastiest way ever!

I want to hear from you! Please respond to this post if you have any success stories or any healthful results you have experienced from taking any of these 4 magical superfoods. I read all comments. Thank you!

I just described how to make my “special no-refridgeration-needed 50%-wild-food cabbage-nori-pate-saurkraut burrito!” in part 2. It was a savory recipe. We also need sweet recipes for traveling…Chocolatey sweet! I am going to give you a guideline formula so that you can create your own raw truffles – cacao covered superfood nougat – that you can munch on while traveling and get your nutritional needs met. This is my specialty. After creating the first two flavors of WildBar 4 years ago, I have figured out how to teach people how to make their own rich treats without giving away my precious trade secrets.

Truffles are great because the outer raw chocoalte coating can be very high cacao content which means it won’t melt until it reaches 90*F (the point when cacao butter goes from solid to liquid), and then a much creamier inner nugget which gets soft at a lower temperature but is held in place by its hard chocolate exterior. Melts in your mouth, not in your car, bag or whatever warmth your traveling might lead you to.

First pick your favorite nuts and seeds, soak them 12 hours and then dehydrate them. A good dehydrator can fully dehydrate larger nuts in 12-36 hours. I love brazil nuts (because they are wild) mixed with pumpkins seeds and anything else (macadamisa, walnuts, pecans, pine nuts, almonds, sunflower seeds and hemp seeds). Note that hemp seeds don’t need to be soaked and dehydrated.

Fill a food processor half full with your dehydrated nut and seed choices and add a handful of chopped cacao butter. Blend until warm and creamy. Don’t let get too hot. Feel free to write down the exact recipe you’re using so that you can tweak it with your future artisan formulations.

Add a couple spinkles of salt, a small amount of sweetener (low glycemic is better, you might try: a sprinkle of xylitol and a few spoonfuls of yacon syrup or Jerusalem artichoke syrup.) Then definatly add a couple small dashes of the NOW brand of organic stevia extract powder. If you have had problems with stevia in the past, this is your solution. This stuff is enzymatically pre-digested to remove the chemical-like aftertaste of the stevia, resulting in a much more neutral creamy sweetness. Place in bowl and stir in all your superfood powders: spirulina, blue green algae, shilajit, mucuna, vanilla, mushroom extract powders, etc. Then add some crunchy whole nuts and seeds. Drizzle into ice cube trays and freeze until hard.

To make the raw dark chocolate: Melt a bunch of raw cacao butter and put equal parts cacao butter and cacao powder together in a blender. Keep warm and act fast. Most importantly, don’t let any water droplets make their way into your dark chocolate formulations or it can mess up the texture (or “temper”) of the finalized hard chocolate. Add vanilla powder, a tiny pinch of salt and sweeteners of choice. A little NOW brand stevia again and small amount of xylitol is all it takes as this chocolate can be bittersweet. Pour into narrow bowl or large measuring glass.

Pop the nougats out of the ice cube trays, hand dip them in the liquid chocolate, and place on wax paper or dehydrator sheets. The chocolate will very quickly harden around the new frozen centers. Chow down immediately to enjoy your personal travel-able decadence. Have the best superfood travels ever!

I’d love to show you how to make non-perishable savory foods for traveling with no refrigeration, no kitchen conveniences, and no wild foraging access. As I began to describe in How to Be a Truly Prepared Raw Superfoodist Traveler Part 1, I was at the Warrior Training Camp last year where I had to make EVERYTHING I would eat ahead of time, and it would have to be able to stay fresh when conditions outside were 100*F. While everyone else was eating pesticide iceburg lettuce sloppy joes, I lived it up like a king (well, a warrior king in sardine bunk bed sleeping quarters) and ate this!:

This is my “special no-refridgeration-needed 50%-wild-food cabbage-nori-pate-saurkraut burrito!” This will work for most people’s constitutions as a traveling staple. It can be whipped up out of a suitcase packed with only the following foods that all stay fresh at least 2 weeks at room temperature:

1. Organic cabbage. Try to find heirloom from farmer’s market. Bring a green cultivar and a red one for variety. This is hardly a wild food, however it is known globally as the least perishable vegetable!

2. Bag full of organic raw/untoasted nori sheets.

3. Sea vegetables of choice. I can eat lot of kelp, but I can only eat so much dulse, so don’t go overboard on dulse, you might get sick of it, even if it is your favorite.

4. Bottle of organic cold-pressed olive oil.

5. Organic limes. Any citrus will do, but I prefer limes because they seem to have the most virility. Low sugar, no molding.

6. Kitchen utensils: Small knife for cutting the limes, spoon to scoop the pate and large dish plate to eat on.

7. Raw Organic Sauerkraut. Have fun with this one. Since we are doing a lot of cabbage already, I would choose or make a saurkraut that had lots of vegetables, wild herbs, lots of flavorful spices, as simple sauerkrauts tend to be 99% cabbage.

8. Spirulina!

8. Optional: Raw Seed crackers

9. And most importantly, my no-water ultra pates!

Make more of the pate than you think you will need, as that is the point of all the preparation is to make sure you are 100% at ease with your food. This way you for sure never run out on your way back home, and you have some to share. You can actually use any pate recipe that you know of, as long as you have every ingredient dehydrated first. This keeps it shelf stable. I made 3 pates to keep my taste buds excited, Mexican, Italian, and Chinese. They followed these guidelines:

Make soaked and dehydrated nuts and seeds (equal parts brazil nuts, truly raw almonds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and walnuts is awesome!) To make these, put them in a large bowl, cover with spring water for 12 hours, the dehydrate them in a dehydrator until they are crunchy dry when you break a seed in half. Half-fill a kitchen-aid-like sharp-bladed food processor with soaked and dehydrated nuts and seeds. Blend into an oily meal. Then add:

~at least a half cup of olive oil (more if you like your food oily like me)

~Veggie-sweetener like chopped sundried tomatos, paprika, and/or burdock root

~Several dashes of sea salt

~Sprinkles of garlic powder and cayenne powder

~Spices and herbs of choice. For Mexican use few sprinkles each of chiles (cumin seed, jalepeno powder, etc), coriander seed, and oregano. For Italian use few spinkles of thyme, rosemary, oregano, and fennel seed. For Chinese use a few sprinkles of Chinese 5 Spice Powder.

Blend into a oily crunchy paste. The oil content will keep the pate moist even though it has no water. Keep in sealed pyrex dishes or mason jars. Onsite, to make yourself the best meal ever, make a couple burritos. For each burrito take a large leaf or two of cabbage, cover it with a nori sheet, then place pate, sauerkraut and sea veggies inside. Top with your preferred amount of squeezed lime, olive oil and spirulina. Eat and share anywhere on Earth!

Stay tuned for part 3: guideline on making traveler’s chocolate superfood breakfast treats and dessert snacks you can eat a lot of with only good medicinal effects, no heaviness or sugar spike.

Imagine this. You are a superfoodist far away from home and your bag of goodies runs out, your water jugs break, and the local food scene is NO help. Low in your usual vital energy you try to fast! But then, far away from home, you bog down and eat some starchy non-superfood meal with crappy water, your blood sugar spikes, your skin breaks out, you feel helpless and….

You wake up from the nightmare and decide to become FULLY prepared.

If a superfoodist like yourself is less than excellently prepared with food and drink abundance while traveling in every condition, then peace of mind can only go so far. We are what we eat, so let’s remain the best ever when we are on the go and only get healthier everyday with no stress. The prepared and well-stocked superfoodist at home becomes an elite traveler in this blog post.

There are a few travel factors and every destination will have a particular permutation which will help you decide what to bring.

~By car or by plane?
~Going by yourself or with others?
~Traveling to hardly-raw friendly or mostly raw-friendly scene?
~Spring water nearby or not?
~Refrigeration on location or not?
~Kitchen for you or not?

Last summer, I went to the one week Enlightenned Warrior Training Camp in 100*F Fresno, CA. No person or situation was going to cater to me. All I had was my car. I knew a raw foodist couple who went to the camp the year before who ended up drinking tap water and eating conventional produce and got sick! Conditions would be rough…if I wasn’t fully prepared, which I was and had the best time of my life!

Thus I brought many gallons of spring water, each bottle wrapped in blankets to avoid breakage in my trunk. I only brought prepared non-perishable foods, as I had no time to prepare, no refrigeration, no camp food to add. How did I have a great balance of savory and sweet superfood lifestyle complete meals and snacks during the intensity of a five-day intensive camp? How did I eat like a king with enough to share?! Stay tuned for detailed instructions in part 2…

I wish to start my first blog entry by saying that this website ChristianBates.com has been a long time coming. Having eating a raw food diet (one high in superfoods I might add) for 7 years I have realized that I have leading edge ideas and methods streaming through me a mile a minute, and I want to give you everything I have. My eating and lifestyle recommendations will be only of the most uncompromised, top quality that this growing movement has seen. I see that a lot of methods in the raw food world are missing “the edge” to truly give you the deep core energy, radiant revitalization, impenetrable immune system, and absolute joy that is truly attainable. I will present everything so that you can pick and choose what to easily add in to your life, one step at a time, so that you can have the most exciting and healthiest life ever!

Tip #5
Eat superfoods and wild foods. These were the only foods available several thousand years ago, all other choices today can be called “hybridized,” “demineralized,” or they otherwise lack the virility that turns on our genius DNA so that we can shed our past domesticated sickness and grow into our sexy God/dess brilliance. However, avoid being too restrictive with this. We don’t go 100% wild overnight. Start by eating a couple types of high quality superfoods like heirloom cacao, fun wild food like chickweed or dandelion (probably growing within 10 to 100 feet of you right now), and of course sea vegetables (which are all wild). While adding these magical foods in, keep a balanced diet with plenty of fats (nuts, seeds and olive oil, etc), greens vegetables, sprouts, spring water, low sugar fruits and fruit-vegetables, some sea salt, immune-modulating tonic herbs like reishi, cacao blendies and some bangin’ savory gourmet dense meals. Over time we will all together begin to displace our raw agricultural staples with the wilder equivalents, one balanced step at a time.

Tip #4
Make tonic herbal tea. Now termed “superherbs,” these high mineral immunomodulating herbs which are at par in potency with superfoods should be taken in abundance. Although I definitely also recommend taking as many pre-made powders or capsules of superherbs as you can afford, FIRST go for the tea you make yourself at home. You can easily order online a quick tea blend of chopped reishi mushroom, cat’s claw, pau d’arco, ginseng, goji berries, gynostemma, and vanilla bean. Brew those up with water (preferably spring water) and a pinch of salt in a 1.5 quart or bigger pot, letting simmer for at least 20 minutes. Sweeten with stevia. There are so many other tonic herbs I consume in tea form on a consistent basis like dandelion root, cistanche, red asparagus root, jujube date, astragalus, white atractylodes, cinnamon, schisandra berries, turkey tail mushrooms, cordyceps, etc. The hot water extracts (a.k.a. tea) of the superior herbs deeply nourish the organs and glands. Many of them are full of polysaccharides which go into your body and teach your immune system to be ever more resilient. Dabbling in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Amazonian herbal medicine will reveal a whole world completely compatible with raw foods.

Tip #3
Eat plenty of high quality oily foods. Experiment with what ratio of fat, protein and carbs keep you balanced. Try the oily food chia. You might surprise yourself as to how little sugar you actually need, and how much fat your body is actually craving after a lifetime of eating too much sugar and only toxic fats. This goes with the part of tip #5: avoiding hybridized produce which has been foolishly bred over generations to have higher sugar and lower medicine – the exact opposite of what we actually want.

Tip #2
Realize that water is a living organism and that you are mostly water. Fresh spring water is the only living water, and all high-tech filtration systems cannot bring tap water back to life. However, it would be wise to stay hydrated on plenty of filtered water than to have too little water because you are holding out for the spring water. Go to www.findaspring.com and find your local spring. Get a carload of spring water in jugs from it twice a month, and feel the difference that fresh living water makes to your state of well-being.

Tip #1
Connect your diet to your lifestyle and nature. Touch moist earth with bare skin and get electrically and spiritually grounded. Get naked in the sun this spring and summer. If you have nosy neighbors, but a private south facing window, open it at noon, take the screen off and get a tan indoors! Garden with heirloom and wild seeds, and make sure you amend your soil with GroPal, rock dust, MycoGrow, bat guano and silt from your nearest clean river or creek. Saturate your mind with educational YouTube videos on raw foods, superfoods, wild foods, spring water, and begin to pick out what is great information from what and who is missing the mark. Acknowledge your efforts and have really high self esteem about your choices no matter what!