Day Twenty-Two: Oi, The Cravings!!!

Another hard day with cravings.  I mean a HARD day!!!  But, was I craving anything from my “previous life” that was healthy?  Don’t count on it!  Greasy burgers, dripping burritos, nachos with chips fried in lard, topped with lard-filled beans, hot, stretchy pus-teuriuzed cheese, canned jalapeños and the ever popular hormone-laden sour cream!  Maybe a bit of fresh lettuce on the side?  Only on occasion.  REMARKABLE!  Not referring to the taste, just referring to how remarkable it is that I ate that crap for so long, and that I lived to tell about it.  I mean yeah, of COURSE I miss the taste!!!  It tasted freakin’ treMENdous!!!  How could I NOT miss those flavors?  But I just kept reminding myself that just this past winter, I couldn’t even stand on my own tip-toes.  Now I can hop on one foot several consecutive times!  So I don’t miss the horrible health that came with it, the groggy mind, the inability to wake up, the constant post-nasal drip … oh, the list goes on and on.  But Jay and I laid there in bed dreaming of our “past lives” and jonesing for that food so badly!!!  Jay wanted gyros with Greek salad, as well as a burger and calzones from places he’d been to when he lived in Florida.  Thank goodness we live in WA state and far out of the reach of things in other locales.

I’m getting a little sick of chocolate, actually, but I had a chocolate-goji bar that I made for breakfast, lunch was savory trail mix with another piece of chocolate, this time flavored with orange oil, and dinner was a Greek salad (Jason inspired me with all the earlier talk of it), and some chocolate-dipped strawberries for dessert.

Not sure why I missed this the 1st two times I watched Food Matters, but raw cacao is likely the highest source of iron in the world, and has a lot of vitamin C in it (which dies if you heat it up).  Fascinating.  I already knew about the magnesium content and antioxidant properties, but I’m glad to find these new things out.

Welp!  On to day 23!

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 Eighteen: A Milestone Day!

Well I’ve finally done it.  The longest I’ve ever been raw (up until today) was 17 days.  And here I am, on day eighteen, and I know that cooked food is behind me.  I mean REALLY behind me!!!  Like I said to Jahn at the beginning of this journey:  “There’s nothing cooked that we can’t make a raw version of.  And if we can make it raw, why would we ever eat it cooked?!?”

So to celebrate, he and I did some creative work today in the kitchen to invent what he calls pepperawni (a raw version of pepperoni).  We sliced up some Italian squash (which looks and tastes a lot like just a mini zucchini) and we slathered them with a mixture of a tomato concoction we came up with which was:

• wheat-free tahini
• sun-dried tomatoes
• garlic powder
• onion powder
• water
• pink Himalayan salt
• black pepper

We put that all together in the Vitamix, put it on high and kept smashing it down to get the stuff to make a creamy paste.  After the slices were slathered and placed on a dehydrator tray, we took several cups of raw, soaked pistachios, walnuts and almonds and mixed them up in the tomato mixture as well.  I’d love to be able to buy Jahn the marinara nuts we found yesterday all the time, but that doesn’t fit into our budget except as a treat, for now.  Besides, it’s fun to try to get a recipe at home to taste like the stuff you found at the store.  And now the house is starting to smell like a freakin’ pizza parlor!  Poor kid is having a hard time waiting the few days that it takes to dry the nuts back out.  But at least the squash ones will be ready by the end of tomorrow.

So for breakfast I had a frozen chocolate-dipped banana (oh, tasted just like my memories of Disneyland as a kid, when I first had them).  Is being raw wonderful, or WHAT?!?  The longer I do this, the happier I am.  And I’m so happy that Jason and Jahn are so happy, too.  For the first time in any of our memories, we are truly, and I mean TRULY satisfied when we are done eating.  We never overeat anymore, I don’t have to monitor how many sweets Jahn gets, because they are all completely safe and don’t give him a sugar rush (and his behavior and memory have gone off the charts, in the positive direction) the crazy cravings that made me obsess over foods and make horrible, malnutritive choices are gone.  I feel … I feel free!  I feel like I’ve been enslaved by “food” for so long, and now that I’m eating REAL food and my addiction is FINALLY broken, I am alive, happy, getting healthy, and the world is my oyster (or some non-animal equivalent) 

Lunch was a smallish salad and some chocolate sauce (not on it, of course), and dinner was blackberries again, but I tried some dipped in chocolate — an EXCELLENT combination!  I’m really looking forward to tomorrow, as I have the house to myself and a new shipment of cacao paste and butter to start my next round of candies with!  Can’t wait! 

Day Eight: Keep Me AWAY from the BBQ Beef!!!

My land and stars!  Ok, so if there was ever a temptation issue, it was today.  Thank GOURD I am gluten intolerant, and caramel coloring (which comes from wheat) is in BBQ sauce, or I may have lost it today.  I was over at a friend’s house, and he was eating BBQ beef, and it smelled SO good, I was going a little wonky!  It wasn’t even that I wanted meat.  Just that smokey-sweet smell of the sauce, I actually started to drool and hop up and down a little.  He would’ve offered me some, but thankfully, he is a better friend than that.  But I didn’t give in to temptation!  I TOTALLY stayed raw, put some goji in my belly for nutritional value and had a bit of avocado with Herby — that one usually kills my desire for meat and smokey flavored foods, as does the Rawmesan on salad.  It’s amazing how much easier it is to stay raw when you know what to do to kill your cravings by satisfying them with other nutrient-dense foods and specific flavors.

Breakfast was a shake with just bananas, water and cacao — not as good a smoothie/shake as usual, but good.  Oh, and I had to add a bit of agave as the bananas were under-ripe and I didn’t put any coconut in it.  Lunch was trail mix of goji, pine nuts, pecans, raisins and white mulberries.  Then I had a piece of fudge that I made with cacao, maca, mesquite, agave, pecans and … are you ready for this?  AVOCADO!!!  It tastes more like ganache, but it’s freakin’ YUMMY!  Dinner was a spinach salad with strawberry vinaigrette, Rawmesan, flax meal, hemp seeds, strawberries, grapes and pecans.

I had to take Miko home, and even though I took an apple and a mango along as snacks for the drive (it’s about an hour and a half trip to his house and back), by the time I got to his place to drop him off, I felt like I might make a bad food choice.  So I threw myself on the mercy of his kitchen and good nature and begged an avocado off him (trying to get some fat in my tummy to distract me for a bit).  He kindly obliged, and I was able to make it home without incident.  It is so nice to finally be raw!  I just almost can’t stand how great this is.  )

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 Four: Sea Bird Watching and a Picnic

I woke up feeling pretty sluggish, so I made a chocolate & maca shake and it perked me right up.  My side of the family invited us all to a sea bird festival, but Jason had to work, so Jahn and I went with my mom, dad, sister, her husband & son.  We packed a picnic lunch of strawberries, grapes, Clementine oranges, chocolate syrup, strawberry syrup, chocolate cheesecake and lemon cheesecake.  Jahn and I stayed totally raw, despite being surrounded by peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bologna sandwiches, Cheetos, Doritos, juice boxes and hard-boiled eggs (left over from Easter).  I made sure to pack the cheesecake because I knew that it would fill us up quickly so we wouldn’t be tempted to eat the other things.

But the picnic was the last part of our outing.  First, we went to the funnest little festival.  It was all about sea birds, and there were real birds from a sanctuary there (permanent residents that are too old or injured to be returned to the wild), free games, prizes, face painting, a nature hike and a ferry boat ride!  Jahn and his cousin Ben got to actually drive the boat!  It only held 16 people, so it was very cozy, and the boys were beyond proud of themselves for actually steering under the Captain’s supervision.  Too fun!  And they even got Honorary Captain certificates to commemorate the day.

Then it was off to the picnic (which I described above) at a local park, where the boys got to run off the rest of their energy.  I was even able to keep up with them and didn’t need a nap!  Then Ben came over to our house and played with Jahn for a few hours.  Jahn discovered the sweetness of dandelion flowers and was smashing them up and eating them.  Ben wasn’t as keen on it, but we all had a taste and had some fun gathering up flowers and leaves and trying them out.  Worst case scenario, we get a little liver cleansing out of it.

I certainly got my exercise and was ready for bed by 10.  I had a bite of raw pizza with Jahn and the rest of the fruit with chocolate left over from the picnic.  Then, for dessert, we had sliced bananas with raisins on them, drizzled with strawberry and chocolate syrups.  Delicious!  All in all, a great day, and Jason stayed raw all day, too.  Looks like we’re finally on our way!