Excerpted from the book "Your Right to Be Beautiful: How to Halt the Train of Aging and Meet the Most Beautiful You" by Tonya Zavasta. The book is available at: http://www.beautifulonraw.com

Aging would not be so bad if it did not tell on us at every encounter. As we hug one another, we register the love handles on the other's waist, the flab on their arms and the sag on their cheeks. We stare into each other's faces. After all, only saints find no pleasure in the wrinkles of their peers. We are not inexcusable sinners; we are checking to see how well we are holding up. Estimating someone's age and deciding how well that person has aged tells us a lot. Looking and feeling younger than chronological age has increasingly becomes a yardstick of success. Preoccupation with age is a reality for our rapidly aging society. It is part of our resume and every bit as important as our employment records.

The signs of deterioration that we consider the signs of aging are the result of waste overload on the cellular level. When our actions are in opposition to nature, the results are different types of bodily ills, deformities, and ugliness. Eating denatured and devitalized food leaves residues the body cannot utilize, and they are deposited in places our Creator never intended. Whatever the body cannot use, becomes toxic accumulations that steal our health and our youth.

Body acids enter in chemical reactions with waste products causing calcification of the soft tissue. Now tissues of vital organs and glands become burdened with mineral salts and crystalline deposits. Overloaded with waste, they not only can no longer function normally but also become more responsive to gravity's pull. As every tissue elongates and sags, drooping jowls and sagging cheeks begin to drape on both sides of the mouth, and the eyebrows begin to hang over the eyes.

Most of us feel our appearance lacks something. In reality, ugliness is more about excess. Toxic accumulations in our bodies are responsible for stealing our health and attractiveness. Beauty lies latent under cushions of retained fluids, deposits of fat, and sick tissues. Your beauty is buried alive, but in most cases it can be revived in a version that will be satisfactory to you. You must take immediate action to revitalize it. When you do, your uncovered beauty will surprise and delight you.

Some physical characteristics of our face and body we cannot change--they were determined prior to our birth. But the consumption of the raw plant diet as an adult will make a difference in the texture of skin and hair, the health of nails, weight and complexion. All of these traits and more are determined by daily choices, with food being one of the most important and, luckily, the one we can fully control.

Since there can be no natural health without eating 100 percent natural food, most of people have never explored optimum health. In my book Your Right to Be Beautiful, I advocate a diet made up solely of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds-Rawsome Diet. No, you will not be asked to graze the garden, dig up the squirrel's nuts or dine out on the birdfeeder, but you will be introduced to an unexplored world of preparation techniques that allow you to create not only the most nutritious meals, but also dishes that are delicious, filling and satisfying. Some raw food recipes even mimic traditional cuisine and make the transition to the Rawsome diet easier. There are 100s of different kinds of fruits and veggies, nuts and seeds with a variety of tastes and flavors, which awakened taste buds will begin to appreciate. If you combine only two or three ingredients at each meal, then the number of dish combinations is endless.

The ability to renew cells is built into your body, and the body itself is capable of making you look more attractive. After all, we were designed to bloom continuously as old cells get replaced by new ones. The Rawsome diet makes the most of this rejuvenating ability of our bodies. Rawsome beauty is not manufactured from the outside but cultivated from the inside by nutritionally charged food. Whole raw food restores the integrity of every cell and facilitates the optimal operation of every organ inside and out. The body, having been awakened by the improved diet, in its wisdom, will reach out to the places where health was lacking, and you will gradually see your beauty surfacing. The Rawsome diet will eliminate all the toxins on a deeper level and bring amazing changes to your appearance.

Only the body sustained on raw food will host natural beauty, or should we say Rawsome beauty. The body becomes transcended and will unfold from the inside out. While your non-raw eating peers discover new blemishes, blotches, and moles on a nearly daily basis, you will see your own skin irregularities gradually fade or disappear. Feeding your body raw food will make eyes, once sunken in bulbous flesh, look larger and more round by eliminating the surrounding puffiness and by firming the eyelids. Eyebrows that were beginning to form an awning over the eyes will regain their youthful arch. As natural collagen production improves, it will fill in the places where it is needed as in hollow cheeks. It will not just patch your face, but every one of your 3,000 square inches of skin will improve.

The landscape of the body will change. The surface of the skin will become soft and smooth but still firm and supple. Visible pores will diminish. A sallow skin with a yellow pallor will turn into a porcelain-like complexion. The whites of eyes, once red, will become bright with a bluish tinge. Raw food eating will clarify and refine your features and bring delicacy to your face.

People who have been on the raw food lifestyle for several years begin to have a glow, the kind not often seen in middle-aged people. Optimal health is recognized by an emerging radiance. Glow is hard to fake because it is internal. It comes from an abundance of clear, pink, almost transparent cells that light up the face. Only superior blood circulation can bring this transfiguring glow. Several years on the raw food diet will make you look as though you just stepped out of a painting by Renoir--the impressionist best known for his preoccupation with light.

Even on the 100 percent raw food diet, no one lives forever. For individuals who follow this diet for many years, aging comes a week or two before death. Deterioration takes place rapidly. Perennial youth is a perpetual dream. The raw food lifestyle is the closest anyone can come to reaching the maximum life span with the quality of life intact. The diet allows the body to mature gracefully. It produces an alliance of character and health. The Rawsome Diet allows everyone to live as long as God intended and look as God envisioned. ©2003Tonya Zavasta

"This article may be freely reprinted as long as the entire article and byline are included."