Main » September 2004
September 29, 2004
During the 2nd week
This is my response to the comment. Thank you for your nice words, they are much appreciated. I've learned that eating mono means eating one fruit or one vegetable at any give time (and not mixing them with other things). Apparently this improves digestion, since each fruit/veggie needs its own (stomach) environment to digest well, and combinations are more often than not rather detrimental. You have to be sort of knowledgeable in how you combine foods (so you need to do research, etc.), but that's sort of out of question for me right now, since I would not have enough time to do it. So I am not eating mono right now (rather, I allow myself to have banana and watermelon in one sitting, or other combinations, but I try not to combine more than 2 foods in one 'dish'). It has sort of gotten easier with each day to stay raw... but I do stick to my coffees every day, so roughly speaking, I am only 90% raw...
Posted by Liliaak at 10:15 PM | Comments (3)
September 24, 2004
Fifth day in the evening
Some things are going well. My tireness though does not seem to go away. Being on this diet does not make me sleep less, as I thought it would. My sleeping patterns are exacty as before, I am extremely tired at around 10pm but refuse to go to bed that early, keep working until1-2am and then sleep about 8 hours until say 10am, when everyone's out of the house anyways. So I enjoy the benefits of no bathroom queuing :).
No headaches either, and some weight loss. I am now at 154lbs and my old jeans fit way better :). So there are immediate results to a switch to a 90% raw diet -- something which is gratifying and certainly motivating. I have not been 100% raw since I still take in some coffee through the day. Am trying to make this relatively transitional just to make sure that I don't go beserk and give it all up at some point, in rage. Need to gradually go into something, get used to it, make sure it doesn't do me sudden harm. I've never been a fan of the "shock therapy" approach to economic transformation anyway...:)
Gotta chase and conquer the day.
Posted by Liliaak at 06:20 PM | Comments (1)
September 21, 2004
Second day of this journey
Well... now: when someone has a day as busy as mine, who can even take the time to think about the raw issue? Well I did not have time to think of it, but it was constantly on my mind, and in fact I did dread the hunger through the day. Maybe I should be more lenient with myself.. naaahh, I've been lenient all my life, now it's time for a real change. My birthday is coming up soon too, so I gotta look good and feel good.
Today I ate a bunch of fruit and a bunch of vegetables. As I was saying, I am no great cook, so I really envisage this as being a very very unsophisticated journey, cuisine-wise. I was thinking today, do people ever get bored while they are on raw food? A lady was mentioning on a website that she makes special sauces from seeds and eats them with carrots and celery. Sounds yummy, and sounds like I should get myself a raw "cook" book.
There are many thoughts in my mind and have to organize them. First, I did not really go into this without any preparation. I ate lightly this past weekend, and relatively healthy stuff. Healthy, as in the "vague" notion of healthy. But I did stick primarily to fruit juice and a few bits and pieces of cooked stuff. I do not really think that my body will undertake major, MAJOR changes. And I hope it does not revolt against this enterprise of mine, either.
Since yesterday I have had no major eruption of acne or anything, but there is a sore spot on my upper lip, now WHAT is THAT!? It feels like I bit myself by accident. That should go away, please, now. I've had no headaches either, and the only ones I might get are b/c I am not too good at hydrating myself (as in drinking plain water). I drink billions of juices, but not really water. They say the fruit alone should be able to provide all the water we need, so for ppl on fruit diets, water is not exactly necessary. They say many things, who can remember and take account of them all?
My sleeping has been quite good too and the scale showed a clear improvement, but I do believe it was triggered by my light eating over the weekend. I seem to be @ a significantly improved figure of 160 lbs. One would think that some miracle has happened. Well the secret unfortunately is that I lose weight Very Very Rapidly, and put it back on Equally Rapidly once I cease dieting. So this is an illusion, the fast weight loss. However, I shall not deny the fact that it's highly motivating too. Too bad that with weight loss comes no guaranteed happiness. Used to be younger and used to think so. And yet, when I was at my lowest, I was also the unhappy-most. In fact, let me write this correctly. At my lowest, I've had both my happy-most and happy-least moments. So in statistical terms, there is no correlation...
There is a beautiful website with amazing pictures by a lady called...Nora. Her transformation images are absolutely stunning. Very inspirational, too. Speaking of websites though, I must draw your attention to the links on the right side of this blog. They appear to be generated automatically, and last night there was a bunch of links to mood disorder support groups and stuff. Very very interesting selection mechanism. I think that the way this works is some search engine picks words randomly, and then matches them with the corresponding websites. Now: a very light reading of this diary entry would select: great, beautiful, happy, birthday, feel, hope, entertaining. So it'd better be that the links tonight be rising up to the challenge!!!
I am doing unjustice to Health Diaries by not entirely sticking to the healthy side of life. I must confess. I smoke. OOoops. That needs to be remedied. I mean, rawfoodist who smokes? Yuck! They say that while on a raw food diet, retarded addictions such as smoking (or coffee drinking, for that matter), will be decreasingly sustainable, and will vanish in time. That's something I really wish to believe. Otherwise I will have to wait for the day when a health scare will send me to the 'no-smoking' land, and it will take One Big Scare to achieve that.
This being said, enough for tonight, and leaving more impressions for tomorrow. Bottomline: this ain't easy, but it's not impossible either.
Posted by Liliaak at 11:33 PM | Comments (1)
September 20, 2004
The beginning of a neverending road
Nothing is more interesting than actually making vegetable juice. I mean – it’s understandable, one can always squeeze green peppers and celery, but spinach and dill? I, for one, did not think it was possible. How much water can there be in a bunch of dill? It’s like the thinnest vegetable I have ever seen. Well, apparently it works, and it also works with other leaves such as spinach, lettuce, etc. What a wonder nature is!
This was my first day on 90% raw stuff (some veggie juice, some apples)… and have been doing fairly well except that I obsessed about food and felt hungry through the day. But they say that it gets better after a while, so I am waiting for the ‘while’ to reveal itself to me: three days, seven days, three hundred seven days?
Well I am a terrible cook so I don't see myself 'cooking' any sort of fancy raw dishes (which I presume could be 'cooked', as in 'arranged' rather than cooked), so I will pretty much stick to very raw food (like in almost 'untouched', with the exception of a knife which is meant to bring it to an chewable size).
Now, the reason why I am interested in the entire raw affair is because it clearly is pretty much the smartest idea anyone can come up with. It leads to pure, undivided, perpetual health. That’s for sure… or at least, I strongly believe in that. I don’t know all that much about all the destructive effects of cooking food, but the theory is out there, and until the theory is found guilty, I will take the liberty to believe in it. Also, looking too much into theory at the expense of practice might not lead to the right decisions (yes, I do not like theories much... though they occasionally help). And since my inner voice tells me that this is right for me, I am going for it. I know it will not be easy, it might even get frustrating ('flu' symptoms and everything…) but it’s certainly worthwhile.
There is no other strategy that has made me feel generally Good before. Exercising has always worked, of course, but I would do it when I was mad; I was doing it to release all that negative energy, all that anger at certain people (so in other words I would just exercise when I got dumped!). Now, that’s not a good reason to exercise. Not sustainable either since getting dumped is not something I entertain thinking of as a 'habit'.
Furthermore, eating healthy stuff is by far the vaguest idea I’ve ever come across. Potatoes and meat were once considered healthy (several centuries ago, that is…) . Now, vegetables and fruit and whole wheat are considered healthy. Well, then, how come vegetarians don't look better (on average) than non-vegetarians? Or maybe they do and I've just missed it. I have been a vegetarian for as long as I can remember (perhaps... 6 years or so), and yet there have been times when my stomach ached because of the bad restaurant food, have been -- let's just say -- not exactly on the slim side, etc. So vegetariansm (or fishtarianism or whatever it's called) can't be the answer either.
Speaking of being slim. Yes, or rather no. I am not slim. I in fact weigh 165 lbs (edited, I'm afraid, I tried to avoid the pounds system since the numbers are higher than in kilograms! :)) and have decided that this is a beautiful round number that I am eager to forget. Rather, I want to feel better by carrying (considerably) fewer pounds, but not at the expense of feeling weak and lousy. I feel weak and lousy already, so something can't be right... Yes, I think that there is no other better option out there for me now than going raw. I am by all means convinced that this is the right strategy, and the right thing to do. Of course, I am thankful to those who have put up all the information on rawfoodism out there on the internet, which I have found and selectively read. It has been very helpful indeed.
In terms of how I shall structure this entire trip... don't know whether I shall be posting here daily (I hope I'll have the time!), or whether I shall write about what I eat, or what I feel or anythnig else... but this is, at least, the intent. If there is anyone else out there who is starting a similar enterprise, do let me know (perhaps you have a diary too, perhaps elsewhere?). All in all, I shall be around, I shall be writing, and reading. Will let you all know how this is unfolding...
Posted by Liliaak at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)
