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- CK Friday Links--Friday November 20, 2009
- Raw Foods Trial: Day 8--The Day After Raw
- Raw Foods Trial: Day 7--The Last Day of Raw!
- Reader Questions and Answers on Raw Foods and My Raw Food Trial
- Raw Foods Trial: Day 6
- More Recent Articles
- Search Casual Kitchen
Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts and your feedback.
PS: follow me on Twitter!
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Are vegetarian diets truly healthy? It's a common question, and this post gives a balanced and well thought out answer. (Food Politics)
Ten great tips on how to stay focused on your diet and fitness goals during the holiday season. (Functional Fitness) Bonus post: CK's own 15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating.
Everything you need to know about brining turkey. (Serious Eats)
15 things you probably didn't know about coffee. (The Oatmeal via Eat Me Daily)
Got a cold, or worse, H1N1? Here's a spicy drink that will ease your pain and clear your sinuses. (Food Woolf)
A food blogger finds a lost wallet and rediscovers what's truly important in life. (5 Second Rule)
Recipe Links:
How can a potato recipe be both this easy and this good? Potatoes Anna. (The Buttery Blog)
One of the coolest looking cakes ever: Zebra Cake. (AZ Cookbook)
How to make a simple and delicious Pork Roast. (Beach Eats)
Not sure whether this is vile or brilliant: making Scrambled Eggs with the steam wand of an espresso machine. (Abstract Gourmet, after The Amateur Gourmet)
Off-Topic Links:
Unsolicited book recommendations of the week: If you're looking for a few investment/stock market related books, either to get a jumpstart on investing next year, or to give as gifts this Christmas, let me recommend three excellent ones: Jim Cramer's Real Money
(I know he might play the buffoon on TV, but this book is extremely useful on many levels), One Up On Wall Street
(really good for beginner investors) and Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits
(for intermediate/advanced investors).
Does social media simply feed our delusions? (Dave Johnston's Blog)
Our three primary obligations as bloggers: show up, deliver value and keep improving. (chrisbrogan.com via @dragosroua)
An interesting personal finance idea: your household should practice "financial fire drills." (Bargaineering)
How to stop fearing death. (Erin Pavlina's Blog)
Do you have an interesting article or recipe that you'd like to see featured in Casual Kitchen's Food Links? Send me an email!
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com
via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
This post, the last of the daily posts on my seven-day 100% raw trial, documents my official return to cooked foods. Once again, I'm sure you all know the drill by now: first I'll list the foods I ate and the schedule I kept, and then below I'll share my closing thoughts on the day. [See the full archive of posts on the raw foods trial.]
Breakfast: 8:00am
2 cups of pineapple, 1 apple
1 splash of caffeinated coffee (yep, I seriously had about 1/16th of a cup--literally a splash).
Note: we played some doubles tennis that morning and the first piece of cooked food that I had--during a break between games--was a simple bagel. Pretty anticlimactic, I know. More below on how my body dealt with it.
Lunch: 1:45pm
2 apples, and yet another huge veggie platter of carrots, celery and a tahini dip.
Laura's comment after I made up this platter: "you know you don't have to eat this stuff anymore, right?"
Dinner: 6:00pm
All cooked food. A small glass of red wine to start things off, followed by a Tortilla Espanola (
it's basically a frittata with fried potatoes and onions--a recipe post will be forthcoming!). Dessert consisted of a couple of pieces of dark chocolate and
another glass of red wine. Delicious.
Concluding Notes/Thoughts on the Day:
1)
On returning to cooked food: Most raw foodists are quick to share war stories about how they can get totally sick on even small amounts of cooked food. And most raw food trials seem to end with a final post describing how horribly sick the trialee became after the very first day of returning to "dead" food.
Sorry to disappoint, but that just didn't happen to me. I felt fine. The dead bagel I ate on the tennis court didn't make me barf, nor did it give me projectile diarrhea, much to the relief of our tennis partners. And dinner didn't make me double over with cramps or keep me in bed the next day.
Of course, that didn't stop me from
worrying that I'd get sick. In fact, the whole reason I only allowed myself a teensy splash of real coffee this morning was because I was literally afraid to drink any more than that. I didn't want to suffer a spontaneous death from toxin overdose, or suffer something even worse--a spontaneous bowel movement.
Once again, nothing untoward happened. It was all so anticlimactic. And I'm not ashamed to admit I was just a tiny bit disappointed.
2)
My first glass of wine: I had a tiny glass of red wine (don't worry, the dark chocolate part is coming up) right before dinner. The wine didn't taste all that good to me, oddly enough, and just a few sips made me feel surprisingly buzzed. (Talk about a completely unexpected
way to save money on wine!)
3)
Chocolate: After dinner, I helped myself to another very small glass of red wine. Thus fortified, I helped myself to a single individually wrapped square of Dove dark chocolate. And then another. And then 10 more, and then another 20. And then... I'm kidding. I managed to stop at two. Once again, nothing happened, other than perhaps a few quiet moans of pleasure.
4) Despite Laura's comment above about not having "to eat this stuff anymore," my diet on Day 8 was mostly raw by design. I thought it would be prudent to gradually work up to cooked foods over the course of the day, rather than start out with a
heavy, eggs-and-sausage type breakfast and shock my body first thing in the morning.
5) I will say that cooked food, and particularly the dark chocolate, tasted stronger--and better--than ever today. They tasted "loud" to me, for lack of a better word. I'm sure my palate became quite a bit more sensitive after eating relatively bland foods for a full week.
6)
On how easy it is to overeat cooked foods: My dinner, a Tortilla Espanola, was a simple dish which I lightly seasoned with some ground thyme and fried onions. It was really good.
Really good. But I will say I felt heavy and really full once I finished eating, and (this part is sort of hard to explain) I had this vague guilty feeling, as if I had just eaten a ton of food that I didn't really deserve. It all went down the hatch so easily, too easily, with almost no effort or chewing, and I felt almost like I hadn't really
earned all those calories.
It was so much less of a mindful experience than eating a big platter of fresh veggies and being forced to take the time to carefully chew through everything. Clearly, it's far easier to thoughtlessly overeat cooked food because it requires so little effort to consume it. I can't imagine how anyone could have a
mindless eating problem on a raw-centric diet.
Stay tuned--in a few days I'll run my final conclusions from my raw foods trial!
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
Welcome to Day 7, the final day 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 the raw foods trial.]
Breakfast: 8:30am
3 cups of fresh pineapple and 1/2 an avocado, plus a couple of handfuls of sprouted wheatberries
Post Race Lunch: 1:30pm
Two apples, then a salad with some walnuts
Snack 4:30pm
Pineapple, about 2 cups' worth
Dinner 6:30pm
A big salad and a big plate of veggies with a small amount of plain tahini dressing.
All that remains between me and the end of my raw foods trial are these two huge plates of veggies:
Concluding Notes/Thoughts on the Day:
1) There are few things more discouraging than looking forward to eating an avocado that's been on your counter for three days, ripening until it's just
perfect, and then cutting it open and discovering that it's mostly brown on the inside. Devastating.
2) No headache and no weird metallic taste in my mouth this morning. I feel totally fine. Which is a relief, because at noon today I'm supposed to run a 10k (6.2 mile) road race.
3) That's right: Today's 10k race was a final exam of sorts for my raw trial. Unless this week of raw food has completely sapped all my strength, I should finish in about 52-53 minutes (or a per mile pace of about 8:30). I'll be very curious to see what my endurance and energy level will be.
4) I felt great at the beginning of the race, but things went quickly downhill at about the four mile mark. I started to feel heavy and slow, and my body temperature went haywire. Despite the fact that it was a beautiful, warm autumn day, I started experiencing chills during the run. Normally, the only time I get chills during a hard workout is when I'm about to get heatstroke on a brutally hot day. Are there any raw athletes reading this series who have had an experience like this?
5) However, the race ended with an even bigger surprise:
I finished in 51:56 (8:22 pace), a respectable time for an average runner like me, and a
shockingly good time given how awful I felt midway through the race. It just goes to show that sometimes you really need some objectively measurable data to see how your body performs under certain conditions--you can't just go by feel. It turned out that in spite of (or perhaps because of) a week of 100% raw foods, I was able to push my body quite a bit harder than I thought.
6) My first restaurant meal: After the race, a group of us went out for lunch. And no, we didn't go to a raw restaurant--from what I'm told, there isn't a raw restaurant in the entire state of New Jersey (hmmm... business idea?). While we were waiting to sit down, my brain went wild imagining how I'd annoy the absolute crap out of everyone around me while I monopolized the waitress and systematically worked through the menu (is this salad raw? Is the dressing raw? Can you make this entree raw? No? What about this entree? That one? I'm on a raw diet--I can't eat anything cooked! Is this pasteurized? Is that pasteurized? Are you sure that's raw?, etc.). I figured it wouldn't be long until everyone within a ten foot radius was laughing and pointing at me.
Fortunately, nobody laughed or pointed. Heck, nobody even rolled their eyes, at least that I saw. There was only one thing on the menu that I could even order: it was a goat cheese salad that I ordered without the goat cheese and without the dressing. Basically what came was an $8.95 plate of lettuce with some apple slivers and a few stray walnuts. The entire experience was much easier than I made it out to be.
That's it for my seven day raw foods trial! Tomorrow, I'll run one more post:
Day 8, The Day After Raw, where I gorge myself on alcohol and dark chocolate (just kidding.... sort of). Let me also say how grateful I am for all of the increased attention and interest from readers during the past week--your thoughts, ideas and comments helped me immensely, and I hope you all learned a few things while following along.
Finally, in a few more days I'll share my conclusions from the entire trial. This week of raw foods gave me a lot to think about on a whole host of food issues, including how to deal with food cravings, how I might adjust my diet after this experience, how my body changed after just one week of going raw, and how grateful I am for regular old everyday food. I can't wait to share these thoughts with you. Stay tuned!
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
Here are several questions and comments that came in from readers over the course of my raw foods trial. [See the full archive of posts on my raw foods trial.]
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How much extra did it cost to eat raw?
Not that much extra. I spent about $5.00 on grains (which will last me 2-3 weeks at least at my current level of consumption), and then I spent a total of $44.58 on the various fruits, veggies and legumes that I ate over the course of the week (I also had some extra food left over at the end of the trial, so the $49.58 total exaggerates the cost somewhat). To put this in context, our weekly grocery food budget (for the two of us) generally runs anywhere from $30 to $75, depending on what we cook in a given week. It's definitely not cheaper to go raw, but it's not crushingly expensive either.
I've read that people experience strong emotions when they are on a raw diet, but you didn't really talk about it that much.
Interestingly, I've felt like my emotions were more stable than typical during my raw trial. However, I've also been reading the Sedona Method,
which has helped me a lot in that area of my life, so it's probably impossible to tease out the two factors. But in general, my emotional state this week has been good to the extent that there isn't really that much to say about it.
I will say, however, that during some of the days of this trial my mental clarity was exceptional. I got a ton of writing done, especially on Days 4, 5 and 6, and I was able to focus on my work for hours at a time without distraction. It's unclear how much of this is due to kicking my caffeine habit, how much is due to the raw foods, how much is due to the combination of the two, or how much might be due simply to placebo effect (e.g., I'm on a raw diet, so I'm supposed to feel mentally sharper than normal).
Aren't you worried that you'll miss a lot of nutrients on this diet?
This was one of my primary concerns going into the trial. But as I learned more and more about going raw, my fears subsided. There's an elegant logic to the diet: the more you cook, process or refine your foods, the less nutrient-rich they become. Further, there's the argument that you get far more nutrients in your diet when you go raw because you have to shift a large percentage of your food intake towards nutrient-rich leafy greens, fresh veggies, fruits, nuts, seeds and grains.
Here's the other thing: this trial is only for seven days. I could eat apples all day every day and I'd be fine.
What about alcohol? Is wine "raw?"
Most raw foodists consider alcohol a toxin and avoid it. Technically, wine can be raw, but it is generally assumed that you'll avoid all alcohol during a raw foods trial. (This will obviously be a huge deal killer for some of my readers.)
Would you do this for 30 days, or would you ever go permanently raw?
Great question, and as enthusiastic as I am about this diet, I don't think so. I'm actually losing quite a bit of weight on this diet, despite the fact that I'm already thin to begin with and it's only been a few days! I suspect my body needs more energy-dense foods than I can get on a 100% raw diet. Furthermore, I'm just not ready to say goodbye to cooked foods for that long a period, regardless of the potential benefits.
However, we are likely to make a permanent change here at CK by incorporating a higher percentage of raw foods into our daily diets.
Did you use any sweeteners in your smoothies?
None. Obviously processed sweeteners, like sugar, molasses, brown sugar, etc., are off-limits on a raw foods diet. Opinions on sweeteners like raw honey or stevia are mixed: some raw foodists use them, some do not. In my case, because I didn't know whether our honey was raw or not I opted out of using it (it was buckwheat honey sourced from the Ithaca, NY area, but it didn't specifically say "not pasteurized"). Instead, I used raspberries or blackberries for sweetness, or I simply enjoyed my food unsweetened.
Will you buy a Vitamix blender?
I'm seriously considering it. My regular blender worked fairly well for most smoothies, but it really struggled when I tried to use it to process heavy leafy greens. The key advantage of a Vitamix is it has a far more powerful motor and the blades spin far more quickly. This extra cutting speed ruptures the cells of even the toughest cruciferous greens. Thus, in theory at least, a smoothie made with a Vitamix is healthier for you because your body can much more easily extract nutrients from the food. There's a cost tradeoff too, obviously. A standard blender will run you $25-$50, but a Vitamix can run you $450 or more.
Some raw foodists swear by their Vitamix (Victoria Boutenko
strongly recommends them and considers hers a prized possession), but I've met others who just use a regular blender.
How badly did you crave cooked food?
Not that badly, surprisingly. I probably faced some degree of cravings each day, and the cravings peaked on Days 5-6 of the trial. And as weird as this sounds, I was grateful for the cravings, because they gave me some really interesting insights into my mind and my relationship to food. I hope to expand on these thoughts in a future post.
Isn't it a pain in the ass to cut up all those veggies to make smoothies?
Actually no. My first couple of smoothies took a few extra minutes to make, but once I got the hang of it, it was quite easy to cursorily chop up a few things, chuck 'em in the blender and go. Sure it's not as easy as pouring a bowl of cereal, but you'll have a much healthier meal that fuels you for a lot longer.
What did Laura do during your raw week?
In terms of eating, Laura didn't go raw. She sampled a few of my smoothies and shared in some of my veggie platters and salads, but her food was primarily cooked. Otherwise, she handed out encouragement and/or sympathy when I needed it and gamely tolerated me and my antics. In other words, it was just like any other week for her.
I'd love to try going raw, but there's no way I'm going to bother with sprouting all those grains.
Admittedly, I was a bit stymied at first by the grains. But it turned out that learning how to sprout wheatberries, buckwheat and lentils was the easiest and most interesting part of the entire process. Don't let this stop you.
Get ready for the colon blow!
Sorry to disappoint, but nobody's colon blew. We already eat a ton of veggies here at Casual Kitchen, and nearly half our meals are vegetarian, so perhaps this might be more of a digestive adjustment for someone on a more meat-centered diet. But my digestive tract ran, uh, like clockwork.
Readers, if you have questions you'd like to ask regarding my raw trial, send me an email!
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
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!
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!
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