Raw Vegan Love.

A Willingness to Change.

For as long as I can remember, I worried about my weight.

Growing up, I was constantly dieting. I’d get down on myself every time I gave in to my cravings.

I realize now that it was never a craving for the food, really, it was a craving for something else—something I’ve finally, recently found.

In January of this year my younger sister decided she would finally try being a vegan. It felt right to me, too, so I decided to try it with her. We never expected to stay vegan for more than a few weeks.

It’s coming up on nine months, now, that neither of us has had any animal products of any kind and we’ve never felt more like ourselves. We don’t ever plan on going back to eating the way we did before.

See, we were lost. Neither of us was truly happy with who we were or what we were doing. Adopting a vegan diet was a step in the direction of love: for the animals, the planet, and ourselves.

A few days after going vegan, I bought Alicia Silverstone’s book, The Kind Diet, and right away we went to work making every recipe in it. We fell in love with her casserole dish, and the spinach and artichoke dip, and every morning we would cook up some mochi waffles with maple syrup. We were loving our new lifestyle.

About one month into our vegan experiment, I noticed I was feeling very “cooked,” and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any vegetables raw. Before becoming vegan, I never ate vegetables, but I think that because I was making all my food pretty much from scratch, I’d became incredibly aware about what exactly I was eating. I had heard about raw food before—my mom actually took on a 100% raw vegan diet for a few months when I was much younger, and recently, I had been making a raw chocolate gelato from Juliano’s book The Uncook Book. But that was pretty much as far as I was willing to go with raw food at the time. I used to say if I had a raw food chef to prepare all my meals, I’d eat raw food all the time.

~

I found what I was looking for one month after becoming vegan, about the time I realized my body needed something fresh, something raw. I don’t know how I found it, or how it found me, but somehow it did. I was exactly three hours away from a raw vegan farm that produced all kinds of raw food and would ship anything—from mock un-tuna to coconut vanilla ice cream—right to my door! I was ecstatic. Right away I started ordering all the goodies they made.

It was so easy, it was so perfect, it just worked.

From that moment on, everything has been so different. The way I eat now and what I eat now is amazing to me.

My sister and I have been eating only raw, vegan, and organic food for a little over four months now. The last eight months were pure detox, and I finally feel like I’m starting to move forward with this new lifestyle. At first all the stories I’d heard about raw food were about how amazing you feel eating it, I never heard anyone talk about how intense the detox is, physically and emotionally. The emotional detox is, looking back, pretty fascinating. I mean, to think that you have these old emotions and thoughts lodged in you and the cleaner your diet becomes the more all those thoughts come up to be released, is something else!

I thought that by taking on a vegan diet I’d help the animals and maybe lose some weight (which had been my original goal), but becoming vegan changed my whole life. Since day one, I’ve been learning, growing, and releasing. If I had a question, I’d look it up online.

There were so many times that I was scared, feeling like so many things were coming out of me all at once—but I never once doubted raw food. I knew that all that I had done to my body in the past had to come out. I heard a quote once from David Wolfe regarding raw food and the detox process:

“Imagine if the whole world was addicted to nicotine and then one person decided to stop using, they would experience withdrawal and all the doctors would tell them that they needed nicotine, that they were deficient in nicotine, when really it was the nicotine being detoxed out of their system that was creating the discomfort.”

The whole process, from detoxing to changing of my lifestyle, has shown and taught me so much about myself. Before, I never knew what it felt like to love who I was—to truly love who I was as a person…and now I don’t know how I ever lived without her. Finally, I am one with myself.

I am one with the world. And I know you will find whatever it is you’re looking for. A willingness to change and patience are all that is needed.

I believe in you!

~Wesleigh

Wesleigh Jeannine is 19 years young. She is a Reiki practitioner, a raw food chef, a musician, model, and actress. She believes and knows for herself that there is not limit to what we can be, do, or have. She loves reading raw food books by David Wolfe and repeating Loving Affirmations by Louise Hay. She is very excited about an upcoming move to the west coast.