A different lifestyle: I just realized how hard it is on our friends and family.

Something very strange happened to me last week. It was my daughters 4^th birthday and I invited my parents and sisters to my house. I have been a raw vegan for 8 months now and I’m in it for life, but I just realized how difficult it is for people around us to accept the way we eat.

My lifestyle changed completely four years ago when our daughter was born. She was born with many food allergies and was so sensible that everything I ate passed through breast milk and if she didn’t tolerate it, it would affect her with pain and swelling. Interesting enough we found by trial and error, what made her sick, and guess what made her sick? Dairy products, wheat, soy, eggs, meat, fish, poultry, sugar, food colourings (like yellow 5) and additives (like monosodium glutamate) as well as pesticides and fertilizers. All these gave us a hard time. The baby was one month old when we saw that something was wrong and with the help of a La Leche League leader who told me to start eliminating foods from my diet my daughter’s health improved.

Over these four years our habits and food choices have changed in order to help our child. She is still breast fed because she still has reactions to certain foods and my milk has helped her with the allergy symptoms. Even though she gets into an anaphylactic shock (her throat swells and can’t breathe), she has never needed a cortisone injection or been hospitalized. We have gone to the hospital 3 times, but just to have her checked for the swelling and the rash. A few months back she got a very bad allergy episode and she just drank milk for about 3 days, she didn’t tolerate water or food, but she wasn’t hospitalized. I just took good care of my nutrition with green juice, green smoothies and water and she was all right. She is a very intelligent, tall, active, sensible and healthy child and she is learning not to eat what she is not supposed to. Every time she gets a runny nose, a rash or she begins to swell, she asks mommy for milk and ten minutes later the symptoms start to disappear. All this has made us change our lifestyle in many ways. We have decided to let her breastfeed until her need to breastfeed has ended.

We also decided to be raw vegans and to home school our child. We buy our food in bulk and my kitchen is always full of fruit and greens, and we have started to grow our own food inside our house. We have plants growing in soil and hydroponics (which is food grown in water or medium without soil). And because our food is happy, we are happy too. We talk to them and say out loud “these plants are beautiful, strong, full of life and energy, healthy, nutritious and delicious”. We have romaine lettuces, celery, spinach, watercress, beets, radishes, tomatoes, swiss chard, herbs and we love to take care of what makes us feel good.

I feel that my diet and lifestyle is just perfect for me and it seems to be the natural way to do the things I do, but I had not seen how difficult it is for others to accept our way of life. It seems to me that the change in my energy flow and the way I just slowed down my life to be happy by eating all the mangos my body needs without feeling stuffed, but never again feeling deprived. These things I would not change for anything. My life has become complete, I feel in harmony with myself, my body, my mind and my soul. I don’t need anything else to feel free, happy and in charge of my life. My health is again mine and not of the things I did to my body thinking that what everybody does is normal or natural. Normal and natural is what you do and feel good about. Drinking a glass of orange juice in the garden with the sun warming my body is the most comforting thing I have felt in the past few months. Is like when I needed a hug, now I can feel all the love the universe has for me everyday in everything I do.

I thought that what felt natural to me should feel natural to others, but after 8 months, I just realized how difficult our change is for our friends and family. This makes me think about all those times that I rejected people around me because they acted or reacted differently from what we think or learned to be correct. Now that I have a child at home with me, we take the time to learn about what we want and what makes us happy. If it makes us happy we continue doing it, but if it doesn’t we change it. We have to be patient with others in understanding what we do. Living this way opens our eyes and hearts in a very subtle way and with this also comes responsibility and empathy towards others. Our change in consciousness gives us a lot to work with us and it just makes me feel very worthy of what I have been learning throughout the years. I know that everything around me helped me become who I am now and my lifestyle is just another piece of the puzzle. We don’t need to like what others do, we just need to accept them just as we want to be accepted.

My house was full of food, but everybody in the family thought there was no food they could eat. I didn’t have bread, cheese, ham or cow’s milk. It is strange for me to see that I grew up in a family where we did things in a way and now I have my family and I am doing things in a different way. I cannot possibly think of my life to be different, but we are always evolving and so is our lifestyle.

Here are some pictures of my kitchen to let you see what food I had the day they came for you to see how differently each of us can see things. I buy food for about 2 weeks, more or less and I had bought food just a few days before.

I wish you all harmony with the universe and happiness in everything you do.

Alejandra Hernando, Raw Vegan in Mexico City.