If you have a diet you believe is healthy and want to make it truly work for your long-term well-being and make sure you don’t overlook the hard truths, then listen to this.

Let’s say you’ve decided to eat raw food, and you’ve got three, four, even five days (or more) of meals you think are doing your body good.

And you’re looking for ways to make it easier, more comfortable and more “inviting” to keep going.

And let’s pretend one of those meals looks like this:

A giant plate of fruit, a raw salad, and maybe a smoothie… but with barely any greens, no sulfur-rich vegetables, and almost no variety day after day.

What you don’t see at first is what happens next.

A few weeks in, your digestion starts to feel off. Not terrible, just… sluggish. Your energy dips in the afternoon. You notice you’re bloated after meals you thought were “light.” You assume it’s just part of detox.

But over time, a deeper issue takes root.

You’re missing the nutrient diversity your gut microbiome needs to thrive. Without enough cruciferous greens, allium vegetables like onions and garlic, or the dense phytonutrients from berries, your good bacteria start to weaken. Your digestion turns unpredictable. You feel foggy in the morning, even though you “should” feel fresh.

I’ve seen people push through this for months, even years, thinking it’s just their body adjusting. And then the real crash comes: their lab work shows nutrient deficiencies, their skin breaks out, their hair thins, and their immune system tanks.

All because they never learned that whether it’s raw food or, in fact, any restrictive eating plan promoted for a specific goal (weight loss, muscle gain, blood sugar control, cardiovascular health, detox/cleansing, managing specific conditions such as heart disease, PCOS, etc..), success isn’t about simply following the label - it’s about eating the right variety in the right amounts so your body’s repair systems stay switched on.

And here’s the painful truth: this doesn’t fix itself. Left alone, it snowballs. Your digestion weakens further. Your energy tanks. And your motivation to eat raw food collapses, so you quit, and tell yourself it “just didn’t work” for you.

But it could have worked. You could have avoided all of it with the kind of eat-more-raw plan that nourishes every system, your microbiome, your immune health, and supports your energy, all at the same time.

Anyway, I have found this to be a really useful reality check.

Not only does it break up the “sameness” of eating the same raw foods every day, but you are also far more likely to notice the most important foods your body needs before it’s too late.

If you want the exact steps, food combinations, and daily structures to make this work for you, without guessing, you’ll find them all in my books.

They’re right here on Amazon:

​https://www.amazon.com/author/irina-valeva​

Irina Valeva

​www.IrinaValeva.com​