Raw Challenge Day 5 January 9, 2014

This morning I was still feeling a bit lethargic.  Now that I'm the only one in my house on the challenge, I am ready to take myself even further down the path of less processed.  I also decided to start tracking my calories.  Hopefully I can use this as a means of tracking my progress, and making sure I am eating enough calories that my body isn't starving.

This morning my smoothie was made with 1 banana, 1 large orange, 4 ripe kiwi fruit, half a pint of strawberries, and 2 teaspoons of raw unprocessed honey.  I made sure to get the raw organic honey, but I'm not sure if a purist would count this as ok.  As I'm still new to this, I am going to count it for now.  My smoothie came to 484 calories and was 92.5% carb, 1.5% fat, and 6% protein.  This definately falls under the minimum of 80% carb and 10% max for fat and protein.  I added enough ice that my smoothie made 64 ounces, just 2 glasses of ice.  However, it falls well below the suggested 800 calories for breakfast.  I'm not quite sure how I'm going to even come close to that!

On day 1 and 2 it took me most of the morning to finish a 32 ounce smoothie.  This morning I was able to finish my first 32 ounces on the drive to work and had finished the second before 8:30 am. 

During the morning, I was really hungry, so I had a few glasses of water and two bananas.  Bringing my total calories for the day to 694. 

For lunch I experienced my first "monomeal".  This is where you have very minimal variety in the food.  So I ate all the oranges I could.  Turns out my current limit is 4, which amount to 348 calories.  I was amazed with how refreshed and satisfied I felt after eating.  Unfortunately, again I did not succeed in getting in the suggested calories for my meal.  My stomach is just not used to this volume of food. 

I felt really hungry pretty early today.  So by 5 I was ready for dinner.  A friend shared an awesome recipe for pasta with an advacado sauce (instead of heavy cream).  So I decided to give it a shot making it fully raw.  I replaced the pasta with zucchini and squash noodles.  This was super easy and really yummy!  The entire recipe makes an huge bowl of pasta, easily for two people, and the whole recipe has only 376 calories.

I sat down with my enormous bowl of pasta, ready for a pig out session, and was pretty amazed at how quickly I slowed down.  I didn't get through half of the pasta before I was done.  So today, eating as much as I can, I struggled to get 1,230 calories for the day.  Based on normal diets, this is good for trying to lose weight.  But with the raw vegan, I'm a little nervous that I'm not getting enough calories to keep me going, but I'm feeling good so far.  Today my food breakdown was 88% carbs, 5% fat, and 7% protein.  I hit the 80-10-10 balance!! :)

I have been enjoying learning more about this lifestyle.  I was watching a video from Kristina (http://www.fullyraw.com/) and she was talking about how important it is to replenish energy (carbohydrates), as that is what we are using all day.  It reminded me of biology in college.  I remember studying how plants are able to take light from the sun and convert it to energy.  In the animal world, the herbivores are getting fresh energy from the plants they eat.  The carnivores get their energy from eating animals that eat plants. 

I have always been a big advocate for fresh and not processed.  I love taking very simple ingredients when I cook.  If I am going to make something, I don't use prepackages sauces and powders.  I would rather make them myself.  I had never thought of applying this line of thinking to the energy I was getting from my food.  By eating only plants, I am cutting out nature's middle man.  I'm not relying on the middle animal that has preprocessed the energy from the sun, I am going straight to the source.