An end and a beginning

Ok. I packed up the scale and hid it in the recesses of a closet. I stopped counting calories and stepped away from the mirror. And I'm no longer calling myself raw.

New eating mantra: Don't eat crap.

What started out as a healthy lifestyle change turned into an obsession with food. I did my research before we started, read quite a few books. If I had them with me, I would pull out some reference quotes, but one claim that kept coming up was effortless weight loss and management. Now, I'm not overweight and I'm lucky enough to have never been overweight, but I've got a woman's body with hips and thighs and a belly and breasts when I so enviously lust after the figure of the small boned and the androgynous, tiny and curveless. I can be so self-deprecating, saying things like, "If I'm wearing the small, what the hell are people who are actually small wearing?" So all this talk about losing weight appealed to me (and my slightly self-destructive side).

But I didn't lose weight without watching calories, and when I did start to watch calories, I was grumpy and hungry, a general pain in Madeline's ass, all for about 3 pounds over a couple months. And the cravings. I was in a constant daydream about pizza, burgers, fries, falafel,... vegan or not, I wanted it all. There were good days and good raw meals, but when I gave 80/10/10 a go, that kind of broke me.

Throughout this, though, working out has been a solace. I feel strong when I'm hiking, cleansed after a run. I finally made it to the community yoga class this week, and it kind of kicked my butt and I was so sore the next day, but in a good way. I'm excited to increase my mileage each week, and I'm excited to increase my endurance. I'm going to keep working out, keep moving everyday, in the pursuit of strength. I'm going to stop comparing myself to others and find my own strength.

So I've abandoned my raw journey and going back to being vegan, albeit a vegan who eats a lot of fruit and vegetables (imagine that!). No junk, no preservatives, no artificial flavors, just real, whole foods. Don't eat crap.

The story could end there, but that's actually where things got interesting. If you've read the blog of a length of time, you may recall that I. Love. Bread. Specifically, a good french loaf, but anything soft and starchy will do. So the first thing we added back into our diets were whole-grain sprouted tortillas and then bagels.

My body freaked the fuck out.

I was crampy and constipated. That lovely complexion I had cultivated during my raw days was marred by deep and painful cystic pimples on my chin and a weird, spotty rash that spread across my chest and upper back. The rash thing happened to me once before a couple years back and lasted for almost six months, during which I reconfigured my entire wardrobe around very high necklines. I was miserable and wondered if I'd ruined my ability to eat cooked food forever. But it occurred to me that I had incidentally been gluten-free for the past few months, and maybe that was the problem. I'm unable to verify this with a doctor, as I don't currently have health insurance, and you have to ingest gluten for a couple months for a blood test to be viable, but I substituted my bread products for gluten free varieties about a week ago, and my skin has almost completely cleared. So who knew? All these years and all the money I've spent on unsuccessful acne treatments, maybe all along I've had an undiagnosed gluten-intolerance. I'm still kind of pouty at my lack of french bread and eating out as a gluten-free vegan seems next to impossible, but I've had surprisingly few cravings since adding more cooked foods to my diet. So far so good.

I'm not sure if I'm going to keep blogging. I don't want to talk about food anymore, because I'm tired of thinking about it. Maybe I'll use it as an all-purpose blog, document my knitting as I had intended a while back. I'm not sure yet.

-Eloise

Day 133

Man, it's so easy to let blogless days slide by. My camera is on its way home to me, though. I find it so much easier to post with pictures to anchor my thoughts.

Raw and I have reached an understanding. We are going to co-exist in a way that makes us both happy. To be honest, with the zeal of a new convert, I pushed myself to be too raw, too hard, too fast, and I was unhappy. After giving strict 80/10/10 a go, I found myself incredibly unsatisfied and unhealthily obsessed with food. It's all I was thinking of, what I was going to eat and what I couldn't eat. Every night as I fell asleep, I was having intense cravings for non-vegan foods that I haven't eaten in years, even things I'd never in my life considered eating. I didn't want to be raw anymore. I barely even wanted to be vegan.

So here are my compromises. I'm sticking with the low fat framework, keeping the percentage of my calories that come from fat each day to 10-12%. I'm eating all fruit and veggies throughout the day. At the moment, I just can't stand to eat a salad, so I'm not pushing it. Instead, I'm getting my greens in smoothies and I've been making wraps for dinner using sprouted grain tortillas from Food for Life. That little bit of bread is making all the difference in the world. To mix it up, I've been experimenting with different dressings. My current favorite was found here, which I'm going to post with my minor mods:

Liquid Gold

1/2 c olive oil

1/2 c water

1/3 c lemon juice

2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

1/4 c Nama Shoyu

1/2 c Nutritional Yeast

2 tsp Dijon Mustard

1 tsp ground cumin

Shake in a mason jar to mix. Dressing can be kept in a jar with a lid, refrigerated for 2 weeks. Makes 2 cups.

I am loving this stuff.

Other stuff I am loving includes My Daily Plate over at Livestrong.com. Like the cron-o-meter, it can be used to track calories and nutrients, but it's so much more. It can also track exercise, determine your optimal calorie intake based on your goals and includes more packaged food. The abundance of advertising is rather annoying, but being able to log into any computer to track my day is really convenient. Right now, I have my goal set to lose 1.5lbs per week, which for me means that I can take a day off each week to forgo keeping track and let myself indulge a bit without entirely derailing. It's been really great so far and I've already started dropping some of those last few vanity pounds. I sound like an ad for the damn thing, but I'm excited and I wish I'd found it sooner!

-Eloise

Day 122

Four months raw!

My (three-month old) camera had to be sent out to be repaired, so it's going to be cellphone pics or bust around here for the next couple weeks.

Yesterday was the close to the epitome of an idyllic summer day for me. I slept in until 9, cleaned out a closet and hauled out three garbage bags of junk, exercised on the treadmill and then showered all before noon. In the afternoon, I brought a blanket, a book, my knitting and quart of farmer's market strawberries outside and relaxed under a tree in the grass behind by building for a few hours. The perfect mix of getting stuff done and doing nothing.

There are two things that I struggle with that have made this last month of going raw less fulfilling for me than the previous ones: I wind up running the other way when confronted with dogma, and I want to be perfect. These are not new issues, and I know they both stem from getting kicked out of my church when I was a teenager. Being barred from the community that I had devoted myself to makes me question everything, and I cannot accept that there is only one way to live, that any human being has all the answers. However, not wanting to adhere to the rules is in direct competition with my need to prove my worth, to be the best at whatever I attempt.

I've been pushing myself to be more and more raw, more "pure." One by one, I cut out nuts, oils, spices, salt. I've been eating just fruit and veggies. I've felt pretty good physically, but mentally, it's been agonizing. I was craving cooked foods hardcore, and I would have given my right arm for savory. So two nights ago, I made a salad dressing: lemon juice, tahini, maple syrup, ginger, garlic and Nama Shoyu. 1/8 cup of that on a huge salad of spinach, cukes, peppers, basil and tomatoes and all was right in my world again.

I think that happiness is equally important as health, and if I had to choose one over the other, I'd rather be 100% happy than 100% healthy. And I don't necessarily think that cooked food = inherently unhealthy. I've had to step back from some of the raw communities I've been participating in, because sometimes the spiritualism and moralism associated with eating raw can be too much for me. Eating raw does not make me a better person. It does not foster compassion and kindness. It does not bring me closer to God. It's just a way of eating. I'm giving myself permission to step back, to enjoy food and preparing meals again. Still raw for now, keeping the fat around 10-15% of my total calories. But I'm making salad dressing.

I feel like this is a common theme in my blog, perpetual quandaries about what I should be doing versus what I want to be doing, making choices based on other people's perceptions versus making choices for myself. So many of the other raw blogs I read are so happy all the time, jiving with the universe and perfectly content with their raw lives. Part of me thinks that people just aren't talking about what a challenge it can be. I have days where I'm blissfully happy, and if I only blogged on those days, it would be a very skewed picture. Actually, I think I need to blog more when I'm happy, because I typically am. I don't think my blog accurately reflects that.

But other days are difficult. Even now, I feel a degree of guilt about taking a step back, that I haven't lived up to the standards I've set for myself, that I'm not trying hard enough. And maybe other bloggers are perfectly content. I don't know. But tomorrow is my girlfriend's birthday, and I'm going to take her out for a not-raw breakfast when she's off from work on Wednesday. And I'm going to enjoy myself without guilt. The next day, we're going to a pick-your-own farm for strawberries, and I have a feeling we'll mono-meal on them for the day. And I'll have fun. And that's what counts.

-Eloise