Tom’s Raw Foods Blog

Roger Haeske opened up his blog for readers to ask him questions about the 80/10/10 raw food lifestyle. He currently has about 182 questions to answer!

Today he starts answering those questions, and I’d like to talk about number 3: Feeling Tired. As I read that question, and Roger’s answer, I realized that I hadn’t really talked about that here on this blog, yet I find that my experience pretty much mirrors what Roger talked about. I’d like to talk about it in hopes that it might give others in my position something to compare with their situation.

First, I’ve always been at my best when I sleep an average of 8 hours per night (actually, it’s about 7 hours and 40 minutes for me). When I did switch to an all raw food diet about three months ago, it did seem to me that I was sleeping more, but as Roger pointed out, I attributed this to the fact that my body had about 50 years of damage to repair and simply dismissed the thought.

Now that I’m three months into this, I still find myself sleeping quite well, although I will have the occasional night where I don’t sleep well (last night was one of them; it was a stressful day and I slept less than six hours). In my case, though, another factor is that I work a weird midnight shift and switch back to night sleeping on my days off.

My shifts go in a two week cycle. The first week, I’ll work 12 hour shifts on Monday and Tuesday, be off on Wednesday and Thursday, then work the 12 hour shifts again on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The next week, the scenario is reversed; I’m off on Monday and Tuesday, work on Wednesday and Thursday (again, 12 hour shifts), then take off on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Lather, rinse, repeat (just use the right shampoo, OK?), with an occasional paycheck thrown in…

Since I have a family that I love to be with, I switch things around somewhat, sleep wise, on my days off. Normally I’ll come home from a mid shift and pretty much sleep the whole day, then go back to work the next night, but after my last shift before a break, I’ll only sleep six hours or so, then go to bed that night about midnight or 1:00 AM and get up around 8:00 or 9:00 AM the next morning in order to spend more time with my family and do things with them. I’ll then take a two hour nap just before reporting for my first shift after a break.

Not exactly a schedule for developing good sleep patterns, is it?

I actually considered trying polyphasic sleep (another of Steve Pavlina’s experiments), but since I work for 12 hours at a stretch, taking a 20 minute nap every four hours wouldn’t work for me. Besides, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to try two major lifestyle changes simultaneously (I think it’s better to let one change become habitual and second nature first).

The bottom line is that I’ll move back to the day shift at the end of this month and will be on it for about three months. There will be some interruptions, such as an international trip in the middle of July, that will still present challenges, but I’m curious to see what will happen to my sleeping habits now that I’ll be moving back to a more regular sleeping schedule.

One other thing I’m going to try after my trip is getting up at the same time every day for at least 30 days. I’m also incorporating some of the other suggestions on that page, such as eating right(!), exercise (although it’s still not enough), etc.

And of course, on this diet, it’s hard to eat “heavy” at night — unless you postpone your daily fat consumption to the end of the day. I’ll confess to not eating any high fat food most days simply because I don’t feel the need for it, but I’m going to experiment a bit with that during my switch to day shift. Perhaps eating something a bit fatty around noon, then waiting until 6:00 PM or so to eat more fruit (or a salad) before bedtime, might be an interesting experiment. My average daily fat intake is well below the recommended 10%, so it won’t hurt to take in a bit more.

So that’s it for now. My next “adjustment” will be to get on a regular sleeping / waking schedule to see how it affects my overall need for sleep, and I’m going to increase my fat intake. Both of those will happen after I return from my trip (somewhere around July 21).

And this time I’ll try my best to remember to blog about it…

Smacznego,
Tom

Happy Monday!

Now that I’ve been on the 80/10/10 lifestyle for over three months, I think I’ve developed what Roger Haeske calls “Gourmet Taste Buds”. That’s when you are truly able to appreciate the flavors in raw fruits and vegetables.

And I’m totally there.

Cherries are in season right now and we never pass up the opportunity to eat them (while my wife isn’t 100% raw, she does eat a lot of fruit). We picked some up on Saturday but they didn’t last long, and since stores are closed here in Germany on Sundays, we could not get any until this morning.

We bought a package at a local store today and they were pretty much gone by the time we walked home! And the taste sensation when biting into that first cherry was simply awesome. It was the first thing I had eaten all day and I’m glad that I waited.

I get the same thing when I eat grapes, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries… It’s something that I’d never experienced before. It’s even better than chocolate (but don’t trust me… Go 100% raw for a while and find out for yourself).

My wife still does some cooking, mostly for the kids, and today she made a potato casserole. It used to be one of my favorites. It consists of sliced potatoes that are baked in a cream sauce with onions, bacon, and parsley. It really does smell good.

Thinking about the gourmet taste buds and a comment that Roger had made about losing your taste for cooked foods, I decided to dip my finger in the sauce and take just a small taste. I used to love that sauce, and so with great anticipation, I dipped the tip of my finger in the sauce, put my finger on my tongue…

And what I tasted was absolutely atrocious. Bland. No flavor. Oily. Disgusting. YUCK!

Yes, I do have gourmet taste buds, and I am beginning to wonder if I could even eat a cooked meal at this point.

Now, about counting to 100. In today’s blog post, Roger talks about doing 100 push ups every day for better fitness. Ouch! 25-30 is a good day for me right now…

But thanks again, Roger. I now have a goal. Even if I have to do them five at a time, I’m setting a goal to get up to 100 push ups every day as soon as possible. I do have more energy and find myself looking for excuses to take walks now (not hard when you have an exercise-crazy Golden Retriever), but as I joked about recently, I’ve had enough of matchstick arms.

I’ve also read before that the older you get, the healthier you are if you have high muscle mass, so now is the time to build that up. Besides, I’m a bit vain — and the more muscle, the younger I’ll look. Some people still think that I’m 10-15 years younger than I actually am — and that’s only going to get “better” as I exercise more.

So it’s time to learn how to count to 100 over the course of a day. Hopefully some day I won’t have to worry about losing count because I’ll be able to do 100 push ups at one. Yes, that is my ultimate goal — and I think it’s quite reachable, thanks to my new lifestyle. Time will tell.

Smacznego,
Tom

Just a brief note for today — and for a very good reason. It was exactly three months ago and one day ago — March 13, 2008 — that I experienced my first all raw food day. Every day since then (with a couple of very minor errors — none were intentional) has been 100% raw.

You, too, can do three months raw if you choose to do it!

I meant to write this yesterday but got a bit busy doing some other projects. Nevertheless, hopefully you’re encouraged by seeing another complete “newbie” stick with it for this long.

Smacznego,
Tom