French fries with cheddar cheese and bacon. One of my former favorites. My wife bought some for herself and the children today at our local food court as we were out shopping. As always, they didn’t eat them all.
I had the honor of throwing half a box away. That would not have happened just a couple of weeks ago because I would have eaten the rest for her.
Talk about painful… And yes, I did enjoy the smell! 
Yes, I still want to eat cooked foods almost daily (there have been a couple of days where I honestly had no desire to eat them). But as I’ve mentioned before, it takes 21 days to form a habit or replace an old one.
Notice what I did not say; I did not say that it takes 21 days to get rid of a bad habit. Bad habits cannot just be dropped, in my opinion, especially when it comes to something like eating. If I stop eating cooked foods I have to eat uncooked foods. If I stop seeing someone who is harmful to my well-being I must find something else to fill that time. If I stop smoking I must find something else to do to fill the time I used to waste on smoke breaks. If I stop drinking I have to find an alternate activity to fill the time I used to use to drink.
You can’t just “quit”; you have to find another activity (hopefully one that is beneficial) to do.
So you don’t really get rid of a bad habit; you find a good one to take its place. And after 21 days you should be well on your way to not reverting to your old habits.
Getting back to those french fries…
I still have 12 days to go before I hit the 21 day point. I’m almost halfway there. And right now, the simple fact that I really need 21 days to make raw foods a habit is what’s keeping me from doing silly things like eating those french fries. I would not be doing myself any favors if I self-sabotaged my own efforts, would I?
In other words, eating anything cooked before I’ve given my new lifestyle choice the opportunity to become a habit would be plain insane, in my opinion. After 21 days, if I still want cooked food, then I’ll look at it from another perspective, but for now, I know that I need at least 21 days for the habit to become a habit.
And there is another factor worth mentioning. After we got home, my wife said that those fries made her feel a bit “bleah” (that’s a highly specialized, highly technical medical term…). What would have happened had I eaten them after nine days of nothing but raw, living foods?
Yeah, there goes the weekend!
Not much else to report today. It is “weekend”, and there’s more snow here in southern Germany as spring arrives in full force (no more 60 degree days for a while, I guess?).
One thing from last night that I wanted to mention; I need to ensure that I get at least some fat every day. Last night I was feeling kind of “low” (for lack of a better word). I wasn’t hungry or anything, and the prospect of eating my salad seemed quite daunting. So I cracked open a few raw pecans and ate them (one pecan has about two grams of fat, making it easy to figure out how much you are eating). Within minutes I felt much better and was finally hungry for the salad. I didn’t eat it, though, because it takes longer for fat to digest than the carbohydrates you’ll find in vegetables, meaning that they probably would have sat in my stomach and not digested properly. I didn’t want that, so the salad still awaits me this evening.
Tomorrow will be another day on the road. Since I pack a bag full of fresh raw food every day for my time at work, it’s no problem at all to do the same for a day trip. In fact, it’s almost second nature by now.
Smacznego,
Tom
