Refined purpose and new focus

For the first time in 5 months, I feel led to blog! I have been too busy living to be online as much. I have been continuing to grow and continuing to eat some raw foods. I have been journaling more lately and see a therapist regularly. This has helped me grow tremendously this year. I can feel the changes and others have commented on them too. And there's much more to come.

Since last December, I have had green smoothies almost every day. I usually skip the weekends to give myself a break. Usually these are fruit, water, and greens, and sometimes other bonuses like green powders, chia seeds, slippery elm bark powder, etc. Sometimes I make green protein smoothies instead. With those, I leave out the fruit as my stomach doesn't seem to like fruit with such a high level of protein all at once. It took some work (my first creations were kind of gross!) but I've got those protein shakes down to tasting really good too. The last was kind of cherry cordial-like. Mmm!

The rest of the time, my diet's not "raw." I stay away from dairy and wheat with rare exceptions. They make me ill and no mind-over-matter positive thinking can keep them from leaving me at least mildly depressed. Why would I want to go back to feeling sad, lonely, tired, and apathetic? We made a vegan, gluten-free pizza at home the other day, with fresh home-made tomato sauce (which was way easier than I thought it would be, by the way), and it was quite probably the BEST pizza I've ever had. It was SO good.

I do need to get away from eating corn all the time - I know it bugs me too, at least in large amounts. And I have been reading more about the connections between gluten and soy intake and thyroid problems, so I'm reducing my soy intake too. I hardly eat soy anyway, so that's not hard for me.

In my efforts to achieve great health, I've focused on food and diet pretty exclusively for a couple of years. That has done me a world of good, and I've learned so much. I'm not going to drop the ball on it, but it's time for me to focus on some other things too:

• Overeating and fast eating: How much I eat and how I eat can be as what I eat. Eating too much "healthy" food, or gobbling it down too quickly, will leave me as tired and icky-feeling as an "unhealthy" food. I've long had an issue with overeating because I didn't want to see any food go to "waste," but I'm working on that. It's still a "waste" if it's making me feel sick, after all! I also need to get used to the idea that my small frame and small appetite means I don't need to take or eat as much as a 200-pound man or a marathon-runner. Also, I am trying to take the time to eat slowly and mindfully, remember to chew thoroughly and breath deeply. This makes a world of difference to my digestion! And if I'm eating more slowly, my body is better able to signal me to stop when I am full, reducing how often I overeat.
• Sleep: Ever felt like your life would be easier, like you could get so much more done, if you didn't have to sleep? I've felt that way sometimes. Couldn't I at least have to sleep less? But really, if I had to sleep less, I'd just feel I have to do even more. For as long as I can remember, I've slept too little during the week and tried to "catch up" on the weekends. The more I learn about health, nutrition, and healing, the more doctors I talk to and the more books I read, the more I learn that's all a bunch of hooey. Sleep is important, not just on the weekends, but every night. It's needed for health, disease prevention, concentration, intelligence, energy, digestion, beautiful hair and skin and weight loss. Want to look and feel great? Commit to getting enough sleep every night. I'm going to!
• Exercise: I've long being pretty lackadaisical about exercise. It's not that I'm entirely sedentary - I like to go on hikes a couple of times a month, some days I dance around the house when I'm feeling good, and I play games with my friends and my cats. But it's been over five years since I had a committed, regular exercise program and it's past due for me to do it again. Again, the more I read about health, the more I learn that exercise is not an option. It's essential. 

Focusing on diet is important - it really is a big, big part of health, probably the single biggest factor in disease causation, prevention, and healing - but it's not the whole picture. Exercise can do a LOT to either make up for or compliment your diet. You can get away with eating more crappy food if you exercise more... but eating crappy food means longer recovery times are required, too. But that, my friends, is a whole other post!

Back from a leave of...

And... I'm back.
It has been a long time since I last posted, I know, and I can't promise regular posting just yet. I had been avidly reading and blogging all winter, but toward the end I hit the winter-blues, and since then, I've been refocusing my time and energy to things offline. I am changing a lot of priorities mentally and slowly changing the manifestations in my life of these priorities. This has meant I had to focus my energy on things other than my diet. But things are coming back around again

I have been eating what I have felt like, and that's been pretty far from the gluten-free, corn-free, raw vegan diet I'd like to follow on a semi-regularly basis. Once I allowed wheat, dairy and corn back into my diet, the addictions reasserted themselves and I have not been able to resist bypassing all three for even one day. But chocolate is really bad - I realized that I am pretty thoroughly addicted to chocolate/sweets and they are a big part of how I cope with stress. Not good.

Emotionally, I am having a rough time. Depression sunk in midwinter and has been hard to beat back. Trying to stay optimistic, though. I know it is harder because of the crap food that I am eating - food that causes inflammation in the body and therefore fatigue, depression, and all that. But the weather is warming up and it's past time for me to go for a higher-raw diet again. This will, by itself, make a difference, but it is also not the only thing I am doing to improve my mood situation.

Oddly enough, I feel that I've been hesitant to go "whole hog" on the raw thing in part because I've been getting mixed messages from my body & my intuition, both. I simultaneously feel that high-raw-high-vegan (HRHV) is the best thing for my body, AND that I might need to integrate some animal products more after 9 years of vegetarianism. I have been eating raw cows' and goats' milk cheeses occasionally for a few months months now, and I don't think they are sitting with me very well. I have eggs occasionally, and those don't disagree with me, but they do feel heavy. So I introduced a little chicken, after research and buying only from sources I am OK with. I have, when eating it, intentionally let myself listen to what my mind, body, and conscience are telling me. And I have really mixed feelings about it... but they are not all bad. So I've had chicken a few times now... I'm not sure it's something I want to do often, but perhaps it will be something I do once a month or something like that. Or maybe it was just something I needed for now, and I can go back to eating more in alignment with my values soon. We will see.

So, I'm doing the six-week detox thing again. I've been listening to inspirational speakers and educational teleseminars. Also, I am spending the first week of June in New York, and I am looking forward to trying all sort of fantastic raw vegan restaurants there. Nothing like gourmet raw food that I didn't have to work for to get my inspired and back on track, right?

Day 3/4, and the monetary price of raw food

To start, yesterday's food intake:

Day 3:
a glass of fresh raw almond milk
a couple heaping spoonfuls of "Mock Salmon Pate" from Living on Live Food
most of a whole pineapple
more zucchini and nut "alfredo"
several flax crackers from Foods Alive with mock salmon pate
a slice of raw pie, a friend's creation
an apple

If it doesn't seem like I'm eating a ton, well... I guess I'm not. But I'm a pretty small person, so I didn't before, either - unless I was overeating, and I felt pretty awful when I stuffed myself to the gills, so I'm making a point not to do that now! But it would be awfully easy to do with those Onion Garlic flax crackers... MM!!
My husband was very helpful yesterday in getting me through the day. I hit a rough patch emotionally, and all that fresh almond milk didn't sit right with me, as I have some trouble digesting raw nuts and I forgot to take digestive enzymes beforehand to help. So I was sitting there, feeling sad and sick, and that last slice of homemade vegan gluten-free pizza looked so tempting. "It's pretty healthy, after all," I told myself. And I told this to my hubby, who said to me, "You told me you want to eat raw this whole month, and I said I will help you. I will go make you whatever raw dish you want, and I will support you and prepare food for you all month, if you DON'T eat that pizza."
And so I rested, let the nausea pass, and then I pigged out on a whole pineapple my sweetie cut up for me, because that's what I felt like eating. ;)
And my hubby is going to finish that pizza so it stops tempting me every time I open the fridge!

One of the criticisms of the raw food diet is that it is expensive, especially if you go for all organic produce, which is the best way to do it. (I do feel that healthy eating is often out of reach for the poor, but I do think there are many reasons for that, and that is a topic for another post.) I have found that the initial, upfront investments can be pricy, but only as much as you want them to be. I recently acquired a Vita-Mix and a dehydrator, which are pretty big monetary investments, but they are also more-or-less frills that help make the raw diet more interesting. As for myself, I want to do this raw thing 100% of the time (at least for now) and learn to make a lot of gourmet dishes, both so that it is easier for me emotionally at first and also so that I can make really attractive and delicious dishes to share with friends and family. Hence the investment. But eating raw doesn't require special equipment (you don't even need a stove, microwave, or cookware!) or a lot of money. Eating more raw food can be as simple as allowing yourself to eat your favorite fruit to your heart's content.
Emotionally, I had to get past that myself. When I was little, fresh fruit and veggies were a special snack, not an every-meal food, so mentally I've had to get past the idea that one apple a day is all I can have, or eating an entire 8-oz box of strawberries in one sitting is selfish, and other ideas like that.
Anyway, today I did the week's grocery shopping, equipped with my list of everything I will need for this week's planned meals. I also picked up some goodies - like the organic mango I'm munching on right now and some Synergy GT's Raw Kombucha - for lunch. My total was under $32. Now, I will still need more greens (less than $10 worth) later this week, and I have some of the staples, like spices, almond butter, and that sort of thing at home already, so if you were starting with a bare cupboard, one week would cost more, but most people aren't starting from nothing. You can transition - when you run out of Jiffy creamy PB, buy a jar of organic raw almond butter instead. The price is higher, but the flavor is really amazing!

How much are you spending on groceries this week? Why not considering skipping the ice cream or crackers this week and buying some fresh fruit or almond butter instead? Yum! For those of us who are not chronically poor or disadvantaged, what we buy at the supermarket is more an issue of priorities than it is of having food at all or not. What are your priorities?