Raw Bento

I think it’s about time I update my foray into the raw food diet. Readers of this blog must’ve thought my tentative steps into this radical lifestyle were just experimental, but shortly after starting I fell in love with the exuberance raw food gave me. Unfortunately, the great new physical well-being came with some emotional confusion at the ninety day point. So where am I now?

I’m still eating a high raw diet with some cooked food daily and have lost a total of 8kg (17.6 lbs). Around the fourth month I was riding a wave of being 100% raw for a few weeks — I felt great until I went back to Singapore for a short holiday and ate quite a bit of cooked food, so have been struggling to get back to 90-100%. To sum it up, I am vegetarian with a mostly vegan diet though I tend to eat a bit of dairy when I am out socializing.

Here are my thoughts…

The Good:
+ I definitely feel much better than I did last year when I was gaining weight steadily and felt pulled down by lethargy.

+ My skin is still fairly clear. The perpetual rash on my left forearm (I think this condition is called keratosis) has faded but flares up a little when I drink alcohol, or consume gluten. I used to get pimples on my neck but I don’t seem to have that problem anymore.

+ I need less sleep and tend to shut down at 2am and wake at 9am naturally. I don’t take naps in the day unless I had extremely little sleep the night before.

+ I feel energetic when I work out but am veering towards less bootcamp-ish exercise. Hooping and Latin dance routines are my fixations now.

+ I feel less pressured to exercise daily. I used to feel guilty when I skipped my workouts but I realized it’s more about moving and being active everyday, on top of a raw food diet. Walking is a great way to burn calories and I’m happy not to own a car.

+ I love love love trying new raw recipes and I adore the taste of fresh produce.

+ I’ve connected with a few raw vegans in Tokyo and that makes me feel a little closer to the raw community.

+ There is one thing that made me feel that this is truly a healthy diet and I’ve not talked about it in any of my blogs: it helped me flush out the multiple cysts growing on my ovaries. Please note I have no scientific proof and this is purely from my own observations and deduction.

Basically for the past three years I had a huge number of cysts that grew and shrank on my ovaries. I was never diagnosed as PCOS but I was told to go for a check up every six months instead of annually. It was a cause for concern but I swept it under the carpet and didn’t visit the gynae till three years after the last diagnosis.

In the first three months of eating a raw food diet, my periods were very heavy and lasted for two weeks. The first few days tired me out and I did worry a little. I even sought out ways to stop such heavy bleeding (pinch of cayenne and tumeric in iced water) and booked myself an appointment when I returned back to Singapore. During this time, I was 80% raw and took 10 wheatgrass tablets a day. I couldn’t get my hands on pure wheatgrass juice so that was the next best thing.

Guess what? I only have one single cyst left that is fairly small. One. Wow. Out of uncountable ones. I think my body flushed them all out. It’s incredible, isn’t it?

The Challenges:

+ There are a lot of conflicting viewpoints on the raw food diet and some folks nitpick on what’s truly raw or not (for example, although agave nectar is featured in many raw recipes, it’s not raw as the process of extracting agave involves high temperatures which would classify it as “cooked”); there are arguments for and against being 100% raw 100% of the time; is the enzyme argument sound? I’m not sure where I stand in all of this except that I’m still adjusting my diet as I go along and I’m using how I feel as a compass of what’s “good” or “bad” for me. However, there is one thing I’m very sure is processed, refined food is toxic for you and you can see that same tenet in all diets, fad or not.

+ Which brings me to my next point: is being 100% raw a truly healthy choice? It seems your body will become so clean that it will not tolerate the smallest bit of pollution, according to some long-term raw foodists. Even if it is the ultimate level of health to achieve, is it worth it? Socially it’s just a nightmare if you don’t live in a raw-friendly place (LA, NYC, and London have thriving raw communities but I don’t live in any of those cities).

+ I still miss cooked food sometimes, and try as I might, I do feel a bit guilty if I indulge too much which is not a good way to go in the sense that I shouldn’t be feeling any guilt about food.

+ Though my energy levels are pretty high in the day, I somehow feel some seeds of discontent and want to be even more alert. Sounds crazy? Well, perhaps it’s human nature to be slightly dissatisfied even in the throes of happiness. What you have somehow is not quite good enough and you want more. I even reached a point a few weeks ago thinking, “If I can’t reach the level that I want, I might as well go back to cooked food.” So, for a whole day, I just ate cooked food but I felt sluggish and awful so I went back to raw the next day.

Will I continue the raw food diet? Yes, absolutely. It feels good so there’s no reason to stop. But I’ve still got many unanswered questions swimming in my mind and am curious to read or hear about more perspectives.

This sort of explains why I started this blog. I’m keen to carry on eating this way but I need to encourage myself to continue and reach out to others in cyberspace. I don’t live in a world where I know very many raw vegans but somehow I’d like to create a bigger space to talk about raw stuff, apart from my personal blog and my business-related one.