Day Twenty-Nine: Almost There! (and a Weigh-In)

Well, I’ve gotta say that I’ve never gone this long on any kind of diet, and I’ve never felt less deprived.  This has not felt like a diet, actually.  It’s felt like an unshackelling and a freeing from prison!  This has truly been an amazing month!  Probably the best of my life!  You know how when you accomplish something so amazing, it had challenges, but it was SO worth it?  That’s what this has been like.  I just can’t explain it.  You have to try it for yourself to know what I mean.  I’m just not good enough with words to tell you.  I don’t know that words CAN tell you.  SO much has come up for clearing, I feel so much happier, lighter — oh yes, I’m down to 211.4 pounds — and just … God, I wish I could explain it in words!

But since I cannot, let’s just get to the meat of the day — well, figuratively.  LOL

I had chocolate chips for breakfast after my water, then had a small salad for lunch with nutritional yeast, golden flaxmeal, my favorite vinaigrette (olive oil, apple cider vinegar, agave and Herby) on baby greens with shredded carrots, chopped red and orange bell pepper, plus a few raw olives for good measure.  SSOOOOOOOOooooooo delicious!!!  Dinner was chocolate-covered pecans, raisins and hemp seeds.  Again, delicious!  Somewhere in there, I think late at night, I had a big glass of grapefruit juice and a few kiwis.  Just started craving them.  Oh!  Had an apricot, too.  Very fruity day.

My thirst has really come up to a much higher level, and I’m really ready for water in the morning now.  I drink a lot throughout the day, too.  When my 30 days are up tomorrow, it isn’t the end of a journey, just really the end of making sure I’m getting chocolate every meal.  I’ll still eat it, of course, but I’m absoLUTEly not going back to cooked food!  No way, no how, uh-UH!!!

Day Twenty-Six: Happy Mother’s Day – Gardening and Honey Bees!!!

Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there (and people like me who are semi-moms but resist the label).

This morning, Jason and I slept in (how delicious was THAT?!?), then we headed over to our friend’s house, Dave and Laurie’s, to pick some fresh, baby Red Russian kale.  Or so I thought.  In exchange for helping Laurie to “weed” her flower patch, I got to take all those “weeds” home with me.  And said “weeds” were said KALE!  In addition, she uprooted a rhubarb plant, a lovage plant, TONS of young oregano starts, baby angelica starts, lemon balm, lemon mint, orange mint and a horseradish plant!  All payment for taking her excess kale out!  And it only took me 5 minutes to help her.  Plus, we just bought a Sungold cherry tomato plant yesterday, and a friend gave us what we thought were 2 strawberry plants.  Turns out they were FOUR!

So Jason and I had our work cut out for us.  I planted or transplanted everything except the tomato plant while he mowed and weed-whacked the yard with Dave’s mower and weed-whacker.  A sweet little boy in our neighborhood named Cody came over and showed Jahn how to uproot dandelion plants.  The kid has been watching his dad, who manages the park we live in, and I tell you what, I’ve never seen a kid so little (I think he’s 5 or 6) who is so handy with a shovel!  I kept telling Jahn to watch Cody dig, because he knew exactly how to do it.  Went all the way around the plant, clockwise, over and over and over again, until it came right out, root and all.  We are so lucky to have so dang many dandelion plants in our yard and the surrounding fields that we have more than we can possibly eat, even if we ate just those, so we placed the uprooted ones from our rock path around the apple tree, mixed in with the grass clippings.  Jay said that when he had orange trees in Florida, they always put grass clippings around the base of the trees, and it was the very best compost.  Said it made for the sweetest, juiciest oranges ever.  Had other Floridians wondering why their fruit was so perfect!  Well, fertilize well and you get a strong plant with delectable fruit that can protect itself from pests and the like.

We also found some surprise dog “treats” in the yard (as in, some neighbor dog made a deposit in the middle of the lawn), but Jay just threw them in with Cody’s dandelions and the grass clippings.  I planted everything we got from Laurie in little planter boxes except for the kale.  Then I planted the strawberries.  Most of these will probably get permanent homes in the actual earth, but we only moved in in February, so we haven’t decided exactly where to do our Lasagna Gardening, yet.

Last, I planted the baby kale in the cinder blocks that go along the edge of the right side of the house (the back lawn is along the left side) and Cody, the handier-with-a-spade-than-me little guy, went through and weeded all the little plots of dirt and turned over the soil for me first, and I didn’t even have to ask him to!  He had a little metal shovel that Dave and Laurie gave Jahn, but Jahn was more interested in reading Calvin and Hobbes while sunning himself on the deck, so I figured, “Well, each can do what they like.  At least they aren’t fighting over who gets to use the shovel!”  So all I had to do, literally, was turn a bit of fertilizer into the earth with a large spoon, transplant my little kale babies, then water them!  Got a whole nice row going, too.  Hopefully next year they will keep us in green smoothies all season long and we won’t have to buy many greens!  We fed Cody an apple, and he tried mango for the first time.  Liked it quite well.  I told him that since he worked so hard, when our apple tree starts bearing fruit, he can come over and get some apples.

Oh!  I almost forgot!  The very BEST news of the day!!!  There is a huge raspberry farm right outside our backyard (I’ll take pics soon — and they let us pick all we want for free!) and I think they have their own honey beehives, because yesterday I saw 4 bees visiting our little apple tree (which is LADEN with blossoms) and today, there were SIX!  All at once!!!  With all the issues these poor little guys have been having, and with all the work that Jay and I are planning on putting into growing our own food, I gotta tell you, I have literally NEVER been so happy to see bees in my entire life!  I almost started crying!!  Jahn and Cody got scared, but I showed them how the bees were so busy they didn’t care about us.  I walked up and put my hand literally an inch away from 2 of them, and when they didn’t sting me, the boys were convinced that bees might not be so bad after all, and were more willing to listen to the good aspects of bees.  Eventually, they were standing in front of the tree, watching the bees do their work and cheering them on, dancing and chanting in unison, “Poll-in-ATE!  Poll-in-ATE!”  Pretty freakin’ cute!

So after all that gardening fun, poor Cody was sad to see us go, but we had to.  We went to my brother-in-law’s house to discuss cookbook layout (just wait til you see them!  He is a PRO!) and mull over logo ideas.  Things are rolling along smashingly in the design department, so we didn’t have to chat long.  Then it was all of us (my Jason, me, Jahn, my sister Beccy, her Jason, and their son, Ben) off to my mom and dad’s house to celebrate Mother’s Day.

We went to my mom’s house today and we gave her 2 tulips from our flower patch (they had mostly finished blooming already), an apple-spice cake that I made (pretty much my happy accident cake from a few days ago with marinated, minced apples in it), and some iris bulbs (purple, her favorite).  She also got a DVD about Alaska from my brother and his wife (my mom grew up in Sitka), a white geranium plant from my sister, her hubby and son, oh!  And a little crescent moon shaped crystal to hang in her window, also from my brother and his wife.  Jahn made me a very sweet little watercolor painting at school and it was accompanied by a letter that said the he loved me and was grateful that I make him raw treats.  It was very, very sweet.  It made me cry, then Jay cried, then everybody was crying, and Jahn rolled his eyes, and said, “Oh, brother!”  Funny kid.

We all had dinner there, and we were served a veritable feast of fruit salad (oranges, red grapes, bananas, watermelon, mango and something else — I think another melon), green salad (with all kinds of great stuff in it — radishes, red peppers, cucumbers, iceberg and Romaine lettuces, some baby kale that I brought from Laurie’s garden, oregano (also from Laurie’s garden) shredded carrots, celery, raw walnuts … and I think there were a few more things, but I don’t remember what they were).  I brought our raw dressing, nutritional yeast and flaxmeal for us to top the salads with.  There was also roasted chicken and 2 kinds of potato salad, but we didn’t partake of those (I’m the only raw foodist on my side of the family).  It was a great meal, and Jay and I were very excited that we all were so full afterward.  That was our first time eating nothing but raw around other people in a very long time.  We finished off most of the apple-spice cake, and everyone agreed, it was very reminiscent of the filling in apple newtons — like fig newtons, but spicier and apple-ier.

We didn’t really have any breakfast, just our 2 litres of water in the morning.  Strange how satisfying it is when you’re hydrated.  Your artificial hunger alarms just don’t go off the way they do when you eat cooked.  So we weren’t even hungry until about 4 p.m.!  Ok, we sampled a few greens in Laurie’s garden, but that was just 3 or 4 little leaves, pea shoots and the like.  I can’t believe how little we eat now!  If you’d told me even a month ago that I’d be this happy raw, I’d probably have slapped you.  Ok, maybe not that.  But I would’ve definitely recommended counseling.  😉

I did have a bit of chocolate before we left, but just one bite of ganache – just so I could say I’ve been doing the raw cacao for 30 days with every meal.  But we’re down to one meal a day, and one or very occasionally 2 snacks (a handful of berries, a half a mango, a handful of sprouted nuts, etc.), so I’m having a hard time being hungry enough to eat any cacao at all.  There’s a surprising twist!  Not hungry enough to eat CHOCOLATE???  But there you have it.  I’d heard of other raw foodists experiencing this lack of hunger, and being able to work really hard for hours on end with no food, but until you experience it for yourself, it just doesn’t seem believable.  I think that’s because there are so many social, psychological and emotional things tied in with cooked food.

But that’s a subject for another day and another post.  I’m off to pack and go on my little silent mini vacation.  I’ll still post while I’m gone, though.  No talking needed for that.  Cheerio!

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 Twelve: The Yard Sale (Part Two) and Lasagna Gardening!

Well we certainly felt like we got caught up on a bit of sleep last night.  We got up this morning at 8 a.m. and were ready for yard sale business by 9 a.m.  We didn’t get that many customers, but we made $20 and took the rest of our stuff to Goodwill.  We’ve actually found a few more things we wanted to get rid of, (isn’t that the way it always goes with yard sales — AFTER you’ve had them?) but our neighbor just across the way is having another this coming Saturday, so we’ll be able to probably off-load a few more things.  Yippee!!!

So we got a GREAT, almost brand-new, looks-like-it’s-fresh-off-the-showroom-floor couch off of craigslist today, and we only had to pay $85 for it!  I love that we are finally starting to make our first house look like a home (and not a college student’s apartment).  The furniture in the living room and bedrooms is starting to look like we meant to put them together that way and not like we found it on the side of the road.  ;o)  Gotta love when the place looks nice!  I’ve never really had that before (since I’ve been on my own, anyway), and since I’ve been on my own longer now than I lived with my parents growing up, I say it’s high time!

Jay came home with a book from our friends Dave and Laurie called Lasagna Gardening.  I’m pretty excited about it, and we’re going to start our own garden, probably using the techniques outlined in the book.  We’ve gotta save up a bit, but we’ll be starting something small this year, and based on how that goes, we’ll add to it next year.  Our eventual goal is to grow almost all of our own food in a biosphere of Jason’s design.

But none of this is about chocolate, is it?  For breakfast I had chocolate frosting of all things!  More of a ganache.  It was cacao powder, maca, mesquite, agave and just a touch of coconut oil.  Lunch was non-existent.  Just couldn’t get hungry.  At night I made a new batch of pizza dough that I invented last week (it will be ready in the morning), and while I watched The Holiday, I pulled basil leaves from their stems (there were a LOT of leaves).  Then I made a quart of pesto, and Jay and I will probably have pesto pizza tomorrow with nutrional yeast on it.  It came out a little too sweet, but by tomorrow it should be perfect.  I don’t do so well with garlic when it’s freshly chopped, but the next day it’s usually ok for me.  I tasted the pesto, having forgotten about the garlic sensitivity, and it made my stomach hurt.  I ate a strawberry, and for some reason that calmed my stomach.  Don’t know what drove me to do that, but it worked.  So I had a few more with cacao syrup, and that was dinner.

I cannot believe how quickly weight is coming off me, btw!  I mean, if I had been told 3 years ago that I would, or even could lose weight AND HAVE MY SKIN SHRINK as I lost weight, I would’ve thought they were crazy.  But it’s working.  Jason and I are taking pictures of each other every two weeks, and I’ll be showing how we looked and how our bodies changed when we publish the ebooks.  We have the eventual goal of printing them, as well.

Well, I’m tired now, so I’m off to bed.

Raw Chocolate Addict: A Brief Diet History of Lori J. Bayne

So here I be … the nut job that has decided to eat nothing but raw chocolate for 30 days … just to see what happens!  Now granted, even though I could probably get away, both sanity-wise and health-wise, with just plain, straight-up cacao beans (they are nutrient-packed little superguys!), I’m going to mix it up a bit – just cause I wanna.  I’ll be using recipes that I created for my upcoming book, “Go Raw, Not Crazy© – with Chocolate”, and eating from every single chocolate recipe in the book at least twice during these 30 days.  That’s right!  Chocolate candy, chocolate milkshakes, chocolate cake, chocolate frosting, chocolate candy bars, chocolate truffles, chocolate filled candies, chocolate pies, chocolate smoothies, chocolate milk, chocolate cookies, chocolate ice cream, chocolate cheesecake, chocolate chips … and anything else that strikes my fancy … provided it has raw cacao in the recipe, and all the other ingredients are raw, too.

So why am I doing this?  Well, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been interested in magic, whether it be tricks, cures, beans (Jack & the Bean Stalk) or anything else.  And in my 39 years, I’ve tried every flippin’ “magic” diet on the planet.  Any diet that promised that I could eat chocolate and lose weight got my attention.  But every time I tried them, they either had artificial sweeteners, which made me sick, or gluten, which I’m allergic to — and they ALL had cocoa processed with alkali!

And frankly, they tasted like crap!

Grainy, crumbly, bitter, fake tasting and just plain nasty.  AND, if I DID lose weight, I gained it all back and then some when I stopped gagging down the “food”.

So here’s the deal.  I want to see if I can “magically” lose weight on a chocolate diet that I create for myself.  I’m not a doctor, I’m not a nutritionist, and I’m not some exercising know-it-all.  I just know that I can lose weight on raw cacao because I’ve already lost some weight, just incorporating it into my diet.  I know that when I eat it with maca, I feel so energized that I want to go roller skating like I did when I was 9!  I know that it’s super-dense in nutrients, great for my mood and lots & lots of fun.  And I know that it’s a healthy food — WHEN it’s not processed or cooked.  I’ve lost almost 90 pounds already (and have lost the last 30 using raw foods).  I’ve read David Wolfe’s book, Naked Chocolate, and have been thrilled to find that not only is raw cacao better tasting than the standard chocolate on the market, I don’t get any icky side effects from it like I do from pasteurized milk, high fructose corn syrup, invert sugar or any other massively processed, chemically altered, denuded-of-nutrients shell of a food.

So if it gives me bio-available protein, heart-healthy fat, I know that I’m not gonna fall asleep from carb overload or get the caffeine jitters like the cooked stuff, there’s no sugar high or crash (because I sweeten it with bananas, raw agave, dates, yacon syrup or raw honey), and I’ve got over 20 recipes to choose from to avoid boredom, what could the drawbacks be?  Come follow my progress as I find out if a person can happily and healthily eat essentially nothing but chocolate for 30 days.  I’m sure it’s gonna be one heckuva ride!!!

By the way, I’m not recommending that anyone else try this diet.  So if you try it and get sick or unhappy or your mate leaves you or an elephant falls on your cat or your 2nd cousin’s ear falls off, I have to say for legal reasons, that’s not my fault.  All material on this blog is provided for information and entertainment purposes only and may not be construed as medical advice or instruction. No action or inaction should be taken based solely on the contents of this information; instead, readers should consult appropriate health professionals on any matter relating to their health and well-being.  So there.