Hi, I'm back. Things spiraled down for a while, and taking care of business trumped food issues.
The combination of dire financial straits and tooth pain from raw foods has forced me to revamp this experiment. As soon as I figure out how to do so, I will erase the previous entries from this blog, and I didn't want any regulars to pull a "Dude, where's your blog?!". The New Improved version of Out of the Frying Pan is this: rather than pick a raw percentage and hold to it (or try to), the focus will be on eating only whole foods, and I'll see whatever percentage of rawness emerges.
The reasons for this are that I can no longer afford to eat only raw foods, with fruits that cost $2 each and nuts that cost $25/lb. I am not chewing them up anyway, with my teeth hurting so much. Last week, as I stumbled into a tornado of activity to salvage my businesses, I didn't give a RIP about food, and ate whatever I could. Needless to say, I didn't choose an abundance of hard fibery food that takes an hour to chew! And sure enough, my teeth stopped hurting.
I also went ballistic on coffee again, and by only the end of the week, the magic had worn off. It sure was fun to fly high and kick out some serious work, but the evidence is pretty obvious that I don't have the reserves to burn my candle at both ends much longer.
And after all, my "trigger" foods that I gorge on are all refined, and I still don't fully believe that mildly steamed soup is that bad for my health.
I had sanctimonious ideas to start on Memorial Day, throwing out any leftover refined little devils; however, when I went out to pick greens from the garden that has been neglected in a week of rain, I discovered to my horror that most of my starts have been chomped by slugs or are covered with aphid eggs -- GRRRRR!! Instead of being able to eat a significant protion of my meals by now as I'd planned, I'm still going to be reliant upon grocery foods. It just felt too wasteful to dump whole wheat rolls and frozen Marsala burgers in the trash.
So the day's food looked like this: tea with lots of yerba mate, green smoothy with garden greens and two messy mangoes; vegan oatmeal-cheese with home dehydrated onions and green powder, on Manna bread with half a long English cuke; the two Indian burgers, openfaced on a wheat English muffin with mashed avocado and most of a bag of mache, a wonderful green that grows in little rosettes.
I also intend to quit eating while watching the telly, but after a day of labor and stress, I was still physically hungry and splurged with my favorite olive/cahsew mix. Not bad.
However, today I have had another smoothy and an avocado-based salad with more Manna, and by the end of the long meal, my teeth started to hurt again. Soup tonight, then ... and so far, still a little enthusiastic about a fresh start, I am fine without the exciting foods I had gotten used to again so easily.

Gaaaaaah -- I can't believe it, after days and days of 80, 90, even 100% raw days, my April tally only averaged out at 69%!! How the freak did that happen?! So I petered out at the end, and had a day or two of, like, 10% -- after so many days of acute rawness, I am frankly baffled that two or three days could pull down the whole average so drastically. Looks like I'm donating money again this month; this time it goes to earthquake victims in Tibet.
Why Tibet specifically? Because it was a Tibetan retreat that I went to this past weekend. I only stayed for one day; it's not my style and I got very little out of hours of chanting mantras in a foreign language whose meanings are shaky to me. (And yes, I managed to take raw food for lunch, no problem.) The Empowerment ritual itself was interesting; but afterwards, I don't really feel any different. But I like the monk who teaches, and his area of Tibet was devastated, so they profit from my laxness.
This same monk is a highly trained healer in their tradition, so I went today to get a "pulse" reading. This entails the monk taking my pulse from both wrists, and diagnosing from the subtle feelings. I'd had it done last year, and was eager to see if much had changed.
No, not much. I still have low blood volume, still shouldn't eat sweets or drink coffee (see, he knows his stuff!), and still had back pain. This time, however, he added that my uterus is weak and I have a slight "wind" unbalance. Well, at least it seems my lungs strengthened up from the last time, when he gave me medicines for it.
The problems are, though, that he comes from a heavy meat-eating culture (there are no vegetables in Tibet for half of the year -- it's practically like living on a glacier, for Pete's sake), and that's how they traditionally cure low blood volume. He also recommends milk and eggs for my condition, and here's the corker: low fruit, and almost NO RAW FOOD!!
So on the one hand, I could say, Yaaaay, no more of this stupid experiment, the doctor says so!! Get-out-of-jail-free card!
But on the other hand, much as I like and respect this Rinpoche (teacher), I'm not about to start eating factory-farmed animal products unless it's truly life-or-death (my life, that is). But whom do I believe about the raw aspect? I certainly have not been my twinkle-toed best when it comes to energy on this diet. But I have reduced gas pain, a bit of joint pain, have better skin, and have fewer Moontime symptoms.
Yet a large part of that could simply be from reducing refined products, not so much just rawness. If I could go a month truly without any refined junk in my "free" 25%, that would be a good way to test if my body responds better to high-raw-with-a-little-crap, or to med/high-raw-with-no-crap. I've already started May off with a cooked binge, because I got really freaked out about money again and have been trying to plan and organize like a fiend, not able to spend a lot of time around food. But it's still early enough that I could try this little experiment-within-an-experiment. Sigh.
So much as part of me would love to abandon this project and just examine what a third of a year's results look like, I feel I want to go on with it. I am not Tibetan, and do not really understand what things like "too much wind" mean; I think it works well for them and I admire that, but I'm not quite ready to shift to a foreign healing system mid-stream. Maybe next year.
I also spent a whopping $567 on food in April, up from $433 in April. This is not good. Again, a lot of it multiplied when I ate out several times in the last few days; the wonderful Chinese glut in Seattle alone was about $30, which is more than my electric bill was for the month! Why do all the raw "experts" keep insisting that this gets cheaper? Nothing costs as much as organically grown produce and nuts, and I have yet to notice any reduction in the volume I desire. If that's a difference between 100% and 75% (or 69%), so be it.

Everything was going so well -- then out of the blue, I crashed and burned. One day, after several weeks of averaging 80% raw or so, I was just so tired that I pissed the morning away, and decided that a glut at the Indian buffet would perk me up. Instead, it opened the doors of hunger and I became voracious -- I had three plates overflowing. Yes, half of each was salad, but I couldn't stop taking halves of naan bread, I simply couldn't get ENOUGH.
Needless to say, I hardly perked up; instead, the rest of the day was also pissed away, reading scary, sad news of human rights abuses and environmental degradation in Mother Jones News. I intended to get up early and get right back on the smoothie routine, not to let a little slip distract me, but I still don't have my sense of taste back, and the thought of sewage-sludge-textured smoothies, or mealy sour fruit (the SAME damn ones for four months now!), was unthinkable. Another low-raw day followed the first, with the grand finale being a trip to the coop for chocolate cake. At least it was vegan and gluten-free, but as I headed towards the line, I had that freaky form of paranoia again: it's not enough!! So I added a bag of potato chips to boot, and that was dinner, as I thought about all the refugees in the world who had nothing at all for dinner, which perversely made ME even hungrier.
That tipping seems to have portended a little crisis; I got an unexpected bill this morning, large enough to take all the money I needed to do another bout of advertising next month, and suddenly the seriousness of my financial situation hit me. Having to visit my mother, after my brother mindlessly told her a check she'd sent him bounced -- which in her Alzheimer's mind translated into OMG, I have no more money at all!! -- was the straw that broke this camel's back. I stopped at the coop to get a cup of mate tea, and they were out; nothing for it but to get coffee instead. I at least got half decaf, and it neither tasted very good nor gave my semi-panicked mind the longed-for perk. I have passed the day in a fog of fear about how I am going to support myself for the rest of my life, and the answers are not cheerful. In comparison, suddenly this little experiment seems trite, and I don't even care that much today that I am still on a cooked-food bender.
I'd just sent money in to register for a Buddhist retreat this weekend dealing with healing (especially for professionals), deciding at the last moment that it would shift me back to my recently-preferred raw state and therefore would be worth the cost plus another weekend without income or time to do chores. Now I'm sorry I committed the money and time; I can only hope the information comforts me somehow. I have no time before it starts tonight to make lunches; what will I take?!

So one more important piece of info was gleaned from Dr Tel-Oren's pH lecture: I decided to try to go cold-turkey off ALL caffeinated drinks. And you know what? I had been harboring a cold, which happens to me about as often as I get invited to the Oscar awards, and when it struck, I just used the misery of constant congestion to sort of slip in any withdrawal symptoms, too.
So today is my tenth day without any caffeine, and so far I'm doing fine. I get my usual energy crashes around 4-5:00 p.m., but last night I had a little perk and stayed up as late as a normal grown-up! Probably in part because I had a carob-date-coconut water shake, a green salad with miso/pumpkin seed butter dressing, and flash-steamed broccoli with half a can of refried black beans -- which I did not know had jalapeno peppers in it, and it all did not combine too well. I was a bit acid-stomachy, but I had enough moxie to practice my dumbek drum!
Today has been a mixed bag so far. For the first time in weeks, I just did not feel like a smoothy first thing in the morning. I blended blueberries and an old apple, no excitement. Then I took out a batch of dehydrated green pea snacks I tried, and they are fabulous! But the "casserole" style salad I had, from avocados, an overwintered beet from my garden flash-steamed with its greens and the stalks of an old bok choy, was GROSS -- I added the last of a commercial mix of fresh seaweeds that was too salty, even when washed off, and I think it was going old to boot. I tried to pick out the juicy bok choy, but most of it went down the drain. And the freakin' avo's were perfect, too!
But I am less discouraged than I would have been by such a failure several months ago, because I am really happy overall right now with my raw level and its results. No, I'm not going to up and run the Boston Marathon without even training, but my skin is more clear, I'm back on a more decent sleep pattern, and -- maybe just because it's getting nicer outside -- I am usually not feeling as much "deprivation" anxiety around rawness.
However, I DID stop at my favorite restaurant in Seattle when I attended the World Rhythm Festival last weekend, and glutted my heart out on vegan Chinese -- no regrets!!

So what happened? The surly guard told us to pull over and go into the building, and I had a premonition this wasn't going to be good. I asked them if Dr. T could just go on without me -- after all, he had his passport -- and the good Canadian got almost belligerent, insisting that BOTH of us had to go inside.
What followed was a nightmare. Under the supervision of rude 26-yr-olds with guns, we were interrogated as to our purpose there, then told to basically sit down and shut up. We watched as several of the thugs put on what appeared to be a mild version of a space suit and proceed to search every iota of the rental car ... taking a good two hours or so to do it, during which they would not let me go to the car and get my cell phone to tell the coordinator that we were detained.
Finally the "investigation officer" told us that we had been chosen for a random check, and that we could go, after he formally advised me that the rules state that one must carry certification of citizenship (DUH!!). But by then, it was too late, and we had missed the lecture. And all those nice people had sat there and waited ...
So how's that for making a good impression on your version of The Pope?! Yup, that's right, I not only wasted his afternoon by making a non-sophisticated mistake, I caused him to miss his scheduled talk and patient treatments afterwards, pissing away his predicted income to boot. It seems small potatoes that I missed the lecture too.
You see, I for one do not believe for a New York minute that our search was "random"; I think I triggered their interest by not carrying documentation. Maybe they were jonsin' for a reason to nab a man with a Mid East name in a rental car -- imagine their excitement if they thought they were about to finally get to use some of their advanced training to catch a terrorist!! And how deflated they must have felt when it was just a bumpkin American with a mild-mannered doctor going to talk about health stuff at the library!
I can't quite bring myself to feel sorry for the jerks, though. It gave me pause for thought: all the political prisoners in the world probably go through a more hellish version of what we went through. The detainees at Guantanamo Bay, most of them do not have any hard evidence against them at this point, and now I can better imagine the utter shock of being arrested, blindfolded, flown to God-knows-where, and not being told anything ... for years. Imagine the added pain of knowing that your wife will start worrying when you don't arrive home on time, and that your boss will have no way of knowing that you didn't just blow off your job. Nobody will tell you anything, and just for fun let's add the documented feature of hearing your comrades-in-bewilderment being tortured.
Kind of puts missing a health lecture in perspective, doesn't it? But I can't help thinking that if those sarcastic young people with petty authority would consume fruit instead of the mocha-javas-with-whipped-cream they passed out (as we stood there in line, unhelped), not only would they be more aware in response to a REAL threat instead of yo-yoing on the Sugar Blues, but perhaps with their pH levels less acidic, they could actually treat visitors to their fair land as human beings.
Dream on, Skya.

What a surreal adventure I had this weekend. And if it wasn't for raw foods, it never would have happened ...
At last it was time for my Raw Food Hero, Dr. Adiel Tel-Oren, to come lecture again in our city. The topic, pH. levels in body systems, is so relevant to so many things that I'd been talking about it to people for weeks, and thought a lot of clients and friends were interested. As his local coordinator, I'd survived several last-minute switches in the organization of this tour, but all in all I felt prepared.
Then, one by one, other supporters mentioned that they would be out of town this weekend. I started to worry a bit; as a new city on his tour, we're still sort of on probation, to see if we can generate enough of an audience to make it worth his while to stop here. And on top of that, I'd offered my own office for his use to see patients, and as the weekend was approaching, suddenly I realized that it was soooo not-spring-cleaned! I mean, this to me is like Joe Blow Catholic getting a visit from The Pope, and I had solidified coconut oil on the floor, a year's worth of dust in the high window tracts, and I just happened to find a CD tower at the thrift shop that I've been needing ... but it's so ugly, do I dare take time to paint it?
Of course I painted it, this is The Pope!! Now, to artfully rearrange all the stuff to accommodate the new, reeking-of-death-toxins spray-painted piece. Hmmm, somehow with less stuff it actually looks MORE cluttered ... but I don't have time to worry about that now, because the bomb just dropped: the friends he'd planned to stay with are also going to be out of town and now I get to host him for the night!
OH MY GOD, I get The Pope, in my dirty, dumpy little dive! I have 24 hours to do a reality-show makeover. But dang it, I don't have the $100,000, nor the crew of round-the-clock carpenters, nor the professional designer that those guys have. I have a vacuum, a dandelion digger, and a sponge. Big breath, in and out. On your mark, get set, GOOOOOO!!
Reader, I pulled it off. Somehow, I managed to get my office, my yard, and my cat-hairy house in a decently presentable shape, as well as buy enough food and whip up a Pie-In-A-Blender, which I didn't even take time to taste. Not only that, but I managed to get myself and all the paperwork to the lecture hall in time to meet-and-greet the throngs. Exactly on time.
But at 6:45, as I feverishly folded brochures, no throngs were yet forthcoming. Okay, after 24 hours of sheer pandemonium in my world, this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. How could all those people agree that this info would be so relevant to their health and then not show up?!
6:50. Nobody. The next city's coordinator called, needing to speak to Dr. T, and I had to explain that I was sitting alone in an empty room. 6:55, no audience nor lecturer. Well, this is a good exercise in letting things go. I actually can see humor in the situation. A little bit.
6:59, and suddenly everyone shows up at once! Oh, how beautiful each and every health nut was to me, I loved them all! Oh, thank you for forsaking a beautiful spring Friday evening to learn about your body and how to make it work better! And there's our star, who due to such a hectic travel schedule, is usually a bit late anyway. Whew!
We had about ten people, which was not a large crowd, but the lecture was so fascinating (to me, and seemingly to them too) that if even one person changes some part of his/her eating habits to reduce acidifying their systems, it was worth it. Yes, the spray paint, the crookedness of my certificates that got slapped into thrift shop frames, the straining of my back muscles to vacuum corners that I didn't even know could be vacuumed, it was worth it.
Until I got the bright idea to accompany Dr. T to his next stop, in Vancouver, Canada. It was his first time speaking there, and he was speaking on a topic I'd missed, so it suddenly made sense to go help out, since that's what another coordinator did for me on my first run, and her kindness kept me sane and focused. And this new coordinator hadn't even met him before, so it seemed like a good idea at the time.
So after seeing a few clients and finishing the "Pie" (which turned out fine), we set off with plenty of time to allow for crowds at the border.
BORDER ... oh shit, I forgot they require a flippin' birth certificate to cross into Canada now! Oh no. We were almost to the border, no time to turn around and go back. So what happens if you don't have that, or a passport?
Gulp. I guessed we'd find out. I told the doctor that he could just leave me there and continue to the lecture if necessary. It would be achingly frustrating, like a Catholic knowing that The Pope was giving a mass just down the street but she couldn't go because she had a freakin' cold, but I would not let him be late on my account.
Late? You don't know the half of it. Tune in tomorrow to find out what happened ...

Well, here's an interesting twist. I did indeed fix my red pepper dip on Friday night, and had plenty of time Saturday morning before the retreat to make up a nice lunch: leftover orange and spinach smoothy, the dip with sliced turnip, and a salad of mashed avocado, spices, celery, sunchoke, and romaine lettuce. I was feeling so chipper, on top of knowing that I would be sitting for hours in meditation all day, that I took myself out for a little jog -- oh, what a perfect spring morning, how good it was to tuddle along at my little snail's pace and anticipate an inspiring weekend ...
... oops, went too far, got so sweaty I had to shower, and got addlepated about being late. Buddhism is one of the only things I do where the events actually tend to start on the scheduled time, and no doubt about it, I was late.
So I promptly drove off WITHOUT MY LUNCH, gaaaaaah!!!
Now, it's sort of ironic that in order to go study mindfulness, I got so stressed out that I messed up such a basic element of life, especially after putting so much time and thought into it. I could sort of laugh about it, in an uptight sort of way. But I also had to make an instant decision: do I turn around and go back to get it, making myself at least ten minutes late? Or do I just go with the flow and buy something at the coop?
I was so upset about being late that I let it go, and bought strawberries, dates, braised greens and a gluten-free roll at lunchtime. It cost almost $10, and I was a bit sad as I thought of all the vitamin C leaking out of my fresh smoothy. But it was what it was.
And at least I had the next day's lunch all ready to go. I've noticed recently that food is starting to all taste a bit "off", and I'm not sure what's going on, if it's a new hormonal symptom of peri-menopause, or if my body is telling me it's time to fast a bit, or maybe even that my tastebuds are changing somehow. I was disappointed to find that the food I'd put so much energy into really didn't taste that good. Orange and spinach is my favorite smoothy, but after a day in the fridge, it was quite flavorless.
Fortunately, the retreat itself was very inspiring, and I maintained the most constant levels of awareness (as in, being aware that I am aware) that I've experienced in a long time. Of course, it's easy in such an environment: two days of essentially no phones, no superfluous talking, no distractions. No book or videos while I eat, how strange!! Nothing like focusing on food that doesn't taste all that hot.
But I also feel deep in my gut, so to speak, that this moment-by-moment training mind to be aware of itself is the only ticket for me out of food-addiction hell, or at least it is the most important component of true change. After it was over, I spent the rest of the daylight gardening, and was tired. I finished the red pepper dip, but had it with the last of some whole wheat English muffins that I had for my "treat" food, topped with cucumbers. Fine and dandy, after a day of all-rawness. But as I watched my telly, I felt the daily craving for junk food, for FUN food coming up, predictable as sunrise. And this time I totally felt the craving, no reduction of desire at all -- but I had a little "space", as it were, around the mental anguish of it all. I consciously decided that I did not want the consequences of eating too much, nor eating, say, potato chips. I also saw that I did not want health food; fruit sounded cold and nasty. And that was what was arising; the conditions were there and could not be taken back, and so what? Yes, I experienced a mild suffering. And it did eventually pass.
And I helped it along by going back to finish the rest of the bread and dip, hahahah!

Wow, no time to really do a full treatise -- I just finished a long workday and I am attending an all-weekend Buddhist retreat for the next few days.
It would be much easier to just go out to lunch at the coop, which is just down the street from our sangha's center, but I have been really high-raw the past few days and I don't want to blow it, in case the deli does not have the raw or raw-ish selections. A full day of meditating and studying is actually quite hard work, and I just don't feel like a bowl of fruit will cut it. So I am trying to plan what to take for my lunches that will go down quickly enough, but have enough calories that I won't get hungry. We have a full hour for lunch, but I am such a slow eater to start with, and in meditation everything tends to get slower -- I will be hard put to pack in enough food in an hour that I won't get hungry again by 2:00!
So I'll make two smoothies when I get up (man, that'll feel early!) and take one. I'd like to make my usual red pepper/cashew dip and take sliced turnip and Manna bread, but I'm starting to fade tonight and I still have to make dinner. If I don't manage that treat, I'll have to get up even earlier and make a salad with mashed avocado and spices as dressing ... and what else? That won't be enough. I made my signature pie-in-a-blender (orange, apple, pear, spices, soaked almonds, and carob) but used banana instead of a pear, and it SUCKS!! I really don't like bananas that much, and that's all I taste in this batch, but it's what I have. If I really punk out, I can take that and an Asian pear as the dipping medium.
Or if worse comes to worst, I can always get a boring expensive green salad and fruit and the coop ... and hope I can resist if they have Almond Udon noodles. Or, God forbid, cake.

I'm getting sketchy about entries; I blame a sudden dearth of activities that are distracting me. Of course, that's part of the whole dilemma of diet-change -- it's really hard to find time to do new habits!
This week, for instance, it's time once again to coordinate the local lecture for the fabulous raw foodist Dr. Tel-Oren, which has so far entailed a last-minute schedule change, needing all four printer colors changed out to make fliers, and informing everyone who has expressed interest over the past few months. So far, so good ...
But like clockwork, my mother had another credit card snafu that has so far sucked up two half-days. The frustration of dealing with a multinational corporation that has been nothing but inept in my experiences (Chase Bank), with such blunders as refusing to tell me where my mother's new credit card is because they don't have my Power of Attorney -- while I am staring at a fax sheet that verifies they received it back in June of 2009, in addition to the copy the local branch made of my original that is also not in their records -- has led to a few meals out that I did not plan. I got stuck in situations that took longer than anticipated (by several hours) and I was unwilling to stop in the middle of a cold, rainy day doing things I despise and buy messy produce and eat it in my car.
So I tempered the damage as best I could: I had the lunch buffet at the Indian restaurant and ate a good 50% of the bulk of my meal as salad. I've been hanging pretty tightly with the new fruit-before-anything breakfast regime, but to kick out multiple walk-in clients, delivering 40 fliers around town, as well as focusing on applying for a totally new credit card for my mom (which nowadays is almost akin to taking out a second mortgage), I have been sneaking in coffee later on some mornings. Did I really have a spell when the stuff didn't appeal to me?! Wow, that was short-lived.
In spite of the stresses, I think I have only dipped below 50% raw on one day so far this month, and most days are within the limits. My most prevalent issue has been excessive tiredness, which I hope is resulting from several weeks of poor sleep. That in turn has led to excuses for coffee, which undoubtedly does not help the sleep issues, and so it goes. I tell myself as soon as THIS is over, then as soon as THAT is over, then I will try going coffee-free again and see if that helps; but so far, some unforeseen problem pops up just as I am contemplating if it is possible to function without chemical help -- go figure!
But I was so exhausted last weekend that I crashed hard and had to cancel plans at the last moment that I had been looking forward to all week, disappointing both myself and a friend; this after a pretty decent raw intake. I almost never succumb to virus-type 'sicknesses', as I've mentioned, but as I sat in my chair like a zombie, unable to concentrate on a book, I felt nothing but ill. That sludgy, semi-conscious feeling of not caring about anything, just wanting to close my eyes more than I want to have fun, is indeed a sickness that I suspect it's time to start taking more seriously. But first, I'm going to ride out the lovely coffee I had this morning ...

Well, I have not totalled up this month's stats, but I suspect it will be close; I might eat another donation (no pun intended). The frustrating lesson is that the month started off a bit rocky, but then ironed out into solid 75% plus every day; just because my habits changed for the better, I cannot undo the damage of earlier times, which sort of reflects my overall dilemma. If only I could have understood as a young person what sort of foundation I was laying when, on top of the Standard American Diet my mother fed me , I added years of candy and fast food, with a side helping of vomiting half of it back up for a few years!
But it has now been a quarter of a year of this experiment, and time to reflect on what is going on. Thanks to Mr. Van Orden's lecture, I now start every day with a green smoothie, and a lot of the black circles under my eyes have already disappeared. After truly sleep-deprived nights, I will still indulge in something caffeinated, but only after the REAL food has had a chance to do its thang.
Last night, after an almost 100% raw day and a session of meditation with my sangha, I have no clue what hit me, but I stopped for an O'doul's and potato chips! I then did not sleep well, although I cannot assume it was only the junk food and the lateness of the hour at which I ate it that did all the damage -- at the least, it did not help matters. But I resisted a true sugar glut, which is good. I think I can honestly say that most things I eat, no matter if raw, junk, or some of both, I at least think about what I am doing and if there are even marginally better options that would hit the same craving-button.
Thanks to Dr. Tel-Oren's detox lecture, I now keep my big clunky air purifier running 24/7. Thanks to Mother Nature, I am squeezing in more exercise here and there; I bought a second-hand jump rope and was gifted a lovely soccer ball, so even if I don't have a lot of time and don't want to get sweaty, I can go jump 50 jumps and get a flash-workout (50 jumps -- try it!).
Other things have not particularly improved. My rosacea skin condition has not changed a bit, really. Both my hands and face have even more dry skin, in spite of coconut oil being slathered on multiple times a day, and decreased use of forced-air heat as spring comes on. And I am mortified that I'm still winded after only 50 jumps of a rope!!
But overall, I believe that when I hold steady at around 75% raw, I get benefits well worth the extra cost and time. With gardening season coming on, the financial cost will go down a bit but time cost will increase. I know from past experience and common sense that eating raw in the summer is so much easier than the winter that I anticipate the ride to be smooth sailing for the next quarter -- barring some unforeseen circumstance like a tragedy or a love affair. But then, if it's unforeseeable, I'm not going to worry about it now! Keep up the good work, Skya! : )

I rode my wake-up-with-a-smoothy enthusiasm all week, just gobsmacked every morning that I can get up and function without tea. The last few days have been rocky, though, as I had a bad-sleep night and the effects are reverberating for days. I get so tired by afternoon that all I can do after work is slouch into a chair or bed and read; when the sun is out, I feel so guilty doing "nothing" that it plunges me into a mild depression, which makes me feel worse, and so down goes the spiral.
This week, when it happened I had a cup of tea (mixed herbal with a little yerba mate) which was nice, and I took a walk another time, which was even better. But yesterday I got so tired of being tired that the moroseness won; a perfect spring day went to waste. I got my mother's taxes out of the way, and that was about all I could accomplish. I tried to get enthused, I really tried, but when I poked my sleep-deprived head out the door it was so windy that I couldn't cope with exercising and shivering at the same time, and I was so nice and warm and clean from my morning shower that I didn't want to ruin the feel by getting sweaty indoors.
And as usual, as I crashed in my bed with my eyelids at half-mast, I let myself imagine all the happy people out there flying kites, jogging without knee pain, puttering around the garden in cheerful oblivion of the wind, getting ready for a nice spring weekend. The contrast of feeling "sick" in bed, without looking forward to having a sweetie come home and ask what we would do this weekend, was too pathetic. Not to mention, my teeth have been hurting like mad from the minuscule berry seeds in the smoothies; there was nothing for it but to haul out and drive to the store for comfort food.
The only part I'm proud of is that when the grocery down the street proved to have stopped carrying Tofutti Cuties, the only vegan dessert in the whole store, I didn't go into full melt-down. I got mad, fumed a minute, then realized there was nothing I could do except A) buy a bar of high-cacao chocolate, which was succedaneum I did not want, or B) drive to the next store. Feeling like a spoiled princess as I thought of African refugees who walk miles just to carry their own water, I got back in my car and drove to the next store. There I discovered organic asparagus on sale for $3/lb and frozen berries on sale for $3/bag, so the trip was salvaged from being just a junk-food run. But just as I thought I would get over this hump, I did not sleep well again LAST night, which means two more days of sludgy not-caring. I know that if I had the money, I could go out and do something active and novel and fun, but I do not have any spare money now and I can't get happy enough from the no-cost varieties like jogging on sore knees, or throwing a frisbee for myself. I'll look at this need-for-novelty in more depth this lonely spring weekend and see what that's all about.

I went to a lecture by Tim Van Orden, a raw food runner, and it was just what I needed to jump-start my enthusiasm. This month has been driven by hormones, and once the Time of the Moon passed, I found myself naturally gravitating more to raw foods. The time change and shift of season by calender did not help, but hey, now it's spring and the loopiness has passed.
But when I heard that extra something in the vibes of this speaker's voice, and felt positive energy radiating from his fit body/mind, I suddenly remembered why I'm doing this! The lecture was about reaching peak performance for athletes; as a martial artist I was very interested. What got to me, though, was that this fellow basically up and went from a sack of chronic fatigue to a competition athlete -- in five short years!
Now, I have been dabbling in this lifestyle for about eight years now, and I am nowhere near peak performance. But that's because I have never been too consistent. This lean, keen, running machine IS consistent, and naturally his results are consistent. How much more obvious of an example could I hope for?
The most important info I gleaned is actually a fact that I'd had presented to me before, but somehow forgotten: our livers fun on fructose, a fruit sugar, which is what converts to brain fuel, and after a night of sleep during which you repair your busted stuff, that liver is hungry. And if you don't feed it, your body has no choice but to start yanking fuel from other places -- like muscle mass! I won't bore you with the details -- this is not a scientific paper and you can go research all this yourself -- but suffice it to say that for some reason, this time that image clicked. Just that morning, I'd rationalized going out for coffee: there's my starving liver, and I dump burned toxic bean residue into my gut for it to deal with! And then nothing else for hours. Gaaaaaah!!
Here's the part even I can't quite believe. The next morning, I got up and DID NOT WANT COFFEE!! Not only that, I didn't want tea, either -- all I wanted was to dump a green smoothy into that belly and imagine my liver smiling, Aaah, thanks Skya, you figured it out. So that's exactly what I did, and to my surprize I was every bit as woken-up by the nutrients as I usually am by caffeine!! I went the whole day just fine, and I have so far done the same today.
OMG, could it be that I have just shucked off a habit that's started my day for over 30 years, just like that, instantly?! Regardless of chemical arguments, the amount of mental energy I have expended worrying over my caffeine consumption has been significant enough that if I can just stop craving it -- instantly! -- then I am freed from a powerful addiction. It's too soon to guarantee anything, but I honestly don't want the stuff, it does not even sound good right now. Talk about peak performance!!

I know all experience is supposed to be just how you perceive it, so it should work that to enjoy "health" foods, all I need to do is perceive that I enjoy it. Sounds easy. I tried it this morning with the last of a fat-free split pea soup I had made; I picked a bunch of overwintered cress from my garden and imagined the spice of it complimenting the sweetness of the yams in the soup, how nice and warm it would be and how full I'd feel, priming the pump of my mind to enjoy it, even though the soup was pretty dull, and a bit slimy with added uncooked seaweed.
In my effort to keep the greens fairly "raw", I just added them to the hot soup, took it off the stove, and covered it to steam for a while. The little suckers didn't cook down at all, which I thought was great, hey look, I'm going to get the best of both worlds! What a positive frame of mind I was in, just like how it's supposed to work! Boy, this will taste good AND have the majority of the benefits of fresh raw greens. I can have this every day ... this can replace my cravings for blueberry pancakes ... sure, I can do high raw easily ...
Gaaaaaaah, it tasted like crap!! The cress, although nicely warmed and softened a bit, was so spicy that it hurt my mouth a little, and no amount of altering my "perception" could persuade me to enjoy the sensation. Yuck, my stomach still feels upset from it an hour later. It was a good experiment, and it works well with other greens, but this one that was so easy to grow and is so hardy makes me sick. Guess I'll stick with the expensive green smoothies for now.

I'm finding new ways to manipulate my data, since there is no hard way of determining the exact "rawness" factor of foods. If I eat a smoothy alone, it's 100% raw; that's easy. But if I have, say, a bowl of soup half an hour later, which might be only 20% with its raw accoutrements, I can include it in the same meal and the average is thus 60%. Eating a few bigger meals means fewer numbers to average the day's take, while if I had to use both of the entries in the above example as separate, then I end up dividing the day's mini-meals by five or six, and the total is lower. I've found myself doing both, with foods an hour or so apart, and this gets wonky.
This has been exasperating, as I feel like I have been sacrificing this month while my daily averages can't seem to get above 60% or so. Granted, I haven't been "sacrificing" as much as in my gung-ho first month; if I want Chocolate Decadence before I can bear the chore of hours of filing, I'm going to do it (and I did!). The only way out of this would be to create a strict menu-guideline, with everything I ate standardized in its proportions and calculated to a set degree of rawness, that is NOT going to happen. This ain't Weight Watchers!!
So I'll muddle through with my guesstimates, and, like my budget, try not to get too wrapped up in the figures. I'm trying to capture the spirit of raw dieting, and so far it is much more elusive than expected when I have to be honest and write about it. But I can say that after half a tub of Decadence yesterday, I had a perk and later a crash; today I indulged by having a date-carob-coconut water shake, which tasted almost as good and so far has had just as good a perk. The test will come later, if I have a crash or not. Tune in tomorrow to see!

I had a reality check coming out of the movies. I rarely go to a theater, and when I do it's usually to the small independent moviehouse where I am a member -- that means discounted popcorn, and they have olive oil and nutritional yeast to put on it, which I rarely resist. This time, however, I had snuck in a chocolate bar -- cooked, not raw -- to have something to really look forward to, and to fit the theme of the animated short films being shown. I ended up trading candy for popcorn with my neighbors, so we all got the best of both worlds, and the films were wonderful, laughs all around. I sure had a blast!
But as I approached my car, shivering as the temperatures plummeted, I saw a homeless man settling down to sleep on a brick bench under a glaring spotlight, the type they were using as torture to keep "enemy combatants" awake at Guantanamo Bay in last week's filmfest of human rights abuse. I don't know why this particular man got to me; it's not as if I am unaware of our local homeless population, nor do I usually pretend not to see them as I walk or drive past, and I make an effort to at least smile at them, if I don't have cash to help. After all, I have almost been there myself.
Maybe it was how quickly it was getting really cold. Maybe it was the mind-numbing differential between my immediate happiness and his immanent suffering. Maybe it was the sort of emotional caricature, the way he resembled one of the puffy, cute Wallace & Gromit characters I'd just been laughing at, as his layers ballooned out, which was not funny at all here. But something snapped and I stared: this is a human being about to freeze his nuts off.
I literally stopped and asked myself what I could do to help this person, whose face was totally hidden by the pursed sphincter of his hood, obliterating his humanity from the still-mirthful movie crowd and the bar-hopping college kids. I did not have enough money to send him to a motel. Food would not shield him from the now-bitter cold. Short of inviting him home, I could do nothing.
I felt really, really bad as I, like the nice people around me, got into my car and drove away, doing nothing. I realized several blocks away that I could have offered him the blanket I line my hatchback with, but then it's so thin that I doubt it would be worth the space it would take up in his cart. But I also watched myself tell myself that, rather than turn around and ASK him if he would like it. It was as if I was an automaton, conditioned to do the same ol' thing, just drive home and offer a prayer, as if that would really keep his fingers warm.
By the time I got home, the situation felt a bit surreal to me, how all of us just walked by, being free to excuse ourselves that it isn't our problem, they have shelters for "those" people, he's probably drunk, I only brought enough money for drinking and dancing and I worked hard for it, I deserve a good time. And what tipped me over the edge was the knowledge that if he had been, say, a little lost poodle, shivering and whining, most people would have interrupted their revelry to help him -- but not a human being!!
And I had to see myself in that category. Unacceptable.
I hit on the best thing, in my opinion: I took the big foam pad I had, to at least cushion him from the stone. I grabbed half the bills from my "giveaway" jar and drove back to the corner, in a sort of daze. I prattled on in my head, a soliloquy worthy of Plato, examining just why I and everyone else accept it as normal to consider bringing a stranger home out of the cold as completely ridiculous behavior. Why, he might be mad, he could hurt me! He might steal possessions and run away! He might smell up my garage or office or spare room!
Or, God forbid, he might ask to come back again. Or he might ask for a ride back into town the next morning. He might tell me his name and story and suddenly he won't be a shapeless mass of down-filled parkas with a rusty cart of carefully balanced plastic bags, but he'll be someone I know. I'll have to care what happens to him, whether he is mad or a thief or smelly from lack of available showering facilities.
He did not respond to my timid greetings, nor my mousy offering of the pad. Of course, he would have to have the ability to tune out the public domain, wouldn't he, to stay even partially sane and to be able to sleep in at least fits and starts. I put the pad next to him and stuffed the bills into the top bag, and drove back home.
This was a very emotional experience for me, and I did not feel triumphant from it. my belated action brought relief from something akin to a physical pain; ahhhh, that's better, I can calm down again. But suddenly my obsessions over food and how raw or health-producing it is and how much I can have, they all seemed rather silly. I don't want to hear well-meaning congratulations on how "good" I was -- I think I would explode in rage at such triteness. That's not the point -- it shouldn't BE "good" to notice a human being sleeping on stone , it should fucking be NORMAL!! And it's not; instead, it's "normal" to complain about how fat we are, how much money it costs to buy food these days, how tired we are after such hard work driving ungrateful children to soccer and then to McDonalds because we're too tired to chop veggies after a day at the office and it will cease their whining.
Reality check: I am ashamed that my mind can obsess for hours about food and eating, but it couldn't recognize immediately the right thing to do for a suffering man.

Oy, I forgot the transitional hunger that always accompanies shifting back into healthier eating habits ... for some probably psychosomatic reason, no amount of food seems to fill me up, even extra cooked food, when I eliminate the flours and fat-soaked grains and sugars. Smoothy after smoothy, fatty avocados, hours of chewing fiber -- nothing achieves satiation, at least for a few days. I even tried sneaking in a few Dixie-cups of free swill-coffee at the bank, partially to kill the hunger and partially as reward for starting the dreaded tax preparations, but to no avail. I was still hungry a few hours later, and was glad I had the last of the split-pea soup, to which I added steamed red potatoes and nutritional yeast and extra salt. Aaaah, after about half a bowl too much, that hit the spot! And I proved to myself that at least in the post-binge days of chagrin, I CAN indulge in a little coffee without regressing into craving all-things-junk. This was an especially welcome discovery after being informed that I'd forgotten my February credit card payment, and had two "minimum" payments (translate: a bunch of money) due in a few days, grrrrrr!!
This morning, I had the luxury of having time to actually check in with my stomach and see what it wanted for breakfast, after the requisite herbal-yerba tea. The immediate response was, Coffee and blueberry pancakes, you fool, and make it quick!! Oooooh, gotcha -- something sweet. Okay. Didn't thaw any frozen berries, only fresh fruit left is grapefruit, hmmm. Open fridge and stare, willing a magical form of raw blueberry pancakes to effortlessly appear.
No pancakes, but the dates hiding in the back of the tray inspired me to try something different. I blended the grapefruit with boxed coconut water and some dates, adding just a little green powder and cinnamon, imagining a citrusy concoction that would be light yet filling ...
Well, that didn't exactly happen. It was okay, but the dates did not blend well, even when I zipped the mess around on "high" for long enough to start heating it up, and the flavors just didn't quite mesh. But it did give me a good simple-sugar fix to start the day, and the stomach grudgingly agreed that the end result was better than pancakes and coffee.
The only problem is -- I'm hungry again!!

Hi, I'm back. A bit chubbier and more humble, perhaps, but the maelstrom has passed.
What happened here? I tipped out of control, in a nutshell, and could not get back on top of things while my work demanded all of my daylight hours. It was just too easy, after a non-stop workday that left me exhausted, to go buy cooked food, and I can say honestly that if I have to work at that level for any protracted amount of time, there is no way I would care about staying high-raw. This sucked!!
So the combination of a convenient, arbitrary occasion -- the end of a calender month -- with the inevitable waning of interest in junk food after super-saturation, juxtaposed with a reduction in my workload, allows me to start to get back to "myself". My better self, that is; of course this eating extreme has always been a part of me, too. But I took the bull by the horns yesterday and stopped the coffee (oh, I managed to make it with an old funnel and paper towels; so much for getting rid of the paraphernalia!), made a dull-tasting green smoothy (after getting re-used to the thrill of fried egg rolls and donuts, how do you think it tasted?!), cranked out a little jogging ... and CRASHED hard by mid afternoon. Pitiful.
Pitiful, yes, but I still managed to do another whole afternoon of massages in that state, so I'm not going to complain. What I want to hone in on is exactly what shifted in order to keep getting back into this saddle; when eating this raw food takes up so much more of my time, and the immediate gratification is not exactly gratifying, why do I keep trying? Do I really think that some day I will just wake up and not want to eat delicious cooked foods?! That I won't waste precious hours thinking about food, wandering store isles in The Stupor as I try to decide what is the least destructive thing I could put in my mouth while still pushing the "junk" button?
Well ... um, yes, I guess I DO think that. I fantasize that if I can stay raw enough for long enough, then the cravings will just go away, and that when I have a 15 minute break I will automatically pick Brussels sprouts off their stalks in my garden instead of wanting a peanut butter sandwich. This latest fiasco was a good demonstration of how nonsensical that fantasy is; I was pretty freakin' raw for, what, six weeks? And instead of forgetting about spaghetti and cakes and pad thai, I nearly drowned myself in them when the going got tough!!
So if I have to sum up the reasons for transitioning back to this 75% experiment in one word, I'd have to say: clarity. Energy is the first word that actually came to mind, but even as I slogged through my tired afternoon yesterday, I could already feel a difference in quality of energy, instead of quantity. Super-processed foods and stimulants, after a certain amount, leave me feeling uncaring and absorbed in my own pleasure-seeking, which are fuzzy states of mind. Now, even in the worst glutting I tried to still add in dehydrated green powders, salads here and there; but for the most part, man I was cooked. It really only took ONE DAY of mostly raw and simpler foods (I made split-pea soup for my cooked meal, eaten with commercial falafel chips -- can't let them go to waste, can we, GOAD?) to feel more clear.
Oh yeah, THAT's why I keep on trying.

This project has gone too sideways this month to salvage much, but I plug along as best as I can. A good day is about 50% raw, but that has been uncommon this past week. I've lost my momentum and am submitting to the undertow, as work and family demands fill literally every hour and there is no energy left to spend an hour chopping and chewing raw greens.
So which agency should get my "penance fee" this month? I have had just enough energy left most nights to drag myself to the local Human Rights Film Fest going on this week, and have been bombarded with videos ranging from fighting over dwindling resources to suffering beyond my comprehension. My tiny drop in the bucket will probably only go to heat some nonprofit-CEO's office for an hour or something -- which CEO will give me the most bang for my buck? Is there a nonprofit that helps people who observe themselves eating junk food but cannot stop the tide of stress that creates the cravings which are beyond control?
Well, I'll pick one, because as far as I'm concerned, this month is beyond hope. Next month my workload will diminish, creating a different form of stress, but at least will allow me the time to chop-and-chew. The rest of this month is devoted to damage control and simply getting through my days of work-work-work, regardless of what I put in my mouth.

Well, the worst is over. It simply got to the point that no matter what I ate, it didn't taste that great. The salt, the GMO fried corn, the drug-quality sugars ... eventually, like when I used to drink too much, I just couldn't get the thrill back.
So back then, I quit drinking alcohol altogether. A simple, though not necessarily easy, choice. But I can't stop eating altogether. I donated all my coffee supplies, including the special mug that fit my lips smoothly, to the thrift shop. I had my herbal-mate tea blend, a large apple, and another day so packed that clients were coming in as the last ones were leaving: no time to grab even a lettuce leaf.
So of course, after a long session whereby a client's sickeningly-perfumed deodorant kept me in headache-state for over two hours, I was way too tired and grouchy to cope with raw food. I had one more glut at the Mexican restaurant, and deliberately avoided going for dessert on top of it, which I sorely wanted because I'd gotten used to it again.
Now, that is actually fairly revolutionary! The GOAD was trying hard to remind me that I'd just stuffed myself with cooked fats and pesticides, so what's a little sugar on top of it? And for an instant, she made sense; yeah, why not? Then I remembered that I'd purged my beloved coffee paraphernalia because java had become a trigger to attract the damned GOAD ... the whole point of that was to break the associations of coffee:cooked food:must-end-with-sugar.
So for the first time in a week, I just went on home and chewed on olives and cashews. I must say that there were several times during this bleak week that I felt like this experiment is hopeless and why am I torturing myself like this? The worry and guilt over backlashing is going to make me way more sick than a couple of corn chips -- even a LOT of corn ships!
Because I hate feeling like crap, that's why. So, as the Japanese say, fall down seven times, get up eight times. I'm on fall about 932, but here goes get-up number 933. Sigh.

The backlash is passing. Today I am examining the twin dragons of extremes and moderation. See, the 25% cooked foods, if they include things I love like hot bread, keep the doors of cravings open. If I "allow" myself a little bit, then eventually I will hit a really bad day -- or two or three -- and will glut on a lot. That's the moderation, playing with fire (no pun).
But what constitutes "extreme" in this society, the consuming of mostly or all uncooked foods, has so far always led to backlash too; I just get sick of raw foods and have to stuff myself with everything that I've been "denied".
There is no way around that fact that really bad days are always going to happen, regardless of what I put in my mouth. If one believes the people who have been high-to-all-raw for many years, they all say it gets easier, that your taste adjusts, that your body changes, etc. But if one cannot stay raw enough long enough for that process to take hold, then that advice just makes one feel weak and stupid. And I think that many people who would like the benefits of high-raw life hit this same wall. For some of us, food is just too much pleasure, with its encompassing social rituals and myths and built-in excuse of being an essential requirement for biological life.
So where do I go from here, if the option of moderation leads to wreckage and the option of extremes leads to wreckage? The only way to cure any disease, be it individual or societal or planetary, is to change the underlying conditions that are creating the environment for diseased states. The deepest level that I can perceive here is that level of too much pleasure; THAT's where the addiction lives. I know the Buddha had a lot to say about food and its addictive properties, but I have never taken the time to study the suttas and formal discourses on the matter. Will more "information" help me, when my arms are vibrating in pain and I have to do another massage on a 300 pound person and I still don't have the money to pay the yellow-page bill due tomorrow -- and the last thing I want is a cold blended bunch of kale?
I guess it depends how much truth I discern in that information and to what degree I can put it into action. And once I answer the 86 emails piling up, get my office vacuumed before the next client, and call the bank to find out why they lost another important document I sent them, maybe then I'll have the time to start studying the Enlightened One's roadmap to avoid this mess. And I'd better do it while I can still rationalize having a morning coffee!!

Tipped. Going sideways. A family crisis threw all sense of dietary importance out of the window and I have not yet recovered. And I don't care.
This is essentially what happened last year when I attempted to undertake this experiment. With an aged, senile parent in my care, there will always be little emergencies going off like dirty bombs, coloring everything I do and food is right at ground zero.
The stress is just too much; I stepped out of the "game" of this experiment for a few days because I could. The idea of putting cold hard food in my mouth during an issue of this recent magnitude is so loathsome that even as I feel and see immediate consequences of exhaustion and joint pain and depression, I will not go back to raw food until I feel ready.
The difference is that this year, I acknowledge that I fell off the wagon (we're talking a few meals of 100% cooked food here, flour and sugar and everything bad) and that it's not permanent. Already I am tired of being too tired, and in a sick sort of way I look forward to being back on raw. The dynamic which interests me is the dance with my old friend, the Grandmother of All Demons (GOAD).
It started with going out to dinner the first night after discovering a potential major error on my senile mother's part; I simply deserved a respite from the panic, instant responsibilities, and knowing I'd be following up on this for days if not weeks. And after dropping off to sleep with a bloated wheat-full belly, the GOAD woke me up with the alluring memory of the scent of coffee in the air; oh yes, I remember what it was like to have something immediately to look forward to, a reason to get out of bed when the day promised to be hell beyond that first hour of caffeinated delight.
And for two days now I have not been able to stop the cycle; the damned broad keeps lulling me back into the somnambulant realms of gluten torpor, the dreamy escapism of glutting-into-oblivion where I'm just too tired to be responsible. This is not good, and at some level I know it's not going to continue for long. But when I imagine that this isn't a game, like as if I was diagnosed with cancer and I was "playing" for my life, I fear that the results might be just as hopeless. I feel out of control and all the information I just worked so hard to learn about liver metabolism and brain health and all might as well be in Swahili for all I want to hear it today.
Today I hate raw foods.

Crash. I needed a play-day so badly that I took my Sunday by doing nothing that appeared productive. I browsed the antique mall, handled little relics of history, bought the week's produce ... and found myself tired, hungry, and wanting to prolong the fun, the mad-free-fun that only comes from a day off.
So I caved and ate at the Asian buffet. All the things I have been avoiding, gluten and massive salt and cooked fats and pesticides by the dozens got dumped into my poor system, and I was feeling pretty full after just the first plate.
But the lovely managers, who know me by sight, had the chef make me a special plate of vegan "sushi", which was pretty as party-food, with elegant layers of diagonal avocado. Food is love, remember, so of course I had to eat all of it!! And I could taste that love, too.
I dropped to sleep soon after getting home, and awoke this morning feeling a bit puffy, skin mildly broken out, and a mild headache. Not too bad for a serious glut, but not something I want to take to that extreme many times. But at least I stuffed in raw lettuce and seaweeds with most bites of fried carbs!

So how did I end the night, jousting with the windmills of cravings and physical hunger? I compromised; I made cooked food at home.
Now I had what I thought was a good idea to keep some of it raw: I made soba ramen soup, and crushed the veggies -- burdock root, Brussels sprouts, daikon radish -- in the Vitamix. I figured that the fibrous little suckers would be pulverized to the point where I could just dump them in the soup at the end and they would be so small that I wouldn't mind their sulphurous bitterness.
But they got so jammed down in the blender that I FORGOT and simply poured the hot soup into the blender to flush the veggies out! Gaaaaaah, then I had to cook them all four minutes with the noodles! In all good conscience I could not call that "50%", like the barely-steamed stuff that keeps me going. Which does not seem fair, when I consider that I resisted a huge glut on the Asian buffet in order to keep things organic, lightly cooked, and fats not heated -- yet they both get written down as, say, 25% (even the buffet has a salad bar, and I did add other raw ingredients to the soup).
And sure enough, after nothing but smoothies all day and hours of laboring work, today I am again dreaming of egg rolls and salted mushrooms with zucchini in soy sauce. It's Saturday, the night before I shop, and I don't have a lot of food to choose from for dinner; this is the perfect set-up for excusing a restaurant visit!
But then I remember an excellent documentary I watched last night about a family named the Toms in CA (My Flesh and Blood, by Jonathan Karsh, Docurama Films, 2003) where a single mom adopted nine special-needs children ... like, real special needs, many of them. She is totally awesome. But she's also providing for these plus a few of her birth children on the little Social Security some of them get, so there are no $8 smoothies in that house. One scene showed her shopping, with three overburdened carts, and the total came to $600!! That's about $200/mo per person; sure, most of them were quite young and wouldn't eat that much, but it's still less than half of what I paid for myself last month. And the groceries would probably be lucky to last a week! But sadly, all the loot was all Standard American Diet crap, cheap refined foods and subsidized animal products, the stuff of nutrition nightmares.
It was a humbling viewing. This saint has committed her life to caring for cast-off, deformed, otherly-abled little people, and she is doing so on a shoestring. But these children, most of whom seemed happy and contented in spite of their teasing-prompting accidents and diseases, are some of the ones who could most benefit from a full-fledged array of nutrients. One boy in particular had bad mood issues and ADD, which has been correlated in multiple studies (too many to footnote here, Google it if you are interested) to nutritional deficiencies and additions of things like artificial colorings. As he hit adolescence, he became increasingly out of control, to the point of the other children fearing him. Now, I do not say that raw foods would have reversed his genetic curse of cystic fibrosis, but I'd bet my dinner at the buffet that simple, whole foods with no additives could have made his mood disorders way more manageable. What's 500 X 11?? More than Social Security will pay.
Unfortunately, we'll never know if I'm right. He died as a teenager from his disease, and one more special child who was saved by an angel has gone home. And perhaps I can do my best to help people like that by not supporting the agribusiness conglomerates who supply mainstream restaurants with low-nutrition, high-carcinogenic food. At least for one more night.

Yesterday was another easy day of sailing through rawness as if it came naturally; client after client, a pre-prepared large enough batch of green smoothy that it lasted all day. Potluck at night, carrying my salad with my frozen garden greens that are starting to go over -- there's a jewel I'll drop on you gardeners. Don't freeze your produce in such large bags that you can't eat it all before it, in all its raw glory, starts to go bad.
Today, however, has been more of a challenge. My business is delightfully busy for the next week of so, but I'm also starting to feel a touch of resentment that there is so little time for anything else. I missed visiting my mother last week and today, in full-blown-Friday-frenzy, I only saw her for half an hour. No time to make ANY smoothies, and I got too hungry and tired to really want one now. No, this is the Witching Hour, 6:00 p.m. after the end-of-the-week waning of energy, all work and not enough play making Jack a rather dull boy. And Skya a dull girl. Nothing but samosas at Indian Flavors sounds appealing, revitalizing ... or a big bowl of pasta in oil ...
...and my mind is off and running. Fry-fry-fry, cook-cook-cook!! Bread, baked bread, such a simple pleasure. Yeah, I remember, I remember -- the gluten will bring me down way out of proportion to the few moments of that simple pleasure. But I just don't feel energetic enough to get creatively health-oriented with the daikon, an old lettuce, unsoaked seeds, and the ubiquitous oranges and apples on the counter; no, I want difference, I want the stimulation of excito-toxins to perk me up enough to enjoy some conscious free time tonight. The problem is that I already had a bowl of soup today -- African yam and peanut, FORGETTING that I don't do well with peanuts and that's why I rarely eat them. Oh yeah. Now that rather small bowl pulls my proportion of rawness down significantly, since I didn't have time to eat much of anything else, just a ton of apples and a veggie vinaigrette deli salad. If I indulge in any more cooked food, the day's tally will need some strict rawness to balance out, and as we go into a weekend, I don't want to excoriate myself from my fun free foods.
After all, tomorrow's schedule looks an awful lot like today's, and the chance I won't get hungry and tired is about as likely as finding President Bush's stock of weapons-of-mass-destruction in my cellar tomorrow!

I watched a most interesting video from the library last night, a PBS three-part special called The Meaning of Food. Not a lot the average person doesn't know -- of course we all associate food with childhood, celebrations, etc.
But having committed to a serious switcheroo in lifestyle, the meanings of food have become altered for me. Just because we experience a direct memory of the past when we taste something, or share something, why do we have to keep eating the food part if it is not promoting health? Why can't people be satisfied with the memory itself?
Here's my answer: one segment dealt with a lady who had compiled a list of recipes from women a concentration camp in the Holocaust. She herself was one of the only survivors, and she got the actual written materials from a lady who did not make it. She tells of how after lights-out, the women, in dire hunger and need to escape reality, would recite their best recipes. Can you hear them, in their rows of wooden bunks, arguing in Polish about how much sugar to add to the cookies? Can you see them, skin and bones wrapped in rags, in filth, fighting to keep some civilized life force going when their exhausted bodies should have been asleep -- sharing food ideas because they could not break bread together? Was one of them your grandmother, perhaps? Or your best friend's grandmother?
Somehow the recipes, like paper children, got written down and passed to this elder who adopted them and created a book from them.

Now one does not have to be as sensitive as James Van Praagh to realize that to cook these recipes is to recreate a bit of those murdered mothers and sisters and aunties and friends. What more direct connection could there be than to emulate her, put her work into your mouth, take that memory into your body and make yourself of it? Does it matter at that point if it has gluten that will cause you to get diarrhea, or refined sugar that will cause a mood crash in three hours?
No, I understand this meaning of food. I would spend a day's cash to taste my grandmother's Swedish limpa bread, which of course nobody else can do the same way.
But to limit such special foods to only a few times a year, to keep them for serious celebrations and ceremonies -- that seems to be the problem. We want our home-inducing comfort foods all the time, and the truth is that most traditional foods are not that good for humans any more, if they ever were. We do not have the land mass and water to sustain huge herds of animals to provide butter for everyone who grew up eating kagels, and flesh for tamales, and we are running out of ability to rock with the pollution it generates. And why would it be okay to perpetuate suffering of the animals in the name of remembering suffering? Is food really that important to humans?
Sometimes, yes.
So what does it MEAN to be a raw foodist, in the context of family and culture? I will not attempt to answer that in one sitting; this is part of the ongoing discussion in this movement, or it should be. I am just noticing that I will never have Mimi's light rye again, and I am fine with that; should I go to a Swedish festival and a piece of limpa falls into my lap, I will enjoy it. But let's not, as a species, get so attached to our imposed meanings that we confuse the menu of emotions with the actual meal itself. My important memories are in my heart, not in my stomach.

Here's the tally of what I spent on food in my first Really High Raw month: about $477.
Gaaaaaah, I spent almost $500 on food -- just for me!!
This is hard to believe. However, those $8 smoothies do add up. I ate out a few times, which is of course not efficient use of money:food ratio, but the fun factor made up for it.
I guess the depressing thing, besides the unsustainability of that tally, is that it felt to me as if I skipped a significant portion of eating-to-satiety altogether. How does one spend so much money on food yet still not get enough to eat?!
Now, a part of the equation that I did not tweak out is what proportion of groceries purchased went for bulk items that did not actually get consumed that month. These are sale items that I stock up on, like frozen berries and coconut water. So maybe that would account for, say, $35 or so, if memory serves me correctly.
But STILL! I also ate a certain amount of greens frozen from my own garden last year, and nut butters that I already had, and bulk nuts I freeze when they are on sale. Not to mention all the green food-powder that I habitually add to my morning fruits, occasional supplements. This seems outrageous ...
... unless one imagines that this food is also my medical insurance premium! Eating this way, with the exception of the rotten vertigo day that came out of nowhere, has kept me free from most common "viruses", flu's, etc., that plague the normal population. I stay this way free from drugs and their insidious side effects, which must include an assessment of the pollutions created in their manufacture and wanton disposals (seriously, all that Prozac has to come from some chemical source, and it all gets peed out into everyone's drinking water!!). Add another $100 or so to make homemade food for three small cats -- who, being all-raw, almost never have to go to the vet's -- and these benefits put this investment into perspective. Yeah, it's a lot of moola, but here's the rub: even when I was only earning the equivalent of about $8, I still managed to eat a lot of organically grown food. I had a lot more of the cheaper, processed stuff like pasta, instant soups, canned beans and all, but I also had enough fresh produce to stay alive and pretty healthy this long!
How'd that happen?

Backlash, of a sort -- in the middle of a busy workday, I was smote with an attack of one of my occasional and annoying bouts of vertigo, which gets so bad so quickly that I am also as nauseous as if I was at sea on the Minnow. I always associated it with candida die-off, as it seems to happen when my diet gets too clean; but it is not consistent and if the little buggers died off as I eliminated most of the junk, it should happen at the beginning of a clean sweep, not weeks later, or so I'd think.
But I really don't know for sure, I just suffer through it and wooze around like the Exxon Valdez for a few days. Rotten timing, just as I'm going to an intense workshop. On the other hand, maybe it's the incentive to really really listen hard, and to open my mind to the possibility that I should, and can, release old patterns of cravings that are destroying my health. I'll let you know what I learn.

Hooray, I passed my first month by averaging 77% raw! Now, you might be asking what would happen if I did not? I thought about that and concluded that an old psychology trick might do the trick: if my monthly total averages less than 75%, I have to send $25 to the NRA!! Gaaah!
Then I recanted. See, for that punishment to work, you have to actually DO IT, and I just won't give such a paranoid organization one penny of my cash. True, the incentive to avoid screwing up is stronger, but I feel I am low enough on finances at this point that sending a $25 donation to anyone, in addition to what I already chose to give, will hurt a little bit. So why not send it to an organization that is helping to promote the health of all beings? So if I miss the mark, that is what will happen. $25 goes to a health organization, and I'll take suggestions as to the best one.
This weekend was so busy that I was still in that rather nice place of not needing food too much. We were fortunate enough to have another lecture by Dr. Tel-Oren here in my city -- that was the raw-related event I'd worked to promote. Sadly for me, it was the same time as my beloved cadaver lab, so I missed most of it, but got the gist as well as a nice visit. And on my "free" Sunday, I splurged and took myself to see Tao: the Martial Art of Drumming, an exciting taiko drum group from Japan; man, my bones are still humming! So much inspiration, from seeing blood vessel damage in a deceased person to young artists with the capacity to memorize two hours of complicated rhythmic routines, could only result in the desire to eat raw.
Since we also got the benefit of an impromptu workshop by Dr. Tel-Oren about serious detoxing tomorrow, of course I want to feel 'clean' and light ("No need to detox here, nope, not a problem, no need to change MY habits, nosireebob!"), and so will enjoy what is becoming a daily green smoothy. While I am surrounded by fun and educational activities, it is easier to enjoy raw foods; I am starting to notice slight changes in my sense of taste at last. I am more sensitive to salt, and even a blah smoothy tastes pretty good. I am not certain that this is a good time to get into a whole three month detox program, since the point of this year is to examine what it is like for a common person to eat high raw (and that level of work is not exactly common). But having the info to put into the hopper of my mind will also help steer me when my food-crazed keel gets blown off course, and will be available to share with my clients, and can help me remember what are the worst things that should be avoided.
And besides, Dr. T is sort of cute -- go see him when he comes to a location near you! : )

How much easier it is to maintain resolutions when one is in the presence of an inspiring being!
Enter one Dr. Adiel Tel-Oren, Lecturer Extrordinaire and general overall Way-Too-Accomplished Person. This remarkable man is one of the most reliable educators, in my opinion, in the raw foods community, and we are fortunate to have him in the NW several times a year to share his vast knowledge with us, as well as amusing anecdotes about what life is like when one has more drive than an Amtrak locomotive.
So it was easy to zip through my day on green smoothies and fruit, knowing I had an evening listening to my hero to look forward to. And as always, I was not disappointed. This time the topic focused on brain health and peak functionality, and let me tell you, my brain felt pretty non-functional by the time it was over. All the years as my body-temple was developing, all those ignorant things I did to it -- the coffee, the sugar, etc; of course I know I did damage, but I've been pleasantly denying the extent of the consequences these days. And the gist of the lecture was that it takes more than simply dietary changes to reverse the damage done at that magnitude; one must stop the unhealthy habits (oh no, there goes the coffee again!! Darn that dude, I'm not of space-alien-quality, how does a mere mortal function without any caffeine?), and slowly detox all the heavy metals and such from the deepest of tissues.
I'll let you go to his web site and check out the information yourself: www.Ecopolitan.com. I guess I have to look at whether I am truly willing and able to make a commitment of that level, to completely eliminate everything that I know to be toxic to my body/mind/soul/emotions; in the mean time, I'm going to keep eating my canned olives and enjoy them while I can!

The 'raw' factor seems to be seeping into my consciousness: I finally had a dream where I was searching out the raw food. It was a huge banquet, three loaded tables, and I saw a crudite on a far table and made for it. Interestingly, all the other lovely cooked foods seemed to be variations of my favorite combo, cashews and broccoli!
Indeed, it is getting easier to think in "rawese". When I smell the bananas getting ripe, then it's time to remember to soak the sunflower seeds for the morning carob "oatmeal". I just don't have the time to make the fancy dehydrated things, and that helps on one hand and is detrimental on the other. If I had a batch of, say, garlic flax crackers, then I would automatically grab them and think less about real bread. But I also get dehydrated myself when I eat too much dry food, so having mostly fresh produce around means I am forced to grab an orange if I only have 15 minutes between clients, which means feeling better.
The problem comes when I have 15 minutes to prep and eat something, I'm sick of freakin' oranges, and if I just keep working until I'm so hungry I could drop, then I have the perfect excuse to eat quick cooked foods!

Well, I guess things were getting a little complacent, and some drama was needed. I got more action than I would have desired, though, by way of a narrowly-avoided scam-o-rama. A very clever and sophisticated plot almost snagged me, and I'm lucky to have gotten off with only an afternoon of wasted time and effort. The emotional level, however, was pretty far up there on the "ick" scale; I feel distinctly violated, having started to trust someone who made it out that they were helping me, when all along they were laughing up their sleeves at my gullibility.
They're not laughing any more, though -- the jig's up. I was so angry at how close I came to financial doom and so exasperated by the waste of my precious afternoon off that I was truly set for a big fat binge, devil may care about tipping the rawometer!
Then I realized that I've spent most of my "free" time for the last two weeks working to help create a raw-based event; did I really want to show up to it sleepy and farting?! That's hardly going to persuade anyone to try this lifestyle, since I'm supposed to be an advocate, and nobody would know that I'd just bloated myself on ... let's see, what would I have had, if I'd gone through with it? Chocolate cake, this glimpse into the void of human conscience certainly merited that, and maybe French fries, and ...
Wait a minute, STOP THAT!! I didn't do it, and I don't need to scare up cravings that I already defeated once. I am proud to say that I went home and had a salad with a jigger of olive oil, steamed cauliflower, and a few Sunflower burgers, all jumbled up together. Plenty of salt and fat to take the edge off the hurt from our species' greed, but raw enough to keep my goal within legal bounds.
I do kinda wish I'd eaten the cake while I had the chance, though.