I Did Not Realize That I Was Doing This

One of the other members over at Roger Haeske’s Raw Food Forum has been sharing with us lately about a secret weapon he is using to help him make the transition to 100% raw. That’s one of the great benefits of being a member to a site like this; members share their experiences and you can learn things from other members that can help you reach your goal.

In this case, the guy is using hunger as a tool to help him reach his goals. He’s actually WELCOMING hunger. Why? Because by not eating every time his stomach tells him to put food in it, he is learning to to ignore that response. I talked about this a while in my blog post about Appetite vs. Hunger, and while I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to go hungry, I have to agree that it’s a great tool that everyone should consider using.

In my case, I began to realize last week that I can slowly start to transition back to an all raw food diet. As I mentioned in my last post, raw vegetables are helping me move back to the raw food diet. Already I find myself not wanting cooked food after I eat them; instead, I want to “chase” them with a nice fruit smoothie. It’s working well!

But now, on to my realization. It all started when my “forum friend” mentioned his use of hunger as a tool. I jokingly posted that it was Roger’s fault that 12 hours worth of raw vegetables only lasted for three hours — and that I would have to resort to chocolate to last through the night. Well, of course he recommended hunger, and in this case, hunger would have been much more healthy than chocolate (actually, I’m still in transition phase, so certain cooked foods are still OK. Sort of. Keep reading for more details…).

His comments helped me realize a big mistake that I’ve been making for the past few months before I adopted my new “phased” approach to returning to the 80/10/10 raw food diet. I would start many days 100% raw but decide to have a cooked meal. After that, I would rationalize that, “Hey, I’ve blown the diet for today; let’s eat all of those unhealthy foods that you used to like!”

Very bad decision. Very bad choice, but it’s one that I made.

I’ve decided to start carefully planning and “rationing”, if you will, the cooked foods that I am eating. This is the next phase in my return to the raw food diet. I’ll start phasing it in gradually over the next few days. My goal is to return my cooked intake to what is allowed by the McDougall Diet (which is a vegan diet). At that point, at the very least, I’ll be combining my fruit breakfast, veggie snacks, and “cooked McDougall”, which will be much better than what I’ve been eating.

No more “Gee, let’s REALLY have some fun with our food today!”

Again, I feel comfortable with this particular plan. It’s quite livable and I could do it every day for the rest of my life if I wanted to.

One more closing thought: The title of this blog post isn’t quite accurate. I was completely aware of what I was doing; I was just rationalizing it without thought to the long-term consequences and my long-term desire to be 100% raw. So I realized what I was doing; I just didn’t fully appreciate the long-term drawbacks.