Healthy living encompasses body, mind and spirit. If our minds and bodies are healthy, our spirits can soar above the earthly confines of the physical world. Therefore, keeping ourselves healthy in all ways is of vital importance.

In our Healthy Living program, we are delighted to be able to present you with a series of interviews with leading experts and discussions on innovative research. We seek to provide some fun, practical and simple approaches to address your health on all levels.

Welcome to the world of Healthy Living!

Today on Healthy Living, Supreme Master Television had the pleasure of interviewing Angela Stokes, of Raw Food Reform. She’ll tell us about her extraordinary transformation, and how she turned her health and weight around by changing to a raw food diet. Nowadays Angela is inspiring others to join her in this exciting and vibrant lifestyle. She is taking her message to the people and has given talks and workshops in venues ranging from yoga studios to home potlucks and lecture halls. She has traveled to many places to reach interested audiences: Europe, the United States, North Africa, as well as Costa Rica. She shares information through her website RawReform.com. Let’s join Angela Stokes now in the studio.

Interviewer: Welcome to “Healthy Living” on Supreme Master Television. Today I’m in the studio with Angela Stokes. She’s 28 years old from England and she lost 160 pounds adopting a raw food lifestyle. Welcome Angela.

Angela: Thank you.

Interviewer: It’s nice to have you here, so I want to start from the beginning. As I understand from your website, when you were eleven years old your thyroid went under active, and then at twenty one years old you were up to two hundred and twenty four pounds and at twenty one years old you were up to two hundred and ninety four pounds, and when you started this new lifestyle you were up to three hundred pounds. Tell us what was going on for you and what was that like?

Angela: Well yes when the weight started to come on when I was eleven years old we didn’t know what was happening. The thyroid wasn’t diagnosed as being under active for like two years, so I started to gain weight and prior to that I’d been really active and so my whole life started to change, you know I was gaining weight constantly and so I was becoming less and less active because I felt, you know, less able to be active. And so it just kind of spiraled and spiraled and even though the thyroids condition became diagnosed and I started to take medication for it, by that point I was already like really immersed in eating food, as my kind of comfort system. So even though I started to take the medication I still continued to gain the weight, so for as you said, for like a decade constantly, basically from the age of eleven until twenty one, I just gained weight constantly and I was miserable you know.

Interviewer: I bet.

Angela: I had a façade of being happy and that I was really enjoying everything, and you know I really wanted to come across as like the good girl, and underneath that I felt very dis-attached from other people. I didn’t really interact with other people honestly, I felt very scared that anybody would make any comments about my weight.

Angela: They didn’t because I had the kind of same group of friends for the whole time that I was growing up, that really wasn’t an issue, you know it was…. there was actually a lot of support from my friendship group as I was growing up. The issue for me really came with that when I went to university, when I was like eighteen years old. Because I went to university about four hundred, five hundred miles away from where I came from, and suddenly, you know, my whole friendship group was gone and I was two hundred and something pounds at that point, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds or something and my self confidence was very low. You know all of those self things, self esteem, self worth all of those things were just, they weren’t there for me, and….

Interviewer: You were in a state of denial?

Angela: Yes absolutely.

Interviewer: Tell us about that.

Angela: I just lived in this bubble you know I just, I would not speak to any body about my health or my weight or, you know anything that felt like it was, that it was actual honesty, actual truth about something. I just didn’t want to connect with people I just wanted to have my boundaries you know, and I guess in a way the fat was like a kind of a protective layer.

Interviewer: Right, ok so what was the turning point? What made you start this raw vegan lifestyle?

Angela: I guess my first turning point came with a diabetes scare actually.

Angela: I guess the main trigger point came for me in the form of a diabetes scare.

Angela: I was traveling and I was very run down at that point. Throughout this whole period of living with obesity I was always ill, I mean literally always from one illness to another. Always taking medication, sometimes like 15 different pills a day and at this point I was like 300 pounds and really, really run down and….

Interviewer: Did you ever at that time ever think that you would never ever be thin, like it was a impossibility, or did you dream of it?

Angela: Yes I guess I dreamt of it, but because you know I never spoke about it with people, it was kind of like it wasn’t part of my reality somehow. The concept like I would ever actually be slim, because I knew nothing about how to lose weight or how to be healthy, you know it was just, I kept myself completely blocked, you know all I was interested in was eating and I just ate and ate and ate. So yes there I was like nearly 300 pounds, really, really ill and I overheard this woman say “You know what I think maybe Angela has diabetes” And it completely rocked my world, you know I just, I thought wow maybe she’s right.

Interviewer: So what did you do?

Angela: I looked it up in a medical encyclopedia I literally had every single symptom of diabetes. But as usual I didn’t want to speak to any one about it so I went for tests in secret and to my absolute astonishment the results came back negative and it felt like being given a second chance you know.

Interviewer: Oh that was wonderful!!

Angela: And it felt like a wake up call. No, it was like WOW. You know, I’ve myself that far and now I have the chance to turn this thing around. No, I can’t keep pushing this body this way. So, from that point I tried to kind of do something, you know, to treat my body nicer and to hopefully loose some weight. But as I said, you know, I will do it!! I didn’t know anything about how to be healthy or diet or exercise or anything. So I did my best, I kind of tried not to snack as much and be a bit more active, things like that. Mainly vegetarian and I lost a bit of weight, you know I lost about 30 pounds but when you’re like 300 pounds, you loose like 30 pounds, that make such a difference.

Angela: I was about 23 years old, so at that point I kind of worked my way from being veggie to kind of vegan and I lost a little bit of weight but I’m still in the same position. I’m still more a bit obese, still always getting ill. I’m still miserable underneath with it. I was still single, you know I’ve been single for a long time, like 5 years. And still wasn’t willing to speak to people about what was going on. And I was living in Iceland and a friend of mine there. She was my homeopath and she saw that I was very unwilling to speak about these things. But she knew a lot about healthy lifestyle. And she really wanted to share it with me. So she kind of swiftly worked into my life in a beautiful way. She asked me one night if I wanted to borrow a book. And she lent me a stack of books and one of them was “The Raw Family Book” by the Boutenkos. Which I don’t know if you’ve read that but it’s the testimony of how one family went raw and their lives completely changed. And I heard a little bit about raw foods before that but it just had not resonated with me, like at all, you know. But actually reading this story, it spoke to me with so much and I read the whole book one night and I just knew like this is it!!

Interviewer: This is it.

Angela: This is my answer. This is what I’ve been waiting for.

Interviewer: So tell us what diet you went on? And what kind of things did you have?

Angela: Yeah, well I went 100% raw vegan, straight out. And it was actually a really interesting journey for me in the first week. I was going on an adventure trip in the north of Iceland and I had to take all the food with me that I was going to eat that week, because there weren’t going to be any shops there to buy anything. So I packed a bag of completely raw food, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, seaweeds, oils. Everything I can get my hands on in this tiny town and what considered raw and off we went. And I really didn’t know what I was doing. You know, I was just out there in the wild and Iceland and just trying to make things fit. And I was chewing almost constantly. My jaw was just aching, you know, because it was such a contrast to junk foods.

Interviewer: What were you eating?

Angela: Nuts, dried fruits, fruits themselves like chewing on apples and bananas.

Interviewer: And what kind of juice were you having?

Angela: I wasn’t having juices at that point because I was on the roads. And then when I came back from there, I just realized I actually, being 100% completely raw is a bit too much for me right now. I mean, that is an incredibly de-toxicating path to take for the body and I just had so much toxins in my body from being like 300 pounds. And I need to take a step back, from being 70% raw and I was just experimenting natures, trying stuff out. I didn’t know like what would work and what wouldn’t. I made some horrible food combinations in the beginning.

Interviewer: Did you start to see weight come off then?

Angela: Uh-huh.

Interviewer: So from starting the raw food, weight started to come out, how much?

Angela: In the first year, I lost 105 pounds.

Interviewer: Wow, oh that’s incredible!!!

Angela: So it was really, like I can see it burning off. You know, it was phenomenal. And people often say “how did you have the motivation to keep doing it?”. For me “that was it”!

Interviewer: Exactly.

Angela: You know like, with the changes. My body was changing so much, I was like, “no, I have a collar bone, no I hadn’t seen this thing for like 10, 15 years.” All my jewelries were pulling off, clothes didn’t fitted anymore. Everyday I looked in the mirror, I looked different.

Interviewer: Oh, good.

Angela: So you know.

Interviewer: That was a benefit.

Angela: Yeah.

Interviewer: That’s motivation to keep going.

Angela: Uh, huh.

By changing to more wholesome diet consisting of raw vegan food, Angela Stokes was able to lose over half her body weight. Not only did she feel better in health, she was better in spirit. She believes in the importance of being in tune with nature, starting with a humane diet. As stated on her website, “Going vegan supports animal welfare!”

Please join us next Monday for the continuation of our discussion with Angela Stokes, as she talks to us about her 92 days of Juice Feast. Find out what all that is about and more, here on Healthy Living.