Day Twenty-Five: Prep for a Silent Journey

So for those of you who don’t know me personally, I am helping my boyfriend, Jason, raise his 7-year old boy, Jahn.  Jahn’s mom, Star, died suddenly and tragically in a car crash in August 2006, just a few weeks shy of Jahn’s 5th birthday.  So when Jason and I started a romantic relationship, I went from being a single woman in a very peaceful, quiet apartment to woman in a relationship, with a child around all the time, constant hubbub, tons of “why” and “how” questions, and all from a little kid I didn’t  know.  I tried to get to know Jason, much of the time having that time with him revolve around what Jahn needed.  So it’s been a bit complicated from time-to-time, as we’ve all tried to figure out where we all fit inside a new, different family dynamic.

That all has lead me to lose my patience once in awhile, and realize how important taking “me” time is.  Before I met Jason, if I wanted to go somewhere and do something, all I had to do was check my calendar and bank account, and I’d be off!  Well, it’s a little different now — to say the least!  But Jason has always made sure that there was time made for me to do what I needed, the dear heart, and assured that I  get time that is just for me.  SUCH a Love!  We both offer that to each other, to keep the level of insanity down to a dull roar.  Every year, at least once, I go away for a few days.  Last year instead of separate vacations, we took a family vacation to Richmond, VA to see Jason’s side of the family at Thanksgiving, and in 2007 I went to Cedar Springs for the better part of a week — my first attempt at going completely raw.  WONDERFUL place, by the way!!!  If you’re looking for a great way to get off on the right foot, it’s a great place to “dry out” and start your raw journey!!!  I was raw for the 5 days I was there, and then stayed raw for an additional 11 days after I left.  That’s also when I started writing my “Go Raw, Not Crazy” series of cookbooks.

So I give you that little bit of background so that you know where I’m coming from.  Once in awhile, I just gotta get away.  The house is firmly raw now, and I feel very confident that I won’t come home to fried chicken and chili with quesadillas for dinner.   Hmm, ok we’ve never had that combo before, but you catch my meaning.  But back to the relevant point.  I am VERY ready to take a mini-vacation, and a wonderful woman in town named Suzanne has an adorable little cottage for rent, and I only have to pay 4 Life Dollars a night for it!!!  Life Dollars are the alternative currency used at Fourth Corner Exchange, and I’m a member of that organization.  No TV, no phone, not even a kitchen to tempt me!  She often cooks for her guests, but I told her I’d just bring my own raw stuff.  So I’ll be going there late Sunday evening and write-write-writing til my little fingers can’t take it anymore.  I really need to get my free e-books ready for the site launch, and it’s just not happening with all the hubbub mentioned above.

So I’m REALLY excited!  I’ve got my work all laid out that I want to do, I only have to pay “Monopoly Money” to stay at the cabin, and I am just 20 miles from home if any emergency should come up (or if I forget something).  I’ve decided that I’m not going to talk during this time, either.  I’m not sure why that’s important to me, but I just have this feeling that I’m done doing it for awhile.  I’m just tired of answering questions, being “there” for people, I feel so drained.  So I’m going to use this time to do a little piece of my life’s work, and I’ll be able to regenerate and sleep all I want while my body heals from the 38 years of battering it took from my former cooked-food diet.

And speaking of diet, today’s menu looked like this:

BREAKFAST:
Chocolate Creme Pie (OMG DELICIOUS!  The creamiest chocolate pudding you’ve ever had inside of a finely-ground macadamia nut crust — people canNOT tell it’s not cooked!)

LUNCH:
Chocolate “Milk”, a very small green salad and a banana

DINNER:
Pepperawni Nuts with that delectable hot mustard I got the other day, and another piece of Chocolate Creme Pie

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, life is good.  Chocolate for every meal, and a mini vacation on the horizon.  Life is DEFINITELY good!

Day Nineteen: Chocolate Candy in Every Flavor!

Hello Again!  And a happy, happy day to you!  Jason went up to Canada to see his friend Bill, and I was at home with Jahn today, so we got a lot of chocolate making done.  But I’ll get to the details of that in a minute.

Jahn saw Food Matters with us yesterday and is more gung-ho to eat organic, raw food than ever before.  He tried yellow peppers and dehydrated red chard (that I marinated in olive oil, apple cider vinegar, Herby, nutritional yeast and lemon pepper) today, and he loved them both!!!  I’m truly floored at how well he’s taking to raw food!  And thrilled!  It really is amazing how little kids, who we think will only eat burgers, candy and the stuff that’s full o’ things no one can process well, will gravitate toward greens, veggies, and stuff that we are trained to think kids hate.  I think it just takes some time to acclimate them to it after they’ve been exposed to the things that have addictive chemicals in them.

He was so cute this afternoon.  He had 3 little friends over today (ages 5-8) and tried to feed them all raw food.  He got all 3 kids to eat bananas, but one adorable little 5 year old who visits our neighborhood to see his grandparents on the weekends, totally tried the chard and the yellow peppers … and he loved them, too!  He thought the chard was weird at first, because he’d never tried marinated, dehydrated greens before, (heck, neither Jahn nor I ever did before today either) but he is very curious about the smells and tastes in our house, and always is willing to try something new.  Plus, everyone in the neighborhood knows that we have healthy chocolate here, so lots of kids (with their parent’s permission of course) visit us for nibbles whenever they can.  I guess all kids are curious about new sights and smells, and who doesn’t like chocolate?

I had to put the brakes on, though, when Jahn tried to get them all to watch Food Matters.  The kid is turning into one of those preachy little evangalists who wants everyone to convert to his rawligion.  I sat him down and explained that even though he wants his friends to have the same education about food that he has so that they will grow up healthy, not everyone is as ready as he is to hear about what happens in a meat processing plant or in a sprayed field, and we can’t show other children that movie without their parents’ permission.  Ah, teaching the budding raw foodist to not “witness” to people.  It’s a challenge.  On the one hand, you want to shout it from the rooftops how great you feel and how twisted and carcinogenic some of the things we’re sold in supermarkets and restaurants are, but on the other hand, you have to let people be on their own path and make their own dietary choices.  But he’ll learn.  I told him that he can offer anything in the kitchen to any kid who doesn’t have food allergies and who has permission to eat here.  But past that, their parents should be teaching them what’s what, to the best of their knowledge and abilities.  But that’s not good enough for our little minister.  He wants to have a party for the neighborhood kids and only serve raw food at it so that they can be exposed to how fun and tasty it is.  Too cute.  Oh!  And now he’s starting to imitate David Wolfe’s mannerisms and hand gestures.  Well, if you’ve gotta have a role model …

So after the gaggle of kids went home, Jahn and I started in on the chocolate.  It didn’t form a very good shell today (we were making molded candies with chocolate shells on the outside and fillings on the inside, like raw versions of Whitman’s or Russell Stover’s or Ghiradelli’s, etc.)  I’ve got to work out how much cacao paste vs. butter to use with this new brand I’m trying out from Ultimate Superfoods.  I was using Divine Organics, but they are a little out of my price range for a 30-day cacao binge, so I tried something a little less expensive (wholesale) that we got in our Super DUPER Super Foods Delivery (see Day Seven’s post).  They didn’t come out bad, though.  Jahn had on his Spongebob Squarepants apron that Grandma (my mom) made him, and we made chocolate bars with goji berries in them for Grandpa’s heart, some orange-chocolate hearts (also for Grandpa’s heart — his favorite!), some chocolate cremes, and some filled peppermint patties.  Although the consistency of the outer shells wasn’t quite what I what I wanted, I think they still came out pretty well.  I’m a bit of a beautiful food hound, so if it doesn’t look magazine-ready, I’m not as pleased as I might be.  But like I said, they are certainly better than just presentable, and they taste marvelous!

So since we’ve started drinking 1-2 litres of water every morning upon getting up (before consuming anything else), I wasn’t really hungry for my 1st meal of the day until about 1 p.m.  I tried like 2 bites of the red chard “chips”, and was somehow, miraculously full!  I know, it sounds like I’m comPLETEly full of crap (which, as I’m going through detox, I’m sure I am in a literal sense), and if I were you, I wouldn’t believe me either, but I swear it’s true.  I guess this is what comes of eating organic, raw food.  Nothin’ but nutrients, and it fills you up fast!  So lunch was peppers and more chard with the boys that would eat them, plus I had a handful of the skinniest, tiniest baby carrots I’ve ever seen.  They should be called preemies!  Then, when it came to being amateur chocolatiers, licking spoons, bowls and fingers was about enough cacao to satisfy an army.  A very unplanned, odd sort of day, dietarily, but delicious through and through!  I’m glad that my tastes seem to be changing, because the yellow peppers were so sweet, I couldn’t believe it.  And I’ve disliked raw peppers all my life.  But today they were good.  Actually, they were delicious!

So tomorrow is day twenty.  I can hardly believe that this is almost 3 weeks!!!  I’ve never felt LESS like I was on a diet, and more in control of my body, my life and my future.  God, I love this life! 

Day Ten: A Hike, a Picnic, a Nap in the Sun and a Potluck

Sort of a hum-drum day.  NOT!  Jason and I went on a hike to the top of Chuckanut Mountain to Lookout Point.  It was amazing!  I had a really hard time getting up the darn thing, and had to rest a LOT — but it felt good to move my body and smell the fresh forest.  We packed a blanket, water and a picnic and went while Jahn was at school.

On the way up, I tripped, and my noise scared a poor owl who woke up and flew from the ground up into a tree.  We got some video of him/her, and although there’s no audio on the camera,  Jason made a noise or 2 that got the owl’s attention, and they looked straight into the camera!!  Very cool!  I’d never seen an owl in the wild before.  Seen them at zoos, and heard them at night, but never seen one for real before that.  We showed the footage to Jahn later after we got home, and he thought it was great!  I tried to post it here, but for some reason, I can’t get it to load.  Sorry.  

We ate a delicious meal of mango, avocado and banana, plus trail mix that had raw Spanish peanuts, pecans, goji berries, raisins and dried white mulberries in it.  The we fell asleep in the Sun (and in each other’s arms) while on the blanket.  It was SUCH a nice day that we hated for it to end.

Jason and I at Lookout Point

But we had to get back down the mountain (which is really more of a glorified hill with a great footpath) to pick up Jahn from school.  So we did, and spent the rest of the day getting ready for tomorrow’s yard sale and tonight’s potluck/party.  We’re hoping to make enough at the sale to get a new sofa (one that won’t show kiddo stains).

After the yard sale prep, it was a quick shower for us, and then I made my decadent fudge torte with German chocolate frosting for a potluck/party Jason and I were invited to.  I also made a cabbage dish with that wonderful tahini dip that Jason makes, just in case there wasn’t any other raw food there.  And it’s a good thing I did, too, because there were 2 salads there, and one had salmon on it, and the other onions.  I’m allergic to onions something fierce, so Jason and I had the cabbage/dip and cake for dessert.  The cake was a smashing success, even with cooked fooders, and I made contact with someone named Jaime who wants to promote my website when it launches.  SO COOL!

My two-layer German Chocolate Cake with Ganache

All in all, the best day I’ve had in a long, long time.  Got TWO dates with Jay (Jason), got Sun, got to spend time with friends, got to just have fun!

To recap:  breakfast was my usual pick-me-up chocolate shake, lunch is listed above, I had a bit of chocolate frosting as a snack, and dinner was red cabbage with tahini/nama-shoyu sauce and a piece of German chocolate cake.

We were up super late, so I hope I’ve got the gumption to do the yardsale tomorrow.

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.