Raw Food Journal Entries 3 & 4
April 14, 2011
I think this was my best raw food day yet.
Breakfast: I tried out the flax seeds for the first time! I felt proud of myself when I used the coffee grinder to grind them. What an amazing tool. Shows how advanced I am in my food preparation skills….
I created my own “recipe” by grinding two tablespoons of flaxseeds and sprinkling that over two mashed bananas. Ta-da! Raw oatmeal. I completed the meal with a raw food bar, a pear, apple, orange, and two plums. I love these breakfasts because they seem to be a little different each morning.
For lunch today I had an apple and three plates of spinach with an assortment of vegetables on top–everything from carrots, beets (my pee is supposed to be pink from these dang things but it’s not! Fail), red bell peppers, and peas (still don’t know if these are raw…).
I don’t crave desserts! I think when I limited fruit in the past it made me feel even more deprived in other areas. Now that I’ve expanded by eating lots of fruit, I feel wonderful! Even if I don’t completely continue with this diet, at least I learned a lot from it, and that I can load up on the fruit. Plus I’m learning about other sources of great foods, that vegetables provide protein, and that our bodies don’t need as much protein as we think they do (only 3-10% of our daily calories is all that is necessary).
Dinner consisted of two salads, an avocado, okra, a few kernels of popped popcorn (at the track meet I came to watch–I know this is not raw), 2 bananas, and an apple. I’ll admit, by dinnertime I start to crave cooked foods (it’s the end of the day, we’re used to sitting down to a hot meal, etc) but when I ate my raw food I felt great and it tasted great. I also think being cold made me want cooked foods (I was freezing at the track meet).
I came back to the dorm and weighed myself. I saw the change in the diet with my body–I weighed 124lbs at the end of the day! Usually when I weigh myself at the end of the day I am around 128lbs . . . full of heavy, heavy food. I think that’s one of the strangest things about this diet. . . when I feel full, I’m not as heavy. It’s a good, but strange feeling.
I feel the fiber getting to me, especially last night with all those rough vegetables from dinner. They taste great, I feel good afterwards, but then I feel everything moving around and I get gassy. I hope this doesn’t get to me in the heat of summer when I’m running.
The stress is building with the upcoming final exams. I’ve been stressed with this diet as well. Not in the way that I hate what I’m eating. It just comes as a big change mentally–I mean, I’ve been learning all these other health ideas with the government’s food pyramid for these past two years and lived religiously by them, and now many of those ideas have changed drastically! And sometimes I get a little down because I think, wow, I can’t have that food now, but then I remember this isn’t permanent–I can change if I want. I’m just trying it out.
Then there are those times where I worry about protein intake (a natural worry, since its such a big hype in society), calcium, and iron. I need those constant reminders that eating fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds are great ways to get everything I need. I’m learning so much about these foods and how much nutrition they provide, more than I think they do. I think the Standard American Diet has made everything else seem superior to vegetables that they fail to give out much information about the power of the other food groups besides dairy, meat, etc.
April 15, 2011
Weight: 121.5lbs
Breakfast: two pears, raw food bar, apple, two tablespoons ground flaxseeds. The flaxseeds tasted good today. I felt like I couldn’t really taste them yesterday. I sprinkled them on my apple after I took a few bites (so it’d stick) and it tasted delicious!
Lunch: I keep thinking I need salmon. Out of habit I grab it (haha, I rhymed!) because I always ate it when it was available. But there’s really no need to eat it after what I’ve learned. Salmon is good for me, but raw salmon is best–I’ve learned about “salmon ceviche,” which I hope to try soon–basically marinated raw salmon. Maybe I could get it at a sushi place?
I loaded up on fruit (I stashed it all away in a bag I brought to the cafeteria–I needed lots of it for the upcoming weekend). So my lunch consisted of a few strawberries, cantaloupe, pineapple, a plate of raw broccoli (with a little bit of salmon—like 4 bites worth), red bell pepper (for the vitamin C to absorb the iron) and then two plates of mixed greens with beets, some peas, and more bell pepper slices.
Dinner: After I ran five miles I felt famished. I had a banana before the run and felt fine, but the hunger hit me after the run. I ate an entire avocado and another banana, and then went to dinner 30 minutes later. I think I was still hungry by then and really craving pasta, so I ate two entire pasta ravioli things with cheese inside of them. I’ll admit they were to die for. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t resist it. I combined it with a ton of raw vegetables, which made it easier to handle. I still got all the nutrients I needed in while indulging a little and not overdoing it.
The fiber didn’t affect me as much today. My stomach didn’t feel weird, but I’m getting gassy again, ugh!
