The last day of my first raw diet trial. I say first, as I suspect later down the road there will be another trial or more in my future.
Where am I at right now?
As I stated yesterday, I have added a bit of cooked items back into my diet. Mostly just a couple cooked eggs a day, a small serving of light meat (chicken breast..), and a bit of pasteurized plain organic yogurt. This makes up a very small portion of my diet, under 10%, I am still juicing veggies, making green smoothies, and munching on raw nuts or cut veggies all day. I have cut my intake of avocados down, and my calorie intake has not changed a ton from the majority of the trial.
Summary of my process:
Initially, this trial began with me eating all veggies and nuts, no fruit (with the exception of tomato, lemon, and avocado). I soaked the nuts, juiced and blended the veggies quite a bit to aid in the transition and getting down enough food. I had some mild detox symptoms (light headache, bit tired), but I also had problems with my stomach. These problems have occurred before and are not related to the detox, but more likely die off or issues related to Candida. I was nauseous, poor appetite, and just in general my digestive tract was just not happy. The nuts seem to be the worst culprit, and eventually I just had to eliminate them.
The lack of appetite and upset stomach force me to re-think my diet or consider going back to some cooked foods. I opted to add in some more sugar intake in the form of fruit, mostly grapefruit, pineapple, and berries. I leaned on foods that were digestive helpful, or lower in sugar values. I still consumed a large green juice each day (20-30 oz), along with one to two green smoothies. I simplified my veggies a bit, and ate them mostly in smoothies to aid digestion as well. I ate the fruit on an empty stomach, and I tried to keep them to a minimum.
With the addition of fruit, my appetite increased, the nausea settled, and I began to get more comfortable with getting enough calories in a day. My hypoglycemia lingered in the background, and I tried to keep my sugar intake down to prevent that. I was averaging about 150-200 grams of carbs a day, with about 80-90 of those being sugars.
I tried to be pretty consistent with my diet at that point, to monitor and see the affects over a longer period of time. While I had improvement, my digestion still did not come around fully. It became evident that the fruit was just not going to work. With a little over a week left in the challenge, I phased out fruit again, and went back to just veggies. I was able to add a few nuts in (unsoaked for some reason the thought of them soaked still makes me cringe probably tied to the original nausea). I managed this course for about 4-5 days, and dealt once again with yeast die off symptoms. Normally I deal with them by consuming plenty of proteins and healthy fats, staying very low in carbohydrates, and they will fade quickly. On the veggie only regime, they were a bit more harsh then usual, likely caused by the consumption of the simple sugars with the fruits for two weeks.
The last few days, I have wrapped up this challenge with some small additions of cooked proteins. The stomach issues had grown to be just too much for me to take any longer, so I phased in some very small amounts of protein to help ease the symptoms.
I have improved steadily the last few days, and while not 100%, I am feeling much more relaxed and comfortable. It had gotten to the point that I was stressing over the diet, staying raw 100%, and it was less about the health benefits, and more about just completing the challenge following all the rules I had set on day one. I sat down and wrote out the positives and negatives of staying 100% raw for the full 30 days, and it just did not balance out.
