I am overweight by about 100 Lbs. (6ft. 4in tall, 315 lbs.). I grew up in south GA where McDonalds, and Burger King are members of the basic food groups. I have consumed literally truck loads of diet coke and splenda drinks over the years. And on top of that, I stopped smoking 2 years ago after 15 years of that. Oh yeah, and I drank basically 3-4 beers a day for basically the past 10 years. I am one toxic SOB.

I went and had a professional massage for the first time in my life as a present for my 30th birthday. It gave me a pounding headache for literally a week straight. I was told that it was toxins. Oh by the way, I am the Marketing Coordinator for one of the nation's largest health food grocery store chains, so I am around detoxing people everyday. So they all told me, "Man you really should do a cleanse".

Well the headache was so fierce after that massage, I knew that doing any kind of aggressive detox would probably put me in the hospital. But I am totally dedicated to detoxing and taking better care of myself. So I've stopped drinking alcohol (3 days in, wooohooo!), and I just decided after looking at this website to eat a 100% raw food diet for a month or so to reduce the toxins in my body ultimately leading up to a 10 day Master Cleanse.

Well yesterday was my first day with the raw foods, and by 5:00 that day I felt kind of like I was on acid I was so loopy, and my head was pounding just like after the massage. I left work early and crashed on my couch and was asleep in seconds and slept for an hour. I kinda of panicked and ended up cooking myself some rice and sauteed a bulb of fennel for dinner. It made my head feel better and the trippy LSD feeling went away too. That night I slept the sleep of the dead, and my wife said I snored like a lumberjack. (Which only happens when I am REALLY exhausted.)

This morning, I woke up and had my first Bowel Movement, and it was humongous. What worries me though, and what has brought me to this forum, is the fact that it was tomato red. Not dark crimson like blood red, but literally as if I crapped out a @#$%& covered in ragu. (pardon the graphic description). I did drink a raw carrot/ginger/beet/celery/cucumber/parsley juice at work yesterday. So I am hoping it is just the beet juice that is causing the red-ness.

My questions are...
#1. Is the raw foods diet for a month leading up to a MC a good idea, or should flip it, and do a MC for 10 days and then hit up the raw foods?

#2. Is a 100% raw foods diet really THIS aggressive?!? I was basically on it for 7 hours and I already felt totally weird and headachy. Was I projecting that with my mind? Was it just a beer detox and it will calm down soon?

#3. Should I abandon the raw foods aspects for a week or so to get my body over the beer withdrawl, and then go back to the raw foods? Or maybe straight into a MC?

As you can see I need some advice.

Thanks guys!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/2008 01:41PM by pisces7378.

I've never done a MC, so I can't really advise in that area. I would say that switching to a raw food diet can result in a light-headed feeling at first. You don't want to allow your transition to become seriously debilitating. Heavier raw foods can slow your detox reaction and help you stay grounded. You might try eating lots of bananas or zucchini. Raw fats are also very grounding, though you should naturally not allow them to become to great a part of your diet. Avocados, coconuts, nuts and seeds are all good sources of healthy raw fats.

Welcome! I hear you Pisces. Slow and steady wins the race. If you go slow...you can always speed up. If you go fast and fail.....there is no honor there (at best you learn something...heh..heh.). In any event, let the food be your medicine....until you have achieved your lifetime raw food goal. I would avoid cleanses, fasting, food combining or other issues until you have slowly evolved a greater tolerance and acceptance of eating healthy....over a generous time frame of at LEAST an initial 30 days. 6-12 months would be better.

To answer your questions:

1) Don't do it - unless you feel you HAVE to.
2) If you are feeling acute crisis or weird....or highly uncomfortable....you are making changes too fast.
3) Yes. If you are in crisis...always seek a point of good...100% comfortability before proceeding.

-Just my opinions. What do you think?

-David Z. Mason

WWW.RawFoodFarm.com

I dont like the master cleanse personally... I felt pretty rough on it. I dont like how they are using dead stuff like maple syrup. I personally prefer the citrus juice fasting.


I just oj fasted for 10 days a couple weeks ago... it was rough. But the only reason I could do it was because I knew how to fast. And 10 days is pretty much nothing. The problem isnt the fasting... its the mind games you play with yourself... aswell as the detox, it can get depressing.

I think though it is better to fast... then go raw. I have done the reverse before... and its rougher. The reason I am saying this... is because once you have fasted... you have a new appreciation of food, and you instinctually know what is good for you and what is not. So the transition into raw is alot easier... that and alot of the toxins are gone from your body, so they arent playing head games with you.

Beets can absolutely color your urine and bowel movements, and it can be pretty scary. I would recommend not eating any beets for a few days at least. Make sure that the color comes back to normal, just to make sure that it really was the beets and not blood. (This is unlikely if you've been eating uncharacteristic amounts of beet, but if it were me I'd want to be completely certain.)

I read in Victoria Boutenko's book "Green for life", that one low-tech test for healthy stomach acid is to drink a quarter cup of beet juice. The less red color comes through in your urine, the healthier your stomach acid is. If this is accurate, you may begin to see a less dramatic reaction as your improve your digestion.

Well I am three days into my raw diet. I must admit, I have/am not reading any raw foods books, so I don't even know if I am doing ti right. I have questions about things like kalamata olives, pickles, and vinegars. None of these are heated, but they are "processed" in that you can't pick them off a bush or tree like that. But MAN I love them. I seriously don't think I could eat a salad without some red wine vinegar or some balsamic (which I really don't know about).

At any rate, I feel MUCH better today than I did on the first day. I drank another beet/carrot/ginger/parsley/spinach/celery/cucumber juice yesterday at work, and today my poo was CONSIDERABLY less red. So maybe there is some merit to the whole "better digestion = less red in your stool".

I have been noticing lots of stranger symptoms though. I've had moments of extreme post nasal drip as if I'm getting sick, and then just as quickly as it came, it's gone. But then several hours later, my eat was stopped up as if I'm getting an ear infection, but then moments later, it's completely fine again.

During the day I feel great. But when I first wake up everyday, I am very achy, and exhausted like a wet rag. But after a while I feel myself start to pick back up. It's weird.

I don't know. I have just read so many hundreds of diet books, my stomach turns at the thought of going out an reading yet another one. They always spend the first 100 pages trying to convince the reader of why their diet is so fantastic, with story after story of normal people who's lives have been changed by Diet X. And then the last 30 pages are recipes. And there is only about 20-30 pages that actually tell you what you should do. Word for word.

With raw foods, I thought it was just that simple. EAT RAW FOODS!!! But now I am having a lot of questions. What about...

organic pickles (like Bubbies)
black olives (I know that green olives have cooked pimentos)
vinegars
combining fruits and vegetables (someone at work said this was bad???)
Raw juices (good? Bad? Everyday? Once a day? not at all?)

And most importantly, what the hell is everyone eating that isn't a salad?!?! I saw Charlie Trotters raw book and... @#$%& that! Who has that kind of time/patience. Sprouting cashews to make blocks of fake cheese?

pisces....welcome....your posts are great....

it looks like you are on your way, congrats....it is a process...it takes time to transition...

i eat HIGH fruit low fat....that is how i get my calories...i am very active/athletic...i do think food combining is important....

the vinegars. pickles and all that are stimulants....they stimulate false appetitite and cravings...try to stay with fresh, organcic, raw, whole, plants foods...it really makes things simple...i will just buy a head of romaine and eat out of my hand sometimes...

i highly recommend you look up DOUG GRAHAM....his book is the 80/10/10 diet...it has changed my life and is the only way i can stay raw...without eating tons of fat which unfortunately, most raw fooders do...they eat high fat...which any way you look at it...high fat is just not healthy....

keep going p....

Pisces: Your questions are very good / intelligent ones. This diet CAN be as simple as just browsing your local produce isle. A good general rule: if it don't grow when you plant it...it aint that healthy. Don't get hung up on the word 'raw'. Think: "Fresh, unprocessed plant food" and you'll be on the right track.

-Keep in mind that if any other trasitional foods help you to reach YOUR level of fresh plant food eating....then more power to you! Just don't let the tool become the goal! Ha! ha!

So:

organic pickles (like Bubbies) - not raw
black olives (I know that green olives have cooked pimentos) - not raw
vinegars - not raw
combining fruits and vegetables (someone at work said this was bad???) - in the beginning...unless this is causing you problems...don't worry about it.
Raw juices (good? Bad? Everyday? Once a day? not at all?) - good, in moderation. Do not store...but drink right away.

And most importantly, what the hell is everyone eating that isn't a salad?!?! 1000's of varieties of fruits. Others eat sprouts, or a wide variety of fresh vegetable/vegetables dishes like slaws, wraps, etc.

-More power to you!

-David Z. Mason

WWW.RawFoodFarm.com

As for the olives (oh, no, here I go...), your olives are most likely not raw unless you get them from a health store and they're "sun dried"/"living foods." They're an expensive treat. I eat the ones from Nujima (nujima.com, but the site is being remodeled), and soak them when I want olives that aren't dried.

To get around the vinegar, I've also found some organic kalamatas preserved in olive oil and sea salt, made by Silver Leaf. I haven't found jarred olives that compare to these. They are #2 on my list. There's another brand called Krinos, which at least uses no preservatives, that I have eaten in moments of olive desparation. As more non-raw things are added, though, I can notice the decline in flavor and the increase of weirdness in my stomach.

In the beginning, I would say not to worry about vinegar. If a little bit of that helps you eat a giant salad full of delicious fresh foods, NO big deal! And once the salad becomes second nature, you can reevaluate if you still want to use it or not. It did take me about a week of chomping uncomfortably through salads with no dressing before I learned to appreciate the taste. There are also some wicked raw dressing recipes, try goneraw.com. Or this thread from the forum! [www.rawfoodsupport.com]

I eat a lot of fresh fruit, but in the beginning, I found I was craving salads--probably to remineralize. I also made a ton of sandwich wraps with Ezekiel's sprouted tortillas--not raw, but made from only sprouted grains and sea salt (so if I was eating 95% raw and that was my only cooked, I could deal). Now I use lettuce leaves instead.

A lot of people make fruit or smoothies with fruit and greens. If you're into "uncooking," there are a lot of SIMPLE things you can do that don't take an entire day (god knows I've wasted a lot of time with elaborate recipes), like making zucchini noodles with a regular grater, and dicing/food processing a marinara sauce, maybe a pesto or nut-based mock alfredo.

Also, sprouting has saved my life. It's fast, super cheap, very filling. Sproutpeople.com is an awesome site to get started. Then you can make sprouted hummus, I make a sprouted lentil curry which takes <5 minutes... the sky is the limit!

I also worried more about food combining AFTER my first month of raw. First, my focus was to just get raw: then I could focus on how to improve what I had already started. I think lettuces combine with almost anything, and unsweet fruits (tomato, cucumber, bell pepper) combine well with them (*?). Some of the cruciferous veggies are tougher to digest. From personal experience, combining fats improperly gives me more discomfort than anything else, and they make me crave a lot more food when I do.

It is as simple as EAT RAW FOODS! Two other good sayings that float around here are "eat the rainbow" and to never bother with a meal if it takes more than 5 ingredients or 5 minutes to make.

Good luck! Hang in there! The weird ear/nose drippings are also detox... they will pass. Eating heavier foods like nuts/seeds/avocados can slow the symptoms, whereas fruits clean faster and may aggravate them (but then they'll be gone!).

lol... you got your answers.

BTW your nose is gonna run for awhile. Your detoxin! Same with your ears.... thats all lymph fluid. I bet your bowels are full... keep on eating raw and your gonna be in for a suprise. Lol... you will probably lose like 20 lbs of just mucoid plaque in your bowels.

Dry brushing is also awesome to stimulate the lymph, I almost forgot!

[www.naturalhealthtechniques.com]

I do this every night before I shower. It has done wonders for my skin. =)

And hot epsom salt baths do wonders for soothing the body while detoxing...

Pisces, I'm loving reading about your journey and I wish you well.

I agree with all of the above, I'll just add I'm right there with you with regard to reading books.

Keep in mind this is not a diet, but a lifestyle. So this may help in terms of how you're viewing the learning curve. It takes time. There are some good DVD's out there, I'd recommend any of Victoria Boutenko's. So you don't necessarily have to pick up a book. One book that I have used and recommend is Alissa Cohen's Living on Live Food. For someone in your position who was on a heavy SAD diet, she has a gazillion easy to make recipes that make it easy to transition. She also does a great job of explaining raw in layman's terms and there are some great testamonials highlighted in the book as well. The book is huge! After awhile, you will more than likely drift into a more simple diet. But it's just a suggestion to help get you started. Sounds like you're doing really well though! Juicing up a storm.

Also if you like vinegar...try raw apple cider vinegar. I use Braggs. You can mix it with olive oil or hempseed oil for example and drizzle a little bit on your salads.

Best wishes to you!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2008 11:04PM by rawangel.

The seesaw feelings are a bit much.

The first day of eating raw, I felt like a train wreck. Then the next day was a million times better. Now today, day three, is weird again. My legs feel heavy, like I'm walking through molasses. I have total brain fog, and nothing "sounds good" to eat.

I am also finding that I am really kind of blowing the roof off my mind. I was in the shower this morning, and reached for my shampoo (Dove) and had a ten minute debate with myself about whether or not the chemicals in the shampoo are going to derail my detox. I plan to buy some Dr. Broner's body/hair/teeth cleaner when I go into work Friday, but I can't be sure that it is any better. And what about shaving? And my clothes? My washing detergent, (Tide) has all kinds of perfumes and chemicals. Tooth paste? Cologne? City smog?

I have gone from couch potato to OCD toxin freak in three days.

The worst is that my mind isn't "stable" enough right now for me to get a handle on all this. I feel like I imagine a pregnant woman feels with mood swings.

Anyway, this site is great; as long as I can focus on it. )

I did the MC way before I discovered Raw food. The MC is not raw. It uses Maple Syrup. It does get alot of mucus out of your system, though. It is good training for the distilled water fasts. They should run 10 days or longer, too.

Be sure to supplement your diet with vitamins/minerals as transitioning to raw through you off balance until you get a another level. For me, I see raw as phases of cleansing (until one's body is nearly clean) since it is way too harsh for most people to go directly to 100% raw vegan from 100% SAD.

Good luck. Therese

pisces7378 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
I am also finding that I am really kind of blowing
> the roof off my mind. I was in the shower this
> morning, and reached for my shampoo (Dove) and had
> a ten minute debate with myself about whether or
> not the chemicals in the shampoo are going to
> derail my detox. I plan to buy some Dr. Broner's
> body/hair/teeth cleaner when I go into work
> Friday, but I can't be sure that it is any better.
> And what about shaving? And my clothes? My washing
> detergent, (Tide) has all kinds of perfumes and
> chemicals. Tooth paste? Cologne? City smog?
>
> I have gone from couch potato to OCD toxin freak
> in three days.



I did this too. it was all too much. everything was toxic i didn't know what to change first. the money and the time! Just do what you can as you can. More raw food and less chemicals and keep refining it as you get time, energy and money.
dr Bronners soap and washing up liquid is great. Washing soda crystals in the washing machine. Natural fibre clothes. can't do a great deal about the city smog lol
btw, i love your posts.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2008 09:14AM by Grayzie.

Most people do it the other way around. I did. I didn't even like most raw foods and after fasting, my tastes changed and I could handle it better. So do the MC FIRST and then go right to a raw food diet. Read the forums on www.rawfoodsite.com .. which is a Master CLeanse website.

Update w/ questions...

So, I am on day 18 of my new raw foods diet. I finally started feeling human again. I must have had (probably still have) a ton of garbage in my system, because it took me two FULL weeks to stop having weird light headed, head achy, moody, weak feelings. Now, I can finally say that I feel better.

But I'm having some problems. I keep cheating. I'll sometimes eat a plug of bread with one of my raw salads for dinner. I sometimes, when out and about will stop and get a veggie sandwich on wheat bread. And recently, I just was so craving something warm that I made vegan red beans and rice with org. brown rice, and I ate the left overs last night again.

Is this terrible? Keep in mind that I am doing this whole thing to detox. Does the cooked food that I eat honestly shut down the whole detoxing process? Does bread really hurt that bad?

And my second questions is of a less attractive subject. Poopin`! I haven't had a dense solid movement since I started this whole thing. It is always more "soft-serve" and with a lot of the remaining fiber from whatever I ate in the salads: shredded carrots etc. Is this noramal? Will it stop? Is this just how man was designed to crap? What's the deal?

Glad to see you're still here!! =)

Transitioning is a PROCESS, so give yourself lots of room to breathe. If 100% raw is causing you to backslide, just be patient and go in smaller steps. If you still need to eat some organic brown rice with beans for dinner, and for the rest of your day you're eating more fresh fruits and veggies than you have in your life--awesome!! Don't get hung up on percentages--focus on the progress and the positive. And once that way of eating becomes second nature, set yourself a new and smaller goal. If what you are eating now is better than what you were eating before, even if it isn't 100% raw, you're going to see improvements.

As for eating cooked, the one thing I would advise is to stay away from all cooked oils. They are by far the worst. Steaming is the least damaging, and eating steamed veggies/potatoes/sprouts/gains are easier on digestion. I swore by baked potatoes for my first few months. You can really feel the difference between a baked potato and something deep fried. Baking (as in breads, cookies, anything that smells like Panera, haha) is second worst to frying (something called the Maillard (*sp?) reaction), so manna bread/Ezekiel's bread would be a good substitute to try for breads.

Most importantly, try to bring as much awareness to eating as you can. If you want to eat some bread, for example, go ahead--just make sure you are totally AWARE of the fact you CHOSE to do it, and you're not being taken over by unconscious drives. Paying attention to how it makes your body/mind feel during and after was also a good diagnostic tool for me--I eventually realized that the feelings I was getting just didn't compare to the raw fresh stuff. But I did certainly have my goodbyes with sushi, curry, greasy Chinese food, you name it. Especially if you find yourself in a situation that gives you discomfort, ask yourself what do you have to learn from the situation--did you become aware of any unconscious behavior loops that don't suit your growth anymore? Is this food optimal? (etc.)

In the cold death of January, I REALLY wanted warm soup, so I made some raw soups, and heated them on the stove so that I could still put my finger in them. Just warm enough to eat (hot soups are actually WAY to hot for my tongue since it healed!). It got me through some rough times. Some people also use dehydrators to warm foods, too. Another tool for transitioning...

And your poo will be VERY weird in the beginning, I've heard people here say 6-12 months. I'm at 5, and while it has gotten better, occasionally some very strange things still happen.

Don't beat yourself up for not being ready to go 100% raw in the first month. Though some people do that, it isn't something I could have done, and trying would just have made me stressed. Stress is not healthy, either. I've been doing raw for about ten months. I'm still not at 100%, but I find that healthier foods have begun to taste yummier than I ever thought they could be, and unhealthy foods have lost a lot of their appeal. My goal is to gravitate toward 100% as my mind and body are ready so that I do not make myself unhappy. When I eat foods that are not raw I try to think about why I am craving them, what those cravings mean, and what the less healthy foods do to me. I try not to ever blame myself either for the cravings or for giving into them.

Regarding your trips to the toilet, I can't predict what you will see, but I will suggest a rule of thumb my dad taught me when I was 10. If you can recognize your food when it comes out the other end, you need to slow down and chew more thoroughly.

With transitioning to raw, IMHO "slow and steady wins the race". I jumped in from SAD with both feet and was raw for 2 weeks and it was a huge shock to my system, and then I couldn't get back into raw for a long time. Think about conquering one meal at a time, like, start with breakfast and see how far into the day you can be raw. Remember most people take years to get to 100% and stay there effortlessly.

Now, about the master cleanse. I've only done it for 3 days max. I think the the salt water flush is not a good thing, I think enemas are better, I kept leaving the MC because the salt water flush made me feel like eating something to get the salt moving out of my body. I don't know though, some people can handle it.
-I use agave nectar instead of maple syrup, that way there is no question about if the maple syrup has formadehyde in it, the formaldehyde is from cleaning the equipment.
-I also use limes as well as lemons.

Whether or not you go raw for a month or go back to eating your old diet, I would transition to the MC by:

DOING THE MC WHILE YOU ARE EATING FOOD.

I.e. drink the lemonade mixture throughout the day and take the detox tea at night (maybe do the detox tea only on weekends (fri and sat nights) because you will probably have loose bowels the next day).

The advantage of doing the MC while you are eating foods is that the huge flood of toxins that you are going to release will move along and out of your body quickly with the foods instead of sitting around and being reabsorbed and giving you headaches and such. And belive me that detox tea stirs things up, it can give you cramps, it has a substance in it which stimulates the muscles of the bowels to contract.

I love your idea of doing preliminary work before the MC! Good Luck!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/08/2008 05:17AM by Lillianswan.