About Ani Phyo, Eco Raw Food Chef & Author

Ani’s the host of the award winning most popular uncooking show on YouTube, Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen Show, and is the author of internationally acclaimed best-seller Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen: Easy, Delectable, Living Food Recipes. Ani inspires global audiences with her fast, easy, delicious, healthy recipes and eco green lifestyle.

WHY RAW?
My belief is that illness is created by toxins we put into our bodies. Eating raw foods helps me detoxify, stay healthy, strong, fit, weigh my ideal weight, and look my best. When I eat whole fresh organic foods, manufacturers can't sneak in chemicals, perservatives, artificial colors, flavorings, or other toxins into my food. I go straight to Mother Nature as my source for nutrient rich foods. I thrive on nutrifiying myself with the highest quality food I can get my hands on.

MY TAKE ON OBESITY.
My theory on the obesity epidemic in our country is that processed and nutrient void foods leave us craving for more food. We may eat a full meal and feel bloated, but we soon want to eat again because our bodies are starving for the nutrients it needs to function. So we keep eating and eating in an attempt to nutrify. The goal for most packaged and prepared foods is for the food to taste good at the lowest costs for the highest profit margins. Most companies and restaurants don't care about health, just flavor.

BE GREEN.
One of the major changes I noticed was how my kitchen garbage disappeared when I began eating only fresh whole foods. I was no longer buying nor disposing of processed food packaging and all the plastics and cardboards. I can make a meal for 300 hundred people and at the end of it will be left with organic compost. This compost is fed to worms who then create the most fertile soil to grow more organic produce.

MY UNCOOKING SHOWS.
I was invited to host 10 Webisodes of my award winning uncooking show Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen Show in early 2007. My goal was to provide super fast and easy recipes to a global audience and to help everyone include more fresh whole foods into their day. Each episode is only 3 to 6 minutes long. You can watch three of the original episodes on YouTube, and the other seven are available on my DVD.

MY JOURNEY TO HEALTH.
Looking back into my childhood, I can finally recognize how lucky I am to have been raised by a raw food father and first generation Korean parents. Every morning my mother made us juices using almost every vegetable from our organic garden. It was a mud sludge drink my brother Max and I would hold our noses to drink. We snacked on whole fruits, and didn't have candy, soda, or any junk food in our home.

As I grew older, I'd join friends after school to endulge in junk food before track, gymnastics, volleyball, and diving practice. When I got to college, the food hall was full of treats I wasn't allowed to have growing up. I ate up the baked goods, pastas, and cheeses. I shocked my mother on my first visit home with the extra fifteen pounds I'd gained. I realized at this moment I'd never had to think about my weight before because my fresh whole food diet and active lifestyle had always kept me fit and healthy.

Mom took me in to get a blood test, and we found my cholesterol at almost 300. Doctors wanted to put me on meds, but mom simply put me back onto a vegan diet. Of course, my cholesterol dropped.

Years later, I moved to San Francisco, California. I arrived in the early 1990s, just before the dot com and internet 1.0 explosion. It was a very exciting time, and at one point I worked two full time jobs, taught at two universities, and was consulting on two or three projects, and didn't sleep one night a week. I discovered Juliano's raw restaurant, a new style of gourmet raw foods, and noticed how this food energized me. I began using raw foods to fuel my mental clarity, focus, and productivity.

One of my clients convinced me to move to Los Angeles in late 1999, and I was shocked to see large offices using using styrofoam cups to drink one glass of water and not recycling. There were on raw restaurants in LA yet. To feed myself, I began hosting raw food dinners for 100 people a week. My catering and events business grew quickly, and many people began requesting packaged foods for week. At this time, I decided to move to Portland, OR where the cost of living was lower, and I could focus a hundred percent on my raw food business.

I spent four years in the PacNW raising awareness of the benefits of raw food nutrition and eating organic foods while inspiring people to live an eco-green lifestyle. My clients included Adidas Corporate HQ who I helped provide organic raw food menu options on campus in their cafes, restaurants, coffee shops for employees. I also worked with Adidas fitness center general managers to fuel their athletes' physical performance through raw food nutrition. I worked closely with Whole Foods Markets teaching uncooking classes at all the Pac NW stores, participated in many comarketing events, and catered several internal Whole Foods events. I even had the opportunity to design a raw menu for Carnival Cruise Lines, the performance group STOMP, and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, to name a few. By the end of my four years, I'd built a thriving packaged raw foods business and had written what would later become my award winning uncookbook, Ani's Raw Food Kitchen.

By late 2006, California called. I was invited to host my first online uncooking show, 10 episodes. Today, three of these episodes live on YouTube, and the rest can be viewed on my DVD Ani's Raw Food Kitchen Show. I spent most of the following year on book tour and I was able to test my philosophy of fast and easy raw food recipes.

Today, I reside in Los Angeles with my pooch Kanga. I'm happy to be back in the City of Angels where I feel my angles all around me. And thank goodness for my Prius. As gas prices hover around $4 a gallon, I'm loving my hybrid, solar panels, and the sunshine.