Feast Days 3 & 4

Day 2, May 28

Movement: Cardio Salsa workout, Feldenkrais Lesson "Freeing the Hip Joint"

Food: Mangoes, Cherry-banana smoothie, romaine lettuce

Joy: I finally got the last of my melons planted! My baby is so happy to spend some time naked now that the weather is nice. Nothin' is cuter than a naked baby running about happy and free.

Day 3, May 29

Movement: Slim and Sleek Fast workout, walking

Food Nightmare!!! I tried so hard today. We only had 3 ripe mangos left, so I enjoyed those. I went to a different Farmer's Market, as I had a class to attend in a different town. No ripe strawberries yet. :( I went to the store after my class but could not get anything ripe, so the pile of "ripening" fruit in my kitchen has grown, but nothing to eat. I ate two pints of sour raspberries that were starting to mold on the way home. How can they look so pretty and be so sour?

I was really hungry and really annoyed by the time I got home. First I cut up a pineapple. Not ripe, too sour for me. I tried the papaya that was yellow as can be and starting to mold a bit. I knew by smell that it might need a couple more days, but I had to try. Unfortunately, some rot had gotten into the stem and invaded the seed cavity. I tried to salvage some undamaged fruit, but it was, of course, unripe. Then I tried the last watermelon. No good. Over-ripe, slimy, verging on fermented... I had one bunch of bananas that had sugar spots, but they looked a bit hard and green still. I tried. As I suspected, not ripe. With no options left, I blended 5 of them with some frozen sweet cherries. I also had some delicious baby bok choy from my garden, and some Freckles lettuce from the Farmer's Market. This tided me over for a little while, but not surprisingly, by dinner time, I was eating cooked lentils and brown rice and veggies because I was hungry and frustrated. Hey Universe, I need at least 3000 calories of good quality fruit per day!

I really start feeling despair when I spend so much of our limited resources on fruit that ends up in the compost. I have to predict how much to buy when my children's eating habits can be unpredictable. Some times I have too many ripe bananas, other times we run out. I have to order my bulk produce sight unseen, and pray that it is good quality and will be ripe in a reasonable amount of time... about half the time something goes wrong in this equation. And the worst is when I have to take a risk on buying unripe fruit, like pineapples, papayas and mangoes, and hope they will ripen before they rot. Or when I have to buy fruits, like melons, that might look fine on the outside but are horrible inside. Ack!

\

Well, chalk it up to a learning curve that I am going to master. (But I am afraid the real solution here is to move to a farm in a semi-tropical location, or become moderately wealthy and increase my produce budget by 300%.)

In other complaining news, I stepped on a bee today and was in horrible pain for about 2 hours afterward. And so, no gardening.

Self-Love: I love that I am a work in progress. I love that I am beginning to have clarity about some of my stumbling blocks in my raw journey, so that I can start to attract solutions.

Joy: Got to reconnect with some good friends at the Farmer's Market today. And I got to see Trudi Temple speak. She is a fabulous, funny, inspirational firecracker of a person.

Feast Days 1 & 2

Day 1 5/26

Food: Mangos, bananas, blended strawberries and tomatoes, romaine lettuce. Not enough ripe fruit in the house today, so I didn't eat enough.

Movement: Walking and Feldenkrais Lesson #3 Rolling to sit.

Love and Joy: Dancing with my cute baby. Reading my 5 year-old's kindergarten portfolio and seeing how much she has grown this year. Today is the kids' last day of school and summer fun begins.


Day 2 5/27 My dear husband's 35th birthday.

Food: Mangos, banana/ sweet cherry smoothie, cherub tomatoes, avocado and romaine, cooked food from my husband's birthday dinner (not happy about that one... but it gave me an opportunity to practice self-acceptance and compassion)

Movement: Walked with the children to the park and chased the baby around for awhile.

Healing: Was feeling a lot of shame and sadness early in the day. Was later able to pinpoint what had triggered that and name my needs around that, but I still could have used some more... something. Was feeling stressed. But, last night I was able to offer my daughter some empathy when she got really upset and scared at bedtime. She was really receptive to it, and calmed down. It was so nice to be able to help her. She hugged me really tight and told me she loved me, and then went right to sleep.

Love and joy: Got my kids a little kiddie pool that they have been asking for. They were so happy! Felt lots of love for my husband who is having a mini midlife crisis on his birthday. LOL!

40 Day Feast

Connie at Naked Food Cafe has inspired me to a 40 day feast of self-care. Just what I need right now. Here are my 40 day goals.

1) I will love myself deeply and sweetly no matter what.

2) I will eat the foods that my body was designed to digest and use for fuel.

3) I will continue to move my body joyfully for at least 45 minutes per day.

4) I will continue to focus on my healing work, and I will celebrate each tiny bit of progress and accept that it may take time.

5) I will take time to express gratitude and love often.

I really want to blog more, but I often feel that I have so much going on, and my emotions are so up and down, I don't know what to share. Here's an update on the last month or so:

My eating has been up and down dramatically, but fruit is my main source of calories. My exercise is consistent. (Walking, rebounding, cardio videos, jumproping, dancing!) My garden is ambitious and I am nervous but excited about it. I planted 7 varieties of melons this week and have more to plant. My snow peas, sugar snaps and potatoes are 2 inches high and baby lettuces, beets, beans, and carrots are poking out everywhere. So far I am keeping my potted baby fruit trees and my tomato seedlings alive. Fingers crossed.

I want to share that I have been turned on to the amazing benefits of Feldenkrais and have been really enjoying doing some of the free lessons found here. It is changing my life!

I am so grateful for the sunshine, and for my beautiful family, and for the fresh local organic strawberries I have been enjoying this week.

I will try to post my progress regularly on this feast.

Love thy neighbor as thyself

Everyone loves themselves best, don't they? Not really. Many of us Earthlings are swimming in insecurity and self-loathing most of the time.

"Love thy neighbor as thyself..." Perhaps Jesus (or his ghost writer) assumed that most people naturally had a high self-esteem. Or perhaps, this teaching is much more profound than initially meets the eye. To love one's neighbor, one must first love himself. I know what you're thinking... you've heard that so much, it's practically cliche. But I heard it with different ears today.

I am reading Mary O'Malley's awesome book, The Gift of Our Compulsions: A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Acceptance and Healing. If you have ever wrestled with eating as if fighting a mortal enemy at any point on your raw journey, I highly encourage you to read this book. It is helping me! Today I read and reread the chapter on "Loving Yourself from the Inside Out." This quote hit me right between the eyes,

"Trying to be different from or better than what you are in order to be okay will never work, for it is based on the belief that you are not okay right now."

But what if my trying is important? I think to myself. I need to be better, healthier, more moral, more successful. I have to. I can't love myself until I am worthy...

Uh, who said that?

I realized that in the past, my attempts at self-love weren't real. They were strategies. They were tricks I was trying in order to convince myself to do the things I thought I had to do in order to be worthy of my own love. Whoa!

Then I got scared. Well, if I don't have that motivation, those moralistic judgements about myself, then won't I just turn into a fat lazy selfish slob who does nothing but eat chocolate and watch bad reality t.v.?

Well, let's look at the results of my strategy. Years of struggle and pain and poor health. Hey, I still eat a lot of chocolate and watch a lot of bad reality t.v. Hmm...

What if I just accepted and loved myself as I was, with no agenda? If I just loved myself and had no demands or conditions on that love, wouldn't I eventually start choosing things that would be gifts to myself. I would choose health because it feels good. I would choose exercise because it feels good. I would choose the yummiest food (cuz really, it is. Trust me, after you leave your favorite junk food behind for a few months and then try it again, it really ain't that great. In my experience anyway.)

But the most important lesson is perhaps that if I do not love myself, then I have wasted my chance here on Earth to give to others.

Connie, a fan letter

I have just finished catching up on the last year in the life of Connie, author of several awesome blogs including Naked Food Cafe, and founder and leader of the forum of the same name.

I have been a fan of Connie since way back, when she had blogs that may not even exist in cyberspace anymore... I remember the old Naked Food Cafe with high-fat raw recipes. I remember her blog after that with the blue background with psyfi graphics, although the name escapes me. I remember Banana Island and how upbeat and positive it was, with beautiful pictures and yummy recipes. I loved Connie's writing style; her intelligence, wit, curiousity and magical imagination. I never, ever was bored when I read her entries, and I often felt thoughtful, inspired, and uplifted for hours afterwards. And then of course, there was Connie's kindness, her openness and tolerance, and her interest in others. She always took the time to answer comments, and to read and comment on the blogs of others, including mine. When I moved, Connie sent me a simple hand-made housewarming gift, a gesture which I still treasure.

I always wondered, though, if a person could be "real" in a blog. Certainly in my own blog, I felt that there were times when I was only portraying a part of my feelings, or a fragment of my experience. When Connie abruptly posted that she was leaving Banana Island to follow the McDougall Diet in the interest of family harmony, I felt confused. Huh? What did I miss?

Imagine my delight to catch up Connies most recent blog entries and see a whole person revealed. When Connie shared her moments of fear walking in the park after a young girl in her town was killed, or her moments of shame when she found herself in a fast food drive-thru, in spite of her best intentions, her moments of frustration as she wrestled with her compulsion to battle with the number on the scale, and her triumph when she kicked that scale to the curb, suddenly I realized... Connie is showing me the way. It is safe and ok to live my life out loud in front of others.

In the last year, I have been to the abyss. When my husband and I broke up, I believed I didn't have a single friend to turn to... No one to give me a big hug and listen to me pour my heart out for hours. But the truth was, I probably could have reached out to a number of people. I could have blogged and gotten support and encouragement from those far away. I did not, because I was ashamed. I was ashamed to tell the truth about my feelings. I was afraid to appear vulnerable. I was ashamed to be honest about behavior that I regretted. Paradoxically, obeying my fears created the things I was most afraid of... loneliness, despair, loss. The more Connie shares about her struggles and her regrets, the more she seems to grow in confidence and radiance. Opening ourselves to truly experience our fears and sadness also opens ourselves to truly experience joy and true friendship.

So, a shout-out to Connie, for inspiring me yet again. I will now confess that I have a secret fantasy that I will show up on Connie's doorstep this winter to get a hug and a smoothie. Just not a grapefruit one, 'k? LOL! Love you!

I'm baaaack!

I admit it, I've been a chicken... Since my last post a year and a half ago, I have spent most of my time struggling with myself and hiding from everyone.

So many changes, it would take a book-length post to update you all on them. But here's the highlight reel. I tried to force myself and everyone in my family in a journey of radical self-development, some of which was documented on this very blog. I ran smack-dab into my deep emotional wounds and lack of interpersonal skills. Homeschooling crashed and burned. My family life crashed and burned. I broke up with my husband Jason (meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, we had conceived our lovely baby boy Qian, pictured above). Our children moved with Jason to the small town where he teaches and went back to public school. I began working 50 hours a week at two new jobs, and spent the weekends with the children.

We planned to divorce and give the baby up for adoption, but by the third trimester we could not bear to do either, and chose to reunite and welcome our baby to our family. Meanwhile, Jason had a very serious health crisis which left him insulin-dependent and suffering from severe neuropathy. He has only partially recovered. I have moved back with him and am down to one job, about 10 hours per month. I am just enjoying my family immensely. But the struggles and compulsions that I have wrestled with my entire life are still present daily. I want to engage them with curiousity and compassion, rather than an endless cycle of self-violence.

I have been exploring my emotional health in new ways, and am finally ready to rejoin the world. I missed my community here, and hope to reunite with you all.

Self-Awareness

I have been wanting to share so much about what has been going on in my self and my life... but I struggle to even find the words to describe the dramatic and powerful changes that are going on in my self-awareness. Now, I am feeling such joy that I am going to write about this no matter how incoherent I sound. LOL!

If you had asked me a year ago, "Are you self-aware?" I would have not understood the question. But, I would have convinced myself that I did, and I would have been convinced that I, of course, was very aware of myself. I would have backed that up with a whole lot of judgements of my skills and talents and flaws and quirks. In other words, my self-awareness was just above zero, with zero being dead. :)

Here's the analogy to the changes I am experiencing that makes sense in my head. Whenever I moved to a town or city, no matter the size, I always felt overwhelmed in the beginning about how to navigate. So, I would map out, out of necessity, routes to the places I needed to go to do the daily business of life. I could get from my house to school, from my house to the grocery store, from my house to the library, etc. But, I couldn't get from the grocery store to the library. I had no idea how the whole map looked, how far things were from each other, or what the neighborhood in between looked like. Gradually, through exploration, I would eventually "fill in the map." Within a few years, even a large city like Chicago seemed quite simple to navigate because I understood the pattern of organization of the streets and the transit system, and had a general knowledge of the different neighborhoods and where they were in relationship to each other. No matter where I might find myself, it was easy to immediately collect clues about where I was in relation to everywhere else in the city, and quite quickly, I could envision where I was on the map.

Now, finally, I believe I am starting to fill in the map that makes up me, and my relationship to the world and other human beings. Suddenly, I am seeing the connections everywhere. I have stopped looking at my feet, as they plod forward, step by step, and I've started to look up and actually seeing what is around me.

Sometimes, I lose my sense of direction and feel lost. I can't access what I am feeling or needing. I can't see options or recognize anyone else. But those times are coming fewer and farther between. I can experience the sense of being lost without despair, because I know that I can just look around me, and learn! Next time I am here, I will remember it, and I will know the way.

Increased Self-Awareness, Contrast, and other Blessed Irritations

When I went raw, I was shocked at how sharp my sense of smell and taste became. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that many symptoms I took for granted disappeared. I hadn't noticed them because they were so much a part of my life... That achy, lethargic, groggy feeling I woke up with every morning? Turns out it's a "food hangover", not just a result of turning thirty, or bad genes, or "not being a morning person."

So, imagine my dismay, when I began eating poorly again, at having all of my gains disappear and all of my symptoms return. Actually, they seemed worse. Are they worse? No, I am not being "punished." It's just a matter of noticing these things more now that I know what it's like to feel better.

In a way, this increased self-awareness has been the one thing that my detour to SAD land can't erase. And I am grateful for that. Grudgingly grateful.

I know my detour has been temporary, because now I've seen the promised land and want to go back.

Two-Week Detour

Two week detour, much like the famed "Two Hour Tour" gone awry, only without the Skipper and Marianne.

Seriously, though, maybe you've wondered where I've been. It hasn't been a happy place!

Two weeks ago, in response to feelings of frustration, anger, fear, and loneliness, I decided to eat some SAD "food." I knew that I would get sick, but I still chose to do it. However, I had a new awareness of my body's reactions to taking in these foods that I had not experienced before when I ate them fairly often.

Within an hour, I could feel my entire body rapidly dehydrating. My throat and mouth got very dry and then my lips. I could feel my hands and feet swell. I felt a comfortable numbness throughout my entire body for about the first hour--a heavy (but not unpleasant) sensation in my stomach, a slight fogginess in my thinking, drowsiness. Then, however, I got a knotted, painful sensation in my stomach. I heard gurgling noises. I also felt unsatisfied. I felt like I "needed" more SAD food. So I ate more. I went to bed feeling heavy. I slept fitfully, waking often to drink water and remembering strange dreams. My stomach hurt but not as much as I had worried it might.

However, the next morning, I threw up and had diarrhea forapproximately 6 hours. I was incapacitated for the whole day. Iimmediately had increased vaginal discharge (something I had since puberty but went away on 80-10-10). Also, I got a mild yeast infection for a day or two. Then next day, I craved more SAD foods. My stomach was still visibly bloated and gurgling. I later ate more SAD foods throughout the next two weeks. I noticed less symptoms--my body no longer produced diarrhea or vomiting--but I got severe heartburn, which felt like someone was literally kicking me in the esophagus. I gained about 10 pounds in one week, which I assume to be mostly water-weight and colon backup. My hands are slightly painful and swollen in the morning. My skin is oilier and I have some minor breakouts. My scalp is also oilier and a little flakey. My workouts were more difficult and I had less energy. My bowels were immediately irritated. I had gas and a bit of constipation.

The other annoying thing I noticed is that I never felt satisfied after eating the foods I "craved." It was never enough!

The interesting thing about experiencing these physical and mental symptoms was that they were all familiar. I had experienced these symptoms before with regularity before, but never paid much attention. Some of the "milder"symptoms I attributed to age or the natural course of things. The more severe symptoms I chalked up to a bug, such as the "flu." The dissatisfaction and cravings I had attributed to my weak willpower or "stress." Somehow, adding back all these symptoms made me appreciate more clearly how I had not been experiencing them at all in the past 3 months of 80-10-10.

So, self-love, where are you? I feel like I was doing great and then I just fell into a pit of despair and self-loathing. Now, I gotta claw my way back outta here.

Today was Day 1

10 a.m. 1 cup of heirloom cherry tomatoes (a gift from a friend)
11 a.m. 3 large Bartlett pears
Noon Smoothie with 7 med. bananas, 2 cups frozen raspberries
3:30 p.m. (Having baaaaaad cravings!) a large quantity of lettuce and 2 cups cherry tomatoes
7 p.m. About 2 mangoes and 2 C. tomatoes blended into a soup

Total: About 1700 cal. (I can afford to be a little low after a week of eating 3000 cal. a day)

Three Lousy French Fries

Well, folks, after eating 100% raw exclusively since April 29th, I finally had my first cheat.

During lunch today, I ate three crinkle cut fries (no salt, no catsup) off of someone's plate. Why? Well, that's a darn good question. I don't remember being really self-aware at that moment. It's not like I did it without thinking. It's not even like I felt compelled by an overwhelming craving or even a strong desire for the fries.

I do remember thinking... all this time; is it worth it to "break the streak" for some lousy cafeteria fries? The answer was, no. They were cold, tasteless (I was a bit suprised that they weren't salted or chemically at all--I believe my tastebuds would pick up on that stuff). They were quite mushy in texture, not because they weren't cooked properly, but because potatoes are mushier than I remember. They also had an unpleasant, starchy potato taste and a slightly oily sheen to them. Very bland. Not sweet.

So why did I do it? Honestly, I'm not quite sure. I do know that I ate less than half the calories than I was supposed to yesterday and this morning was forced to choose between unripe bananas and unripe honeydew melon. I have been quite crabby about food. There have been no ripe bananas to be had in my entire town (5 stores I've been to and all the bananas are the identical shade of pale yellow tinged with green). Local melons are on the downswing. My garden is cashing out. So, I feel very disappointed with the lack of good food choices available to me. I have also been feeling pretty frustrated by not having enough money or the right location to access quality food.

Also, I am not getting enough rest and I was particularly stressed at my job today. But I didn't feel like I was eating "emotionally" at the time that I did it. I feel frustrated that I still lack the self-awareness to understand why I am choosing certain actions. I want clarity, darn it! Clarity about what I want and why.

Well, now I know that I don't want french fries.

I was a bit afraid after I ate the fries that I would get ill, but I had no noticeable symptoms. My mouth was very dry and bad-tasting in the afternoon, but I have had that symptom for weeks. I drink LOTS of water and don't eat salt at all, so I don't know what this symptom is telling me.