Wednesday, March 5, 2008

How to Thrive: Secret Raw Ingredients for Health and Strength

Tim's Training at the Gym

Yesterday I added Tim VanOrden’s YouTube video, in which he says that diet and exercise don’t make you stronger. I didn’t see the rest of this video, but want to take this great subject one step further here.

I think Tim is right: we stress exercise and eating too much. Most western people are always stressed out and keep running around, while in fact the only thing they need is rest. Rest from work, rest from social obligations, rest from physical activities, rest from sports, rest from heavy meals, and rest from our own emotions and thoughts. Tim’s video makes this very clear.

But … I don’t totally agree with Tim. You don’t get stronger just by rest. What you need is training and rest. You need both. Training without rest doesn’t work and rest without training doesn’t work either. It’s like yin and yang, positive and negative, light and dark. One doesn’t exist without the other. You get really healthy and strong by both training and rest, challenging your body and giving it time to recover.

The same is true for diet. We need to get both, the nutrients from our foods and rest to heal and get stronger. I agree with Tim that a raw vegan diet is the ideal diet for this. If you eat heavy foods, your body needs a lot of energy to digest them and usually these heavy foods don’t even contain the nutrients you need. The best foods are foods high in nutrients and easy to digest. A great example of these foods are superfoods. And I’m sure Tim will agree with this, if I see his post-workout smoothie, loaded with superfoods.

So to really thrive, you need a balanced amount of exercise and rest, together with easy to digest nutritious foods, like fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, seaweeds, herbs and superfoods.
This is the way to thrive.

For more inspiration and information about Tim VanOrden and his Running Raw Project,
visit RunningRaw.com

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