Raw Food Diet - 30 Day 'No Fat' Trial - Day 24Today is day 24 and I can't believe I am nearly finished this raw food diet trial! I felt super tired when I woke up this morning. Again, it felt as if it would have been good to sleep for a couple of hours longer. The tiredness didn't last though. It NEVER does. Once I am up I am fully awake and clear-headed and it stays that way until I actually fall asleep. I am never drowsy and NEVER foggy. Weight Back down to 122. So that makes my total weight loss for this raw food diet trial 3 pounds. I had a friend joke with me yesterday and say that if I just wanted to lose weight, I could have popped a few Thinz (ephedrine based appetite suppressants) and dropped more weight than this! Haha! He's entirely right of course. If I just wanted to lose weight. But that really wasn't the point of this raw food diet trial. I want long term health. I want to feel AMAZING! I want to achieve every dream I ever had! If it was just for weight loss I could have done a water fast and dropped 20 pounds in a couple of weeks. Yes, I definitely could have picked up cigarettes and diet pills again, hell it worked for me before, but that isn't the point. None of that would solve any underlying problem (it might cause a few though). Whenever I did these things in the past they only worked as a temporary measure. A water fast is at least very healthy to do, but as a weight loss measure it fails if the underlying problem with food has not been adequately addressed. So many people fast and lose a lot of weight (like me), only to binge after the fast and undo all the good work that has been done. So many more people diet and successfully lose weight, only to put it all back on. This is because most diets involve deprivation of some kind. No matter how much they promise you you won't go hungry, you absolutely WILL go hungry. There is no way to go on eating the same things you're eating now, lose weight AND be healthy and satisfied. For that to happen, a total change is required. While the fact that this is a trial has made me feel like there is an end point, I actually don't think there is. When the trial is over, I will be free to have some fats again, but I really think I have found my path with this way of life. I don't see the need to eat any other way. What I am going to do is carry on exactly as I am now. Occasionally I will buy some nuts or an avocado and make some kind of salad or dish that is high fat and eat it all in one go so that there isn't anything hanging around to tempt me the next day. And I will do that so occasionally that my total fat intake will still be under 10%. When I am in New York in August, I plan to go to some raw food restaurants and believe me, I am going to try raw vegan pizza, raw vegan lemon meringue pie etc. Check these pictures!! I took them from a friend's facebook site. The Lemon Meringue pie picture was taken at a raw vegan restaurant called Café Gratitude (sounds so lovely!) and the vegan pizza picture was from a raw vegan potluck, one of the attendees made it! If only there were raw vegan potlucks in Dubai! I guess I could start one! 
I will balance these high fat restaurant meals with no fat at all for a good few days and allow my body to get over it. The low fat raw vegan way of living and eating is just too rewarding to give up. As I go, I am sure those high fat gourmet meals will just seem less and less appealing. However, for now, these pictures appeal to every part of me! So I will indulge! I read a transcript from an interview yesterday where Dr Douglas Graham was saying that when he began this journey to optimal health, he had to realize that he was in a relationship with food. The most rewarding relationships are the ones that are reciprocal. He loved food. But only certain foods loved him back. A Good and Bad Hair Day Jaye discovered a way to make a great shampoo and used it on his own hair yesterday with great success. He blended a whole lemon with a whole cucumber. He rubbed the mixture into his hair and rinsed. Result: Beautiful freshly washed soft hair. So he made this mixture again for me this morning. 
Unfortunately, my hair is so thick and curly and all the lemon pulp was blended up so well into the mixture that I rinsed and rinsed and could not get all the little pieces of lemon rinsed out. The result was that I looked like I had a bad case of dandruff. Tiny flakes of lemon trapped in my hair were raining down from my head. Also, because my hair is black, they stood out very prominently. I was almost very late for work as I had to get back in the shower and try again to get it rinsed out with only limited success, there were still traces of lemon floating about. I pulled my hair into a ponytail and wore a bandanna and a white shirt, in case anything should still come flickering down and look like a case of dandruff. It gave me an understanding of how people who do have dandruff must feel. On the plus side, it works like a charm and my hair is super CLEAN! The next time I do it, I will just have to have more time available, so I can let my hair dry first so the flakes of lemon can just naturally fall out. Alternatively, I can juice the lemon first! That way there won't be any flakes. Sounds like an easier plan, except I don't have a juicer! PMS No pain, no worries so far! Do you know that women who have been following an optimum diet for a few years can stop having their periods? And it isn't because they're too thin, or unhealthy, they still ovulate every month and are absolutely fertile. Bleeding is not strictly necessary for the body and is actually a sign of toxins that have to be released in this form. In a very healthy person, the lining of the womb can just be reabsorbed into the body; there may be some slight discharge of mucus. That would be all. I was referred to an interesting article on this. I highly recommend reading it if this is something that interests you. My periods are usually quite light, which generally seems to contradict the massive amount of pain I find myself in. All this pain? For this tiny bit of blood? This time last month I was off sick from work, as I was in far too much pain to go in. Same thing for the month before that, and the month before that. Lying on my side in bed crying and occasionally screaming. Jaye getting very stressed out and not knowing what to do. Taking the strongest over the counter pain pills I could get my hands on. Well I'm either cured, or I've got a nasty surprise on the way. To be at this stage of my cycle and have no pain or swelling is unheard of. Exercise I did another Cindy workout. This one is super HECTIC! It is called The Next Challenge and has got me into pretty good shape before. It is an hour long DVD and is the follow up to the Shape Your Body one that I downloaded. The first twenty minutes is legs, all sorts of jumps, kicks, squats and lunges. My heart rate was between 175 and 185. I actually felt nauseous a couple of times as it was so strenuous. Then you go onto the floor to work chest and do 200 abdominal crunches. In this section my heart rate dropped down to 130. Stood back up for biceps, triceps, shoulders and back. My heart rate went up again to 175 for this. Then back down on the floor for another 100 ab crunches. I finished off with some yoga. My flexibility is really increasing super fast. And I managed to hold the wheel (backbend) for 10 seconds! Maybe for you that isn’t a lot, but for me it’s pretty awesome. Food I had a whole watermelon for breakfast (2108g). I went out to lunch with my bosses today, which was lovely. They are really cool people. I was so lucky with this job I really was. I ordered a green salad without dressing and some still water. I am just not good at eating greens without dressing; they taste too dry. That is why I am such a fan of the green smoothie. When I got back to the office I had my second lunch which was a salad made with 3x oranges, 1x tomato and 1x cucumber. I forgot to take a picture! Sorry! For dinner I made a soup with 3x oranges, 2x red peppers, 2x tomatoes and a handful of coriander blended up. Then I chopped up 2x stalks of celery into the soup and scraped the corn off two cobs. Raw corn tastes exactly the same as cooked corn, it is just a little firmer. I actually regretted putting the corn in the soup though. It actually made it seem a little too heavy. I think I am over corn. 
Conclusions My calorie intake is lower than usual. I think it is the lowest it has been since the start of this raw food diet trial. I ate as much as I wanted to today though and felt really satisfied. The difference obviously comes in from not having the evening smoothie as well as the soup. I am so stuffed right now (after the soup) that I couldn’t imagine eating more food. My totals were as follows: Calories 1311, Fat 8g, Carbohydrates 319.1g, Dietary Fiber 43.6g, Protein 32.8g, Sodium 141.6mg. My percentage totals were: Carbohydrates 87%, Protein 8% and Fat 5%.
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