Busy Christmas, Happy New Year.

Hello Darlings. Did you all have a great Christmas? I hope that you did. If you didn't celebrate Christmas, I hope that the break gave you a little space to rest, relax and stretch yourself.

So what have I been up to? Lots! With Christmas just past, family visiting from the Southern hemisphere, and a quick visit to see my parents, this past 9 days has been full.

I will blog about my visit to see my family another day, I want to keep this post short and positive.

Food wise, I have been reading and surprisingly finding answers to questions I had about overeating and transition to raw food. This confirms to me that you only need ask for something be it guidance, information or help and if you need it, it falls into your lap. I have really found out that I am still in the infancy of my path to vibrant health and complete well being. Also, as I read other raw foodists experiences I should really take them in, everyone starts somewhere.

I am going to get myself ready for this evenings' celebrations. Yes I know that it's bearly midday, anyone who has read Dianne Brill's inspirational book will know that she has already started making herself look fantastic.

So Darlings, my last post of the year. I hope that you will have an hour or so, to contemplate what this year has bought and how you have changed and grown. I also wish for you the most vibrant and exhilarating year in 2008 and that you have the intuition and energy to take challenges head on and still have the space in your life to make something special for your future.

Wednesday, almost Christmas

Hello Lovelies. Now I am still rather off track food wise, and I can really start to feel my body telling me that I am not feeding it the right stuff. So this morning, I started the day with a whole 1L of fresh juice (orange, grapefruit and apple) YUM.

I had another 1L of juice later on in the day (apple, pear and grapefruit) Alas no vegetable juice, I really do find the carrot juice nutritious. When I am drinking it I can almost feel the goodness going down.

Anyway, I was thinking that what I am eating now, i.e. not trying hard to be raw, is so much better than how I was eating a few months ago. It's fantastic how we have access to so much information that can help us make informed choices. And how our perceptions can change with a little experimentation.

I have learnt that vibrant health comes from eating vibrant food and of course conversely bad health is a result of bad food.

What I mean is this, it's not as if I NEVER knew that food is integral for good health, it's just that we are encouraged to have a relationship with food. You have probably said it yourself "I just love mashed potato" "I need chocolate" or perhaps "I need a drink". Now it isn't that there is anything wrong specifically with being hungry or feeling that you need something from a certain food group. What I mean is that these are phrases that indicate how we feel about food. And often is it our relationship with food that is a cause of bad eating patterns or eating disorders.

I for one was encouraged to eat at every given opportunity as a small child. So there is a part of me that equates food to love, and that is a hard thing to unlearn. Part of my journey is this, I have to figure out how to eat only foods that are useful to me as a living organism. I have to learn when I am putting my hand in the fridge to pick out something good, and to not put food in my mouth out of habit, and to only eat out of hunger.

I will try to leave this post on a positive note. Today I had TWO WHOLE LITRES (yes that's a lot) of pure, fresh, homemade juice with no nasties added. Yes, I ate other things that weren't health giving, and tomorrow I will do better.

Dead food week.

Hello Lovelies, I hope that you are having a fantastic time in the run up to Christmas and that stress isn't making you want to topple over and spend a couple of hours in a heap on the floor.

So, my trip to visit my friend was absolutely fantastic. A good time was had by all indeed, not least myself.

I have fallen off the good eating plan, and well, even with such a short time of eating live food, my general wellness hasn't been completely compromised with dead cooked food and sugary alcohol drinks.

No guilt though. I will try to make sure that I am getting at least some juice every day over the Christmas and new year period. After that, like the rest of the population of the western world, I will be good, and try to treat my body well with an abundance of nourishing food that cares for all of my organs.

I really do have a craving for raw beetroot, and of course I can't see it in the shops. Oh well, nothing that I really need will pass me by.

Happy days to you all.

Friday funday

Again, today was another busy one! I had a few odds and ends to do before I went to visit my friend for the weekend.

Food wise, fresh juice in the morning, apple, orange, pear and grape. Lunch was a nice ripe avocado mashed with some apple cider vinegar spread on some dark rye ryvita. I snacked in the afternoon on some pumpkin seeds.

Dinner was some lightly blanched broccoli dressed with sesame oil, apple cider vinegar and a sauce made from blanched cashews blended with sesame oil and garlic. It is at this point that I wish I had remembered better what was in my kitchen cupboards, I thought that I had a pack of sesame seeds, alas no.

Work was busy again today, I barely had a minute to myself with people sending me things to do. This evening I packed a case for the weekend and did a few things to myself to keep me looking ladylike.

I won't be blogging this weekend, and I won't be raw fooding much either I can imagine. Sunday evening, which is when I am back, will be a time to get some nourishment into my body and get myself set for the last stretch of work before Christmas, and indeed work around the house, to make it feel nice for anyone visiting.

At this busy time of year, I do feel a little fragmented. I have little quiet do nothing time, in which to look into myself. A lot of people feel the same way during the dark and stressful weeks of December. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we all put a lot less emphasis on Christmas and celebrated something positive in the Summer? Now, I am in no way suggesting that we have another consumer-fest in the year. Just something were we all get together when the weather isn't dark and depressing and enjoy ourselves.

Busy Busy!

Hello everyone.

So this was a very busy day. At work it was all bustle with an abnormal amount of work landing on my desk and with family arriving from Australia to visit for Christmas, although not staying with me in my tiny house. Which I'm not so sure is a bad thing, I do enjoy my own space and a quiet enough house to hear yourself think.

My daytime food wasn't too bad. The normal, juice for breakfast, dressed salad of chopped veggies for lunch. My day time juice was nasty, it's quite unusual on the palate to taste alkaline, and the juice I made was very green and very alkaline. Yes it would have done me the world of good if I had drunk it, but I just couldn't.

Dinner, was a quick blitz of thawed edameme beans. Not really raw, but still good. I mixed with them some sesame oil, some chili powder and lots of lemon juice. I ate it with two slices of bread, if I ever make this again I will be sure to eat it with celery or carrot sticks, the bread

Today was a bit of a whirl, I was glad to see the visitors from Australia. I wasn't so used to being around smokers. It's strictly no smoking in my house and now that pubs and restaurants are no smoking by law in Ireland, the only time that I am exposed to cigarette smoke is walking down the street. Anyway, when I was home, I lept into the shower because I couldn't stand to go to sleep with faggy hair. I also made a fruit juice of apple, pear and grape to help my body after being exposed to deadly cigarette toxins.

So that is Thursday. Busy.

Humpday.

Hello everyone.

Well, today was a day of irregularities and challenges.

Diet wise, I didn't do too badly. Home made juice in the morning (pineapple, ruby grapefruit, carrots and an orange) that I also drank later on in the day. An apple kept my stomach content mid morning and I drank about 5 mugs of unsweetened earl grey throughout the day. I think that I drank about 1.5L of water, which wasn't quite enough especially considering the amount of tea that I glugged back.

For lunch a perky salad of grated carrot, shredded Chinese leaves, cucumber, tomato and raw broccoli dressed with apple cider vinegar and sesame oil. Now raw broccoli is new to me, and I'm not wholly convinced that I like like it. I have read about "creamy" nut dressings, and just as soon as I can lay hands on some cashews I may well try that. This time of year, time is a bit of a factor, so I may well just have to do with ANY cashews that I can get, I just don't have the time to cross town to get to a health store.

For dinner, had another crack at carrot soup, now I was really hungry, so I put a little more oil in. Who knows? I may be a Little low on calories. I really wanted to throw an avocado into the soup but none of my avocados are ripe, they are hard enough to break a double glazed window should they be thrown hard enough. I am sure that the second that I leave the house for any length of time, they will not only complete ripening, they will start to dissolve from decay. A ripe avocado would have gone well in the carrot soup and made it nice and creamy. Alas that is obviously for another day.

For the rest of the evening I had a lot of stuff to do about the house, so pottering and bimbling occurred. An apple before bedtime kept the hunger at bay and that wasn't the worse day for food.

Today I found it quite hard to get out of bed, which resulted in me being late for work. My very excellent co-woker covered for me, so that was ok.

Work wise, things took a slightly different rhythm, resulting in mistakes that just slowed me down and resulted in a lot of paper waste. Yes, of course I did recycle my mini mountain of paper, so that's not the worst of all scenarios.

I am quite excited because this weekend, I am going to visit my friend. We will have a day and a bit of gossiping, eating and drinking. You know, catching up, we haven't seen each other in well over a year, and that is far far too long. Probably, as with most decadent weekends planned, I will not stay raw. I will just aim to stay as well nourished and healthy as possible.

Tuesday of nice colourful picture.

Hello. Good day to you.

Today went fairly well food wise.

Breakfast was about 500ml of fruit juice (pineapple, orange, apple and possibly pear) and of course some water. I could really feel the benefit of that juice, almost instantly I felt more alive. Real fresh fruit juice is really energising.


For my juice in the day I had carrot, apple and kale. Now kale isn't something that I am really sold on, I'm not a fan of the flavour but it was nice to have a change from spinach today. So the juice overall wasn't that green, instead because it was mixed with carrot was a sludgy brown. I think that I will look into other things to sweeten green juices, perhaps I should just stick with apples and pears. Any thoughts?

Lunch, was something different, which was nice. Before I went to work, I grated two carrots, shredded five Chinese leaves and julienned about 3" of cucumber, arranged it almost artfully in my lunchbox, sprinkled it with poppy seeds and turmeric. No, I can't remember the benefit of either popyseeds or turmeric, but I'm sure that there are many. I dressed the whole lot with a slug of apple cider vinegar and some sesame oil. By the time lunch rolled around, the dressing has worked its magic on the veggies, they were softer and sweeter. YUM. I had a mashed avocado with pumpkin seeds with this, although this was a bit much for my stomach.

Dinner was also something new, although alas no picture. Carrot soup, even better it was curried carrot soup. The recipe called for everything to be put into a food processor, of which I do not posses, so I grated the carrots and used my immersion blender. I didn't have everything on the recipe that I found in blog land, so here is my version.

4 carrots
2 cloves of garlic
1 red pepper (all of the insides removed)
Olive oil
lemon juice
1 teaspoon curry powder
Half a teaspoon ginger powder

Now if I had used a food processor, this would have been a doddle. What I did was grate the carrots, smash the garlic a little, break up the pepper, and wizz everything with my immersion blender. Now this wasn't really that creamy, but it was nice, and because there was probably more garlic than one person should really eat raw in one meal, it was fairly spicy.

When I make this next I will, use less garlic, more curry powder and a few poppy or sesame seeds.

I ate this with two slices of wholemeal bread, which made me feel bloaty. So the word is that bread is bad! I liked the soup, although it could have used being blended for longer. I may make a batch up and keep it in the fridge, it will be good for snacking on.

If hunger strikes later, I which I doubt I will, I will juice some celery. I can feel something having an acidifying effect on my stomach, celery will sort this out. Also I am a tad dehydrated, I haven't drunk much water today.

Mood wise, this afternoon a few things at work had me spitting nails, so either I will have to learn to deal with things better or make my needs seem valid to the people around me. Perhaps the bad mood is what compelled me to eat bread with my dinner? It may still have been routine, you know how you ALWAYS have bread with soup, or rather HAD bread with soup.

EDIT: Yes, I do indeed own one of those hilarious chopping boards that tells you that it is indeed for "CHOPPING". Why is it that when you really NEED to buy something, there isn't a nice cool version in the shop that you have time to go in?

Tel me why (I don't like Mondays)

Actually today wasn’t too shabby at all. It could have been the fact that the sun shone for a few hours this morning, or it may be that my mood is lifting due to a better diet. Either way I am not complaining.

This morning, started off with a glass of water with lemon juice, then I had 1L of water while getting ready and making my juices. My morning juice was pineapple, orange, carrot and apple. I made about 800ml, which because I had drunk so much water, was a challenge to drink. It’s a steep learning curve but from what I read, getting fruits and fruit juices in the morning is a good thing.

My day time juice today was spinach, celery, carrots and pear. I made 800ml of this. Everything I read tells me that there is so much goodness in spinach that I can’t get enough of it. I am very lucky that close to where I work is an old fashioned green grocer that stocks mature spinach. Now I haven’t read this, I have no scientific proof, but I am convinced that mature spinach is better for you, I think that because it has had time to grow and absorb nutrients. When I talk about spinach, unless I say otherwise, I am talking about the adult version, not its immature cousin “baby” spinach.

For lunch, I was short on time, so I threw the last of my lettuce, some radishes, celery and tomatoes into my bag. I bought with me the lemon that I opened this morning for a little dressing and some pumpkin seeds. I could have done with less greenery and an avocado, no problem though.

After sipping on my green shake all afternoon, when I got home, I was hungry enough. So I had carrot and courgette "noodles" and raw tomato "sauce" again. I really need to go out there and find something else quick and easy for dinner. I'm not going to buy a dehydrator for a long time, so all suggestions are welcome.

I did see somewhere out in blogland a recipe for broccoli salad. Hmm, I'm not sure that my palette is quite ready for that, I might cheat a little, and blanch the broccoli.

For the rest of the evening, I drank water and a little more fruit juice. While I was at work I drank a three cups of green tea and one cup of fruit tea.

Now that I have been on raw, even for this short time, things have started to change:

• I notice that artificially sweet things have started to taste bad.
• Some of the ladies at work have started to notice that I am eating differently
• My temperament is more positive, the little things don't get to me so much
• I am less worn out by my walk to and from work
• One of the women mentioned that I have lost a little weight.

Now with weight, I can't and I won't give you a running total of what I weight, because quite frankly, I'm not sure. I have a rough idea, and the way that I feel in my self, how healthy I am and the quality of life that I am free to enjoy is more important than shifting off a few pounds. Mostly feeling good and being a healthy weight do go hand in hand, but I'm not going to slave to the alter of skinny.

I hope that you all had a fantastic Monday and that you all did something positive to improve your life.

Dull? Yes, I am quite aware of that.

Hello.

Just to let you know that I am quite aware that I am yet to post one single picture to this blog. I am not the best of food photographers, so you may indeed be waiting a long long time before you see a beautiful picture of something I have eaten.

I will try to be a better blogger and add some photos of things that I have eaten, if not just to make my pages look a little better, then perhaps as an exercise in food awareness.

If you have stumbled upon my little spot here, and you have read from the beginning until here. Well done you. I hope that the first week of my journey has been an interesting enough read.

Happy day to you.

Sunday,

Hello Everyone. I hope that you all had a fantastic Sunday.

Now, food wise, things were a bit different. I ate more later on in the day, I'm not convinced that this was a good thing.

When I woke up, I had half a mug of cold green tea and an organic apple. I’ve noticed that one of the benefits of organic apples is that they taste like applies did when you were a child and you get the pleasure of shining off the whitish bloom from the skin revealing a nice shiny apple suitable for the lips of Snow White herself.

I wasn’t hungry for ages today, and so I didn’t eat again, until 3 in the afternoon when all of a sudden HUNGER! Stomach churning hunger. Now, I know that living in the western world, I am lucky enough to never know what real hunger is and that this sort of hunger is the closest that I am ever likely to come.

So to kerb the hunger while I got something to eat, I drank down almost 1L of water. I made myself a huge, raw, savoury salad with carrots, celeriac, tomato, radishes, sprinkled with a few pumpkin seeds and dressed with some extra virgin olive oil and some Chinese black vinegar. Now I have no idea if the oil I use is raw, it probably isn’t. At this stage, which is my transition into raw foods, I really think that I should aim to use some of what is in my kitchen. Eventually things will be given away or just thrown out, but for the time being, I will use what I can. I finished that off with another apple and that filled me up nicely.

About an hour later, as I hadn’t had any juice, I had some carrot, celery and orange juice.

In retrospect, staying in bed late isn’t conducive to a raw food lifestyle. You have to be out of bed early enough to start eating!

At 8 in the evening, I just knew that I hadn’t had enough to eat yet, even with a smallish glass about 300ml of pineapple, apple and orange juice. I needed more to eat. So I had another large salad with lettuce, tomato, celeriac and celery. I really thought that I needed the calories, so I dressed the mix with some tahini thinned down with some extra virgin olive oil, apple cider vinegar and added some salt. I’m not quite sure why I added the salt, I guess out of habit. To top it all off, I had some nice/nasty pre cooked “crispy” onions. They weren’t very crispy but they were rather sweet. Towards the end of the salad, I was flagging, but I kind of made myself finish it.

So today wasn’t a failure at all. I could have done with a green juice, but perhaps the fibre in the salad wasn’t such a bad thing.

Saturday, rain rain, sunshine RAIN!

Well, I do live in Dublin, so I should expect a lot of rain really.

This morning I slept in. I have had a couple of late nights this week, so, I slept till noon. I don't have a particularly taxing work life as I have chosen a path that means that I earn enough money to get buy comfortably. So any real fatigue is a result of how I look after myself with respect of day to day choices.

After getting out of bed, I didn't really feel hungry or particularly thirsty, so I had an organic apple just so that I had something good in my stomach to start the day off.

Now I had planned to get up early, shower, dress do my hair so that I look a little more "relaxed day off" than "yup I just got up", but as it's raining, I think the furthest that I will be going is round the corner to get some fruit to juice with. I wanted to make some foccacia for my other half, so I set the yeast into action and went out to get some odds and ends.

With everything I had in the house, I did plan to make myself a green juice with spinach and pineapple. As I was doing stuff about the house, I kept putting that off. Before I knew it, the time was 3 in the afternoon, and I was proper hungry. So I glugged about 1L of water while I was making my juice. When I went to my fruit bowl, there were two mangoes that were just perfectly ripe, so I picked them instead.

Spinach through the juicer, no problem. Mango flesh through the juicer, not such a good idea. The flesh was so juicy and ripe, it came out all mushy. So I blended the mango with the spinach juice. That was a juice well made. That whole litre went down a treat.

Let me tell you about my juicing. I know that a lot of people make smoothies with a nice high power blender, I have a juicer instead, and that works for me for the moment. I have a fairly sturdy centrifugal juicer, which in hindsight wasn't the best choice, but it's MUCH better than relying on prepacked juices, that are dead and will not help you live.

For dinner I had a grated celeriac salad with tomatoes and a red pepper, I dressed it with the last of the tomato dressing from yesterday some olive oil and apple cider vinegar. I had some pineapple, orange and apple juice with that which was also really good.

All in all, a very good raw day. I think the only thing I had that wasn't raw was the olive oil and a tiny piece of the foccacia that I cooked. Well I had to try it seeing as I had gone to all that trouble, it was very nice indeed.

Friday Friday Friday

Hello Everyone, I hope that you are all feeling well and that you have enough energy to enjoy the weekend.

Now, I am feeling quite positive about today. It started off well. I think I have learnt my lesson about combining juices, and I will stick to a few ingredients that I know work together.

For my juice today I had a combination of celery, carrots and spinach, I made about 1L.

For breakfast, again, I couldn't drink much juice before I left the house, I must have drunk only 200ml. The juice was actually nice, much sweeter than it looked, true to form for fresh juices, I could feel the goodness as it nourished my body. And of course a glass of water about 3ooml and some apple cider vinegar.

Lunch is getting to be a much of a muchness. I had three slices of wholemeal bread toasted, avocado and an organic apple. Perhaps this is a cause of my binge last night, not enough nourishment during the day or even my blood sugar was a little low or even just because it is cold, windy and rainy and I was home alone. Who knows, these things do happen, and I am lucky enough not to attribute guilt to overeating.

So I drank most of my juice between 4 and 6 in the afternoon, I still had a little left when I got home, but no big deal.

For dinner, I decided that I should just go ahead and eat a lot more. So I made the tomato, chili, garlic, basil and parsley sauce and had courgette "pasta", this time I had a much bigger courgette. To go with that I had a small bulb of fennel finely shredded and dressed with apple cider vinegar and olive oil.

Now this was a big improvement. I felt full, infact a little over full, but not in a nasty bloaty way. I had planned to eat some fruit or make some sweet juice later on in the evening, but I didn't need it.

Compared to yesterday, I did really well today. Partly because I am making a conscious connection between food and health and happiness and partly because after having eaten all of that food in the evening today I had a sore throat, so I drank lots of water and herbal tea to try and perk myself up.

Today had it's bonus, one of my best friends invited me to visit her next weekend and go to a party with her. I am really looking forward to a day and a bit of catching up on gossip, dressing up and going out and buying some herbal tea. Where I live is nice, but we are missing out on a few shops, so I think that I will come back with a suitcase full of tea.

Thursday. EEEK!

This was a particularly difficult day, and I do feel much better having written this post and just kind of put it all out there. Looking at what I ate yesterday it seems that I didn't get enough calorie wise and in hind sight I should have eaten some more solid food or a lot more juice.

So, this morning at work I was feeling a little delicate, not sick, not unwell, rather more feeling brittle. Nothing in particular wrong, just not fantastic.

This morning I made juice for breakfast.

Green juice with spinach, parsley, carrot and celery. Now this was nice, MUCH better than I had expected green juice to taste. I made about 600ml.
I drank about 500ml water and some apple cider vinegar.

While I was making my morning juice, I made about 500ml of juice for later on in the day.
In to my juicer went oranges and parsley. I ave had this combination before and I quite liked it, I did peal the oranges because sometimes I find when you juice citrus with the skin on, it can be far too tart. Now I couldn't finish my morning juice, so I mixed in the last 300ml with the orange juice.

For lunch I had:
about 6 Dark Rye Ryvita
1 Mashed avocado
The last of the plantain chutney
1 large organic apple

Now the apple didn't do it for me, so I didn't finish it off.

When I went to drink my afternoon juice at about 3, after the first glug, I realised that I had struck upon a really bad combination of foods. My thinking was sound when I mixed these juices together. The oranges would have provided vitamin C which would support the absorption of the iron in the spinach. Right?

This was nasty, don't try this at home unless you know something that I don't or your palate is ready for that.

This evening, I had a plan about what to have for dinner. I saw somewhere in blogland, that if you cut fine strips from a courgette it will service as pasta, and well, with some blended tomatoes (see yesterday's post for that one) that would work as sauce. So, shredded a courgette and a carrot with my sharp vegetable peeler, smothered the "noodles" with the "sauce". This was actually nice. In fact the first thing I ate today that I enjoyed, everything else my mouth and stomach just wasn't ready for.

I was still hungry, so I blended the last tomato with parsley, coriander leafs and garlic. Well, until now, I didn't know that I didn't like raw coriander, I had eaten it in curry lots of time, but raw, this wasn't working for me, so it went down the sink.

Then things went bad and I had a minor binge. I won't say exactly what i ate, only it was a LOT more than I had planned on. And I knew that on my third trip the the kitchen that I really was full.

So half way through a bowl of pasta, I looked down at the salty sauce and the penne and I realised that I no longer wanted to fill my body with this rubbish, I was already feeling bloated and a little nauseaus.

Now I hardly every fail to finish eating something, but this just wasn't going into my body. And at that point, I remembered that I have no more room in my life, or my body, for sickness and depression.

So I walked to the bathroom, bowl in hand and poured that excuse for food in to the toilet. When I looked down it did indeed look like vomit.

For a while I was tempted to purge, but it seemed to be a silly idea with it's own problems. So I didn't.

In conclusion, today wasn't fantastic. It wasn't the worst by a long shot. There were many things that were bad like, I didn't realise until walking to work that I had my pants on backwards, and on my way home I discovered that my boots are NOT water tight. What I became more aware of was valuable.

For the rest of the evening, I will drink as much water as I need to help my body deal with that rubbish and I will be firm in my resolve tomorrow to be better to my body. I will try to remind myself that I am precious and that as unworthy as I may be feeling,I have my place and purpose, and that I deserve love, healthy and happiness.
All of this is in my controll.

Food for the day

OK, so here goes. Today I ate:

Breakfast
1.2L water + apple cider vinegar
about 600ml of fresh juice (Celery, carrot, pear, parsley)
Mug of hot black unsweetened Earl Grey tea

Lunch
A mashed avocado
6 Dark rye Ryvita
2 heaped tablespoons homemade plantain chutney
500ml Nasty juice from a carton
1 large organic apple
500ml water + apple cider vinegar

Mid-afternoon
1L Home made juice (strawberries, kiwi, pear, 2 large carrots)

I made the juice in the morning with my morning juice. It was a bit of a fruit bowl clean out, the kiwi was a bit over and I had trouble finishing this. Next time I see something like that, I will just put it in the compost bin. But still, it was better than prepacked, heat treated, dead and dying juice.

Mug of hot black, unsweetened Earl Grey Tea

In the evening I had what I would describe as a raw savory soup. Basically I blended, tomatoes, garlic, basil, parsley and garlic. Very quick and rather tasty.

To finish off the day I had about 1.2L water and apple cider vinegar.

I do feel very good about today, I have consumed a fairly high percentage of raw food and my energy seems OK. So that's good.

First Post. Hello!

So, welcome to my new little space on Le Web.

I started this blog for a number of reasons. Mostly because I want some sort of record of how I eat, and how that works for me.

Initially my goals are not weight driven, although, being obese, getting rid of some weight would be a bonus. My goal is to be healthier. Several of my family suffer with various health problems, and for a while I have avoided some of these. Over time, a bad diet and taking no care of my body has taken it's toll. I have started getting sciatic pain on an almost daily basis, I have acute bouts of intense debilitating back pain and of course with many people who eat refined anything occasional depression.

I have been a vegetairan 20 years, and a vegan less than 6 months. So overall I am not doing too bad, ecologically I am mking a difference.

I now refuse to be that unhappy blob that a lot of people are consigned to be by their diet and thus I have turned to raw foods. There is so much junk food that you can eat as a vegetarian and as a vegan. I want a diet that will support me feeling alive in my body. It seems that raw food is the way for me.