Raw 1-Week Cleanse

I am planning on going a week on the raw diet and ending with a two-or-three-day liquid detox and then the "gallbladder flush." This will start on Monday. I feel kind of overwhelmed because there are so many meals to plan and so many ingredients to buy and I need to coordinate it with what we have and what's available, not to mention coordination with the available time I will have in the week....
Mom says she wants to try the FullyRaw Burrito and we will start the raw cleanse with it on Monday. She even payed the $24 to make an account on Fullyraw.com so we can access recipes. She and I talked about the videos I emailed her and she is on board. I am so grateful she is supporting me.

Blueberries and Italian Bread Salad

Recently I talked to my mother about wanting to experiment with the raw lifestyle and I emailed her some of FullyRawKristina's videos so she can learn more about it. I made sure the email was serious and professional: I requested her permission, support and respect.

Today I came home to a huge crate of blueberries sitting on the kitchen counter and I was so happy. I've been trying to get Mom to buy some local blueberries for days.

I got even happier when I turned around and saw a huge bowl of homemade Italian Bread Salad. I had a huge bowl of that for dinner and I felt very proud of it.

I want to eat more raw fruits and veggies

The world doesn't make any sense to me. I consider myself a healthy person. But these last few days I have been lethargic, constipated, tired, and dizzy. My skin is oily and gross and I have acne. I get headaches. It seems like my belly is bigger than normal.
This makes me want to be more extreme with my diet. I want to just TRY raw veganism loosely for maybe a few weeks to see how it works on me. But the problem is, I live in a household that would probably make that impossible. My parents would say I don't need to because I'm "already healthy." They say raw vegans are "weird people" who "get ideas into their heads." I want to buy large amounts of fruits and vegetables like FullyRawKristina and other raw vegans do, but my parents would get really mad at me for purchasing so much. They are the type of people who don't buy anything until they run out. Once, I bought some raw milk because I was going to run out by the time I go to the grocery store again. My dad got made because "I already had some" and "I'm the only one who ever drinks it anyway." This is not to mention he HATES raw milk. I want to eat more raw fruits and vegetables, but on one hand my family would get mad that I ate all of what we had in the house, and on the other they would get mad if I bought "too much."
Meanwhile, my mother is prohibiting me from purchasing any greens. This is because we are going to be harvesting bok choy and kale soon. I love spinach and a lot of my recipes call for it, but I'm not allowed to buy any.

More Smoothies!

I made another smoothie for lunch today, and I loved it so much I made another.
The first one was the Breakfast Drink from Dr. Oz's 3-Day Detox. It had spinach, raspberries, banana, almond butter, flax seed, lemon juice, water, and ice.

I LOVE almond butter. I got it for the first time for these drinks, and I love to eat it with fruits or crackers. I read in Natural Solutions Magazines that raw almonds are super good for you, not to mention I LOVE peanut butter so naturally I would love almond butter.
I gave half of this drink to my brother, so I was still hungry when the afternoon came. The second one is another one I got from the NutriBullet website, called "Sleepy Seeds" and it's supposed to promote a good night's sleep.

I used my special cup for the first time with this drink. I got it at Teavana in Seattle. It's supposed to be especially for homemade iced tea, but it works for any cold drink. I'm going to try using it to take healthy drinks to school in the fall.

I just realized I forgot to make tea today!! Dang it! I just bought four boxes of tea bags yesterday! I was looking forward to that. Poo.

My First Homemade Veggie Drink

Today I made my first raw, vegan drink. As I predicted, my father was a hindrance to my juicing process. He had to show me how to use the juicer. We have such different cooking personality types. I had lots of specific recipes picked out and wanted to just start already. I had been waiting FOREVER to finally make some raw, vegan healthy food. I went to the natural food store and got all the ingredients today. I knew he was going to take forever. Cool healthy people like FullyRawKristina use their juicer or blender every single day, sometimes multiple times per day. He has only used his juicer once or twice, and it's like a project to him. I don't want it to be a project for me. I want it to be part of my lifestyle.

Also, he rarely goes to the store to buy things he wants to cook with like I do. Instead, he does the opposite: he looks for recipes with the ingredients he has on hand, which is usually garden-grown food. Gardening is so inconvenient. When I grow up, I'm going to buy a farm share from a local farm, not grow my own food. It takes so much time and it's boring and tedious, not to mention we end up with way more food than we need to the point where we're eating apricots, zucchini, and lettuce (just to name a few) every single day. And it's difficult to make the recipes I want because we're stuck with all this other stuff.

For this reason, he always tries to modify recipes to include ingredients I don't want. Another thing about my dad is that he always takes over the kitchen when I ask for his help. Once, I found a soup recipe in Better Homes and Gardens that I really wanted to try, and, like I expected, he took over and tried to make it all by himself. He also said we should put in some other things we had, that weren't in the recipe. He rarely follows recipes--he just does his own thing. I always follow recipes. We are so different. 

Anyway, after he scavenged all over the house looking for the instruction manual, I learned that juicers don't use the entire fruit. It takes out the pulp. I was going for the fine smoothie sort of thing where one just puts in all of the ingredients, pushes a button, and drinks. I didn't want all this complicated separation stuff. I ended up just using our Magic Bullet in the end. 

When I loaded in all the ingredients and looked at the flax seeds sitting on the spinach, I got the feeling of hope for the first time in this process. It's the feeling one gets when she watches FullyRawKristina videos, or the NutriBullet infomercials. I really hoped it wasn't going to fail miserably. I didn't think the rock-solid carrot was going to liquefy very well, and this is a pretty sketchy combo--what if it's disgusting? What if it gets stuck and it won't blend? 

Despite all my fears, I pushed to top and the spinach started blending very smoothly--and before I knew it, the whole thing was a green mush. Success! I did let my dad add in some cherry juice and apricots as well. 

I used a recipe I got from the NurtiBullet website called The Skinny Blast. It had spinach, banana, orange, pumpkin seeds, carrot, hemp seeds, and almond milk. I couldn't find any hemp seeds in the store (plus I don't really know what they are) so I used flax seeds.

It was very clumpy. It had spinach leaves and whole flax seeds still in it. I want to get the NurtiBullet because it liquefies everything so well. I haven't told anyone except my brother that I want to get one because we already have lots of appliances and my dad thinks it's a scam. I don't want him knowing that I was sucked into the glory of the infomercial.
It was good over all, it could just use some tweaking. I don't really like the orange aspect, but I do like the spinach. It's not perfect, but I won't stop until it is. 

When my sister walked by and saw the green mush in my glass, she was like, "What is that?" and I didn't answer. Then she said "What is it made out of?" She's so mean. I hate it when she makes fun of what I eat. It's bad enough that she doesn't have any stubborn unattractive flab even though she eats crap 24/7, but now she has to make fun of me for trying to look like her. I hope the world will finally make sense some day and she will get fat, sick and ugly, and I will be the beautiful, slim, healthy, young-looking woman.

So anyway, I made my first green smoothie--and it was a bumpy ride (in more ways than one) but the first step of anything is always the most difficult. Tomorrow I'll make a different recipe. 

Detox Cleanse Fasting

I've been learning more about toxins and detox fasting lately. This is where one lives off of liquidized vegetables for one, three, or even seven days. I read all about fasting to re-alkalize the body and flush toxins in the binder that Dr. Melos gave me. I looked up more online, and Dr. Oz had a show about a detox cleanse that looked fantastic. I have been drinking lots of V8 Juice lately and I really want to make my own vegetable juice. It's an acquired taste, but it's really good. That's all I've been craving lately.

I've been trying to lose the mysterious weight on my belly that I've had ever since I was a little girl. I thought it was extra fat even though I am healthy and I don't have any fat on other parts of my body. I went through a chubby phase starting from third to seventh grade (when I joined ballet I lost some weight). My baby fat melted away, but I still had a blob on my waist. For that reason, I always considered myself fat.
I just assumed it was a matter of too many calories. But maybe I've been going about this all wrong; maybe I've been looking at the wrong system! I recently came across an add that said toxins make a home in your belly, so that your gut hangs over your belt. That is strangely exactly what happens to me, so I was curious to learn more. I saw this in an add that told me to take a quiz to measure my toxicity level, told me I was full of toxins, and told me to download a free ebook. It was quite fishy, so I did some more research. I took a different quiz on a website that seemed legitimate and they reassured me that I am less toxic than the average American.
I am very excited about doing a detox diet now, but also quite stressed. It seems like I'm tackling this concept all at once. Perhaps I'll start with one or two veggie juice recipes. I feel like I'm getting in over my head. Like I'll never make anything of plan and I'll just be left with some almond butter and coconut water. Like I won't follow through with my plan. For example, take scrapbooking: I bought a whole bunch of paper and stickers, started like eight different pages, but still have yet to finish any of them. I actually want to practice this healthy lifestyle for the rest of my life and getting started is the hardest part.
I told my mom about the detox cleanse and she said she wants to do it with me, which I was very happy about because she never really expresses interest in things I like.

I'm Still Eating After Six

My new rule hasn't been working out very well. My family will make dinner after six o'clock, and I will want to eat it. Two days ago I slightly broke my rule by eating some cheese after six, but I thought that was acceptable because cheese is a tolerable food to eat closer to slumber. People eat cheese with their wine late at night, right? But the next day, I had half a hot dog, a carrot, and some green beans after six because that's what my family was having. That day I had more hunger than normal, and I blamed that on not having a big enough breakfast. Tonight I had some stuffed zucchini with my family. America is a very difficult place in which to try to be healthy.

Naturopathic Doctor Visit

Today I went to a new doctor, a naturopathic doctor. I have taken an interest in natural medicine and I wanted to learn more about the profession, so I set up an appointment with Dr. Melos.
My parents only grudgingly allowed me to do this. My dad says I should do it because "I'm already healthy." My mom only let me do it because insurance pays for it.
During my check-up, Dr. Melos said she had some "articles that she has written over the years" she gives to new patients, and I expected it to be approximately two or three pages. But she gave me a full binder with a beautiful green and pink cover that read "Living Well Naturally" and sixty pages of information! I have read up to page 25, and read it all over again, and then went back to certain pages and read those again. It's a lot to take in.
There were lots of detox cleanse diets offered in the binder, one for each season. I also learned all about liquid vegetable fasting, and I got really interested in it. I want to try it.
I also learned more about raw foodism. I read that cooking food kills the enzymes contained in it. Enzymes allow the body to digest the food put into it, and when it doesn't get enough it takes some from the emergency storage in the pancreas to compensate for the lack. I got kind of afraid because all of the foods that I have always thought to be healthy actually weren't as healthy as I thought, like cooked vegetables. I just thought veggies were veggies. It's kind of like the feeling one gets when she watches the NutriBullet infomercial and is told that she isn't getting the maximum health benefits from her food, even if her food is supposedly healthy food.
The human body is just extremely complicated and intricate. There is so much more to it than calorie intake and outtake. There are so many organs and so many vitamins and minerals and nutrients to react with those organs and each other. And there is so much more to healthy eating than calories and nutrient counting: there are so many factors such as eating certain foods with certain others, eating at certain times of the day or year, preparing them a certain way, eating them within different amounts of time from harvesting.... It makes me scared. There is so much to know, and no human being has figured it all out completely, let alone me. Will I ever solve the great mystery that is my ideal diet for optimal health??

Tea

I have been drinking tea every night. I made one the other night with some lose-leaf tea, and it turned out very beautiful. It was bright pink. I made it out of an herbal tea called Wild Orange Blossom.

I had chai tea tonight. I have been wanting to try chai for a long time but had difficulty finding out how to make it. I added milk and sugar and it was wonderful. My dad said he and my mom used to have chai tea every day when they were in Nepal for the Peace Corps.