Transform your kitchen from a processed food haven to a healthy kitchen. You don’t have to give up all the foods you love to eat at once to become healthier and to start eating raw, organic, living foods. The best place to start changing your life and your diet is at the grocery store. Even if you don’t need to lose weight and are pretty healthy, take a tip from dieters: Go shopping with a list and don’t go to the shopping for food when you are hungry. Doing so will half you resist all those anpan cakes, pokki sticks, and senbei crackers.

To start detoxifying your kitchen, clean out your refrigerator and your cabinets. Throw out the half-empty bags of snack foods. Put any microwaveable foods in a dark bag and stash them somewhere in the back of the freezer. Or better yet, bin them. Out of sight, out of mind.

It’s a great idea to stock up on dried fruits and nuts for snacking. Invest in a good blender so you can start each day with a nutrient-packed green smoothie. I also recommend an affordable slicing device called a spiralizer (check Raw Rapture’s Amazon stores), so you can exchange your cooked pasta for zucchini angle hair shreds (which taste just as good if not better than cooked flour pasta!) and make other food look beautiful. You can get a juicer, but wait until you’ve incorporated your blender into your daily life. Save a dehydrator (they do not come cheap) for that stage when you rarely use the stove anymore, as then you can store your dehydrator on its new permanent home - on top of the stove! If you have an oven (which means you don’t live in Japan), use it for storage. Clean out those crisper drawers in the fridge to get them ready for an influx of fresh organic, raw foods.

Load up on fresh fruits, vegetables, and potentially sproutable nuts, grains, beans, and seeds. Look around for places you can find raw nuts and seeds. Buy high quality raw, organic condiments such as cold pressed olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and soy sauce. Buying such products in raw and organic form can be tricky at first; you’d be surprised how many nasties are loaded into our daily seasonings! If you eat honey, look for the unpasteurized variety too, as you’ll get more enzymes. Search for healthier sweetening alternatives such as dates, agave syrup and yacon syrup. If you love chocolate, explore the world of raw cacao online. Get genmai (brown rice) if you’re not ready to let go of cooked rice, which is such a staple in Japan. If fish is still on your shopping list, that’s OK, but consider getting super fresh tuna that you can eat raw or just sear and serve with raw sesame seeds and a small amount of soy sauce.

Make eating this way fun. Invest in those big, white square dishes that are good for serving colorful, fresh foods. It’s easier to arrange small portions of different foods that way. Getting new white dishes will be symbolic of this new, purer way of eating.  If you are not adept at using chopsticks, start eating with them, as they will slow you down.

Go to a bookstore (likely online if you live in Japanese inaka (countryside)) and get a cookbook (uncook book) or a raw food book so you can learn about eating as raw vegan. Buy a big vase and a bunch of sunflowers to symbolize letting the sun into your diet.

Feel free to copy and paste this article elsewhere, but kindly direct your readers back to my site by adding the following: “For more raw food articles by this author, please visit http://rawrapture.com.” Cheers!