What do you eat??

Since I’ve been eating raw (about a week in and about 7 pounds lighter!) many people have asked me what, exactly, I eat every day. Let me reiterate that I am not 100% raw, nor is that my goal, but I strive to eat as close to that as possible. The goal is to have my diet full of “living foods” rather than “dead foods” and to eat foods as close to possible to their natural state (i.e. raw carrots are better than steamed carrots).

I am no gourmet cook and anyone who knows me knows that I’ve never been that domestic in the kitchen. I just don’t love it. I love fried food that someone else fries, that’s what I love. So I have to keep it simple in order to stick with it, though I will say that I’m loving what I’m eating so much that I can see some gourmet raw recipes in the future and I can’t wait to share those with y’all.

Basically, this is what I eat all day:

Around 7 am I have 32 oz. of Green Lemonade:

Yummy-looking and yummy-tasting!

I do this by juicing the following ingredients:

FUEL!

6 stalks of kale, any type (I use mustard greens)
1 head of romaine lettuce
1 organic lemon (with peel)
2 Fuji apples
A little bit of fresh ginger root

Juice it all up and voila, you have my favorite juice, one that you cannot drink too much of, one that tastes like a delicious spiced lemonade, a perfect pick-me-up. This recipe produces enough juice for two people to have a large 16 oz. glass, but I have both of them myself:

Green Lemonade

It needs to be consumed immediately, as the juice starts to lose its nutrients right away. It isn’t hard to chug down this delicious recipe, so I always finish both glasses in well under 15 minutes. That makes me really full and I don’t want to eat for awhile. When I do want get hungry, I eat fruit! And oh do I love picking out what fruit I want to eat. Oranges, apples, grapes, melon, bananas, mangoes, fresh pineapple, pears. I pig out on fruit as much as I want, all the way up to lunch.

But fruit is fuel, so if you’re gonna eat a lot of it, you need to be moving, moving, moving! I try to stay busy as I munch all morning.

I eat fruit right up until lunchtime, and I quit about an hour before I have lunch. According to the philosophy I follow, I want to wait 30 minutes after eating fruit before I have lunch; less time if it’s melon, a little more time if it’s banana. And for lunch I basically have one of two things: a huge salad, or an avocado sandwich.

Huge salad

Or…

 

Avocado sammich

One recipe essential to either of these dishes is Liquid Gold Elixir:
2 c fresh lemon juice (I juice this)
3 cloves of garlic (I get this from my backyard!)
2 T of minced ginger
3 T of Nama Shoyu soy sauce
5 T of raw honey
1 1/2 c cold pressed olive oil

I blend all the ingredients except the oil, then slowly add the oil until its blended. I have to mess with the proportions more, though, because it’s still a bit runny, but it’s delicious! On the salad I use it as dressing (though I’m making some raw ranch this week and will tell you all about it and give you the recipe), and on the sandwich I use it as a spread/moistener for the bread. Another note on the bread: the bread above was used for my first avocado sammich and it’s whole wheat, but now I’m using raw split grain bread that you have to find at Whole Foods or online.

I combine this with a Lara Bar if I want, or I may have a Lara Bar later to stave off hunger before dark. I keep a “raw until dinner” regimine, so if I want something before dinner I try for raw veggies. If I get a craving for fats I eat raw nuts or an almond butter spread on raw flax seed split grain crackers.

For dinner, I keep things simple. I stick to my principles: No red meat, nothing fried, few processed foods, no dairy, at least 50% of the meal is green. So for instance, the other day I made my own dry rub recipe. I wrote it down somewhere in case it wound up fabulous (it did), but all I remember now is that it contained fresh garlic, fresh onion, fresh oregano, fresh thyme, paprika, cayenne pepper, sea salt, and fresh ground pepper. I rubbed this on some boneless skinless chicken breast filets and used it warm with my Liquid Gold Elixir on a salad for supper.

 

Salad with grilled chicken and liquid gold elixir

If I want a treat afterward, I indulge myself. I’ll have sweet tea (sweetened with stevia or agave nectar), “pecan pie” (a raw, shelled pecan shoved into a date), almond butter (I’m going to try my hand at making my own this week! I’m also going to try to make a healthier version of Nutella, so stay tuned) spread onto raw flax seed split grain crackers, or dark chocolate (70% or more cocoa). This week I’m going to make some whole wheat pasta with Seeds of Change pasta sauce (available at Whole Foods) and try my hand at making raw ice cream (with banana or coconut as a base).

I’ll also allow myself to eat cooked vegetables at dinner. The other night I had nothing but blackeyed peas and butter beans for supper. Yes, I had to pass up the cornbread but the upshot is that I eat as much as I want of what I can have!

I’m completely open to questions, so if you have some, lay ’em on me!

Rapid Detox

Every raw food site I’ve seen will caution you against transitioning to raw too quickly. I’m not sure I can stop myself. I read a lot before jumping into raw foods, but once I jumped, I dove in. The first few days I felt so amazing that I was certain I wouldn’t cave in to sweet temptations or fast food conveniences.

I was loving eating raw. Now, when I say “eating raw”, I’m not 100% raw. The nearest Whole Foods is nearly two hours away and there are certain things I just can’t get around here. Nama Shoyu soy sauce for example. Sprouted grain bread. Seeds of Change pasta sauce. In recipes I use low sodium soy instead and I have had bread once since starting my new lifestyle, and I just had whole wheat. I paid attention to the ingredients, not the calories, when making my alternative selections.

But as far as my body is concerned, I might as well have gone 100% raw vegan overnight. I weigh a lot. More importantly, I was eating a massive amount of crap. Just… not food. After a couple of days on the diet, realizing how amazing things could taste and how they could be flavored so naturally and easily, I was like, “Oh well, forget it – I’m never putting that garbage back into my body!”

So for the past six days I have completely and totally eliminated from my diet:

All sugar – not one bit in anything I eat
All dairy – no milk, no cheese, nada

Red meat – I had a small amount of grilled chicken on two different occasions on a salad, but other than that, I haven’t had meat at all.

Any and all processed foods except for two slices of whole wheat bread in the past six days

Yesterday my body started really feeling the intense effects of such a rapid detox. I juiced for the first time. I was so excited! I got my juicer out and had an awesome time washing and lining up my vegetables to juice. I absolutely love cutting fresh ginger root. It smells amazing. I made green lemonade, which pretty much consists of a whole celery “bunch”, a few fist fulls of leafy greens (I used a mixture of lettuce and spinach leaves), an inch or so of ginger root, two apples, and a lemon.

Because I know that the juice is more packed with nutritious benefits the sooner it’s ingested, I gulped it down quickly. It tasted delicious. Tart, like lemonade, but sweetened just enough with the apples. Seemed like the very best hot weather drink ever. I had about 22 ounces or so.

Within 20 minutes I had to sprint for the bathroom. How can I say this without being too graphic? I just won’t. Use your imagination. This activity continued for about 40 minutes, during which time I would keep thinking it was over and it would hit me again. As soon as I could get easy, I completely passed out. I was zapped of all that wonderful energy I’d been experiencing over the past several days. I ran a fever. And before, during, and after that I have had headaches. I’ve also experienced irritability, bloating, insomnia, nightmares, and have been coughing up disgusting mucous so thick I almost choke.

I feel very, very sick. Sometimes it is hard to concentrate.

None of this sounds good, right? So I looked up my symptoms and The Raw Foods Witch’s website confirmed what I suspected: my body has been rapidly taken off of all of its “drugs” and is going through detox.

The Raw Foods Witch assures her readers that detox will not last forever, and will get better and better if you push through it. However, she – just like every other source I’ve consulted for help – cautions against a rapid detox. Most raw foodists or anyone into this lifestyle will tell you to make certain changes, one at a time. You may cut out dairy for a few weeks, then cut out red meat for a few weeks too, etc., and you build on those changes.

But I read everything, I believe in this lifestyle. I truly do not want to put junk in my body. I look at anything other than natural foods as Unfit for Human Consumption – I can’t bring myself to cave and eat them. I passed right by a box of Krispy Kreme donuts this morning in the kitchen. No temptation. There is not one single food I shouldn’t have that I want anymore. I know that sounds shocking. I packed on 20 pounds FAST when I moved back to central Mississippi, and Ben and Jerry’s had a lot to do with that. Now the thought of eating B&J Milk & Cookies ice cream doesn’t only fail to tempt me, it downright disgusts me to think of eating it.

How does someone like me give up dairy so quickly? When I think over all the foods I truly, truly loved I cannot think of one that I would rather have over a fresh raw meal. I am not tempted in the least – quite the opposite. I have got to fight the urge to go buy a home enema kit to facilitate the detoxing further. That is very unlike me.

I just want the gross feeling I have to go away, but I can’t fathom trying to help it by cramming junk into my body. I’m going to keep dealing with it and I’ll let y’all know how it’s going as the days progress.

I will tell you that at the end of Day 4 I had lost a little over 4lbs.