I have eaten raw food for many years, but that experience has also taught me that being 100% raw is not the only consideration when choosing what to eat. And we don't need to treat a cooked whole plant food as though it has suddenly become nutritionally worthless. I have found that there is a middle ground between completely raw and completely cooked, especially when you are trying to make this way of eating work in the everyday world.

Some people do very well making large dietary changes quickly while others do better changing things gradually.

It’s not a “failure” to eat a steamed vegetable, it is still a whole plant food.

It’s about remembering what the original goal actually was.

In many ways, for me at least, it’s just practical.

I'm not going to complicate it.

Think about it this way:

When someone moves away from a standard Western diet, there are many things that change all at once. They may eat more fruits and vegetables. They may eat more leafy greens. They may reduce processed foods or animal products. And they may change the way foods are cooked, perhaps moving from frying to steaming.

That is not something to dismiss, it’s something to celebrate.

Anyway, I don’t know if this helps anyone else or not.

A lot of people become so focused on whether something is technically raw that they stop looking at what the food actually is.

That is how raw oils, isolated sweeteners, and highly concentrated raw foods can end up taking up far more space in a diet than whole foods.

It reminds me of the difference between eating an avocado and eating avocado oil. Both came from the same plant, but once you extract the oil, you no longer have the same food. The water, fiber, protein, minerals, and other components of the fruit do not magically follow the oil into the bottle. So you can look at the bottle and look at the avocado and ask what each one actually contains.

And the whole avocado is sitting there with everything that came with it.

The simplest way I can put it is this:

“The whole food brings more to the table.”

The oil gives you concentrated fat, just one extracted part of the food.

The same basic issue comes up with concentrated sweeteners, like eating a whole date versus date syrup.

That’s the point I keep coming back to when I talk about whole foods.

Forget the idea that something automatically becomes an ideal food simply because the label says raw.

If you have doubts about whether you need to be 100% raw, whether eating cooked whole plant foods somehow ruins everything, or whether you need to follow one rigid macronutrient formula... remember that everyone requires a different approach. And making small, incremental changes can be much more workable for you than trying to change everything overnight.

Don’t waste your precious energy trying to win some imaginary, virtue-signaling contest on social media for who can eat the highest percentage of raw food.

Just keep whole plant foods at the center of what you eat, whether they are raw or healthfully cooked.

That’s what keeps the focus on the food itself... instead of turning nutrition into another collection of labels.

End of pep talk.

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Irina Valeva