Day Twenty-One: Weigh-In #3

Just a few seconds to write.  Well, I am on the BEST road to great health, and not only am I feeling better daily (not counting detox days)    but the weight continues to fall away!  I am now officially down to 215.2 pounds ~~ WOO-HOO!!!  Today was Jay’s most challenging day, as emotional stuff came up for him from his past, and he sprained his back at the gym yesterday (we’re a mess, eh?), so I had to take the poor dear to the chiropractor.  I mean he was OUT!!!  He was actually out in SIX places!!!  Afterward, he came home and stayed in bed the rest of the day, and I rubbed a natural pain reliever on his back.

Breakfast was chocolate granola, lunch was a salad (I can’t seem to stop wanting salad after I have chocolate) and a goji-chocolate bar for dessert, then dinner was grapefruit juice, kiwi, apricots and a few chocolate cremes.  SUCH good food!!!  I can’t believe that I GET to eat this way and lose weight.  It’s worth it to me to give other junky stuff up, even when it feels hard and I have cravings, because what I’m gaining in the process isn’t weight, it’s optimum health! 

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all tomorrow!

Day Seven: Weigh-In & Super DUPER Superfoods Delivery!

So I was tired a lot today and took a long nap – almost 3 hours, took Miko to the dentist (yippee, he gets to keep his tooth!) and our delivery from Ultimate Superfoods came!!!  We got 5 pounds of cacao powder, 1 pound of cacao butter, 6.6 pounds of goji berries, 5 pounds of maca, a litre of clear agave, 1 pound of powdered agave inulin, and 5 pounds of Peruvian mesquite.  I waited until everyone was home to open it, so we could open and enjoy our first big delivery as a family.  Miko joined in, too, and we all were sticking our fingers into everything and tasting it straight out of the bag.  Then Jahn brought a few bowls and spoons into the living room and Jason started mixing little concoctions.  The best was the straight cacao with agave — tasted like the filling in a chocolate-dipped truffle!  Unbelievable!  Never had cacao of that quality before.  So intensely flavored that we had to use less to get the same effect.  And WOW does it give me energy!!!  I’m LOVIN’ it!!!  (No McDonald’s reference intended.)

Breakfast was a shake (what else?) and Miko almost guzzled his.  He’s just finding out about the joys of superfoods, even though he’s tried going raw a few before and has been doing green smoothies for some time.  We split a bit of our huge order up with him, so he will go home with maca, goji, cacao and mesquite.

Lunch was a salad and a chocolate candy for dessert, and dinner was just 3 dates with almond butter.  I can’t believe how little I need now!  I also had a few handfuls of trail mix that consisted of goji, raisins and pecans.

Weigh-in was a JOY!  No, seriously!!!  I went down 8 pounds in 7 days!!!  I’m now at 220.7 pounds (started this “diet” at 228.6).  I’ve lost 1 pants size and almost all of my back pain is gone, my knees and ankles no longer hurt, and I’m sleeping about 5-6 hours a night, with a small nap every other day or so (except for todays long one).  So far so good!  I LOVE CHOCOLATE!!!

Day Six: Have I Been Doing This For Almost a WEEK Already?

Ok, so don’t hate me, but this is actually feeling pretty easy!  Doing raw, I mean.  And it’s NEVER felt easy before.  I don’t know what made me decide to do only chocolate for 30 days (and obviously, I’ve added to that out of necessity), but something is clicking this time that never has before.  I’ve been trying to go raw for over 2 years, and it’s never stuck.  Maybe it just took me that long to transition, maybe I needed the education base and it took that long to get it.  Maybe I needed to get that “magic diet” I’ve always wanted, but never really believed I could have.  Or did I?  I didn’t give up on it, so some part of me must have intuitively known that chocolate was good for me, I just hadn’t looked enough to find the right kind.  Maybe I’ve only been able to do it twice for 2 weeks at a time in the past because I wasn’t getting superfoods often enough and overemphasized the greens.  Or maybe it is just time, so I’m simply ready.  I can’t say for sure.  But there is a calmness now that’s never been there before.  Like that guy Dhrumil that I saw on We Like It Raw talking about letting go of seeking.  That really hit me in a profound way, and I haven’t had the need to look for perfection in my diet anymore since I saw that video.  It’s like somebody else said it was ok to stop seeking perfection, and even though he wasn’t giving me permission to eat Volcano Tacos, I just felt like his words helped me give myself permission to do so.  But once I gave myself that permission, poof!  Most of the desire for them went away.

What’s I find most interesting is that we’re all ready at the same time (everyone in my household) to finally BE raw, and not just try again to GO raw.  I’ve just finished day 6, Jahn has finished day 4 and Jason has finished day 3.  For some reason, within days of each other, we’re all just makin’ the leap, and it really doesn’t seem that hard.  And it’s not like we have less access to the old foodstuffs, or like we suddenly don’t want them — it just sort of seems gone from our consciousness, in a way, and this way of eating now suddenly seems normal, easy and preferable.

I had this conversation with Jahn recently (after we went on the picnic on Saturday at the bird festival), and we were talking about our cravings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at picnics and for pizza at parties.  I said to him, “So here’s the deal:  there’s nothing cooked that we can’t make a raw version of, if we put our minds to it.  We’ve already made pizza and peanut butter, and I think I can figure out jelly with a good freezer jam recipe.  So,  if we can have a raw version of it, WHY would we eat the cooked one???”  And I could see the light come on in his mind and his eyes as he TOTALY got it and said, “YEAH!”

It’s almost like we tripped and fell into it, or at least that’s how it seems now, from this side of things.  It’s a beautiful thing, and we are all requiring just a few hours of sleep each night now, with a nap here or there.  Jahn got a cold and it was gone in 24 hours.  The stresses and situations of life are not much changed, but we have.  And it’s so nice.  I don’t know if I’m just rambling, but it just feels so different now.  And not in a trying or striving or attempting kind of way.  There’s just a state of being that is so calm now, and Jason noticed and conveyed to me last night that time seems to be slowing down so much.  We are getting more done in a day, or at least it seems that way.  Is this making any sense?

My friend Michael is here and I just read the above paragraphs to him to see if they made any sense whatsoever, and he said that yes they does make perfect sense, so they it seems weird to you, then we can blame him.  ;o)  J/K  Love you Miko!

So I started the day with our chocolate shake/milk this morning that we’ve had most mornings, then I spent the day taking Miko to different stores for produce as he is working on going raw, too.  He’ll be staying at our place tonight, and I fed him salad with a new strawberry vinaigrette recipe that I came up with on the spot.  Jahn made him banana slices with chocolate and strawberry sauces on them for dessert (which he loves to call annunaki towers) , and they were both thrilled with it.

So let’s have the rundown:  breakfast was a chocolate shake, lunch was an avocado and a mango because I was on the road and it took MUCH longer than I thought it would to get home (errands kept coming up — one of those days, dontcha know), and for dinner it was, of course, salad, and then a piece of chocolate candy and annunaki towers for dessert.  Oh!  I made Miko a chocolate shake as he’s trying to get more recipes to help him stay raw, so I had a second one as an afternoon snack.

All in all, even though today was a busy day and I would have called it stress-filled in the past, now it just seems like an unusually busy day.  And staying raw was easy.  The Taco Bell sign wasn’t even tempting today.  I’m really starting to FEEL different, and my false body is slipping away, finally giving way to my REAL body!

I’m gonna go work on my books now, and tune in tomorrow for my first weigh-in.  I can feel a difference in my body already, we’ll see what the scale says.

Last, here are a few pics of me on Christmas Day, 2008.  Just to give you an idea of where I started with raw at approximately 240 pounds (as I was over 300 pounds at my heaviest, but would never consent to pictures at that weight).

Me giving Jason an "I Love You" hand sign

Me smiling with glee at getting the Obama calendar I asked for!

So there, now you can at least see what I look like “before”.  I will post more pics at the end of the month.

Day Two: The Chocolate & Salad Diet©, Pizza, Shopping, Withdrawal & Lassis

Now doesn’t that just sound smurfect?  I did not post my day two on day two because frankly, I felt like mud all day long.  You ever tried to move 228 pounds of mud under your own power all at once?  Not too easy.  So now you see how I felt yesterday.  Not a fun day in a lot of respects, but it all came out well in the end.

Problems started when I only got 4 hours of sleep the night before due to salad cravings.  I got up and tried to make a chocolate shake for breakfast to boost my energy, and against my better judgement, I added goji berries in with it, as Jason had soaked them ahead of time and didn’t want them to go to waste.  I never have liked gojis in a smoothie or shake, because despite the uber-lovely and strong Vita Mix, they never actually get smooth.  If I could just find a way to get those darned grainy little seeds out, I might like it better.

And for whatever reason, my coconut, chocolate, banana, maca, mesquite & goji “shake” was just abysmal yesterday.  Actually made my stomach hurt.  Plus, it got all gelatinous.  Mmmmmm … grainy pudding!  Yeccchhhhhh!  Jason liked it ok, but I added too much mesquite, also.  I forgot that too much mesquite tastes a little like vomit to me.  Don’t know why.  Just does.  That’s why I usually add just about a 1/2 or 1/4 teaspoon of it to each 2 heaping tablespoons of cacao I use.  In my opinion it’s amazing as a complementary flavor, and shouldn’t be used in high concentrations.  Maybe that’s why my stomach hurt.  Who knows?  Jason ended up drinking the rest of mine, cause I just couldn’t take it.

For lunch I ate nothing, as my stomach was still upset, and the idea of food, much less chocolate food, made me wanna hurl!  So no lunch.  On the way home, driving by McDonald’s actually made me shake!  I wanted to stop in so bad I was getting a little nuts!  But I prevailed!!!  )  What’s odd is that i haven’t eaten McDonald’s hamburgers in YEARS!

When I got home, I was on the war path for a salad again!  I mean I NEEDED one!  So I’m thinking that cacao and greens are a very good combo for me.  If I was craving something like pizza or lasagna or any other cooked food for that matter, I would have no real trouble keeping myself from eating it.  But if my body is crying out for green leafs, for Pete’s sake, who am I to deny it that?  And why am I referring to my body and my mind as though they are different entities?  I guess I’m just too used to it.  Well, there’s another thing to put on my to do list:  Start thinking of all parts of my body and systems as one thing, since they are.

On a completely different subject, I have long wanted some nice, thick, heavy glass serving plates and glasses, especially for the Go Raw, Not Crazy © books.  Nothing takes a beautiful dish and makes it look like crud faster than an ugly old beat up, plastic bowl, cup or plate.  So when he got home from school, Jahn and I went to Value Village (a favorite thrift store of ours), and picked up some of the most gorgeous crystal and glass serving plates, platters, ice cream social type glasses and apertif glasses known to the human race.  Since I only needed one of each of most of them, it didn’t matter that they didn’t have mates.  How many times do I need to show a chocolate shake in a book anyway, right?  Also, some of the glasses came in 3′s, so I got those for serving delights to my Valenti boys at home.  I love it when somebody gives their dishes in 3′s to Value Village — ’cause all we need are 3!

While still out, we stopped by Costco, as they are the only place in town where we can get a certain kind of mango that Jason likes.  Jahn saw the pizza on the sign and started going a little nuts for it.  Poor dear.  He’s gluten intolerant, so I couldn’t get it for him even if we ate cooked food, but he was going through a hard patch, so I told him we’d try to make some raw pizza.  Now I had to think FAST on my feet, because I didn’t have ANY idea how to do this.  We went to Terra Organica since no one else in town has such a selection of raw foods already prepared, and started our search for ingredients.  Thankfully, Livin’ Spoonful makes some of the most amazing raw crackers on the PLANET!!! I picked up a package of the Sunny Garden Herb, as they have flavors much like pizza already in them.  (The company puts the gluten-free spin on their site, but they are actually raw, too!)  I got Jahn a raw cookie as well, and gave him a taste of the cracker.  HE LOVED IT!  Whew!  One ingredient down (crust), two to go (sauce &  cheese).  So I got a few nice red, ripe tomatoes, a package of sun-dried tomatoes and out the door we went.  When I got home, I put 1 small tomato, a handful of sun-dried tomatoes, about a tablespoon (accidentally) of Italian seasoning, a pinch of Celtic grey sea salt, and a few dashes of pepper (Jahn loves his stuff spicy).  Blended it up in the Vita Mix, and it came out tasting, if not feeling, exactly like pizza sauce.  (Jason suggests water and chia be added next time to make it come out more like an actual sauce next time.  Plus, then it will be thicker and I can then blend it longer.  I think I’ll take him up on that!)

So I took a cracker, spread a bit of sauce on it, topped it with the only thing I could find which was hemp seeds (for protein, and because they look white, sort of like the color of raw cheddar), and plopped it down in front of the wee one.  Would he eat it?  Tune in tomorrow to find out.

KIDDING!

He put Herby on it (he puts that stuff on everything savory — no, I mean EVERYTHING!!!), promptly gobbled it up and said it was delicious!  I about fell on the ground in shock!

Jahn gobbles up his "pizza" with gusto!

So that’s going in the kid recipe book for SURE!  For dessert, I made him a mango lassi, as he’s been missing those, too.  He used to go out for Indian food with his dad, and really missed his lassis.  I cut up 2 mangos, a young thai coconut, and set the Vita Mix a-whirlin’.  Good LORD was it bland!  Added agave, still not quite right.  Added the juice of half a Clementine orange to give it some oomph (this batch is rather tart), and Jahn said it didn’t really taste like a lassi, but that it was very good.   “You can save the rest for Pop,” he said.  Well, I can’t win them all.

All this excitement with “pizza” and “lassis” and helping someone stay raw made me forget about what I was up to, which was chocolate.  So I had the left over mango bits with chocolate sauce (quite good!) and sent the little one to bed.

All in all, my day was more about Jahn and his diet than it was about me and mine.  But that’s ok.  I got 2 new recipes that will be highly effective in the future out of it, and some of the prettiest dishes I’ve ever owned.