Happy New Year!

Hello, Reader, and thank your for visiting my blog! I am trying to learn how to do cool things with the layout, but I am not a techno-girl and so for now, I'll put my introductions here.
The purpose of this blog is to explore my adventures in a year of eating at least 75% raw foods. The focus is not about nutrition advice nor recipes, but to record the emotions and mind-play I experience around this non-standard way of life. Along the way, I hope to inspire people to make at least small improvements in their own mind-body-emotions-soul health, demonstrate that this way of life is neither weird nor unattainable, and to make new connections and have some fun!
The target audience I want to reach is people who are already somewhat health-conscious (I know, we all think we eat a good diet, don't we?), who might have heard some buzz ("What's this raw thang?!") and feel curious about the benefits and trials of eating uncooked food. To this end, I include a lot of "transitional" tips, for mainstreamers who just want to add more nutrients to their diet.
The parameters of this experiment are that I will eat 75% raw food for a year and honestly record the results. Since I'm already mostly vegan, all foods during this year will be 100% plant-based, which will be easy for me.
But what exactly constitutes "raw and uncooked" foods? There is some discrepancy in the raw food movement about this. For my experiment, I say frozen fruits and veggies are good enough for government work. I have a dehydrator, and include foods dehydrated at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit or so. I also dry some of my main spices this way, such as garlic and turmeric. I think that commercial Manna bread, made from sprouted grains and heated at very low temperatures, is also raw enough for my purposes. After some debate, I decided that my morning tea, which is currently a blend of yerba mate and herbs, does not have to count as part of my precious "free" 25% of cooked food.
When I figure out how to make a better site layout, I will include a more in-depth description of the history of this idea, and why I think this is a worthwhile endeavor, when I could be out there enjoying East-Indian-all-you-can-eat-buffets. For now, I'll just say that I have been in and out of this movement for about eight years now, so I am not coming into this as a raw beginner, hahahah!! I started this project last year, hashing out a complicated system of ranking the "rawness" of everything I ate, recording every bite with diligence, and fighting to keep eating cold, tough, often tasteless foods when what I really wanted was mashed potatoes and gravy after a crappy day!
But I also was trying to include a running commentary on the poor state of our "healthcare" system, plus cost-analysis to see if, for instance, a single working mother could afford this way of life, and also dealing with the time factor, how long it takes to prepare this food to be palatable and then to chew it all up. It got too big, and although I recorded data for most of the year, I lost my momentum to actually publish the book that is the true motivator for this blog. Grrrrr, I would have been DONE WITH IT TODAY if I'd stuck with it!
During the quondam year, I discovered that 75% was a realistic level to shoot for; just enough to get noticeable results, yet not so strict that I backlashed into Glutland. But it also didn't seem fair to lump barely-steamed-kale-from-my-garden into the same category as fried-bean-taquitos-with-tofu-sour-cream! No! So for this experiment, I will count foods that are truly lightly steamed or sauteed in water as 50% raw. Canned black olives are my raw version of a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, and I will defend them as raw unto the death! B-b-l-l-ah hah hah!
So here is Day One of being Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire. Yes, after a year of recording publishing-worthy honesty, you're darned tootin' that I frequently felt like I was Into the Fire!! Today, however, I am all hopped up with that enthusiasm that comes from a fresh start (with maybe a touch of sheer ignorance, too). I've been too busy cleaning the house and jogging and making resolutions to worry much about food, and I've just had a bunch of oranges so far. Fear not, Reader, I will not bore you with an anal-retentive list of everything I eat, the resultant bowel movements, and other such cases of too-much-information. Weekly tallies of averages should suffice.
So today is easy and I'm excited to start what has been a goal for me for several years. I have some leftover green salad with homemade Italian vinaigrette (creamy, with added Vegenaise) from a luncheon I served that I plan for dinner ... oh crap, that soy mayonnaise sucks up about 10% of my 25%! Guess I'm a little rusty at this. I'll use up the rest of my "free" percentage by adding some cubes of marinated tofu from the same meal, and add more lettuce and cucumber, have some grapefruit as an appetizer. Gulp ... oh yeah, today is easy, alright ...