Raw/Living food - Day 1

I recently stumbled onto a raw food book. I had no idea there was a whole world of eating like this out there! For anyone else not really familiar with it, it's only eating foods that are not cooked above 118 degrees. This rules out... well a lot of stuff. It's about eating fresh food, and often organic food where you can, and avoiding processed food. The people who have been living this lifestyle claim all sorts of fantastic health benefits and crazy amounts of weight loss. I feel like this is close to the eating style I had towards the end of college, where I just ate things like sprouts with mustard on them. My body felt so good then too. I just didn't wake up with aches and pains any longer. I know I'm a lot older now so more aches and pains are to be expected, but I had pains that did go away with my eating style changes. So I'm considering trying to go back to it.

It's a hard transition and yet, not hard at the same time. On one hand, I've been against processed food for a while, especially all of the additives. And after reading these books, now I just look at it and think Toxic!! But who knows how long that strong of a reaction will stay with me. Also, I know from personal experience that I felt better in the past, so that should be strong reasons for me to do it again. On the other hand though, it is hard to do! It's expensive! We've been to our local fruit and veggie place two times today alone and spent over 50 dollars between the trips. That's only getting me about 6 meals in this lifestyle. I can't be spending hundreds of dollars a week just on my food alone! Plus there is no way that my husband will be joining me eating like this so now we have double the food costs, plus double the time and energy to make a whole second meal. These raw meals do not just make themselves. They are time consuming and use just about every dish and device I have in the house it feels like. They need the juicer, the blender, the food processor. They often call for a dehydrator, a sprouter and an ice cream machine but I don't have any of these items yet, so I'm skipping those recipes for now. Then I have to sit next to my husband while he eats things that I know are delicious! It's hard to sit there and smell that food and never have a taste! I'm still not sold on the taste of all raw vegetables yet. I'm sure it would be fine if I never knew other things, such as pizza and tuna casserole and others along those lines, but I have had delicious foods before and I know what I'm missing! While I had the willpower to turn it down today, will I tomorrow? Or the next day? Enough so that this can be a lifestyle change and not just some odd fad I'm going through? I'm not sure.

But surely a healthier, less painful life should be worth giving up a bit of taste, right? Taste is just one little sense. I have 4 others! Plus it's not like you can NEVER eat anything else in this lifestyle. Just mostly it has to come from raw, unprocessed foods. I'm going to try to monitor my body and feelings carefully as I try this lifestyle on for size. It would be great if it would help me lose excess weight while still having tons of energy as it claims it will. I would love to lose 46 lbs from this point. I'll watch to see how much weight I lose from here, if any. The book I'm following to make these change also asks you to rate your energy level every day, presumably so you can see how much it improves over time. Today's energy rating would be between 2 an 5 throughout the day. At one point I was so groggy I was bumping in to all sorts of things. It would be so fantastic not to feel so sleepy in the afternoons!

I do know one thing though, if I always ate alone, always had enough time to prepare my food, and money wasn't an object when purchasing ingredients, I would definitely always eat this way. This sort of lifestyle really speaks to me. Maybe that should be reason enough to give this a try, even if it may be hard along the way.