Ok.. I thought to myself, have a cooked meal once in awhile.. Which I don't think is a big deal still.

So I have a HUGE order of brown rice, and Panang Curry. Followed by a bunch of chocolate chip cookies. My stomach felt like I was about to give birth. I felt ok, just painfully full.

It's now two days later. I have been struggling with fevers of 101-102, sweating, cold, hot, the WORST headache I have ever had, guilt, and haven't had a bowel movement since I ate that! I'm scared, It's staying in my system. I can feel my poor digestive system trying to process what I did to it, but can't figure it out..

I made a big green smoothie this morning, full of sprouts and greens and good things.

I don't know if being 100% raw for 6 weeks has made it very difficult for my body to have anything cooked, or maybe just not a MEGA order of cooked food and a bunch of toxic, sugary cookies..


Trying to stay positive, and not beat myself up.

Can anyone relate or have had similar experiences? Please share..


Still Painfully Ill....

Jeff

To borrow Gosia's analogy...

If you bang your head against the wall every day, your body gets used to it to the point where it adjusts to the banging, maybe making your skull thicker so you don't feel it. So every day you can bang your head against the wall, and you don't notice it and everything is fine. Then if you stop banging your head against the wall for a few months, your body relaxes and your skull returns to its normal thickness. If, after several months of this relaxation, you one day go back and bang your head against the wall just like before, but without that physiologically-adjusted thickened skull, it's going to hurt like mad.

That's what I think, anyway.

Man, I totally feel you.

I've done the same thing and regretted it. The only bad thing about going 100% Raw (for me) is that you can never ever go back to eating cooked food the way you used to with out having major problems. I get those exact symptoms if I splurge on anything cooked (especially sugar and grains) I feel like I have a bowling ball in my stomach...really bloated and icky feeling. The only thing I know to do is to go Raw again and wait it out. Your system has gone into shock and it's going to take a few days for all that food to digest.

The best advice I can give you is to learn how to uncook Panang Curry! Make a raw dish out of the spices you love in that sauce. Make or buy some raw carob/cocoa cookies. Find a healthier substitute for those dishes you used to love because going full-blown back into a SAD diet (even once in a while) will cause more damage in the long run... I'm giving this advice to myself as well.

Don't beat yourself up about it.
Guilt is like holding on to a bag of bricks.
Put the bag down.
You are doing great going Raw!!
Everyone goes through this.
You are adjusting to your new body and new way of thinking.
As you've said, progress not perfection.

I hope you feel better soon.
Much Love,

J.R.

Jen Rose

"You must first unlearn the lies, and then you will have room for the truth"

Been there!

No! dont beat yourself up, just move forward!

I found lots of water and plenty of rest really helps me when this happens.

Cooked food is addictive.

The homeopathic remedy nux vomica (often associated with over indulgence of food or alcohol) can also help.

Stick with it, this time will pass!

That does sound very extreme. You probably overate too. I don't know why the tendency is for when raw foodists decide to eat some cooked food for it to always be the worst kind or junky cooked food. It's usually never like, I broke down and had some steamed broccoli and peas with my salad. It is usually always, I gorged on pizza and fries and milkshakes and ice cream and cookies etc. LOL. Maybe it's because those are the foods that are hard to resist sometimes, raw or not.

I'm not 100% and I'm fine with some of my cooked food additions in their limited quantities. I feel totally healthy and fine with them. However there are some cooked foods that are junky, I know I should not be eating, make me feel sick and are still hard to give up. So I don't think cooking food in general all of a sudden makes a food "addictive" I just think some junky foods are addictive and make us tempt them or have cravings for them etc. I still have a hard time resisting those few oz's of bread once a week or those occasional cookies. Although the longer I go without them I am getting more sensitive to them. Last time I just had 1 of the cookies and immediately felt horrible. Just clogged and greasy and yucky.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2006 09:15PM by nik.

Hi ShineOn,

Don't feel bad. Probably almost everybody on this forum has been right where you're at right now, maybe many times. I have - in my sordid past . The thing to do is look at it as a learning experience. You can think about what made you do it. And what you can do to prevent it in the future, or make it less bad. And it's not always just you. There may have been something lacking that your body was saying you needed.

I think nik made a good point about trying to avoid the really junky or heavy stuff. For me I found that whenever I felt like going off, if I had veggies around (even frozen ones), I would be able to limit myself to steamed veggies rather than go all out with the grains. For a pretty long while, I ate a lot of salads with steamed frozen peas (or fresh steamed green beans, or cauliflower). The thing to avoid is telling yourself, "well I've blown it now, I might as well go wild". You will probably feel a lot better the next day after steamed veggies than after a big bowl of brown rice and a bunch of chocolate chip cookies.

For me, I found it was very difficult to eat only a small portion of cooked grains. I would always tend to overeat grains. Recently I heard on the news that cooked grains have a chemical in them that actually stimulates appetite. That jives with my own experience! Of course you could overeat steamed greens too, but if you do overeat steamed greens or even peas or sweet corn or sweet potato or yam, those foods are much easier on the system than cooked grains.

It wouldn't necessarily be negative thinking to consider you might end up doing it again. Try to be prepared with some veggies around that you can cook instead of a grain. And/or have something heavy raw that could take the place of the heavy cooked.

Also, when you go out to eat, try thinking ahead of time about what you'll eat. Sometimes it's helpful to bring something of your own to add to the salad or whatever.

Hope you're feeling real better real soon!

Best wishes, -Ally

You're o.k. YOu'll be alright.

I've never even been raw for 6 weeks straight... You'll be fine

Thanks all.. Starting to feel better tonight.. My fever as down.. I haven't been hungry in 2 days because the friggin food is still in my colon and stomach! But I managed to eat a big greens salad.. Learning to fly, you said it well... My body was pretty clean and everything was functioning on a pure level, I added toxins and the tolerance to the toxins was gone so I felt it big time.. Ally and Jen, thanks for your wisdom.

Jeff