day one of food intake

I am spending the next 30 days revealing what I eat every day, how I feel and how much exercise I am doing.
Day one:
slept horrible, had bad dreams about food. I woke up feeling groggy and foggy headed from eating bad the night before. Got up at 6:30a.m.
Biked 1 mile to work and back
Breakfast: 8 small organic brae burn apples: worked cleaning for 3 hours
Felt much better. Fog lifted, energy was back. Felt very happy, content and peaceful.
took city bus across town to fruit stand. Biked 1/2 mile to next job.
Lunch: 3 cantaloupe: worked cleaning for 2 hours
Still feeling great. Had great mind set and attitude.
Took city bus back across town
Worked cleaning and cooking for 2 hours.
Biked 1 mile home.
Dinner: Went out to Shangri-la tea room to see a presentation (drove my mom's car because I brought some kids along). Wish I would have biked.
Ate a cabbage salad, it came with a citrus ginger dressing that I am sure had oil in it. Also, I had a small portion of raw avocado-cacao pudding.
Developed a small headache after eating all those fats and cacao. Felt irritable and was cranky with my daughter. Felt like my energy had been zapped, wished I could go to bed and it was only 7p.m.

Tomorrow I want to focus on eating some greens and avoiding all overt fats. We will see how well that goes :)

what I learned from an apple

A few years ago, after turning my life around with eating raw, I was about six month into the raw lifestyle. I was going on a walk and eating an apple. The apple I was eating tasted so good, it was the most amazing thing I had ever eaten. With each bite I could feel the life of the apple flowing through my body...giving me life, peace and healing. I felt my mind enter into a whole new realm and I was overcome with gratitude. I started sobbing and sobbing...still walking and eating my apple (probably looked a little crazy :) ). I realized that this apple was what was keeping me alive, I was a living, walking, breathing person because of the gifts the earth had given me. The food that not only kept me alive but allowed me to thrive was from trees and plants, not from packages and wrappers and stores or death...all the food I was eating was a gift from nature. Without trees and plants to keep me alive...I would either have to go back to eating dead foods that caused me to live a life of disease and depression or I would die. During this intense awakening, I also thought back to my old life and felt so very very sorry for all the damage I had already done to this wonderful planet. I used to throw my cigarette butts all over, I would litter all the time, I would pour toxic chemicals all over the ground and many more things...not even thinking about the consequences of my actions. Not only was I destroying the earth, but I was destroying myself. Now that I was loving and healing myself, I knew it was only right to love and heal the earth. What is good for the earth is also good for me and vice versa. I had become one with the planet I lived on and it was an incredible awareness. I was eating living food for my living body...and because of that I was experiencing life to it's fullest.

At this time my purpose in life became very clear. My life was needed to help the life of the planet. My calling was to do everything in my power to heal the earth and make it better not only for myself and my children but for all future generations. Without a healthy planet every single person, plant and animal that lives on it suffers.

I decided to first step I needed to do to heal the planet was to start with my own life. My truck was the first thing I wanted to address. I didn't enjoy it anymore like I used to, I felt it wasn't adding quality to my life and it was a great supporter of foreign oil and the destruction of the earth in many many ways. I parked it in my driveway and rode my bike for a full year only driving my truck a handful of times. When the year was up and I had gone through every possible scenario of what if's over and over again in my head...I felt it was time for it to go. I remember shaking when I handed the keys over...scared to death. Once it was out of my driveway and completely gone I was overcome with joy. I felt so light and free...it was an incredible feeling and I liked it. I liked it so much that I wanted more. I decided my next goal would be to get off grid and no longer support coal or hydro power...which in Idaho we have 50% coal and 50% hydro...both destroy the earth and nature in many ways. I started by getting rid of my dryer and using a clothes line...that seemed to go well..so I got rid of my washing machine. Washing my clothes out each morning from the day before seemed to be no problem. Each time I got rid of something the better and lighter I felt...so out went the TV, freezer, stove, a/c, large appliances..(all were donated to people who needed them). I also turned my cleaning business green....making all my own cleaning supplies with non-toxic ingredients and biking to all my jobs.
Now I have only a small mini fridge, hot water heater (that I keep the breaker turned off until I need it), a hot plate (rarely used), low power space heaters (winter only), low wattage lights (winter only), phone and laptop chargers. Hopefully by next winter I will have solar panels installed and then I should be set :)
Amazingly, my life is so much easier and simple than it used to be. None of these changes have made my life harder. I don't mind wringing and hanging my clothes, I find it very relaxing and meditative. I like making my smoothies with my hand cranked blender, it gives me a great work out and is fun to use. My life has none of the drama and chaos that it used to have. Instead it has abundance. Money is never an issue anymore, I always have more than I need. I always have food and clothing. I pay my bills months ahead of time. I never have to worry about gas prices or alternators or insurance or batteries or brake pads. I am never sick or depressed or suffer from severe mood swings. My business is thriving and I have more work than I need. I love biking everywhere, it makes me feel like a kid again.
I had no idea when I changed my diet that my life would change in such an incredible way. As I said in my previous blog...sometimes I fall back into old patterns, but now that I know what a life of health and abundance is like I am able to pull myself right back up on track...continually moving forward :)
You never know what eating an apple on a walk can do...lol...it could change your life.

fear of health

I am reading a book called "Emotional Intelligence", recommended by Adam from "30 bananas a day". I feel that there are some self destructive issues in my life that I want to deal with.

I have been coming up against some "road blocks" in making healthy choices. Ever since I've started eating 80/10/10 the longest I have been able to stay eating this way has been for 3 months straight. On average I can make 3 or 4 days and then I find that I feel incredibly good and as much as I enjoy that feeling it very foreign to me and I reach out for what's familiar.

Ever since I was a baby I have lived with pain and sickness. When I was a 4 month old baby my right leg was burned from hot water from the bathroom sink. I was left in the sink while my mom was out of the room, somehow the hot water got turned on and the water ran onto my leg for quite a while. Most of my childhood was spend in and out of hospitals getting skin graphs on my leg. So with all the surgeries I've had and then becoming sick and depressed at the age of 12, my whole life up until the age of 34 has been full of hospitals and sickness. That is all I had ever known, sickness is very familiar and comfortable to me.

So now that I have found health I am stepping into unfamiliar territory. When I eat healthy, feel healthy and live healthy I feel great on one level but I also feel scared and bare on another level. I find myself purposefully eating foods that I know will bring me down because I want to feel that blanket of sickness. I want what's familiar to me. I also have no childhood memories attached to fruits and vegetables. We ate very few of those in my childhood home and our fruit intake was composed of fruit pies from Eddie's bakery...which actually don't even have real fruit.

So how do I change this self destructive behavior? How can I feel comfortable in a healthy thriving body?

I just keep at it. It is like learning a foreign language, there comes a point in the learning process where everything clicks. There is not an option for me to go back to eating fast food and being sick all the time. That I cannot live with...I am all about self improvement. I want to become the very best person I can be...mentally, spiritually, physically and emotionally. Now that I have tasted the sweet nectar of health, I will continue on that path.

I have read it can take years to fully transition into a healthy raw diet. In November it will be year number 4 for me..with 2 years as 80/10/10 raw vegan. This is a little discouraging to me, but not that much. I have come a long way in a short amount of time. I spent 34 years living my old patterns and only 4 in changing those patterns to new ones. Some people have been able to jump into eating right without looking back...they just go 100% and stay that way. I haven't been able to do that, but I will get there. I just keep filling myself with knowledge and work on loving myself and my body every day. I am only becoming better.

All of my life I felt sick. I remember especially at age 12 I started having IBS in the form of chronic diarrhea. Also at the age of 12 was when I started having severe depression and mood swings. During the lunch hour at school I would sit in a corner by myself in a state of extreme depression. As I grew older I continued to slowly gain weight and continued to feel worse and worse. In my mid 20's I started taking anti-depressants, which would help temporarily but then I would after a while I would have to take more in order to feel their effects. By the time I was 34 years old I felt so sick all the time that I was sure I was dying and my depression was worse than ever even though I was on the highest dose of effexor that they would allow. I was also at my heaviest then, weighing 250lbs, eating fast food three times a day and guzzling a 6 pack of pepsi daily. I went to doctor after doctor only to be told over and over again that it was all in my head and nothing was wrong with my body. Finally in one of my emergency room visits after getting an ultra sound I was told that my gal bladder was full of stones and needed to be taken out. Surgery was scheduled a month out and I wasn't sure if I would survive another month. At the time I felt I would get better if I could just make it to surgery. I was sure that my gal bladder is what had been causing all of my health problems since I was 12. After the surgery I went straight to Sonic and got my favorite breakfast burrito. I immediately broke out into a sweat and the pain in my body was even worse than before surgery. I was devastated and called the surgeon only to be told by the nurse that some people don't get better right away and it could take a year before I got better. I didn't think I would last a year.

Somehow I was determined to survive. One day I was so miserable and in pain laying in bed when this infomercial came one. I felt too bad to even bother to change the channel. The guy on TV was talking about how the food we were being fed was bad for us and that we could heal our bodies by changing our diets. He was selling a book "What they don't want you to know" by Kevin Trudeau...or something close to that. I was so sick and desperate that I ordered the book, thinking it can't make me any worse! A few days later the book arrived and I dove into it. It talked about all the preservatives, chemicals, pesticides that are in our food and how the food was making people sick. I thought...I've got nothing to lose...so I changed what I ate. I started cooking at home instead of heading to McDonalds or ordering pizza. I started to feel a little better but not great. Just feeling a little better though made me realize that changing what I ate could make me feel better. I started reading more about food and one day came across an article that talked about raw food and living enzymes. Ah-ha...I thought, maybe I am not producing my own enzymes and I should eat food that has living enzymes in it. So I switched to eating raw fruits and veggies. I immediately felt fantastic within a day. I had no idea I could feel so good since I had never felt that good at any point in my entire life. I went on a roller coaster for about 6 months where I would eat all fruit and veggies for a few days and feel so good but then I would feel so hungry I thought I would starve to death and eat some cooked food. As soon as I would eat the cooked food I would immediately feel horrible..literally within a few minutes of eating the food. After about six months of this cycle I decided that I was done feeling bad and I went 100% raw. I felt so good and had great energy. Not only that I seemed to think quicker and clearer. I decided to quit taking my anti-depressants since my depression seemed to be gone. I quit taking effexor cold turkey...which is a very very bad idea...I went through 3 months of horrible drug withdrawls. After coming out of that horrible experience I felt even better, so I decided to quit smoking cigarettes..which was hard, but nothing like getting off effexor.

So here I was eating all raw fruits and veggies and feeling amazing, losing weight like crazy while having endless amounts of energy. The only think missing was other people who ate like me. I started searching for other raw foodies who lived in Boise and I found them. They introduced me to a whole different world of raw food eating. I was shown how to soak nuts and seeds, how to make raw brownies, raw pies, raw crackers...etc. I started making all of these great recipes and eating tons of prepared raw foods. I didn't really even need to eat fruits and veggies anymore I could eat all this other food that tasted just like to food I was "used to", the food I grew up eating. After about 3 month of eating like this I started to feel bad again. I started to feel depressed, gain weight, have mood swings. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I was eating "the best diet in the world", why was my health failing again?

It was around this time in my life that I met a lady named Michele who was attending a raw food class I was co-teaching. Michele told me about a book called 80/10/10 by Dr. Doug Graham. She said that maybe I was eating too many fats. I was skeptical but I read the book anyway. The book made logical sense and I thought I should at least try what Dr. Graham was suggesting. In the book he was saying that our diets need to be made up of mostly fruits and veggies with very little nuts, seeds, avocado's or any overt fats. 80 percent carbs, 10 percent fat, 10 percent protein. So I started eating fruits and veggies again and immediately felt better, just like before when I started eating them.

So this is where I am at. 2 years later I am still eating 80/10/10. I do slip up now and then and even eat cooked food at times but I always regret it and feel my very best when I follow 80/10/10 a hundred percent. I continue to struggle with my food addictions, but my life is incredible over all.

In another blog I will share how I made a connection to the earth and how that changed my life in such a way I got rid of my truck and am now a year round cyclist. Also this year I planted 14 fruit trees around my neighborhood.