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.