As previously mentioned, Mother and I are on a health rampage this summer. Personally, I’m getting all of the exercise I could ask for in the garden. It’s harder than it looks, working out there for eight hours a day! I’m quite sore.

Anyways, both she and I have had a hard time losing weight in the past, and we’re kind of discouraged by our lack of success. We eat a relatively small amount, and what we eat is good, healthy food (though, I must admit, I maybe got a little bit off the track of “healthy” at school). Yet still, there is a serious lack of weight loss.

Well, not for long! (Hopefully). We’ve decided to try an enzyme diet. All these years, we’ve been eating vegetable soups, steamed veggies, and roasted vegetables–and all the while we’ve thought, “Wow, look at how healthy we are!” Well, turns out all those cooked veggies were an enzyme waste! Quite upsetting.

When foods are cooked–especially in a microwave–the enzymes in them are completely destroyed. In fact, on a diet of mostly cooked foods, you will be losing enzymes because you are not gaining any new ones and you are using up your body’s supply of enzymes to break down and digest the food. Enzyme advocates suggest that society’s trend toward cooked, enzyme-less diets is one of the dominant contributors to premature aging, early deaths, and most degenerative diseases. In fact, research indicates that there is a correlation between when humans began cooking food and when they began developing these degenerative diseases.

So, if eating cooked foods is so detrimental to our health, then what is the answer? Well, the answer is eating lots of raw, enzyme-rich food. Raw fruits and vegetables, as well as sprouted grains such as quinoa and brown rice, are high in enzymes. Particularly high sources are mangoes, avocados, and bananas. However, it is not sufficient just to eat some raw foods and some cooked foods–the enzymes gained from the raw food will never make up for the strain of the cooked foods on your body’s enzyme bank.

Unless you are eating a meal consisting of entirely raw food, you should have 1-3 pills of plant enzymes along with that meal. Mother and I are using are Vitalzym, which can be purchased here.

Basically, my reason for writing this isn’t to tell all of you to go start your enzyme diets now, but to tell you how great my mom and I are feeling on it. We’ve been having wonderful salads of sweet potatoes, avocados, tomatoes, carrots, cilantro, quinoa, and white beans, and taking these Vitalzym pills, and we feel absolutely spectacular. With a mango or some strawberries for dessert, we’re satisfying our sugar cravings, too. We have so much more energy and are so much more alert–it’s really amazing, seeing as we just started a couple of days ago! Plus, suddenly the fat on our bodies just seems especially unnecessary and unhealthy, so we’re motivated to continue. Really, the effects are almost immediate. We think we may have finally discovered one of the keys to better health, and we are quite excited.

Note to self: I’ll take some veggies, hold the roasted/steamed.

Lily Berthold-Bond grew up in a chemical-free zone and has struggled her whole life to understand and accept this non-commercial lifestyle. Now a freshman at Tufts University, she has embraced her green life and hopes to share its possibilities with the rest of her generation.