Raw Foods Trial: Day 6

I have never told anyone that shifting to a raw food diet is easy. In fact, it was very hard for us. Our bodies were demanding foods that we used to eat. From the very first day, and for a couple weeks, minute after minute, I daydreamed of eating bagels with cream cheese, hot soups, chocolate, or at the very least, various types of chips. At night in my sleep, I was searching for French fries under my pillow. I sneaked two dollars from our family budget and kept them in my pocket. I kept plotting that one day, I would have half an hour alone to run down to the corner restaurant and buy a slice of hot, cheesy pizza, eat it fast without being seen, run back, and continue the raw food diet. Luckily I never found that chance.
--Victoria Boutenko, 12 Steps to Raw Foods
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Welcome to Day 6 of Casual Kitchen's seven day raw foods trial! I'm sure you're all used to the routine by now: first I'll list the foods I ate and the eating schedule I kept, and then below I'll share my closing thoughts on the day. [See the full archive of posts on my raw foods trial.]

Breakfast: 8:30am
1 avocado and ~3 cups fresh pineapple chunks

Lunch: 1:00pm
Smoothie: 1 apple, 1 cup blackberries, 5-6 Tblsp wheat berries and a few ounces of water. Yield: 1 1/2 cups.

Snack 3:00pm
1 apple and a handful of lentils and buckwheat for nibbling

Dinner 6:30pm
Vegetable platter: 5 carrots, 1/2 a large cucumber, 1/2 a green bell pepper, broccoli, with a small amount of tahini dip (pretty much like last night). I had one apple for "dessert."

I didn't feel I wanted a smoothie after this enormous plate of food, so I allowed myself to not have one. Last night's smoothie on top of a similar plate of food was just too much. Also, tonight's veggie platter was delicious, and it wasn't hard work at all to graze my way through it.

Concluding Notes/Thoughts on the Day:
1) Once again I'm not feeling all that well, in fact this morning I feel pretty much the worst I've felt all week. I felt a little queasy for much of the day and I had a bad headache from the moment I woke up, although it fortunately faded somewhat after breakfast. It felt exactly like a hangover headache--except I didn't have the pleasure of drinking too much last night.

2) One positive thing: that weird taste in my mouth is mostly gone.

3) At the same time, despite the "hangover," I had one of my most productive mornings of writing in months. I think the takeaway here is that pain focuses the mind and I should hit my head on something every morning before I sit down to write.

4) Yesterday's breakfast worked well for me. I think the fat content of the avocado not only was good for my body, it also was exactly what I wanted. I'll probably eat the same thing to start off Day 7.

5) A couple of kooky food craving anecdotes today:
a) I was measuring out some rice for Laura's dinner, and, weirdly, the smell of it was enormously tempting to me. That's right. Uncooked, plain white rice. It never occurred to me that uncooked rice even had a smell, much less that it could smell so delicious.

b) I spent an hour today excitedly flipping through cookbooks for "cooked" recipes. I've been in a bad cooking rut, and this is the first time in several weeks that I find myself actually excited to cook. That's gotta take the cake for the most unexpected side effect of a week of eating 100% raw.

Onward to Day 7--just one more day to go!

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