Raw Foods Diet: Days 31 and Beyond
No Comments yet, so why not make one?…When you are hungry or thirsty, my eating of food or drinking will not fill your stomach; you must eat and drink for yourself.
- D. T. Suzuki
Raw Foods Diet: Days 31 and Beyond
First of all, I would like to warn you that this is a very long post. This isn’t a conventional blog, and this isn’t a conventional blog post either. I hope you get something out of it.
I would also like to apologize for taking so long to write this entry. I had gotten my computer stolen, and had yet to receive the insurance money to fund the cost of buying a new one. Unfortunately, the public computers at my apartment complex are not the best, but I have decided to just try to do the best I can regardless. That is all anyone can hope for, right?
Another unfortunate development is that I am also unable to fully analyze the blood tests I had done. The results were E-Mailed to me, but in PDF format. These computers can’t read that format, so I am going to have to wait to give an objective analysis of my blood work. Furthermore, I won’t be able to finish making the Week 4 (plus two days) Graphs, since my graphing software was on my computer. Do not fret, it is only a matter of time before everything will be back to normal.
Many of you will probably be wondering what I ate the day after the raw vegan foods diet had ended, and after my final blood test was completed. Scratch that, I know for a fact many of you are wondering, based on the number of comments and E-Mails I got alone.
Leaving the Raw Foods Diet
I did plan on easing smoothly back into my more “normal” way of eating. I took suggestions and thought long and hard about what I was going to do; however, the final outcome was far from what I had expected.
The day went something like this…
Baby food -> Banana -> Cheese stick -> Banana ->; Turkey & Cheese Sammich -> Glass of Milk -> Lou Malnati’s Deep Dish Pizza with Barq’s Root Beer
Crazy? Probably. As you can see, I got more and more confident with each passing meal. At the end, I just basically figured that nothing could stop me, and went for the pizza. It became almost a test. I ate cheese, turkey, bread, and pepperoni, and drank both milk and root beer. All the things I was trying to avoid, and everything that had been recommended against, I decided to eat. Why? Well, I’m not exactly sure. I felt that I deserved some reward for my efforts, and didn’t want to wait for a few days to ease out of the raw vegan foods diet, have my reward, and then finally go back to my more normal way of eating. This was risky, but I really just wanted to get it over with.
Imagine my surprise when I felt fine that day, and the next. I’ve had no symptoms from eating these kinds of foods, and still am not exactly sure why. For all intents and purposes, I should have gotten sick! I got my digestion used to 30 days of raw vegan foods, and then all of a sudden forced it to undergo some heavy, fattening, and gastrically-violent foods. I had more of a reaction when I ate onion and avocados!
The next day I went right back into eating what I had been eating before this trial started. Now that my reward was out of the way, I could continue undisturbed. I knew for quite some time that I wasn’t going to continue eating raw vegan foods after the 30 days were up, and had already decided what sort of diet I was going to do. It hovers around 45% protein, 30-35% carbohydrates, and 15-20% fat. My carbohydrates come from things like brown rice, bran cereals, a variety of oats, as well as three servings of fruit and three servings of vegetables each. My fat mostly comes in the form of different oils, with the bulk of them being either flax seed oil, fish oil, or extra virgin olive oil. The bulk of my protein intake is from leaner meats like chicken breast, chunk light tuna, turkey burgers, as well as some whey protein powders and egg whites. This is not all I am eating, as I occasionally have been implementing different foods, but it is the bulk of it. I am still eating this way today.
I could probably get myself completely off of eating meat, and develop into a vegetarian lifestyle, but I am still making my own conclusions about that. As of now, I just eat meats for the sake of convenience to my particular diet plan and that I find it to be rather affordable, easy to prepare, and even easier to store.
With that in mind, let’s return our focus to my trial wherein I completed 30 days of eating only raw, or uncooked, vegan foods. These almost entirely consisted of various fruits and vegetables. This will be a subjective analysis. I will use no objective data to reach these conclusions, as that part was forced to be done at a later date. For now, I will outline my own experiences with this diet, what I have learned, as well as what I liked and didn’t like.
Sugar Content, Sweet Tooth
If this diet has had any sort of effect on my physiology, as a permanent change, it would most likely be in the further development of my sweet tooth. The high amount of sugar, namely fructose, in this diet was difficult to handle at first. My teeth didn’t feel 100%, but fortunately, this was a passing side effect. Had this been a longer trial I may be singing a different tune, however. Eventually, I did get used to it, and noticed no differences. In fact, I might have gotten too used to it, you might say. Take for example, my recent trip a few days ago to the Brazilian steakhouse, Brazzaz…
After sitting down, and trying different cuts of meat, I realized that I actually found myself being more drawn to their salad bar. But I was trying to get my money’s worth, and still in a bit of a shock about my newfound taste buds, so I still tried to eat more meat. I found myself not even being impressed by their filet mignon wrapped in bacon! This is not to say, however, that it was the restaurant’s fault. I could tell that the meat was very well cooked, but I also just was not as interested as I would have been. I noticed it was the carbohydrate-rich foods that excited me, not the copious amounts of pork, steak, chicken, lamb, or even bacon! Bacon for Pete’s sake!
To me, my normal desire for the “meaty” taste had been deactivated, and replaced with by a sweet tooth. Fortunately, it seems more specific to fruit, as I have not had any cravings for any desserts or anything else of the sort. This means now all I have to control is my desire for fruit, and green smoothies, and I will be good to go. I still like to get a few servings of fruit a day, and I find myself attracted even more to sweeter fruits like grapes and apples.
Preparation
Compared to my normal dieting, which consists of a fair amount of cooking, this diet was a breeze. The most complicated thing I had to do was blend fruits and/or vegetables. Because I was so used to measuring, weighing, and keeping track of my food on a daily basis, when I eventually started doing this with raw food I found it easy as well. The weighing took mere minutes on a scale. Definitely not a big task.
If, however, you are not used to keeping such a close eye towards what you eat, it would definitely be something you would have to get used to. I would definitely recommending keeping track of your calories and macro nutrients at first, to become fully aware of just how much you need to eat.
Smoothies
For all my blender woes, without it, I would have been doomed. Why? I needed it to make smoothies! It is just incredibly hard to get enough calories without drinking smoothies, be they “green” or otherwise. Many times, I did not get enough calories in, and as a result, probably lost too much weight. If I didn’t have a blender, I know I would have found it even more difficult to consume even the amount of fruits and vegetables that I did. Overall, making a smoothie was not that taxing. It would have been a lot easier with a different blender, but I ended up getting the job done anyway.
The Almighty Banana
If you have been following this trial at all, you will know how I seemed to eat bananas with wild abandon. You should also have some sense as to why I did this, as I explained myself a few times, or when questioned. If this is your first time at GrowStronger.com, or you just plum forgot what I had said, you should keep reading.
-High calories. The banana, on average when accounting for the varying sizes, is about 100 calories. Given how hard it is already to maintain your daily caloric needs, a fruit this high in calories is important.
-No fat (or very little). This is important if your approach to a raw vegan foods diet is a high-fruit one, which for me it was. Avocados are high in calories too, but they are also high in fat.
-Not too sweet. Let’s say, just for an example, my mainstay had been apples instead of bananas. I personally know that I would have eventually, and probably not far into the trial, gotten sick of their sweet taste. Sure, there is a wide variety of them, but with my temporarily heightened taste to sense sweet things, they all seemed pretty sweet, and sometimes mealy, to me. The banana is not that sweet, making it ideal for eating a lot of them.
-Easy to consume. Going back to the apple analogy, eating that many of them would not only be much more taxing on the muscles of my jaw and my teeth, but it would also take much longer to eat. The banana, on the other hand, is quite easy to eat, easier to hold on to, and takes a very short amount of time to consume. This might sound trivial, but when you ate as much fruit as I did, the difference is surely in the details.
-Very important to smoothies. A few times, I had different concoctions of smoothies that featured no bananas whatsoever. Miserable failures, all of them. Whenever I did this, I felt like some crucial element was missing. It didn’t take long for me to find out that it was the banana that gave the smoothie its rich and creamy texture. The equivalent of cornstarch or xanthan gum, the banana literally acted as a thickening agent for the smoothies. Without them, it could only be called a fruit drink, in my opinion.
-Easily freezable. Peel them, stack them on a plate, and put them in a freezer. Stacking them on the plate can be fun for the whole family! Bananas may ripen at their own leisure, but thanks to modern conveniences, such as the freezer, we can hold off that process for much longer. Furthermore, adding a frozen banana or two into a smoothie makes it even more enjoyable!
If you haven’t figured it out by now, the almighty banana was a crucial part of getting through this diet, without which I don’t know if I would have been able to. Of course, Murphy’s law must have also been at play here, as when I needed bananas most, they turned their backs (peels?) to me. Thanks a lot Peapod.
High-fruit vs. High-fat
When considering to go on a diet that consists of eating only raw vegan foods, you are going to have to make a choice. Will you get the bulk of your calories from eating a lot of fruit, or from eating a lot of fat? You simply can’t get enough calories from a diet that consists primarily of uncooked vegetables, so forget about it. When I made this choice, I took the high-fruit approach because it made more sense to me. It still is a controversial issue in the raw vegan foods world, but I took it upon myself to pick what I thought would be best.
I experimented, briefly, with both high-fat days, and high-fat meals, with little to no success. While I didn’t give them a 30 day trial of their own, I don’t feel I need to. I knew that they wouldn’t agree with me, and whenever I did eat a meal high in fat on this diet, it usually tasted quite good but left me feeling pretty awful. The effect was so powerful at first, that I ended up occasionally using an avocado or two to help me get to sleep, and for awhile it turned out to be quite successful. Eventually, even that positive aspect went away, and all I was left with was the high-fat beast who would come to take my energy away. For others, fruit may not agree with them as well.
In fact, there have been a lot of people who have been successful with a raw vegan foods diet that was high in fat. In the end, you’ll need to try it out for yourself.
The Nutrition Of It All
From my understanding of nutrition and biochemistry, as well as my own body, I am not convinced this diet would work for me as a long-term solution or lifestyle change. The low amounts of protein and fat put it, in my mind, in an extreme category. In my opinion, there are two different ways of eating. There is dieting as a tool, and dieting as a lifestyle change. This raw vegan foods diet was a tool, that I used for 30 days, and gave me both positive and negative results. Since I can’t see myself eating this way for the rest of my life, at least not at this point, it remains only a tool. Using different diets as a tool or as a lifestyle change have their positives and negatives, and one approach can’t be favored over another. The more restrictive the diet, the more temporary it usually becomes. In my eyes, this diet is a tool in the same way the carbohydrate-restrictive ketogenic diets are a tool. Neither of them are usually permanent lifestyle changes, but both of them can be successful in their own way. Of course, I still have to leave this open to further objective analysis, mainly from the results of my blood tests.
Social Eating Aspects
This diet is awkward outside of your home, to say the least. I felt weird not being able to go out to restaurants with people, or ordering fruit when finally forced to. There were times when we would have to stop by at Whole Foods first, so I could get a bite to eat. There were other times when I brought food with me. I don’t care how self-assured you think you are, eating bananas in a dark and cramped movie theater is awkward. What do I do with the peels and rinds?
Psychological Aspect
One of the most interesting developments was the psychological struggle, or willpower, to endure this difficult challenge. I would definitely say it changed me in many ways, and made the entire ordeal worthwhile. First of all, now that I have successfully completed 30 days of eating in this rather extreme fashion, I find myself “laughing off” things that I would previously have found much more challenging. I am constantly reminding myself that if I can go through 30 days of eating basically only fruits and vegetables, there isn’t much that I can’t do! And secondly, I find that food is no longer very important to me. I see it more as a means to an end. To a goal. To some worthwhile result. If I didn’t before, I would definitely describe myself as a person who easts to live, and doesn’t live to eat. My love of cooking, and baking, has fortunately not changed either. Instead of cooking or baking for myself, I now enjoy doing it even more for other people.
Sleep
Before going on this diet, I would call myself an amateur insomniac. While it wasn’t always a regular thing, I never found it easy to go to sleep. And when I could go to sleep, every day it seemed my schedule would change. Within the first week or so, my sleeping habits were radically changed. Whether this was due to this new discipline I was forced to have, or the actual diet itself can’t be known. What I do know is that now I have an easier time going to sleep and getting out of bed, so I am not complaining.
Miracles/Fanaticism
One thing that almost stopped me from even partaking in a 30 day trial of a raw vegan foods diet was the fanaticism espoused by many raw foodist “gurus”. Everyone was not only selling something related to raw foods, but many of them encouraged blind followers by attacking all other ways of eating. It is not my opinion that eating a raw vegan foods diet is the only right way. There are many paths up the mountain. And anyone who feels it is the epitome of healthy eating frightens me somewhat. This diet has as many fanatics, be they right in their thinking or not, as any other diet I have ever seen. There’s quite a lot of misinformation, and it was a daunting process sorting through all of that.
Onto the subject of miracles. In my first post discussing my plans to go on a raw vegan foods diet, I discussed the many promises, or benefits, that several people said eating this way would bring.
People eating a raw food diet are the healthiest looking people I have ever seen. They have a glow in their skin, a shine to their hair, a sparkle in their eyes, a healthy, fit, body and look younger than their age. They have a youthful energy and they feel good about themselves and happy to be alive!
If you are sick, tired, overweight or just want to feel better than you do right now, know that this way of eating could be the answer to your prayers. Does it sound like I’m promising a lot? Well, I am because I have seen this raw diet work time and time again. This has been one of the greatest miracles in my life and in the lives of other people whom I’ve shared this with.
Overall, I found only a slight increase in energy, but I feel that was only as a result of all the fructose I was consuming. My dry skin didn’t clear up, nor did it get any worse. My eyes didn’t change color, and I wasn’t visited by any spirits. This way of eating, despite all my best wishes, was not the answer to my prayers. I didn’t experience any of these benefits, unfortunately, and I’m sure that many will conclude that it was my fault, and not the diet’s. That I did something wrong. Maybe I did, but I feel as if the hype is far too great for ANY way of eating to live up to it. There were benefits, no doubt, but nothing as extreme as I had seen others achieve.
Specific Circumstances
There were many reasons why I decided not to continue along the path of my raw vegan foodist forefathers. Several of these I have already touched upon, and others I will touch upon later in this post. There are some, though, that need to be pointed out specifically as they remain under the realm of specific circumstances. Basically, these are reasons why this diet was difficult for me at this particular time and place. Circumstances change, coincidences happen, but at times I felt like I was cursed by some meat-eating gods.
For one, the fact that I was so dependent on getting to the grocery store made everything difficult. I’m used to developing into a routine, where I can go to the grocery store once, maybe twice, to get my food for the week. The conditions necessary to make this happen on my raw vegan foods trial were definitely missing. I had no idea what I was going to eat the next day, as I had yet to get into the “flow” of things. I didn’t know what food was going to be available, what my body would feel like eating, and whether or not the fruit would be too ripe, or, as what happened in most cases, not ripe enough. This meant that I would have to go to the grocery store several times a week when things didn’t turn up as I had planned. For a student, on a budget, without access to a car, this becomes a tiresome chore.
Another quip about the grocery stores was reiterated by the fact that I had access to no car. This left me with very few options. I could either haul as much as I could carry in a backpack, which I often did, and go several times a week, or I could depend on getting bulk orders from online grocery delivery services. However, nothing turned out to be very reliable. Lugging a huge backpack stuffed to the brim of bananas might have also made me look crazy. I know I got odd stares as I had to explain to several cashiers that, “Yes. This is all for me.” and, “No. I don’t need a bag, but can you fit them all in my backpack?” Public transportation did not help that much, and I was forced to pay the expensive cab fares far too many times.
Chicago winter’s carry an air of unpredictability to them. Will it be sunny out, or will it snow in record amounts? Will the lake freeze over, or will it merely bring extremely cold wind? And most importantly, will the bananas be ripe or not? As I were to find out, I had about as much luck predicting the weather based on my sense of smell than predicting whether I would be able to find edible bananas. When grocery stores like Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Dominick’s, and the local convenience store nearby failed to deliver, there was Peapod. Readers of my blog should know my experiences with them, but if you don’t suffice it to say that in two days, 198 extremely green, under ripe, bananas exchanged hands between Peapod and myself. When I was so dependent on these as my main form of sustenance, you can imagine what would happen when I couldn’t find a moderately ripe one in all of Chicago. Overall, eating raw vegan foods in Chicago in wintertime, is no easy task.
And finally, the act of blending just became ridiculously difficult. My blender was small, its motor was weak, and the whole thing was just far too old to put up with all the stress I forced it to undergo. Sure, I could have gotten one of those fancy Vitamix blenders, if I decided to sell a kidney. Retailing for close to a thousand dollars, it obviously was not in the cards for me. In fact, using that old blender that I borrowed from my parents was my only real option financially. This meant that it took a lot longer to blend things, I couldn’t blend a lot at once, and lots of different fruits or vegetables wound up not very well blended at all.
As you can tell, these concerns, or specific circumstances, were not set in stone, but they still needed to be pointed out. This diet is susceptible to a lot of different variables, which is why I found it to be difficult at times due to the aforementioned reasons. I could have found myself a different blender, just like Peapod could have been less crazy with what they consider a deliverable banana. So it goes.
Will I try it again?
I should reiterate that while this diet may have not been for me, that does not mean I won’t be back to try another, possibly longer, trial in the future. Due to different circumstances and my own personal findings, this diet wasn’t right for me, but only at this present time. Who knows what the future could hold? Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and the benefits it gave me.
Could it work for you?
While this diet was a temporary tool for me, it could be a longterm lifestyle change for you. While this diet didn’t give me enough fat or protein, it could be the right amount for you. And while I felt awkward eating out with friends, you might possibly not care, or even fit right in. The only way you can tell is by trying it out for yourself. If I have persuaded, or dissuaded, you into trying this diet, you must realize that ultimately, it is your experience that would be more important than mine. So try it out for awhile, and analyze the results you get from both a subjective and objective standpoint. Don’t let any biases, or fanaticism, get in the way of the conclusions that you draw. Who knows, you might like what you find. At the very least, I fully believe you will find the entire process as rewarding as I did.
Thanks to everyone who read, commented, enjoyed, or even hated these entries. I’m glad I could get some kind of reaction out of you.
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