One Foot In Front of the Other!

Beginning Raw Vegan Weight: 425

Beginning Blog Weight: 277

Weight Yesterday: 254 1/4

Weight Today: 255

Today’s Loss: + 3/4 lbs

Total Blog Loss: 22 lbs in 18 days! Only 1 lb to meet my 23 lbs blog goal!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

10:18 a.m. and i've accomplished more in one morning than I sometimes get done in a whole day! I've been up since 2:30 a.m., catching up on emailing while Cliff slept, and sending out the Arnolds Way weekly email, which takes me several hours to accomplish. At 8:00a.m. Cliff and I went out for our exercise, he, on his bicycle, and me, a very intense mostly uphill walk in Manayunk. Now i'm getting to my blog.

ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER - UPDATE ON WALKING
I tell you, when i started that walk this morning, i never imagined i would walk for an hour, or that i would do such a strenuous walk. I was overtired, overwhelmed, depressed and didn't feel like walking. 10 minutes into the walk, which i had given myself permission to be a light 30 mins stroll, my mood changed and i began to enjoy the adventurous new route i was taking...and i forgot that i felt bad, and i just kept moving forward, and literally up and up and up! I walked my ass off up hill, up hill, up hill, up hill. Why? I wanted to! I am getting strong! I don't know where all of this strength is coming from. Oh, yes, i do. It's RAW JOY POWER! I was able to forget about the emotional blah blahs and turn around what could have been a depressive zero of a morning.

As for the overwhelmed depressed state? I have a LOT to do. Dishes, laundry, vocalizing, getting ready for the raw wedding. But just as i put one foot in front of the other this morning and saw myself achieve what i never planned to, i, too, can put one foot in front of the other, break my chores down into small chunks and just pick, pick, pick away at it.

On the topic of exercise, let me just put in my two cents for SUPPORT FOR EXERCISE. If i did not have my darling partner, Cliff, to exercise with me every morning, i would NOT be having this much success at it. God bless my Cliffy and i'm so THRILLED that we have found a system that works for us for success. That's the way a good partnership should be. Both of us getting BETTER...and not worse!

Poopy UPDATE
Anyway, so i've been up since 2:30a.m. What woke me up at 2:30a.m.? Poopy patrol! I had to poop...at 2:30 in the morning! I suppose with all of the fiber i've been sending my body...it's just got to go when it's got to go.

FAT UPDATE
I DO notice something interesting. The more fat I eat, the less i sleep. I fell asleep at 9pm last night and slept 5 hours. Eating zero overt fat, i generally sleep 8 or even sometimes 9 hours. I think my body is in a detox then and needs the rest. The fat must stimulate the body somehow? It is now, however, 3:30pm and i am feeling pooped! A nap might just do the trick.

I'm happy to say that my +3/4 gain didn't effect my mental state for TOO long this morning. I was a bit discouraged and disheartened, but I just got on with my exercise and then took some new pictures (above), (these are fresh off the presses, just shot this morning)...and in examining the pictures, i felt so much better. I really see that my body, lower body specifically, is looking better and looking trimmer. I see that i am losing INCHES and that joyous realization overrode the weight gain funk!

I did eat that whole avocado yesterday, and it's amazing to me that doing that alone would produce a weight gain when my overall calories were no more than even 1500.

This is certainly a learning experience. And I am becoming a pro at just rolling with the punches. Some days are even, but many are up and down emotionally. I guess this is how real people live. You just learn to adjust and go with the flow!

In documenting this challening experience, losing weight on raw (that shouldn't really be rocket science, but it turns out to be a lot harder for some than others), I hope to really solidify what works for me, and what will hopefully work for other morbidly obese people, seeking a 'way out' of the hopelessness. The perplexing part is that what works CHANGES over time!

* * * *Candida Alert* * * * - My body now sends me signals when it's taken in too much fat, or taken in something it doesn't particularly like. If i eat too much fat, I start to get itchy down "there" (and in my heinie hole)! So, I woke up itchy this morning! scratch, scratch! The body communicates to us!

THE PERPLEXITY OF THE GOURMET TRANSITION IN TERMS OF WEIGHT LOSS I was able to lose 140 lbs eating sunflower seed cheese at least 2 or 3 times a day, extra raw crackers, 4 course fatty meals at gourmet raw restaurants SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK in the beginning 8 months of my journey. And I chowed down when i went out! And i just kept losing and losing and losing.

But, I think the body goes through different phases. When i began, i was coming from a diet so high in calories, my caloric intake was probably 5,000-10,000 calories a day that eating guacamole became a 'diet' food compared to 5 double cheese burgers. Now avocado is a weight gain food. Aren't i lucky? 2.5 years into raw, and things certainly HAVE changed in what i can eat and how it affects my weight.

I hear this pattern with many raw foodists - when they first go raw, they eat alot of nuts and fat and still lose weight, as i did, it just dropped off of me, but then, something happens, and the body says, 'okay, i've had enough.'

I was also doing a tremendous amount of exercise daily in my first 8 months of raw.

After the first 8 months of eating the raw retreat diet (raw vegan moderate fat in the form of seeds, no salt, no nuts, no olive oil) with sometimes DAILY and always WEEKLY trips to 'Cilantro', the neighborhood gourmet raw hotspot, I returned home, and began to work at Arnolds Way while still working out daily. That's when the really out of control eating began. But curiously enough, the exercise from 8 months of constant walking, swimming, i suppose had kicked my metabolism into such overdrive that i could literally pig OUT ALL DAY, and i STILL was losing weight! I came home from the raw retreat 285 and lost another 10 lbs completely pigging out non stop.

As the exercise cooled down, I gained back the 10 lbs and started to get kinda desperate. This was my first attempt at something akin to 80-10-10, David Klein's all banana diet for 2 weeks and lost 20 lbs bringing me to my lowest weight then of 265lbs. After i went off of the banana diet, i gained back the 20lbs almost overnight.

And for the next year, i ate and ate and ate and ate...and stayed the same weight. Every morning, 285ish. It was FREAKY and BIZARRE.

Then i began to feel tired every afternoon, and then every morning and the exercise had LONG SINCE died out completely months and months ago, but i was still packing in the fatty fatty gourmet pate's and crackers all day, and i began to gain. And gain. And gain. I went from 285 to 299 rather rapidly. That's when i said to myself, 'that's it. something has to change.'

That's when i found Dr. Graham's 80-10-10. I mean Arnold had been counseling me to go that route since i MET him, but i just didn't want to listen. I loved the gourmet stuff too much. But after gaining and gaining, i gave up. With 80-I0-10 I lost rapidly and was thrilled, only to return to gourmet for a treat a month later. Well, that ONE treat ended up into 3 days of non stop gourmet binge eating. The next time on 80-10-10 i lost what i gained back and then when i went off for a 'gourmet treat meal', THAT treat lasted an entire WEEK of out of control gourmeting. This last time, i really went nuts, literally, on nuts, and ended up gaining 23 lbs in two weeks. THAT WAS MORTIFYING.

[I do NOT want that to happen again. That's why i created this blog. To try to find a balance, to try to bridge the gap between what was literally 'dieting' and 'bingeing'.]

Although i'm STILL tending to believe it is the FATTY SALTY FOOD that overstimulates me and precedes binge eating, RATHER than emotional upset. Perhaps i am totally mistaken!

I started out wanting to learn to eat it in moderation, but everything says to me i should just learn to GIVE IT UP. Why play with FIRE?

Oh, god, such a sad pallor comes over me when i even think of that, giving up the gourmet for good.

For today, i'm 80-10-10ing. The future...is the future. One day at a time. I'll just keep putting one foot in front of the other!

BREAKFAST: 1/2 Vitamix full of a strawberry peach slushee:

• strawberries frozen
• 6 lousy tart peaches that never ripened, water.

Not even slightly delicious, but isn't that cool that that's still cool with me now? Pretty neat. it's a new level of maturity. MOUTH MATURITY!!! The ability to eat for HEALTH rather than PLEASURE alone. Pretty amazing.

SNACK: 2 very small cobs of corn

SNACK: 1 mango in the car

SNACK: rest of leftover slushee

LINNER: 1 large salad with cashew dressing, and 1/4 of a small watermelon for dessert. Here's the salad ingredients:

• lots of baby romaine
• 1 tomato cut up
• 1 Tbsp of cashew butter mixed in 1/8th cup of water
• Black pepper
• garlic powder
• juice of 1/2 large lemon
• 2 Tbsp of nutritional yeast

I fork mixed salad with dressing very well and that's that. Enjoyed it, uy, too much. Would have been divine with salt. God, Fatty things drive me NUTS. I still WANTED something afterwards. Rather than indulging in more fat, i cracked open a small watermelon to happily find it was ripe and red and juicy and sweet. 1/4 of the watermelon was dessert and i was satisfied.

SNACK: 1/2 watermelon

SNACK: 3 cups strawberries frozen, 1 banana made into a slushee.

xoxox michelle joy