Beginners in a fruitarian/raw vegan lifestyle

Comment

Comment by Don Bennett on June 14, 2011 at 11:59am

Nicolette, when you enter the cooked version of a food, in this case broccoli, in services like fitday.com or nutritiondata.self.com or nutridiary.com the program will assume you cooked it with oil (unless there's a "broccoli, steamed" choice), and thus you'll see fat listed anywhere from 3 to 5%. If on fitday, you look at "broccoli, raw", you'll see the accurate amount of fat in broccoli. If you want a very thorough breakdown of the fat properties of raw broccoli, go here, find the fat list, and click the "more details" button. (WARNING: It's more data then you'd ever want to know.)

So from my experience, fitday.com is fine for charting how many calories we eat, and the ratio of carbs-to-fat-to-protein. You can choose your quantities very accurately by using fractions in the quantity field (instead of "quantity = 1" for an avocado" you can enter "0.5" is you only ate a half).

Comment by Nicolette Barnes on June 14, 2011 at 10:47am

Just tried out that FitDay.com site and it is trying to tell me that there is 5 grams of fat in one cup of cooked broccoli... I find this hard to believe. Makes me wonder how accurate the calculations on this site are...

Comment by Don Bennett on June 14, 2011 at 9:10am

Lia, you did answer your own question. The majority of the foods you'll be eating when eating a super-healthy diet are high water content foods. The closer you eat to bedtime, the more you'll wake up during the night. This is not to say that waking up during the night to void disturbs sleep. As long as you can fall right back to sleep after going to the bathroom, the body will not allow its need to empty its bladder to disturbs its sleep. Yyou go through go through 4 different phases of sleep, from the very light to the very deep. Your body will never wake you up during deep sleep to empty its bladder, you'll always wake up from Phase 1 sleep; this is why sometimes when you wake up during the night, the "need" that you feel to void can be mild and sometimes it's "get out of my way, I gotta GO! Rather than wake you up from deep sleep to satisfy your mild "need", your body waits until you are naturally in a light phase of sleep before it allows you to wake, even though your bladder is much fuller than it would have been if it woke you up during the previous deep sleep cycle.

I wake up one or maybe two times during the night, but I don't eat close to bedtime; if I did, I'm sure it wold be two or three. And I always fall right back to sleep. It's important to NOT turn any lights on when you wake up during the night, even in the bathroom. If you absolutely need some light, a tiny night light in the bathroom will be plenty bright, maybe too bright.

That "once every 1.5 hours" is during the detox phase when you should be taking in a little but more water than you will when all is rebalanced/cleaned-out. But if you go, say, 3 hours without voiding, you're either not eating enough high water content foods (maybe because you're being a couch potato so you don't need as much food as you should be eating if appropriately active), or you are eating enough, but you're not drinking enough water. Water should be consumed almost immediately after waking up (assuming there's no food still in your stomach) because you became dehydrated from breathing in drier than normal air for 7-9 hours (unless you live in the tropics).

Habits can be not-easy to break, so you simply have to exercise a lot of conscious thought to not do them. It takes about 25 days to program yourself with a new habit, so once you can do whatever you're trying to do consistently for 25 days, you should be able to be on "auto-pilot" from that point forward.

Hang in there, it does get easier. Another incentive to staying the course is the indescribable way you'll feel down the road... where if someone asks you, "was it worth it?" you'll say, "Absolutely!" even though you're not feeling that way right now.

Comment by Lia de Lancey on June 13, 2011 at 4:35pm

Don, I'm interested to hear you say that you should be urinating at least once every 1.5hours....I always thought I had a weak bladder or something!  Can I ask you about the night time though?  The closer I get to 811, the more I urinate in the night.  I often urinate 3 times a night, (during 7 hours) and I feel like it's disturbing my sleep a bit.  Twice a night is ok, I feel better rested on that, but with 3 times I feel like my sleep is really light as a result.  I've read your info on sleep and I'm slowly trying to put those things into action, but I'm wondering if you have any particular comments on this point?  (I do wonder if it's down to eating a little too close to bedtime, but it seems to be taking me a long time to break this habit).

Comment by Molly Cox on June 13, 2011 at 3:25pm

Thank you so much, again, Don.  I just found the FAQ's page too :-)  I believe tomorrow will be a fresh start....  

Comment by Don Bennett on June 13, 2011 at 2:37pm

The best advice I can give is to look at this lifestyle as a way to regain lost health, as opposed to a way to lose weight. If you focus on improving health, your weight will normalize naturally. This can be the result. The hardest part is always at the beginning when the body gets the opportunity to do some serious repair and cleansing catch-up. Keep in mind that when healing gets a jump start (because you're no longer burdening the body with health-diminishing food), the body can dial down your appetite a little, so if you try and force feed it, this can handicap any critical healing that needs to happen. So since you have some weight to lose, try taking your ideal weight (the weight you shold weigh) and multiply it by 13 or 15 (represents your activity level) and that's the amount of calories to shoot for UNLESS your body is telling you otherwise (if you feel like you're going to throw up, that's usually a good sign).

Just do the best you can to replace the unhealthy foods (rice and other grains, beans, soy, dairy, meat) with fruit meals, and some salads. And while losing weight, it is critical that you stay well hydrated so your body can pass out the toxins that had been stored in fat cells that are now becoming systemic. If you're not going to the bathroom at least once every 1.5 hours, drink more water (in between meals of course).

Comment by Molly Cox on June 13, 2011 at 1:24pm

Thanks Don!  Um... No the peaches were not organic but I peeled them, and I was trying to eat 6 because I figured it was a start at eating more fruit instead of my usual bowl of cereal w/nut milk and fruit on the side.  Cut up the peaches fit in the same cereal bowl, but other than that there was no scientific or calorie counting reason.  And I had a not-hot dog w/ketchup and mustard for dinner on a whole wheat bun.  It is far FAR from raw, or even healthy, I know.  I am almost embarrased posting that, but whatever, it is what it is.  Yesterday for dinner I had black beans and brown rice.  I am really trying and all of this is so new, I have read what I feel is a lot but obviously not compared to the amount of information that is out there about this!  I really want to read 80-10-10 but I can not afford it right now due to my very, very tight budget (single mama) (anyone want to lend?  lol).  But I will try and search out more info on this site.  I am very overweight and am basically trying to be healthy, for exactly what you said, my daughters, and me :-)  But other than that there is nothing going on health wise so... Oh-- but I can say that I have had so much energy during these past few days that I have been walking a lot longer and dancing a lot (in my kitchen, w/my girls, which I will add is hilarious to see an 8 month old literally dancing and wiggling around on her bum on the kitchen floor to her latina musica!) So already I am feeling physically better and that is making me so happy...   

Comment by Don Bennett on June 13, 2011 at 12:24pm

.
Molly,

Some questions need to be asked:

* Were the peaches organically grown?

* Why were you trying to eat six peaches?

* When you say you "crashed at dinner" what did you mean?

In general, when someone transitions from an unhealthy diet to a much healthier one, there are many things that go on in the body. How much "rebalancing/detox/housecleaning" goes on depends on many factors: your age, your current state of health, how fast you're transitioning, how much back and forth you're doing (cooked to raw to cooked to raw again), what kind of cooked food you're still eating, how mindful you are with "food separating", and to a small extent, your genetics.

There are a few schools of thought with the calorie issue. The one that you should adopt is obviously the one that works best for you. It also goes without saying that you shouldn't under-eat and you shouldn't over-eat. If you scroll through the pages of this comment section, you'll find a lot of advice about how much to eat. Bottom line there: watch your weight, post what you eat on fitday.com or Cron-O-Meter so you can quantify the number of calories you're eating AND how much fat you're eating (as a percentage of total calories).

All this may seem daunting at first, just keep close in your thoughts the reason you're doing this... as an investment in your future health, to get the best odds of never getting a diagnosis of a life-threatening disease, and to be there for your girls and their children and their children. :)
.

Comment by Molly Cox on June 13, 2011 at 12:02pm

Hello all!  I am so glad I found this website and thanks all for any advice or input... I have a few questions to start, I'm sure I'll have more later but I have tried going 100% over the last three days, each day did not work out so well, today was by far the best day of the three but I have given in to cooked food each night, including tonight.  So my question is is it ok to not eat the 3000 cals at first and just keep working my way up?  Today I had 6 (very sweet and juicy) peaches for breakfast after some water and cutting up/preparing breakfast for my girls too and they made me SOOO nauseous I couldn't eat any more and hardly finished the 6th one... And yesterday I had some mangos that I thought were ripe enough, they were soft and red/orange/green (when I bought them they were green and hard as softballs) well... The smell of them made me gag too, so today when I went to the store I didn't buy anymore... I generally like all fruits and veggies raw so I don't know what all this nausea is about and also I've never broken out this bad on my forehead before, I looked in the mirror a couple minutes ago and could not believe what I saw... I guess I just need a little encouragement... I had more fruit for lunch and snack today but then crashed at dinner... I don't know, it's only been 3 days and I have not even gone 100% so I'm like-- this can't be detox yet???  Thanks for any comments.... Peace n Love

Comment by Dina Lun on June 12, 2011 at 2:28pm

Don, thank you so much! Now I understand better what to do in this situation.

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