Raw food update.
(I realize how many of you will read that first line, groan, and immediately leave the blog, but it’s important. To me anyway. Plus, since a few readers saw what I was doing and began a similar regime themselves, it’s important to them too.)
I’ve been on the raw food diet now for…I lost count somewhere along the way, but I believe it’s over three weeks, almost four. During that time, the following happened:
- I lost ten pounds. Not ten pounds I could afford to lose, I was already
thin, but ten pounds nonetheless. My neck is thinner, my shirts are hanging off me, I look good in a bikini again. Also, people are starting to comment adversely. “God, you’re so skinny!”
- My feet started aching. It’s painful to walk now, for some reason, though of course all the organs in the body have nerve endings in the feet, so it’s obviously related. Maybe my insides are screaming for help. Yes, that’s probably it.
- I started to feel really alive. Focused, athletic, strong, determined.
- My skin is fantastic. I had one or two minor break-outs while I was detoxing, and I got an ulcer on my tongue that was reeeeally painful. Otherwise, I’m developing a bit of a glow. And in a world looking for alternative sources of energy, that can’t be a bad thing.
- My food allergies have subsided. I put this down to the fact that I’m not eating the foods I’m allergic to. Duh.
- My man-boobs (I’m a B-cup), which developed years ago after I drank way too many lattes (containing hormones) and ate way too much acidic food (which does something to encourage estrogen, I believe) suddenly look even more ridiculous than they did before. [UPDATE: August 25th 2011]. The answer to man-boobs, I’m now discovering, is to cut out wheat initially, then do push-ups to tighten the skin. Lots and lots of push-ups. I started 10 days ago, doing 3 a day (which is all I could manage), then gradually increasing the number each morning. Already I’m doing 18 a day. And two people have commented that my moobs look significant smaller, as the muscles tighten, causing the skin to be pulled taut. Oh yes. But the core issue is about wheat. If you haven’t read the book Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis, you should. He puts enlarged breasts in men mainly down to the crap that’s in modern-day wheat.
- My senses are heightened. My sense of smell, for instance, is through the roof. Unfortunately, this makes normal food smell even better and more enticing than it really is, and I want some. NOW!
- Friends are avoiding me. In droves. The telephone never rings any more. Apparently, I’m considered a real bore because I’m so enthusiastic about nutrition and they’re not, and every time I eat something live and raw and healthy it reminds them that what they’re eating is dead and slowly killing them. So? What’s wrong with that?
- I’m not being invited out to dinner or to dinner parties.
People are anticipating that I’ll be an awkward guest and start picking and choosing what I’ll eat (and they’re not wrong), which ruins it for everyone. Our neighbors called up last night and invited my partner out to dinner. My name didn’t even come up.
- My partner makes his own food without consulting me and sits eating it, reading a magazine, hoping silently that I don’t bring up the subject of raw food, because if I mention one more time that what he’s putting in his mouth is dead he may lash out.
- I paid for an internet course on how to reduce the size of my moobs. The trick seems to be to increase the alkalinity of your diet and do weights to tighten the chest. I begin that next week. (MANBOOB UPDATE: Discovered that man boobs are caused by the consumption of wheat. Didn’t know that. It’s in a NY Times bestselling book called ‘Wheat Belly,’ which I wholewheatedly recommend.)
- Salads I used to eat in local restaurants now taste vile. This is because they use vegetables sprayed with pesticides and for the first time I can actually taste them.
- The food cravings won’t go away. Cake especially. But I’ve managed to talk some sense into myself before eating them, and avoided lapsing. However, cake, being sacred, will definitely be a part of my diet again in the future. It is the law.
- Most of the food I used to eat holds no allure or appeal any more. Pasta may smell good, but I have no desire whatsoever to put it in my mouth. And chicken….yeuw.
15. Except for the soles of my feet, which hurt like hell, I feel terrific. My body has adapted quickly.
- 16. I’ve learned to “cook” raw meals at home that are really very exciting and delicious. Raw is not as dismal or eccentric as it at first sounds.
- Raw restaurants make better raw food than I could ever make myself. I should have learned that by now.
- I eat so much less food than I used to. When the food is raw, or in juice form, it is almost all nutrition, so you need less of it. Dead food, because it contains barely any nutrients at all, has to be consumed in bulk for the body to benefit. Afterwards, you’re soon hungry again and eating more. That’s why people put on weight. Eat healthy food and the pounds fall off you. Though not, I’m discovering, off your man-boobs, which obstinately remain the same size.
- L.A. has some fabulous raw food places, and the health food stores here have whole aisles dedicated to raw food. Only in California.
I’m developing “raw food eyes”, according to some friends. This is the intense, glaring, pop-eyed expression that people on high nutrition diets get after a while. I promised I wouldn’t, but it’s unavoidable, apparently. Damn.
- I sometimes feel entirely separate from my physical body. Floaty, distant, totally at peace within. It’s like I’m just a high frequency spirit trapped inside a low frequency physical form. Oh, wait, that’s exactly what I am!
- I’m impatient and bad-tempered sometimes now. This is because raw food sharpens your nerve endings to a point and you can’t stand to be around fools any more. Clearly, I was extremely attractive to fools previously.
- Raw food is Oh-my-god-Level expensive. I don’t know how much I’ve spent on food and ingredients for meals these past three or four weeks, but it’s still a small fortune. I’m out of pocket by hundreds of dollars. And that doesn’t even include the cost of the course on how to reduce my man-boobs.
- I stopped counting the days about a week ago. But since beginning this piece, I’ve now done a calculation of how long I’ve been raw, and it’s only 24 days. 76 left to go. Yike.
So there you go. The work continues. Sorry if that’s boring for the rest of you, but I’m genuinely shocked at what a worthwhile experiment this is. Clearly, we’re eating all the wrong stuff and our bodies hate it. We’re just not listening to what they’re telling us. Same way my partner and most of my friends no longer listen to me.
Raw Food Further Update
Completed 100-day raw food challenge mid-October. Lost 14lbs total, feel fantastic – beyond fantastic: calm, focused, present, centered; skin is translucent and clear.
On the downside: I look very skinny, have lost my ass completely; am considered a pain in other people’s asses at dinner parties where I actually can barely eat anything they serve; get ill if I try.
It’s very difficult after 100 days to reverse the good that’s been done to the body. Eat cooked food and you get stomach ache. What’s more, things you used to love eating you now can’t get down. Or at least you can get them down, but you can’t keep them down. Pasta looks disgusting, fries are unappealing, chocolate cake tastes like warmed-up snot; bacon smells of diarrhea; and chicken is positively the worst thing ever in the history of the world. No exaggeration.
All in all, extremely happy, then. It all came good. There were brief lapses, and I did have tea occasionally. Plus, I had to eat bread or crackers now and then as binder, otherwise, what with all the fruit and veg, I was developing BIG problems “downstairs”. But that’s all. And therefore I declare this a massive, life-changing success.
Thank you and goodnight.
Everything you read above, by the way, came about because Cash was researching a book about health and healing. After heading down to Brazil on a meditation retreat, he came across groups of people living the raw food life and recovering from all kinds of diseases and physical ailments. That convinced him.
It’s available here.
Sickening. I can’t watch.
First, an official announcement: tonight’s BBC broadcast will be on twenty minutes earlier than normal to make way for the tennis. Like we don’t have enough problems in this world, without complicating everything with tennis.
Having said that, d’you want to see something truly ghastly? Something I myself cannot watch?
It’s tricky. I’m in the unusual position of posting a video on my blog that I am completely unable to sit through and never will. It shows thousands of
chicks being fed into a grinder. Apparently, the footage was shot undercover and is being spread around the internet by Mercy for Animals, an animal rights group campaigning for, if not an end to this brutality, at least a warning message on egg-boxes informing customers that “Male chicks are ground-up alive by the egg industry.”
Oh sure, that’s going to happen.
In the video, if you can bear to watch it – and I repeat, I’ve not seen this – I’m told there are examples of what’s called “spontaneous euthanasia.” Which is billed as the most instantaneous way to kill chicks. And that’s all matters, of course: killing things instantaneously. I’m appalled.
Today is Day 57 of my raw food diet. Back in early July I converted from
eating dead, unnutritious food to a diet of only living food packed with enzymes. Bar one or two necessary lapses and a couple of adjustments to make sure the entire world didn’t drop out of my bottom – which seemed like it might happen at one point – it’s turned out to be a magnificent way of going about things. Not only healthy, but thoroughly humane. And that’s why I’m posting this video.
Last week I had lunch with a producer who worked on my TV show. She ordered a burger and fries and I chose a salad. We got talking about the raw food diet and she, in defense of her lifestyle, launched into a rhapsody about how succulent white meat chicken is, cooing, “I know it’s cruel, but it’s so tasty!”
I could see by her expression that she didn’t get what she’d just said.
Caring for animals, being kind to them, and respecting other lifeforms on the planet rather than killing them en masse simply for our pleasure simply didn’t compute. Not when compared to the scrumptious yumminess of white meat chicken cooked in a marinade.
On the way back to the parking lot, she also, by the way, merrily launched into a neat justification of why it’s okay for TV executives to steal a writer’s program idea and not pay him for it. “Otherwise the network doesn’t make as much money. If they take an original idea and adapt it as their own, changing it just enough so that it becomes different and the writer can’t sue, then that saves them a lot of money down the line.”
“Er….sure,” I argued, speaking as one who’s had several great ideas pilfered by networks over the years, “but they wouldn’t be making any money in the first place without the writer, would they? So why can’t they just be fair about it? Then everyone gets rich.”
Well, I swear, she didn’t see this at all. Why should “everyone get rich”, was her response, delivered in an incredulous voice, when there was a chance that, by stealing material, the rich could become even richer? Wasn’t that what business was all about? And she promptly took an idea for a panel game I tossed at her over lunch and told me, “I’ll develop this.”
I’ve never heard from her since.
With a similar baffling lack of logic, critics of my diet have said to me, “But surely veganism is cruel too. If your food is alive, the way you say it is, then you’re killing cucumbers and carrots. It’s vegetable cruelty.”
I’m serious. I’ve been told this more than once. Which only goes to show that, as surveys suggest, there really are some very stupid people in the world.
Anyhow, here’s the video. BE WARNED: It shows chicks in pain and being ground up alive in a factory. Only watch it if you need a lesson on why you should at the very least be vegetarian.
Background material to this appears HERE on the Huffington Post.
www.cashpeters.com
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