Day 48 Toxic Stress

Despite normally being able to just carry on everyday and brush off 'life's little annoyances', there are times when elderly parents, teenage children and unreasonable other people just converge to take you out.

I tend to carry a pretty high level of toxic stress around with me. It's not my choice, I scrape off as much stress as I can, but there are things in life we have handed to us that we can't just scrape off. There are things we can control and so out of some self preservation, I gave away my littlest poodle. Yes, it was to relieve stress but it brought me a lot more stress in the process, and no, not like, "Do I now change my blog to Screaming Poodle?" I don't want to talk about it.

Like I said, I normally handle life with aplomb despite the static but today it took me out. I felt bad, I was shaking and forgetful, stupid even, and just the most mundane tasks were hard. I endeavored to eat right but I'm wondering really if I can even do that right. Anytime I work out really hard I crave salt like crazy and there doesn't seem to be a cure for that. If I were to crave sweets (and I don't) it just means I need to eat more sweet fruit but the same isn't true for salt. I don't eat salt so eating more of it doesn't work. I've occasionally had popcorn and hated myself and it hated me and it didn't fix the problem. I'm really not sure what to do during those times. The only advice I get is to eat more.

I seem to have gotten a grip or groove that 2500 calories is good for me, sometimes more but now I see I'm supposed to exercise 40% of those off everyday if I don't want to fail at this. I looked at my last work out which involved 2.5 miles on the treadmill and a mile in the pool - no small time commitment there and realized even at that I'd only shaved off 25% of my intake that day by burning 625 calories, according to Fitday. I needed to burn closer to 1000.

WTF? I mean seriously - I'm a single mom. I have a teenage girl. I take care of my elderly dementia ridden mother. I deal with lots of other barking and quacking in my life from other sources to boot on top of all of that. To say it's stressful would be to say the ocean contains water. I'm recovering from years of being sick with a brain tumor and recently a very involved hysterectomy. I don't sleep at night. I sleep now an hour or two, occasionally more but then I'm often up for hours. I'm not feeling too well. The thought of having to fit in 15% more exercise is overwhelming and I'm not making it to the gym everyday as it is.

Last but not least I'm reading that according to 80/10/10 I need to be 'emotionally poised'. As in, without stress. I'd laugh at that if it weren't so tragic. So what do I do? Is there anyone in the U.S. who is 'emotionally poised'? Are YOU? If so, I want to meet you and let you spend the afternoon with my mother and then the evening with my daughter. What am I supposed to do? Is my only solution really to send my 82 year old mother off to another state so I don't have to deal with her anymore, and thus never see her again (which is what would happen because I don't have the means to visit my niece) and my daughter back to my ex? And get rid of all the other stressful people in my life including the people at Medicare who make no sense to me in terms of my mother's benefits and then I can become a raw vegan?

I dunno. Any of my friends over in Banana Land care to help?

Day 44 The Two Types of Raw Food People

photo credit Libraryman@flickr

There are basically two types of raw foodists:
Raw Gourmet and Raw Low Fat.

1. Raw Gourmet. Many people initially embarking on raw food start here. They recreate as many SAD (standard American) diet recipes with raw food as they can. There are websites and glossy magazines devoted to fancy, beautiful raw food. So you have people making fancy stuff as well as pizza and White Castle sliders and crackers, etc., from raw food and you end up with a diet that can be as high as 80% fat and with as many health problems as they had before. Salt also runs a bit rampant in this mix which holds its own health problems.

Besides this flying in the face of proper food combining (a whole 'nother topic) they don't eat a high ratio of fruit and this is the downfall of the gourmet raw foodist - you have to consume enough fruit everyday to make it work. You simply cannot get enough calories from greens, zucchini and tomatoes - you would eat endlessly all day and never make it up. Furthermore, you don't just need 'calories'. You need specific things from those calories. If that were not true, we could all just blissfully chow down on Ho Ho's for the rest of our days and be thin, beautiful and healthy. Right.

1 cup of spinach leaves is only 7 calories. I eat 6 cups a day, sometimes more, but 6 cups are just 42 calories. Wow. Why bother? Well because of the minerals - that's why you'd want to eat those lousy 42 calories. You need that, particularly if you're in your first year. Calorie-wise, you need much more than that, obviously. On good days I eat around 2500 calories so what else am I gonna eat to make that up?! You have to eat high calorie fruit. In fact, this has to be the mainstay of your diet so you replace your glycogen stores. This is why we crave sugar in the first place: To replenish our glycogen stores - the fuel we run on all day.

Granulated sugar will never serve your glycogen stores properly. You'll just need tons and tons of it over and over and it's not the right stuff, so you'll just feel and look like crap. No one ever got thin and healthy eating large amounts of refined sugar and that's a fact. Only whole food (fruit) will meet your bodies requirements - and probably for the first time in your entire life. Wow.

If you eat enough fruit you will never crave sugar again. I have cravings sometimes if I've not eaten enough calories in a day but to my surprise they are never for sugary things because my glycogen needs are finally being met. I admit it's a relief to no longer crave sweets. So what do I crave? Stupid crap like McDonalds cheeseburgers. When I crave that, I know I just need a couple hundred more calories for the day. I finally learned how many calories a day make me tick. It's around 2500.

It's different for everyone but everyone who is a low fat raw foodist or low fat raw vegan needs a lot more calories than you're probably eating now. I've never eaten that much a day on a regular basis in my life. I had to work up to it but it feels good now :)

Those who don't make their calories up in fruit make it up by default in FAT instead. Lots and lots of nuts, tahini, possibly oils and the sad thing is, nuts in America are DEAD. Unless you get them from small independent farms, thanks to the USDA, any nuts you buy in the stores have all been heated - cooked - no longer raw. If you claim to be a raw foodist and you are eating heat treated nuts - you're no longer a raw foodist. You can't even buy them at Whole Foods. An independent store might have them. The way you can tell they are dead is they will not sprout. You're basically eating fat gravel You'd be better off fat-wise on a SAD diet where the fat is around 35-45% than do that to yourself. If you buy nuts locally you need to ask if they've been heat treated. Ask if they're sprout-able. If the person doesn't answer you with conviction either way, yes they're certified raw, they will sprout or no, they've been heat treated and they will not sprout - don't buy them.

Besides the fact they're not raw, even if you buy raw nuts you need to understand that fat will never fill your glycogen stores and you'll be forever craving everything you were trying to get away from in the first place, including your health issues. You cannot make up your other 2458 calories of the day with nuts - aka FAT. You need fruit.

You also need to know that too many nuts will start to affect your teeth. People think it's the sugar in the fruit when they start to have dental problems from a raw food diet, but fruit is not the culprit. It's the nuts. They stick to the teeth and embed in between far more than the fruit ever does. You can rinse the fruit down with water but the nuts stay adhered. Trust me on this one - cut the fat - forget the nuts! I eat some pumpkin seeds once in a while but I'm pretty much even over that. Bottom line - you don't need nuts at all.

Which is not to say you don't need some fat. I track my food everyday and if I need fat, I eat a half an avocado last thing of the day, all by itself. That's it. My body has all night to process the fat, I get to 'sleep on it' and I have no active fruit in my system to get bogged down in the fat - causing blood sugar issues. AH! There is much to learn.

2. Raw Low Fat. Those who eat simply fruits (80%) and vegetables (10%) and fats (10%) and those really into it take the time to learn about food combining (which is not recipes...) and they are adamant about exercise daily. They never try to recreate any of the former SAD foods they ate.

I'm of the 2nd group if you couldn't tell by now, but I'm considered 'transitioning' since it can take a year to fully adopt a raw low fat diet. Wow - just my luck I've set aside a year to do just that. HA! Those who are 100% low fat raw vegan absolutely never, ever eat anything they're not supposed to - not ever. That's why they're considered 100%.

I'm doing better than most people I'm told with my transitioning - mostly because I'm doing it in the public eye so I don't want to cheat or fall back or transition slowly. It's a little tough but I get there nearly all the time. I'd say once every two weeks something stupid happens and we're talking one item - not a Thanksgiving dinner or binging for days on end. It's one item - like some popcorn or a few bites of my daughter's pasta. It's OK. I pay the price which is huge (very painful) and learn once again why I don't want to do that.

The great part is I always get back on the horse, unlike other 'diets', and that's because this isn't just a diet. It's a lifestyle and once you embark on it, it's pretty compelling. Just one example, often gourmet raw foodists are still over weight even a year down the line, they have bloating and digestion and other chronic health issues that they really should be able to get relief from. All dedicated low fat raw foodists are very trim and cut, their faces and bodies have redesigned themselves in the most fantastic ways and they've eliminated their bloating and digestion issues as well as a myriad of health issues. Cut the fat. Up your fruit. Change your life!

As far as all the raw food info out there, a good rule of thumb is if the person is selling you supplements and hawking 'super foods' you might want to take their raw food info with a grain of salt. If you're 100% low fat raw vegan - you won't even have any salt! If you're really doing raw food you wouldn't need processed 'super foods' or any other strange processed preparation. Just RAW FRUITS & VEGETABLES.

Low fat raw vegans/foodists take little if any supplements. I thought I needed calcium recently but upon tracking saw I was actually above the RDA. I supplement Vit D in the winter and I'll supplement B12 as this is a concern for ALL vegetarian type people, but let me tell you - I needed B12 even when I ate meat and many other meat eaters do as well. So there will be no more blaming the veggies ;)

Day 38 YES They Had NO Bananas Today!

OMG I absolutely could not believe my eyes when I finally got through the crowds at Whole Foods to discover that YES they had NO bananas today! I just stood there in astonishment, blinking away, while the sign that loomed over the deserted lot came into focus and said something about their inability to get fresh produce due to the weather conditions at their warehouse in Washington, D.C.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

My daughter reminded me we needed to get water, too, so it wasn't a total loss but it certainly felt like a total loss. I can live without water. I can't live without bananas!!!

So, off to Paul's Fruit Stand I went. The locked gates reminded me they're closed on Sunday. What are they some puritanical fruit eaters - they don't eat fruit on Sunday? Holy freaking cow.

I begrudgingly drove to Kroger where they had plenty of bananas. Sadly they were mostly green and pathetic looking. I grabbed 3 big bunches since another storm is due. I then stopped at Costco and stocked up on oranges. Truth of the matter is I can just eat more oranges. I actually like them better, they're just not as user-friendly and I'm staring down the day from hell tomorrow and I need user-friendly food. Such is life.

I texted Lori (BFF) to casually inquire about her banana stock...and she said she had 3 left. Well, that's not going to do anyone any good at all! LOL - thank you Lori for sensing the panic in my text and offering me your last 3 bananas. It might have been the all caps that gave me away.

I'll be okay. I just want to carry on about it :D

Day 36 Week 5

YES I'm a day late and a banana short on this one. I don't know what I was thinking last night but I'd had the longest day that never ended and to add insult to injury, I was up all night. Which then made me sleep half the damn day today. I hate that.

For week 5 I walked 9.25 miles, swam 1.5 miles and ate 37 bananas. To date I've walked 26.15 miles, swam 6 miles and have eaten 142 bananas. Is that a bushel? Who knows. But while you're here, go visit the farm that my bananas came from today. Pretty wild! This farm has really big bananas compared to some other farms I've gotten bananas from. I'm wondering if Lori's bananas came from farm 633 as well. Though she did report that the bananas I gave her were definitely better than other bananas she's had. Can't wait to find out which farm she had. Keep those stickers woman!

Again I've had a stressful week and I'm pretty unhappy with parts of my life and I don't mean my diet. Things need to change. I can't keep doing things like this to myself, I'm destroying my body. I also need support from other people who eat like I do and I think I'm going to get that now, which will help.

If you're following this and serious, it will help you to connect with others on the same path. I did discover there is ONE other person in my city (that we know of...) who ascribes to 80/10/10, also called LFRV - Low Fat Raw Vegan. Maybe I can meet him. There is a girl another city away and I hope to get together with her as well.

5 weeks down, 47 to go!

Day 33 Bananobsession

photo credit mondopanno @ flickr

I remember thinking there was no way I could eat a banana everyday much less anything more than that on a continuous basis. At most, I ate 2 bananas a month. I'd read about other raw foodists eating 30 bananas a day. I love this site: 30bananasaday.com and Harley Johnstone is da bomb but there was no way I could conceive of anymore than 2 bananas a month. I remember when I first read Steve Pavlina's blog and didn't understand the whole 80/10/10 thing thinking that he was eating way too much fruit. I thought if I was to become a raw foodist I'd eat more vegetables.

WELL that's not the way it works and now while I don't eat 30 bananas a day, I'm absolutely obsessed with them. They are the most important thing I eat everyday. They are the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning and the last thing I think about on my way to bed. Then of course all day long I'm thinking about bananas. When I'm really hungry it's the first thing I want. I average around 6 bananas a day, which is actually very light for most raw foodists but there's so much more to it than that...

Banana Management
One of the things you learn right away is that you need to maintain a steady supply of ripe bananas. Sounds simple enough but one snowstorm and the banana supply chain is broken. You find yourself either cut off from access due to the weather or find your store only has hard green bananas or worse - there are no bananas. "Yes, we have no bananas today" is NOT funny during these times. Pretty quickly you learn that PANIC is your friend and you start to worry about your banana supply on a regular basis. Everything from inclement weather to truckers on strike and world trade agreements stand in the way of you and your main food source: Bananas. I can't even begin to face the fact that the bananas we currently eat today are not expected to be available in 20 years. IT'S STRESSFUL!

Even with ideal weather, trucking and trade agreements there are days you walk in the market to a sea of only green bananas. HOW CAN THAT BE?! This results in visiting multiple stores to see if they have ever-ready fruit. This is a real step down for me because if they're not Whole Foods organic bananas they don't taste as good and now you're settling for second best on your most important food.

By then you're so tetched that regardless of the fact they're not the bananas you really desire and despite being successful at the next store, you'll still drive to others just to verify that there is still food available for you on the planet. While there, you'll go ahead and buy another bunch and then continue on, arriving home with 4-5 bunches of ready to eat right now bananas. Oops. Mostly, it works out. To date I've never been bananaless but it's been close. I can tell you though I've yet to waste a banana!

If you've survived the supply chain problem and can buy the bananas you like in various degrees of ripeness to keep you going, you still must address ripeness on a daily basis. This goes hand in hand with banana demand but basically you're always overseeing your lot for ripeness and guesstimating when the next batch will ripen and if you have enough in between all that to make it through. You contemplate how many you'll need over the foreseeable future and weigh that against the varying shades of bright green to yellow before you. Your job is to make a determination worthy of the psychic network in terms of just how yellow they will become in a given amount of time. Despite sucking at math, I find I'm fairly banana psychic but it's not fool proof.

Banana Obsession
You thought I just described banana obsession above? No, my friend. The obsession has to do with having a ripe banana or two within your grasp at all times. At any given time there is a ripe banana in my car console, my purse, my swim bag, next to my computer and so on and so forth. Of course they're not just traveling, I'm frequently eating them as well. I'm driving, I'm online writing, I'm helping with homework, you name it.

This morning I was faced with the reality of just three mint condition bananas remaining and a huge bunch of still super green bananas. OMG! What the heck happened? Those three bananas would be gone by mid-day and the other bunch was inedible. What were the banana stores like at Whole Foods and when can I fit a trip into Whole Foods? GAAAAAAAAA! I managed it after my run/swim but I was down to my last banana at the pool. I bought two big bunches and the other ones should be ready in a couple days. Whew.

Banana Complications
A friend of mine recently asked me if I'd go on a water rafting trip with him this summer. I admit my first visualization was the bananas in the raft. I'm serious. I was thinking how would I keep them in the raft and how would I keep them from getting bruised? The idea of the water rushing over them was appealing to me, no pun intended. All I could see was me and a big bunch of brightly colored bananas bobbing through the rapids. Not him, not him and me, just me and the bananas. Is that bad? He mentioned there was a base camp but holy cow - we'd be away from camp all day. I am seriously going to need to EAT during the day. He then mentioned how the ranch hands would be cooking up more food than anyone could eat at all the meals. Ahem. Cooking? I realized I'd have to pack in 3 days worth of bananas as well as the other fresh food I eat. Plunging into a cooked food camp out on the first night would be suicidal. I'd be as green as the unripe bananas on my counter hanging over the side of the raft the entire next day. Now this doesn't mean I can't travel or do things but it does bear some thought. I think I'll wait til I'm further along in the program to make any life altering decisions.

Bananas & Your Friends
Basically your friends (who aren't raw foodists or at least vegan) think you're insane. My daughter thinks I'm insane. But to your good friends they're a gift of the highest honor. I recently gave a very beautiful bunch of organic bananas from Whole Foods to Lori, my BFF, who launched her vegan lifestyle just yesterday. YAY Lori! And now I'm obsessing over her bananas, contemplating when those will be exactly ripe and when she'll need more...

Day 26 Human Experimentation

Right. That would be ME. I thought I'd update on some instances of cause and effect. I've done a few intentional and unintentional food experiments. Here's the low down and results of those. Standard TMI warnings may apply.

My first experiment came when I reached the end of my salad dressing rope. Many days into this I decided I would just HAVE salad dressing. I mean, everything else has been so perfect and I'm really disliking dry salad or lemon salad. I wanted real dressing. How bad could that possibly be?

So, I picked Newman's Creamy Caesar. In retrospect, that probably wasn't the best choice. I admit it was fairly yummy, though salty, but I never expected what happened immediately next.

My tummy bloated to the MOON. I mean, like Elasti-girl in all the wrong places. I was 27 months pregnant and counting all over again.

Wow. I was astonished. Anytime my belly bloated this badly was due to my 'candida' and only if I ate the mother-lode of candida reactive choices: a donut. All at once the chapter on Candida in 80/10/10 hit me right between the eyes. It's NOT the sugar - it's the FAT. Yep, it is. I've battled 'candida' for YEARS. Had doctors giving me all kinds of things, spent all kinds of money on cures, denied myself fruit, sugar, wheat, you name it and it *never ever ever* went away.

That's because it's NOT SUPPOSED TO GO AWAY. We ALL have candida. It's actually a necessary thing. OH YES IT IS. What is NOT necessary is the quantity of FATS we eat in our diets, totally whacking out our candida levels, bloating us to infinity and beyond.

Don't believe me? I just lived it. The main 'ingredient' in that salad dressing was FAT. Not wheat, not sugar - but FAT. I'd never made this connection before. I'd eat a donut and it'd be all over. My daughter would marvel at my magically expanding belly. Having been told by everyone that claimed to know that it was the sugar, yeast and wheat, I believed that. No one ever said it's because of the FAT! Additionally, I've been eating large amounts (by any regular person's standards) of fruit all month and lost TWELVE inches off my waistline, and have had no more bloating until the fateful (fatful?!) salad dressing day. So, it's NOT the sugar. It's not the sugar at all.

Still skeptical? Do you have candida and want to finally understand your bloating? Read 80/10/10 and stop being a physical and financial victim of candida FOREVER. Incidentally the salad dressing wasn't long lived. It made me real sick and I was glad when that was all over. Ew. I like fresh squeezed tangerine juice on my salads now, thankyouverymuch.

The 2nd experiment was also kinda accidental. I did not expect this really, really cute guy to be handing out samples of little espresso chocolate thingies at Whole Foods. His eyes were blue and his smile engaging and he placed a little cup right in my hand and well yeah, I ate it. It was two very small little cluster things, smaller than the size of a dime. I didn't think much about it until I was laying in bed 4 hours later unable to sleep the entire night. I've not had caffeine for weeks and my body is so much more sensitive to things I eat now. I hadn't even thought of the caffeine load, much less that it would rob me of an entire night's sleep. Lesson learned - NO chocolate or caffeine or chocolate/caffeine!

The 3rd experiment was intentional, sort of. I was visiting Martin who somehow won the burger lottery at McDonald's prior to my arrival. Something had happened in line and they 'made it up to him' by giving him multiple extra cheeseburgers. He offered me one and I declined and reminded him I don't eat that. He apologized but then said, "Do you think it will taste different to you now?" I thought for a minute. I figured it would and said, "Okay, let me see for the purpose of experimentation." Maybe you don't know how far you've come if you never go back to see. Kinda like spending the weekend at mom and dads where you realize it's not only as bad as you remember, it's worse, and suddenly you feel much better for the choices you've made.

OMG - I just don't have words to describe what happened. Not only was it the most massively salty thing I've ever tasted, it felt gritty as if it was just rolled in salt. It was as if someone had poured pure salt all over every inch of it. I spit it out; it was absolutely not edible at all. I knew it would be salty but didn't expect it to be that salty. What shocked me more, however, was the grainy feel. I took the rest of the sandwich apart and looked at it again and again, expecting to see it covered in salt granules. I figured maybe this sandwich was faulty or something. It just had to be. I've never had one feel like this before. I saw nothing, it looked as they always do. I touched it. I could not detect salt granules on my fingers. Really, really weird.

Then a few days later I came across an article that talked about the Window Cleaning Chemicals in Fast Food Hamburger Meat. You might want to check that out and save yourself while you can. I admit to being doubly sorry I went back home again, even if it was just to poke my head in the door! *gag* Makes visiting mom and dad with all the cigarette smoke and alcoholism seem preferable. Hmmm well okay maybe not. I'll pass on both.

My other bad experiments simply involve me getting too much fat in my diet, either at my own hands or at others. I never realized what that load really felt like until I got away from it. It's heavy. It's tiring. It takes your body forever to process too much fat and it does bad things with the other foods you eat as well. It's these long processing times that rob us of our energy and bring on fatigue. There is no fat that's immune, it includes even those that we think of as 'good fat'. Olive oil is not your friend. It's the friend of the man who sells olive oil. The fats in nuts and seeds in too great of quantities are not your friend, either. They bog your system. They tie up the sugars eaten with them and prevent them from exiting your blood in a timely manner - thus creating blood sugar problems. Everyone blames the sugar but the truth of the matter is - it's the FAT!

Sadly, many vegetarians, vegans, raw vegans & raw foodists are consuming 60% to 80% fat in their diets. They're doing more harm to themselves than someone on a Standard American Diet which logs 35-40% fat at that point. If you're eating veg, go track your food online and see for yourself how much fat you're getting and while you're at it, do yourself a favor and get the whole story - read 80/10/10. It will change how you think about food. The pieces will finally make sense and you'll be astonished at the bill of goods we've been sold all these years, mostly for reasons that line other people's pockets.

Day 25 Salt Reduction

There's an interesting article posted --->here<--- that says reducing salt intake could save 92,000 U.S. lives a year. That is a lot of people! Salt contributes to high blood pressure, heart disease and a whole host of other problems like kidney disease and osteoporosis. The article states that women would benefit the most.

Oddly a doctor told me I was 'low in iodine' and then advised me to eat as much salt as I wanted. Hmm. That didn't really seem prudent to me. If I was really iodine deficient, isn't there a better way? I can't believe he didn't prescribe me something. Big Pharma always there to make a buck, ya know.

I did eat some Nori for its iodine content for a while (dry seaweed used in sushi for those scratching your heads) and while I like it fine, it wasn't something that really stuck with me. I didn't really notice a difference in anything, either.

Now that I've been off salt so much things taste very different and of course the edema in my ankles and everywhere vanishes. We don't think about the invisible effects of salt, though.

Does make you wonder if they get people to decrease their salt will there be an increase in iodine deficiency? Can't imagine I'm getting 'enough' iodine now considering my doctor's recommendation.

Which brings me to one of my main points of going raw vegan: To reduce my contact with as many salty nutjob doctors as possible.

Day 23 Fruit Phobia and Other Psychosis

You may not realize this, I hadn't even realized this until I entered into this, but most people are fruit phobic. Don't think so? Okay, how much fruit did you eat today? One piece? None? Do you rarely eat fruit? Why is that? It's because we've all been conditioned that it's too much SUGAR. Even the food pyramid doesn't allow for much fruit. But I bet you'll freely eat a donut - heck the grain section of the pyramid is way bigger! And you may regularly eat dessert at a restaurant if not after dinner at home frequently as well and if you're me - you want (wanted) dessert after every meal. That's right, breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snacks.

Well gosh, you've just got to get a grip and have more willpower! Don't you? But day after day we sadly fail. We can't help ourselves. We crave sweets like they're going out of style and as of 1999 Americans consume a little over 158 lbs of sugar a year, and the number increases every year. Even more interesting is that fruit is not part of this tally.

So, we eagerly consume 158 lbs of sugar a year - that's 13 pounds of the stuff a month or almost a half a pound a day yet I bet very few people reading my blog eat 13 lbs of fruit in a month.

The reason you crave SO MUCH sugar is we're designed to eat sweet fruit and lots of it. But, we don't allow ourselves to, so instead we consume 13 lbs a month of other sugar to try to fill the genetic need. I mean, you can't be going eating 6 bananas a day and 4 oranges and several apples and who knows what else! Who does that? That's NOT okay in our society. I've had people write me and say 6 bananas a day are waaaay too much and I'm going to do bad things to my blood sugar and become very sick. People get really passionate about it, nearly as passionate as the protein issue, which is coming up tomorrow, but no one says a word if I consume 13 lbs a month of sugar in the form of cane, beet, or corn, now do they? No, they don't.

Couple this with being a woman, and if you're a woman in this society you come up against the fact that we can never eat what we want or as much as we want or we'll be fat and to be fat in this society is the social and often professional death knell. Most women fall into this category. Yes, there are the skinny girls who can eat anything and everything and never gain and we hate you. Okay, not really - LOL - but most of us fall into the other category and my point is that we are always restricting our food in some way, all the while being out of our minds with cravings. If we don't, we weigh ungodly amounts and we suffer atrocities at every level - personal, professional, you name it. We're treated differently by men, women, doctors, lawyers - everyone - including ourselves. So, even if you refuse to 'play the game' and don't restrict yourself, most people still feel it and it's ugly.

So, here I am, able to eat as much fruit as I want and I'm having trouble with it. Why? Because of the whole frickin' paragraph above! I'm conditioned by society to NOT EAT and in particular, not eat FRUIT.

I know I'm not eating enough everyday and so I have to work at it. Imagine that! I've spent years restricting all my food but especially fruit! I'm having to work at eating all I want. Maybe Lori would say this is another one of my non-problems and she may be right as she usually is, but it's something to witness.

I know my weight stands still when I don't eat enough and I know the fact I was tired the last few days is because I haven't eaten enough, coupled with a lot of stress. I have to wrap my head around the fact I get to shed a lifetime of ugly and unfair rules about food, except I feel ill-equipped! You'd think I'd dive right in.

Conditioning runs deep so I'll have to keep working on it. I have all year to 'get it right' but hope to arrive there a little sooner than 12/31!

Day 19 I Picked The Wrong Week To...

I had the day from hell with little sleep, way too much to do and not enough hours to do it in. It was a mad dash to get everything done before 5pm because I made a commitment to attend a local raw food group's potluck with Lori (BFF!) tonight. I was really sweating it through much of the day but things eased up once we finally set our bowls on the buffet table and settled in.

Normally I live for potlucks and this potluck was one of the most beautiful and diverse I'd seen. But since having gone Commando with my food I was faced with a lot of raw but prepared/multi-ingredient foods that all looked yummy but weren't really legal for me. I made raw chow mein for everyone else and we brought a big bowl of bananas and red grapes so I'd be sure to have something I could eat. However, I decided in the spirit of the group to try things, and I have to say everything was truly wonderful.

Unfortunately, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue :) I'm paying the price with a very sore belly from all the added oils, salt, spices and multiple combinations of the foods. It'll pass and I'll get all that extra fat out of my system in a few days. I know, I have all year to work on this. I'm just trying to simplify things and get my energy levels back up as high as I can. I've lived with exhaustion for too long. Setting myself back probably isn't such a good thing but that's life. I think next time I'll stick to my path, though I'm happy to create something more interesting for the rest of the group.

I was really excited to eat a banana on the way home :)

Day 15 Cookies & Cravings

Today in my search for raw tahini (sesame seed paste) I stumbled across the raw section at Rainbow Blossom - an organic and whole foods/health type store. I usually stick to the perimeter of the store, or more pointedly, the produce section but I was looking for raw tahini. Turns out it is also in the produce section! They were just out of it.

So as my quest led me astray I discovered these raw organic almond raisin cookies. The thing was over $2 for one cookie but I really wanted to try it. The ingredients listed were organic almonds, organic raisins, organic raw agave nectar and organic cardamom. But even with a raw food lifestyle there is room for interpretation. I tend to lean towards the hard-core and this doesn't fit my profile exactly but more importantly, I have issues with nuts in America, and the ones on trees as well :)

If you're buying what you think are raw nuts in this country you might want to think again. The USDA or whomever is in charge of nuts (don't get me started...) has mandated that all nuts be heated to destroy - well whatever - fungus, mold, my health, you name it. At that point the nut can no longer be sprouted and it's a dead food. You're eating gravel. Raw vegans typically won't eat these for good reason - they're dead.

What made me buy this, however, was that the package specifically said it was made with soaked and germinated almonds. That means the almonds are very much an alive food. They've not been heated and destroyed. I've not had a real raw nut in so long I just had to try it. I ate half before I swam and the other half well after dinner. I liked it a lot, though 240 calories seems like a lot for one cookie and I feel like I'm cheating. But, it was all raw. Between the price, more fat grams than I want to eat in a day and the lingering guilt-for-no-reason, I'll reserve these for times when I have a craving for something like this.

The truth of the matter, though, is that I really don't crave anything - except more raw fruits and vegetables. What I've read all along is true. If you're raw vegan and you consume enough fruits and vegetables during the course of the day you will not crave anything except more fruits and vegetables. When I say you will not crave anything I have to tell you that this is a level of 'no cravings' that I've never experienced before. I can literally sit down with someone eating (name any number of yummy things) and absolutely not have any desire for it whatsoever. They might as well be eating cement - it holds virtually no interest for me.

Now, on the days where my calories have been lighter, I have thought of other things. Thursday night I had had a long day and was driving home from the other side of the city. Suddenly I wanted a McDonalds hamburger. OMG could I have wanted anything worse? Probably not. So, my first thought was McDonalds (because I obviously needed to eat) and my next thought was had I had a banana next to me in the car I would have eaten that and never thought about McDonalds at all.

The craving wasn't horrible, though I did pass a McDonalds and for a second did think - oh... but I continued on. I was simply hungry. I really needed a piece of fruit in the car with me and usually I have something. I came home, ate a banana right away and then went onto make chow mein. I ate that and it was wonderful. Never thought about McDonalds again and that's unusual. Typically, once I have a craving for something I will continue to crave it regardless of what else I eat and at some point in the next 24 hours would have definitely had a burger at McDonalds. But not now. Once I ate what was legal the craving vanished permanently.

Here's the cookie if you're interested. It comes from Gopal's Health.