T-minus two days

Since I was a teen, I've had angry skin to one degree or another.

My dermatologist calls it "Prurigo Nodularis." Isn't that a celestial phenomenon that happens in Alaska?

She prescribed me, of all things, an anti-depressant. Which is working great at regulating my mood, but the results on my skin are not exciting.

This is something I'll be watching while I'm on the Raw diet. Maybe it's a pipe dream, but I'm kind of hoping that going Raw might clear up my skin.

I just came back from the local farmer's market. I've never bought so many fresh fruits & veggies in all my life. As I packed the grocery bags into the back of my car, I wondered how I was going to fit everything into my fridge.

T-minus three days to raw

Reason for trying Raw: I have a pair of really hot jeans that I want to fit into again. Told you it was all about me. I have developed a little extra padding here and a few extra rolls there. Or as one of my dear friends puts it, I’ve developed a furniture problem: my chest has fallen into my drawers.

Furthermore, I have discovered, sadly, that losing weight gets progressively harder the further you get away from 40. Can anyone else smell what I’m standing in?

I thought about posting a “Before” picture in my bathing suit, but I’ve decided to spare my kind reader of such a spectacle. I’d have to put a “Warning - Graphic Content” disclaimer on my blog.

Instead, I will post my bathroom scale readings. You’ll thank me.

Seriously, if all I’m eating is uncooked veggies & fruits & nuts & seeds, how can I not drop a few pounds?

BTW I know what you’re thinking... maybe I wouldn’t need to lose weight if I stopped blogging and got off my tukus and took my dog for a walk.

Chocolate

A diversion. This was at the desk at the admission desk at Northwest Medical Center.

If you have melted chocolate all over your hands, you are eating it too slowly.

Chocolate covered raisins, cherries, orange slices and strawberries all count as fruit, so eat as many as you want.

The problem: how to get 2 pounds of chocolate home from the store in your hot car. The solution: eat it in the parking lot.

Diet tip: eat a chocolate bar before each meal. It will take the edge off your appetite and you'll eat less.

A nice box of chocolates can provide your total daily intake of calories in one place. Isn't that handy?

If you can't eat all your chocolate, it will keep in the freezer. But if you can't eat all your chocolate, what's wrong with you?

If calories are an issue, store your chocolate on top of the fridge. Calories are afraid of heights, and they will jump out of the chocolate to protect themselves.

Money talks. Chocolate sings.

Chocolate has many preservatives. Preservatives make you look younger.

Why is there no such organization as Chocoholics Anonymous? Because no one wants to quit.

If not for chocolate, there would be no need for control-top pantyhose. An entire garment industry would be devastated.

Put "eat chocolate" at the top of your list of things to do today. That way you'll get at least one thing done.

T-minus five days

Gentle reader, I must admit that last night's dinner of apples & mock tuna salad, while delicious and satisfying, made my tummy gurgle all evening. Until I took some Maalox and then it settled down. It wasn't uncomfortable. Just noisy.

Now that you know a slight bit more about me than you cared to, I must also confess that I think I will miss coffee on my raw diet!

Don't have too much time to blog today. I have to leave straight from work this evening, to drive to the state's capital city and back, 100 miles one-way. So it will be a long day for yours truly.

Mock Tuna Salad

I'm in the mood for some culinary sleight-of-hand this evening, even though it's T-minus 6 days. So I'm going to make a batch of Mock Tuna Salad. I got the recipe here.

I made this a few weeks back on my 1-week-raw trial, and I was delightfully surprised at how much it tasted like tuna salad. I even gave Mr. Meat-and-Potatoes a small spoonful, and he was impressed at the taste, even though he thought that it resembled cat vomit.

I prefer to view it as "nut pate." Here it is served up on a green lettuce leaf & thin sliced tomatoes with Fuji apple wedges. Mmmm, don't you feel healthier just looking at it?

I made 2 changes: I don't have coconut butter in my larder (although I will acquire that from my local health food store soon) so I substituted an equal measure of extra-virgin olive oil. And instead of using fresh chopped onion, I cheated & used some onion granules from my spice rack.

T-minus six days raw

As I said, I love experimenting in the kitchen.

About three years ago I embarked on a nutritional odyssey for my husband’s health. This was a discovery that I made, again, through a link to a link to a link. I was looking at something not very closely related to my original search, and found myself on a Celiac website. I started reading and was fascinated by what I learned. The symptoms of Celiac as described on this site, sounded like some of the health issues my husband had been suffering for years. He had chronic G-I issues like cramping & diarrhea, and also suffered from migraines that would send him to urgent care an average of 4 times a year. (Once on New Year’s Eve! Whoopee!)

So on a whim, I decided to put Hubby on a 30-day trial gluten-free diet, to see if that would make any difference with his G-I problems and his migraines. I devoured all the information I could about cooking gluten-free, and I completely eliminated wheat from his diet.

Almost immediately his issues nearly disappeared. His migraines decreased in frequency, and his gut was happy for the first time in many years, to the point that he didn’t have to take twelve Imodium pills every day.

Hubby has not been clinically diagnosed with Celiac disease, frankly because the test is rather unpleasant... yeah, it involves a biopsy of the inside of your intestine, ewww. But I reckon a biopsy would be superfluous, wouldn’t it? I mean, either it comes back positive, which would confirm what I already suspected, or it would come back negative, which wouldn’t change the fact that Hubby is still gluten-intolerant.

I don’t know all the chemistry behind Celiac disease or gluten-intolerance. All I know is that gluten is a protein that can erode the inside of your intestine and negatively affect your digestion. I have heard it said that more folks are gluten-intolerant than realize it, to some degree or another. However, in most people the symptoms are either too mild to bother with, or they’re blamed on something else. I have heard gluten-intolerance blamed for everything from autism to infertility to attention deficit disorder to Chrone’s to dermatitis to fibromyalgia to lactose intolerance to irritable bowel syndrome.

Would we all be healthier people if we didn’t eat wheat? I don’t know. What I do know is that Hubby’s G-I complaints went ignored or poo-poo’d by doctors (the best they could do was recommend an OTC medicine for IBS), and that he found real relief when I took the initiative to change his diet.

So, is there healing in the food we eat? I can’t doubt that.

Cashew Milk

Okay, how do you milk a cashew? Does it involve goggles, gloves or steel-toed shoes? How do you tell the boy cashews from the girl cashews?

Never mind. I just made a batch of cashew milk for fun. Here are the ingredients:

3 cups of cold water

1 cup of raw cashews

1 drop of almond flavoring

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

1 dash of sea salt

2 tablespoons of honey (or agave nectar)

Threw it all in my blender and pressed "Liquify." It yielded a quart.

Granted, I don't have a super-duper high-speed Vitamix blender that is recommended by Raw Foodies. So it turned out just a teeny bit grainy. I suppose I could strain it through a cheesecloth. Hey, that's an idea. If I had a cheesecloth. Oh, maybe a coffee filter.

After tasting it, this is my impression: It tastes like horchata. It would be good in coffee, I reckon, or on cereal. All by itself it's a tad sweet. I think next time I make it, I may halve the honey. But not at all bad for my first attempt at vegan milk. And the cashews didn't even kick me while I was milking them!

T-minus-seven days to raw.

What is a raw diet anyway? I don't know. That's what I hope to find out. So far from the little I've read, a raw diet consists of vegetables, fruits, nuts & seeds. Seems to me to be a very primitive diet. Like what our primeval ancestors used to eat, sans the occasional barbecued wooly mammoth.

It is dairy-free, gluten-free and vegan.

And of course, everything is eaten uncooked.

It appears, from the little bit of poking around I've done on different blogs, that there are some disagreements among Raw Foodies regarding exactly how far to take the "raw" thing. Is it ok to eat dried fruits? How about dried herbs? Or do those have to always be fresh? I don't reckon it's a big deal. Me, I won't hesitate to eat raisins or dig into my spice rack whenever I please.

Why is everything uncooked? I'm no scientist. I skipped chemistry in high school because nobody liked the teacher. But according to some sources I've read, cooking food destroys enzymes that aid in digestion, and generates carcinogens in food.

I don't know. It sounds like the chant of a militant health-food hippie wacko. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

The chemistry is not the reason I'm trying a Raw diet.

Another "Unreason" is the environmental reason. Some Raw Foodie bloggers claim that the Raw diet is better for the environment. They say if everyone went raw we'd have no need for nuclear power, there'd be less food packaging & less pollution, we'd save the trees and the oil reserves, there would be less carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, we'd save the whales and the polar bears, and life would be sunshine and rainbows.

Maybe that's so. I'm not a tree-hugger.

My reasons for trying a Raw diet are much more selfish. Because it's all about me! I'll get into some of those reasons in future posts.

Some of my more hair-brained ideas come as a result of a link to a link to a link.

Earlier this month, I was on the Web looking for a recipe that I heard mentioned on the radio. I think it was for brownies, or fudge, or biscotti, or something like that. In the process, I found a link to a recipe for no-bake vegan brownies.

No-bake vegan brownies, eh? The recipe looked too good and too easy to be true. I had all the ingredients already in my larder. So I decided to try it, for giggles. I think it had 5 ingredients. It was super easy to make in my food processor, and it turned out delightfully yummy!

I was so intrigued that I went back to the website to find more recipes. (I love to experiment in the kitchen. I've been known to make mock mashed potatoes out of cauliflower, and chocolate cake with mayonnaise.) The recipes on this site seemed amazingly easy. I bought a few staples at my local health-food store and went raw vegan for a week.

After just a week of the raw vegan diet, my skin had cleared up a great deal. (I suffer from a chronic skin condition that I will explain in a later post.) After the week was over and I returned to my normal diet, my skin condition worsened almost immediately. The fact that Christmas was coming up and I was constantly noshing on fattening goodies in the office probably didn't help. I reckoned, if a week on a raw vegan diet was so easy and made such a difference with my skin, why not try a 30-day raw vegan challenge?

My challenge commences on Monday, January 2. The countdown starts.