90 Days of Organic Raw Vegan-ness: week 4

Sometimes correcting a problem is best with baby steps. Week four was all about learning from week three, correcting our mistakes and building on that learning process. Although, when we compensated for the lack of proteins in our diet, we overshot by a long ways and didn’t exactly follow the rules of the road from the book Live Right 4 Your Type.

Have you ever eaten something you thought was just so amazingly tasty and healthy for you by most standards, only to end up sitting on the porcelain shrine a few hours later bargaining your soul to the universe if the cramps would just go away? All the while thinking to yourself, “I don’t understand, everything I ate recently was good for me, right?” In our case, this happened by not eating right for our blood type and deciding to add cashews in great abundance to all the recipes of the week. Basically the principals of eating for your blood type are as follows; “By matching your dietary protein sources to your blood type physiology you can cut down on the level of unabsorbed proteins left in the digestive tract and their toxic byproducts” (pg. 98, Live Right 4 Your Type). Our bodies weren’t agreeing with what we were giving it, although completely organic, raw and vegan the cashews were actually causing us more problems than benefits.

Eating right for your blood type can sometimes be challenging.

After realizing our cashewy mistake early in the week, we dropped a few of the meals from our diet and happily fed them to coworkers who would later go on to brag to their peers about how they ate the best raw organic vegan cheesecake in the world (I don’t know if they actually bragged, but I’d like to think they did.) Not only was it gratifying to share the yumminess with peeps, but we also lost some of the overwhelmingly soapy aftertaste the cashews provided in some of the recipes. This was an extreme plus for me as I had been beyond paranoid the entire week after watching the documentary The Beautiful Truth and learning of Max Gerson’s death by poisoning.

Looking more and more like a laboratory, the kitchen counter holds some soaking ingredients.

Inspired by this extraordinary documentary, we decided to experiment more in the world of juicing in conjunction with making our own rejuvelac. I don’t know if it’s the little kid in me, but I see juicing as tremendious amounts of fun. You put in an entire stalk of celery and out comes one cup of this lime green liquid that looks like some kind of gak from the days of Nickelodeon. In all seriousness, we learned that juicing is far more beneficial to your health than buying any kind of store bought juice because the FDA requires food processors to pasteurize all liquids, which kills most of the beautiful nutrients. On top of all of this we learned juicing is a great way of saving your investment on produce when items become too ripe towards the end of the week.

Losing weight and feeling damn great!

Finally, week 4 brought me to a weight I haven’t been at since the days of training for a marathon. The astonishment that in just four short weeks I had lost over 15 pounds was delightful. Everyday, going to work brought excitement. I joyfully ran into the shipping department and jumped on the scale to see the progress I had made. The satisfaction I got from knowing that I was dropping pounds while others in the office were trying everything under the sun to lose weight was incredible. So much so that I am almost at the point of convincing another person to give raw organic vegan-ness a try. I never want to be a preacher. But, honestly, what better way is there to enjoy something even further than seeing similar positive changes being made by others around you?