Monday, April 2, 2007

Days 10 and 11: Crooked is Straight and Straight is Crooked

Day 10: Yesterday, Sunday, was an interesting day ... ate mostly by "intuition" ... just ate what I felt like in the moment, with little planning. I had a banana and tangerine in the morning, some granola and nuts mid-day, then later a small salad, and for dinner I ate a portion of brown rice California roll (the most cooked food I've had at one sitting so far). Had a half of a raw "brownie" as a snack later (made with figs, coconut and nuts) and then, about an hour or so before bed, I downed a 16 oz. green juice (including 2 shots of wheat grass juice). Thought maybe it would do some "cell/housecleaning" while I slept!

Some really cool things are coming out of this little "experiment" I'm in the midst of. The biggest and most surprising is how little food one really needs to be satisfied! I can only surmise that there is a radical difference in live food versus cooked food in terms of nutrient density.

For instance ...

Day 11: Today (Monday) I went with my friend to a place called "Bunchberries" for lunch, a serve-yourself place that is mainly vegetarian. I got a large salad and added mostly raw veggies on top, along with some roasted veggies and a baked veggie "meatball." Mostly, though, it was all raw. To my surprise, I was feeling sort of full a little past half-way through it -- but because I thought it was "just a salad" and therefore not so "filling," I continued to eat anyway, not really trusting my body that what it was registering was true: that it was satisfied. By the time I finished the salad, I was feeling uncomfortably full ... actually quite stuffed. So what happened was that I noticed myself over-eating, but talked myself out of it because I thought I couldn't possibly be full on such a small amount of food!

THIS is great news. My body now needs less food than what I have been used to giving it. I just have to learn to recognize it ... but not based on the quantity I've eaten but based on how I feel physically. I have to let my brain agree with my body. In the past, because the mostly cooked food I was eating lacked vital nutrients, it seemed I wanted a larger volume of it in order to feel satisfied. But the problem is this: ALL the cooked food in the world won't supply living nutrients that the body craves. (No wonder fat cells come into being. They're like tiny little suitcases that keep all the excess "baggage" the body can't use! Only there can be millions of them!) But if I give my body live food to begin with, the body gets satisfied easily -- 'cause it's not still craving something it's missing. WOW.

So my lessons today: Put less food on my plate than what I did in the past -- because I simply need less; and trust my body when it says, "enough."

I'm repeating myself, I know, but it helps reinforce the truth for me. Adopting this kind of eating puts me on a learning curve of sorts ... kind of like having first learned to ride a bicycle that had crooked handlebars. Along comes someone who gives you a brand-new bike, and you'll think the straight handlebars on the new bike are "wrong" somehow. It takes some adjusting to the correct design. Let's hope my learning curve is a small one.