All-Raw Trial #2

Surprise!

After doing raw until dinner when I was in Oregon rock climbing last week (read about it on my personal blog in a couple of hours), which involved huge dinners with lots and lots of high calorie recreational beverages, I came back on Sunday still craving grapes after a whole day of munching on produce in the car. Now armed with the knowledge that the way to eat on an all-raw food diet is to never stop eating, I have made it to day 4 with way fewer side effects that I experienced during my first raw food trial. I'll throw up some food pictures in a later post, I know they are just so amazing.

Several people have said that nothing about eating all raw sounds like fun. Maybe I did feel generally better before I got involved in this whole business, there are several aspects of it that are worth exploring. Many experts will agree that you can't seriously mess yourself up doing a short term trial of anything (especially if it is a trial of produce and not, say, cocaine), so I see nothing wrong with running a few experiments.

Benefit of the day:

I feel incredibly.. clear. I feel fresh and clear like a crispy lettuce leaf. I feel like my brain has been swept out with a vacuum. If you know me, you know that I am the kind of person who can never stop thinking. I have struggled with incorporating meditation (read a little about that here) into my routine and have yet to be consistent at it. I have brief moments of greater mental clarity after a long day rock climbing or at times during a yoga session or right after I eat a really spicy meal. This morning, it feels like a more accessible state that I can slip into more effortlessly and a state that is just there, not one that I have to seek out specifically.

Flip Side and some Waxing Psychological:

The flip side is that I am also feeling grumpier and whinier (aka euphemisms for more depressed) about nothing in particular. I remember this from my first trial, so I know not to try and attribute it to anything that is actually going on in my life. It is almost like my thoughts are compressed to a narrower space. This narrower space takes up less room in my brain, but also leaves less room for extremes of emotion like the giddy, bunnylike happiness I usually experience when skipping down the streets of San Francisco (what, you don't feel like that?).

I really liked Anne's explanation of detox diets that she relayed to me over the weekend. When you are assaulted with a lot of chemicals from the environment, you don't get around to dealing with all of them because they are stored in your body. So when you start clearing out the junk, you may feel worse because you are experiencing the junk in your system that was previously put away into a corner. I feel like the moodiness may come from that, not some lack of a nutrient. I was much grumpier and had a migraine yesterday, and I am thinking that some of that may have gotten flushed out.

Anyway, my goal is to make it a full 5 days, but I may or may not quit when we go to Rosamunde Sausage Grill tonight! 

How to Dehydrate Frozen Blueberries

Yeah, I felt like a real tool typing that one into Google, I was sure that this was impossible, but it's actually very easy and widespread! Just arrange them on the parchment paper so they are not touching each other (HA completely skipped that one, what a pain!) and pop them in for anywhere from 10-18 hours. (I am guessing it will take even longer since you are supposed to do it at 125-135 degrees and I am doing it at as close to 118 as I could get.)

OK Nesco dehydrator, don't fail me now! They have to be done in about 12 hours so I can make some more raw bread to take to Oregon with me. I am so up for more climbing on a mostly raw food diet. The endurance benefits are amazing. But I am sick of hiking in so much produce so I am thinking some cooked deliciousness throughout the day and I will see what I feel like in the evening - cooked food if I want it, but something tells me I will just be craving a couple of pounds of grapes. And just so I can enjoy some of Jon's cooking, I will totally bring dinner leftovers to lunch. 

Lead climbing on a raw diet

Went pretty well. My muscles held up a lot better than my mental endurance; I suppose that's what happens when you take 2-3 years off. I didn't eat quite all the bananas I brought (I budgeted about 4 a day), but it did train me to enjoy more bananas. "Hummus" and "bread" sandwiches (both terms used very loosely to indicate a raw-ish product that somewhat resembles its title) with carrots, as well as about four raw bars a day, were key.

I don't know if it kind of defeats the purpose when my cheat dinner meal is probably just as big as the sum of the produce I consume throughout the day. That really only comes out to 50% raw, and I imagine I wasn't too far off from that when I incorporated produce into all my meals and did not try to eat raw.

But more and more often meal time rolls around and I am just craving a large amount of delicious crunchy sweet hydrating fruit. Or I will have a taste of something processed I used to eat every day and it tastes so disgusting that I can't eat it. Now that I'm not doing Pilates all the time, I don't feel like I'm starving all the time (oh Pilates and food, why must you both cost money?); anyway, maybe one day I'll make it big and be fed grapes all day long on a reformer.

Raw Carrot Salad Recipe

Ingredients:
-Shredded Carrots (3 large)
-Broccolini (or broccoli) (2 cups)
-Yogurt (8 oz)*
-Raisins (1/2 cup)
-Grapes (2 handfuls)
-Honey (1 tablespoon)
-Cinnamon (1 teaspoon)*
Amounts listed are what I recommend, not what I used.
*Yes you can get raw yogurt. I used pasteurized greek yogurt because that is what I had in the fridge. The cinnamon is the cheat.


Directions:
Combine all ingredients and mix well.

Serves 1 happy hungry raw foodist.

Calories:
None if you eat it while hiking Kilimanjaro. If you are successful at doing this, please let me know.

Notes:
I did not have very much yogurt left, so I went to town on the honey and even added some balsamic, which I highly do not recommend. This is much better when it is slightly liquid, so if you are not a fan of raw dairy/honey, you could either grind up some walnuts with a small amount of water or juice some of the carrots in a juicer and grind some of the carrots. Lemon juice could also be an asset. I suppose Bragg's could be OK instead of Balsamic, but I am not going to risk that again.

Enjoy!

Let me know if you have tried it or have any recipe contributions or suggestions!

The Wild, the Raw, and the Hungry

This weekend I am going to attempt my first ever camping/climbing trip on the "raw until dinner" plan. While the more tempting option is clearly to subsist off of beer and Trader Joe's peanut butter cups for the entire weekend, I would have to change the blog title to "Feeling Like Shit, Throwing up in the Bushes" if I wanted to blog about that experience. I am a little worried about how the raw-ness will affect my ability to get enough calories/digestion/lead climbing ability, but I will play guinea pig and report back.

This is a good climbing trip to experiment because we may or may not even camp, and if we did, it would be car camping (bananas and bear bins would be a TOTAL disaster.) I am not going to entertain the possibility of going all raw for the weekend because a girl's gotta have a social life, and sitting in a corner chain gnawing on carrots while your friends make mac and cheese around the fire is NOT my idea of a Saturday night.

While I am also tempted to bring all the raw trail mix in the world ever as well as a portable apple tree, I am going to attempt to approach this somewhat more systematically. I hate approaching meals systematically. There is something so un fun and diet sounding about trying to plan out what you are going to eat. I'm much more of a live-in-the-moment kind of gal who grabs chocolate peanut butter bunnies at every opportunity.

Anyway, here is my rough plan. Let's see how much I will end up deviating from it.

-Breakfasts: Two bananas mushed up (cashew milk replacement) with some granola and raspberries.

-Lunches: raw flaxseed bread, ground up chickpeas (I suppose you could call that "hummus," but the last time I made it I just called it pathetic.), carrots and apples by the truckful.
(Flaxseed bread recipe here under 3C.)

-Snacks: blue raw revolution bars, Trader Joe's raw trek mix, Trader Joe's dried mango, probably more raw granola.

-Will I drink coffee? That is like asking "Am I a climber?" I tried the caffeine free deal for 4 days, wasn't digging it. With the way I have been sleeping lately, I am basically back to IV status.

In conclusion, can someone please please walk me through the process of homemade hummus?

Calories from FAT and the Raw Food Diet

When you are eating raw, you either get most of your calories from fruit or fat, yadda yadda yadda. After realizing I could not survive on mostly produce, I became more liberal with the sat fat I've been consuming. Seeing as how it is almost a month later and I am still able to zip up my pants with the same amount of effort, your body truly processes food differently if it is raw.

But I'm not sure where I got the idea that it is sustainable or OK to eat coconut oil by the spoonfull if I find myself still hungry after a meal of salad and produce, because it is neither of those things.

Coconut oil jar (see how empty it is becoming), taken from the top in order to be slightly flattering. If you eat too much of this stuff, you will need photographs of yourself taken from the top as well so they are flattering.

SO starting tomorrow, I am going to revamp some of my raw food habits.

Good raw food habits:

1- DO NOT EAT A TABLESPOON OF COCONUT OIL IF YOU ARE HUNGRY AFTER FINISHING A SALAD.

2 - If you are going to cheat and eat something cooked as the "I'm-still-hungry" snack, don't make it a peanut butter flavored dark chocolate Easter Bunny. (Yes, I am still working on those bunnies.) Instead eat a yogurt, egg, or piece of toast. There are infinitely more nutrients to be gained from this.

3 - I am going to work on keeping more varied snacks around. YES the blue Raw Revolution bars are delicious, but A - expensive and B - still have lots of fat! So either I am still eating a high fat snack, or I eat something cheaper, like a tablespoon of coconut oil, instead.

3A: Option 1: soak some chickpeas and munch on them. Sort of vegetable, much more filling than a pepper, high protein, low fat. (This time I will do a better job of observing if they sprout.)

3B: More cashew milk - why not? It's diluted with water and slightly more substance than the same volume of fruit.

3C: Dehydrate some flaxseed bread: 1 part ground flaxseed, 1 part water, multiple parts of grated garlic or finely chopped herbs (I used parsley and cilantro) or dry spices. Dehydrate for 8 hours at 105 degrees, flipping in the middle. Please note that I did not make up this recipe. Google it if you want the source.

Dehydrator bread, view from the top. Please also note that paper towels are NOT a good replacement for parchment (wax) paper and will result in your throwing out your dehydrator's 8 hours of hard work.

Here is the flaxseed meal I used:

Which is apparently NOT actually raw, THANKS BOB!!!  Come on guys, what's a hippie got to do to get some enzymes around here?!

4: Get more proactive about eating fruit before you are starving. So after breakfast, a snack at 10 or 11 before it is noon and the amount of food my body wants is about triple the fruit volume that I can hold in my stomach without wanting to die.

Summary: less calories from fat, more calories from random non produce stuff, more evolved cheating :)

Sort-of-raw day 10 million, bring it on!

Veganism and Ethics

I interrupt my regularly scheduled bitching about cashew milk to bring you some food for thought from another corner of the Internet.

First, check out this article from the L.A. times where Alexandra Le Tellier suggests that teaching your child to go vegan is an effective way to effect change because they will be growing up with the habits that will help our planet. 

The juicy stuff is in the comments (check them out here.) My favorite quote is a tie between Lisa Shaw Osh, who maintains that:

"Lying to your children so they'll eat rotting corpses, blood & pus filled breast milk and hen menstruations is wrong."

And an anonymous poster with the cute nickname Maya Pinion, who maintains that:

"it <sic> seems like it's the skinny people who have every freakin allergy or food intolerance known to man."

As a sort-of-sometimes-bad-raw-foodist, my consumption of animal products has dropped astronomically. After a past miserable four-month attempt to go veggie while overconsuming eggs and fish and constantly feeling horrible, I can now eat inadvertently vegan for multiple days without even realizing it. I am still not advocating cutting out animal products, and I do not currently believe that you can have a healthy diet without incorporating animal products of every kind. I will not go raw for 3 days unless I know that there is a juicy hamburger at the end of the tunnel. The way my body feels both when I consume mostly plant foods AND when I do eat that burger tells me that I am doing something right. 

The ethical question I pose to you actually has nothing to do with diet. Is there any kind of result that justifies our using a wide variety of means to show/explain/persuade/force our lifestyle on someone else? (Think diet, religion, friends making bad decisions, etc.)