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 Five: Let the Cleansing Begin!

Good GRIEF!  I know that one always goes through detox when going raw, but this is ridiculous!  I woke up this morning, and my bowels were competeing with every other part of my body for the “Who can release the most” award.  I went 3 times in under 1/2 an hour!  And all afternoon, it was my bladder in the lead.  But I’m 8 pounds lighter in only my 1st 5 days, so I’m off to a freakin’ good start!    I say good riddance to the weight — as Nathalia Rose says, “waste = weight”.  Let’s get all the crud OUT!

Breakfast was a mango with chocolate, then to the gym for a workout, sauna and lots of stretching.  Let me tell you, while detoxing, there is NO substitute for moving your body and making yourself to sweat in a sauna (followed by a cool, refreshing shower!)  Moves those toxins RIGHT on through and you feel so refreshed and cool-headed afterward!

Went and looked for wild cattails before the workout, and met a nice lady at the gym named Peggy (who told me I should be writing a book about raw food with recipes) then stopped by Kent’s Garden & Nursery to look at Frost peach trees and blueberry bushes.  We’re gonna start growing some of our own food this year!  We’ve already got an apple tree on the property that came with the house.  All we have to do is fence off the remainder of the yard and we’ll be able to keep the deer and other animals out of the garden.  Plus, a little diatomaceous earth, and we’ll be able to keep the buggies off naturally.

So back to today (I do tend to get off on tangents, don’t I?)  I’m really starting to lose my appetite during the day.  All that chocolate is really keeping me full, plus the fat in the mangos is really helping.  I’ll be making frozen bananas tonight (on a stick) for dipping and rolling in chopped pecans tomorrow … who says you can’t have your favorite Disneyland food as an adult and have it raw?  Remember those frozen, chocolate-dipped bananas on a stick?  First place I tried that as a kid was Disneyland.  I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

Jason and I had late-evening cravings – he for raw tahini and I for avocados – so we went to the grocery store and got avocados, more young thai coconuts, bananas, a large mango, celery and something else I can’t remember.  Then we went to Terra Organica and got his Tahini as well as something called Rawmesan by Gopal’s Health Foods — and it is AMAZING stuff!  It’s unbelievable how tasty raw walnuts, sunflower seeds, nutritional yeast and celtic sea salt can taste in the right combination!

But this isn’t about chocolate, is it.  Alas, I am rambling, yet again!  I’m just so thrilled to be finding all these fun, new things to eat.  If I’d've known raw could be this much fun, I’d've done it years ago.  I didn’t really have lunch, as I’m not too hungry during the day very often.  I think I had maybe a banana or 2, of course dipped in chocolate sauce.  For dinner, I had about a quarter of an avocado with Herby on it (the Rawmesan wasn’t too good on it, in my opinion – not a great complementary taste), and a chocolate bar I made.  Then I had a bit of the most bizarre food I’ve ever eaten.  Jason mixed raw tahini with Nama Shoyu raw soy sauce, added some water, and dipped green cabbage in it.  Now, I hate cabbage.  No, no, you don’t understand.  I HATE cabbage!  Cooked, raw, dudn’t matter.  HATE the stuff.  And this tahini mixture is fairly repugnant on its own.  Bitter, slick and just all-around odd.  All that being so stated, when you dip the cabbage IN the tahini sauce he made, something frickin’ MAGICAL happens.  This bizarre, nutty, sweet, almost meaty and fruity flavor with several layers … it just blossoms in your mouth!  I can’t explain it.  I’ve never had anything like it in my life, but it’s farking fanTAStic!!!  In fact, I want some more right now!  But how to incorporate chocolate into it ….  Maybe sometimes you just can’t eat chocolate on everything.