The Raw Foods Diet
Continues – Day 7

Weight: 121.2 (No change. Is my scale broken?)

I started the day with BarleyMax – 1 teaspoon mixed in water.

Breakfast: One-half small watermelon.

Mid-morning Snack: 2 dried figs and 7 almonds, eaten next to a trail alongside the beautiful Blue Ridge Parkway.

Lunch: Raw comfort foods. It’s been an emotional morning… unpleasant emotions just came out of nowhere, although I’m hoping it’s one of the detox symptoms and I’m getting rid of them. That’s a nice thought.

If I hadn’t been on this raw foods diet challenge with my friends and if I hadn’t committed to write about it on my blog, I think I might have eaten some cooked food today, that’s how down I’ve felt. It’s very interesting how eating can be so related to emotional states . Or emotional states can be related to eating.

So instead of having a super-healthy green smoothie of spinach and mango, I opted for other tasty foods that are more seasoned and have stronger flavors. I have a feeling that the smoothie might have turned my mood around, but I just caved in and went for flavor.

Here’s what I had: 7 olives, 2 sesame-flax crackers, 1/2 avocado, 1/4 cup kim chi, 1/2 cucumber. It’s probably more fat and salt than I needed, but maybe the fat will help to smooth things out in my psyche.

Mid-afternoon Snack: Banana with almond butter.

Dinner: Heirloom tomato; mushroom; Marinated Greens (from Living on Live Food by Alissa Cohen).

Recipe:

8 cups greens (I used kale)

Marinade:

• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tablespoon fresh ginger
• 1 tablespoon Bragg Liquid Aminos (I used Nama Shoyu, an unpasteurized type of tamari, or soy sauce)
• 1/2 cup water
• Pinch of cayenne

1. Cut greens into bite-sized pieces.
2. Blend the marinade ingredients in a blender.
3. Pour marinade over greens and mix well.
4. Cover and let sit for a least a few hours, or preferably overnight.

Additional Comments Based on My Journal Entry

I believe the thoughts that I might cheat were emotionally based, but I don’t know where they came from. There’s nothing that I’m conscious of, so I'm thinking that they could be cleansing/detox symptoms.

What was I feeling? Cranky, a little depressed, certainly not the bubbly-happy feeling I had yesterday. I thought a lot about cooked food and wine.

If I hadn’t been doing this challenge with other people and writing about it on my site, I may have cheated or stopped. I thought if I ate some cooked food I could just start back up raw again at the next meal, but when I thought about possibly going through those initial couple of days of feeling sick again, that was more encouragement to continue. Plus, I believe cooked food is addictive.

So, here’s the good lesson I got from this day…

Another persuasive item to keep you on the straight and narrow: If the habit you want to implement is about making the change to a raw foods diet, then just consider the detox effects of when you switch from cooked to raw. If you’re on day 7, you’ve made good headway. If you eat some cooked food and then go right back to raw food, maybe you wouldn’t have too much of a problem. But if you spent an entire day eating lots of cooked food—omelet for breakfast, big salad with bread for lunch, pizza and wine for dinner—that might make you sick, and it will probably be very uncomfortable starting back up on your raw foods diet path.

To read about days 8 and 9, go to my blog.

To read day 10, click here.

Would you like to read about other detox diets? Click here.

Return to Raw Foods from Day 7 of the Raw Foods Diet.