Dedicated

After weeks, months, and years of treating my body like garbage and letting it be ruled by quick automatic responses to stress, I made a change. It will be a lasting one, because it has to be. It can’t be any other way, and I can’t go back to the way things were.

This guy, here, convinced me to make the change.

I’m on what’s called a transitional raw foods diet. Although I hate using that word, ‘diet,’ because this really isn’t one. I can eat as much fruits and veggies that I want. Limitless. It’s more a modification of eating habits. That is, modifying atrocious eating habits into healthier ones. Now, mind you, it’s not that I drink two gallons of Coke a day and feast on candy bar-laced ice cream sandwiches in between. I’m pretty good when it comes to eating habits. But I can also be bad, particularly if I’m under stress or in a rotten mood.

For example, as regular readers of this here blog know, I’ve been under the gun at work almost nonstop this year. A lot of it is not justified; a lot of it is because I’ve reached my limit. Regardless, when I have a particularly bad day, I grab a diet Coke and a some nitrate-riddled lunch-meat white-roll sandwich and head for the park for an hour. I get back, and I snack on little candy bars the girls in the office leave out consistently every day. See here. Then, after my blood sugar’s been spiking north and south a dozen times over the past six hours, after fighting traffic and dealing with child care and a daughter who may or may not have napped, I get home and pop open a beer or two to wash the day away. It works to a certain extent, but weeks and months of this have absolutely devastated my body. I have no energy, yet I can’t sleep. I’ve gained fifteen or twenty pounds since my thirties. The thought of exercise tires me.

My wife and I both went on a similar raw foods plan for two weeks in May 2007. The results were incredible. They said I’d feel irritable and fatigued as the toxins washed out of my body, but I don’t recall being overly so (work, however, at that time was not as stressful as now). We both dropped a huge amount of weight. I think I lost close to ten pounds, and felt no harmful side effects. It was truly amazing. But we cheated one weekend, stumbled through the next week, and then totally derailed, enabling each other’s bad behavior.

Technically, I’ve been doing a partial form of transitional raw foods for five days now, and it’s working. But I’ve been letting myself slip and cheat, especially at lunch and in the evening. So, since I like to start new things with as much significance as possible, today being October 1st, I will ascribe now to the complete transitional raw foods eating style. For this month I’ll keep a log to make sure I stay honest, and I’ll blog weekly on this, giving more details of the eating changes implemented and how it’s affecting me.

Big changes ahead, and this is the first of ’em.