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1. What are some rawfood staples in your current diet? Are you 100% raw? How did you start? I'm an athlete and I'm not into the low-fat thing at all! Okay, I do notice when I've eaten too many dry nuts - they feel acidic, like after drinking wine. So I make my nut consumption specialized. But avocados? Every day. Sometimes several. They digest like the seed-bearing tree-born fruit they are, rather than a heavy fat, and especially important to me, they balance hormones. I mean, who couldn't use a little hormonal balancing, really? Fuerte and Reed, depending on which is most in season, are my prize favorites. I co-authored an eBook - it's a raw nutritional analysis for all those people who want more facts than idealism about where they get their protein from. If you are one of those people, check out the Raw Nutritional Analysis: Spring Athlete's Diet ebook - it's paper-free, so you can feel good about not contributing to the cycle of production and consumption. Well, Joanna Steven and I co-authored this eBook as an athletic follow up to the standard Raw Nutritional Analysis: Autumn's Diet and let's just say protein wasn't the only nutrient this raw foodist was wondering about. My daily calcium intake averaged around a recommended daily allowance of 86%. All that 86% was comprised of was kale salads, wheat grass shots, sea weeds and algeas. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get my numbers very far over 86%. UNTIL I did a little talk down in Dallas, TX at Loving Food's Raw Potluck. Some wonderful chef placed upon the table Raw Tapioca Pudding. At least that's what I call it. I started making the pudding during my writing of this eBook, where I write down every gram of food I eat, and guess what I found: my recommended daily allowance of calcium skyrocketed from 86% to 106% by adding only 2 or 3T of chia seeds, the essential ingredient in Raw Tapioca Pudding! I eat them several times/week now, in addition to doing consistent weight-bearing physical play - my bones are definitely doing what bones do to be strong, that's for sure! I started eating raw after being a vegetarian of 19 years - 9 of which were also cooked vegan. I began eating raw when I had decided to go off medications for manic-depression for the third and hopefully final time in my life. That was August of 2002. With oodles of commitment, resiliency, forgiveness, love and self-directed cognitive behavioral therapy, I have been medication-free ever since. That's my miracle. Every raw fooder has one to tell.
I started tap dancing at the tender age of 4. From the time I could spell my name, I could divide measures into beats and reassemble them into rhythms with my happy little feet. Who says the arts aren't imperative to schooling. I am a math wiz because of tap dance - an arithmetic lesson my entire body - my being - understands. Well, when I was 18 or so I saw STOMP for the first time and thought, "I'd be great in this show". At the time, I was performing musical theatre in Chicago and to see a production that embodied every athletic, artistic and cultural ideal I've ever considered ... seeing STOMP when I was 18 changed the way I rehearsed while on tour with Kenny Rogers at 19 - I'd tap for 40 minutes before every show in the stadium locker rooms (tap shoes on cement floors are LOUD and AWESOME!). Seeing STOMP at 18 changed the way I listened to music in my home at 20 - I'd work out remedial rhythms on my body to my favorite tunes. And I'd imagine I was on stage in STOMP. Beating up trash cans, breaking hammer handles, throwing broom sticks just to see what it sounded like. To be on tour for 3 years with STOMP was a dream come true. Every nite on stage, after the musical finale, the cast slams their blue-collar instruments down, like Trent Reznor's guitar after "March of the Pigs". We'd slam those instruments down, fall in a panting heap upon the stage, the lights would go down and every nite, as I could hear the audience go wild, jumping to their feet, I thought, "I'm in STOMP. This is what I do. I'm in STOMP." 3. What are some ways you stay in shape? I stay in shape by eating raw vegan food - it sure is a lot easier when you run clean and feel it right away when a perpetrator is on the scene. Otherwise, I am obviously a professional dancer who actually loves to dance, so I go to dance class, I go to the club, I dance in my living room and I perform more often on film and television than on stage, now. I get bored easily though, so I have a brigade of fun things that I can rotate - like cross training. Not like cross-training - totally cross training. It keeps injuries away. So I also do Bikram yoga, Wushu and Tae Kwon Do martial arts, bike (rather than drive) all over Hollywood for every reason including auditions, and I do ab training quite regularly. 4. What did you eat yesterday? Yesterday was New Year's Day 2009 and after indulging in a splendid amount of biodynamic wine and other natural botanicals, I was feeling rather slow upon waking, so to pick myself up and clean myself up again, yesterday I ate: *
2 pieces of home made raw vegan maca chocolate
Drink tea, drink subtle, hot, ritualistic tea. Include your friends - now it's a tea party! Go to the local tea shoppe and sip while you play on your laptop. Get the blood pumping with exercise. Take hot baths! And most of all, remember that cold is a feeling, not a disease. It's okay to feel.
I live in the heart of Hollywood and I am totally down with living in paradise in the middle of the city. I want the health of a country dweller living in the middle of the city. So even with my apartment's space allowances, I grow my own wheat grass, solar dehydrated my own flax crackers, ferment my own kombucha and kim chee, sprout my own seeds and vermicompost my own organic food scraps. It is essential to me, as a raw foodist, that I extend the self care I've discovered to everything I touch and that means that the true raw vegan is also an environmentalist. And what could be more essential right now that eliminating electricity use everywhere possible. My most used kitchen gadgets are all non-electric: a hand crank wheat-grass juicer, a hemp seed sprouting bag, a cheese-cloth covered reused sprout jar, a hand built solar food dehydrator on my rooftop and ... my salt grinder. I think my favorite food is salt sometimes. And I love the freshness and the ritual of grinding my own fun salt varieties. 7. How do you come up with a recipe? I'm an artist! I just think about what tastes good and put it together. Raw recipes are REALLY EASY. I mean, when you taste cooked food, it's often hard to discern what ingredients might be in it because they all get jumbled together and reduced in flavor and texture and are often way over flavored with oils and spices - I have no clue what I'm eating! But raw vegan food is not so. I get too much joy out of tasting a raw recipe and being able to discern exactly what (five, usually) ingredients are in it. And I use the advice of the masterful Chad Sarno. He told me once that the human tongue has only three actually taste receptors (all other flavors are a combination of these three tastes). He told me that if you be certain to include three things in every recipe, even if in undetectable amounts, the tongue with register flavor satisfaction. The three taste buds receive: FATS, ACIDS AND SALTS. So, yes, even if I am making cacao bars, I put a little orange juice (acid) and an imperceptible dash of salt in my recipe. And the easiest salad dressing is simply oil-of-choice (hemp, coconut, walnut), salt-of-choice (HImalayan, Celtic, Charcoal), and acid-of-choice (orange juice, lemon/lime juice, strawberries, kombucha vinegar).
8. What are some raw food tips you can offer when traveling? What are some of your favorite places you visited? Don't eat the airplane food! Just because it is free does not mean I am hungry. Gosh, who thought little bags of peanuts could have such a massive environmental impact?!? I bring my (empty) glass bottle through airport security and fill it up at a water fountain inside the terminal. I also bring a reusable insulated mug because air attendants are happy to give you as much hot water as you like, instead of accepting those one-sip plastic bottles of water you could otherwise ask for. I also actually choose to NOT eat during travel. If I can abstain from solid food while in the air, in the car, on a boat or on a train, then my digestive system appreciates the fast and I actually adjust to extreme time zones much quicker. This year I volunteered with an endangered wildlife program in Thailand called Elephant Nature Foundation. The air travel on that trip was 24 hours. But because I sore off solid food for six hours before travel and throughout transit, and began homeopathy with arnica 4 pellets consistently every 4 hours starting six hours before and throughout transit, I did not experience ANY jetlag, cramped muscles, sleep deprivation, or digestive upset whatsoever. Moving every two hours while on the airplane is essential and drinking hoards of water in the air is essential as well. When I land, after a long travel, I choose to eat root vegetables. They grow underground and karmically, they embody the energy of the earth, so there is nothing like a thinly sliced raw root vegetable (water chestnut, sweet potato, carrot, beet) to keep one from blasting off on some "I need heavy food" obsession to sedate the stress of extreme travel.
The raw food movement is a grass-roots movement. When all the nation was in panic mode because of a stock market crash recently, I did an inventory of my friends in raw or green business and found their services were being requested more than ever. Our community is generating more income than ever. I see raw entrepreneurs as the next obvious success stories. Women are natural mothers, like the earth, so I see many, many female business owners in the raw movement changing the face of the work place. I was the first ever fruit eating superhero on national television with my appearance as Creature in Stan Lee and SCIFI's massively popular Who Wants To Be A Superhero. And currently I am filming the comedic lead in the feature film, Bold Native, a film about the Animal LIberation Front being (unjustly) classified as a terrorist organization and what the lives of young animal activists are like when they are wanted by the feds for terrorism (this case is happening right now in the "real" world, people). Please check out Bold Native's initial image story here http://www.openroadfilms.net/boldnative.html . So ... in other words, I'm playing conscious leads in film and television and I see the raw food movement as being ready for popular media now. In fact, I'm seeing it everywhere: in Nacho Libre he Jack Black ate watermelon before a wrestling match and with all his prize money, served the orphans at his monastery salad rather than porridge. In Wall-E the dream and hope of our entire race is tied to the survival and propagation of one little, green sprout. And that's just in front of the camera. I started a company this year that delivers food to MAJOR motion pictures and television and ... my vegetable oil-fueled delivery vans deliver massively more organic produce and natural foods than ever before. It's happening everywhere and now is the raw vegan movement's time for emergence in popular media. Grass roots podcasters are broadcasting it. Internet celebrities are teaching recipes and doing interviews. I'm portraying conscious characters on cable television. Heck, tell the Food Network or Travel Channel that you know of the perfect host for their first ever green travel / adventure show!
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