I’m 27.
Had a birthday 4 days ago.
It’s not the best picture by any means, but this is the ‘cake’ that I made to share with my work colleagues.
Two chunks of watermelon, separated by slices of honey dew.
Strawberry halves decorating the bottom-half … grapes forming a ring around the base of the top-half.
Slices of kiwi underneath of banana ‘candles’.
I’m right in the middle of garden planning at the moment.
One thing has become exceedingly clear: If I truely wish to be self-sufficient, I’ll not be able to live with a raw diet year-round.
I’ve asked myself which is more important – raw or self-sufficiency.
I feel amazing when I’m eating 80-90% raw food.
I feel great when I’m eating only vegetables (cooked).
I start to feel a bit groggy when I eat flour-based foods (bread/pasta)/rice.
I feel my throat get ‘thick’ when I eat dairy/cheese and too much onion/garlic.
For me, it’s far more imporant to be self-sufficient.
It’s easy to be extreme.
Either you’re following a ‘strict’ dietary regime, or you’re eating anything.
It’s difficult to eat for nutrition’s sake – you have to eat a lot more low-calorie food (veg & greens) in order to pack the minerals and vitamins in.
Grains are just a filler – they’re rich in calories, but (unless I’m greatly mistaken) very poor in nutrients. Hence, the need for flours to be ‘enriched’ (pumped full of extra vitamins/minerals).
I guess it’s just like tap water and rain water – tap water will keep your plants alive, but rain water will make them thrive.
I made some raw broccoli soup last night (the second soup I’ve made in as many weeks, and disliked it as much as the one I made last week), and thought I’d have a slice of bread with it. I’m not professing to be 100% raw. I just felt like I needed something a bit more heavy.
YUCK!
The bread was store bought rather than homemade by yours truely … but even so. I really wanted to spit it out. It tasted gross.
I asked Frank if he thought it tasted fine/normal, and he did; so it was obviously me.
I minute ago, I had a glass of mineral water from a ‘dispenser’ type water system we have in the office.
YUCK!!!!
It actually had a taste to it. An odd one at that.
We have a whole-house charcoal filter at home, so our water is pretty much tasteless.
We have a reverse osmosis filter in our refrigerater, but it’s not connected to the water supply.
Maybe now is the time to get that done!!
I’ve switched from monitoring my daily intake via nutridiary.com to http://nutritiondata.self.com/
Nutrition Data has FAR more information, and while you can’t have a ‘historical’ log of what you ate on a given day, you can track a single day’s intake easily enough.
I found my eyebrows raising somewhat when I saw that the overall ‘inflamation factor of my consumed foods on Friday was high!!
APPLES!!! Apples are moderately inflammatory!
Bananas are too, to a much lesser extent.
What does that tell me?
I NEED MORE GREENS!!
I’ve been 60-70% raw per day for over a week now.
For the first week, I started each day with a smoothie of 2 bananas & very large handful of kale, ate a further 2 bananas, 3 oranges, 1 kiwi, 1 pear, and 1 apple while at work, and then had a small cooked meal accompanied by a salad at night.
Before, it used to take around 1c. almonds and 2 cups of water to make a good almond milk.
With my Vitamix, I made a really yummy almond milk with 1/4 cup almonds and 4 cups of water!!
It’s paying for itself already!!
One of the main reasons why I stopped the whole raw thing last year was because nuts were becoming too expensive to keep buying.
I borrowed a huge number of Raw Food books from my local library, and started going crazy jotting down recipes.
I wasn’t overly keen on the lack of variation that a life of salad would include, so these ‘gourmet’ recipes really intrigued me. Many of the recipies had nuts as a base … so I bought lots and lots of nuts.
This time around, I’ve been reading more about nutrition and less about fancy recipes. Continue reading “Too nutty about nuts.”
Any amount of exposure to the Raw Food lifestyle will likely have exposed you to either the Blentec or Vitamix blenders.
I’ll cut to the chase. At this moment in time, I have tried neither.
From the research I’ve done, there is very little difference between the two.
I will be purchasing a reconditioned Vitamix Super (with a wet and dry container) from https://secure.vitamix.com/acb/stores/4/product1.aspx?Product_ID=2342.
Ok … now onto why.
I went Raw at the end of April 2010.
It lasted about 2 months.
Then, the price of eating raw food got out of hand, we needed to consolodate our finances … so I had to stop.
Now it’s the end of the year, things are looking better as far as the bank balance goes, and my eating habits need an overhaul.
