I have been trying to change my eating from someone who eats everything to eating only raw foods for two years now. I have been sucessful for a few months at a time but then I will give into some sort of temptation and then feel I am on a spiral down and find myself binging on foods in the house. I have to feed my family and they eat cooked foods. One thing I notice is I get a craving for salty foods after a while of eating fresh juices, green smoothies and fruit. This time I started with some toasted seawead that was lightly salted and then I aquired some olives that had tons of salt. I thought I could just eat a couple but really binged on the olives. I am thinking it was the salt. I ended up eating some of the cooked foods my family had this weekend including the birthday cake for my daughters party. I find it hard to get myself back to eating raw once I start eating cooked. I am getting tired of the rollercoaster. I wish I could just be strong enough to make this change and keep it going. One thought is perhaps I am lacking something when I am eating raw foods that is causing such a strong desire to eat salt. What do you all think I could use some encouragement at this time.

There are salt receptors on the tongue for our sense of taste. The human body's need for salt or sodium is pretty low, only about 200 to 300 milligrams per day. And sodium is so ubiquitous (everywhere) that it's pretty hard not satisfy the body's need for it. And here's the thing. Salt cravings aren't that unusual but due to eating raw? It seems unlikely. You have already mentioned some great sources of sodium including sea vegetables and olives. Celery is another one. It's critical to maintain your electrolyte balance (potassium, sodium, calcium & magnesium) to ensure proper cell function. Even if you aren't hypertensive, too much salt can cause water retention, and has been linked to certain cancers (e.g. stomach cancer). It's not worth it. Is there a chance you are going through some detox? How long have you been able to go low sodium? In going through detox, you may feel worse before you feel better. Just a thought.

Paul

p.s. we need roughly 10 times the potassium we do of sodium for correct electrolyte balance. And I'm sure the 80-10-10 crowd will tell ya, this is where fruits shine, particularly bananas and citrus. The potassium to sodium ratio needs to be greater than 4 to 1 to avoid disfunction according Richard Moore, Ph.D, MD based on his research. Boundries to keep in mind.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/06/2009 04:21PM by pborst.

Tomatoes are a big help to me as well, when I crave salt

*****************************
"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."
—Thomas Jefferson

pampam - re the cooking for your family thing - I really understand, me too. The hardest time is when I cook them some delicious vegan meal. Usually I am very happy with my salads but occasionally other things beckon. Because my partner works very hard, physically all day I think it a bit hard to expect him to cook his own food too. So there I am cooking away, making tons of washing up etc when all i want is in the fruit bowl. lol

Just remember how amazingly you are doing and try not to focus on slip ups. You are light years ahead of most people and do the best you can every day. Celebrate how well you are doing.

I've never been much of a salt person so I can't shed any light on that - maybe there is some mineral you are wanting. Sorry not much help - but you've got all my support.

PamPam,

Just do your best, don't beat yourself up over it.

Regarding the salt, I've read that salt is not necessarily "bad" for you. In one of Carol Alt's books, she mentions that the SAD/refined salt is bad, but Sea Salt or Himalayan Salt is good and provides some important minerals.

I have salt and fat cravings as well. My favorite way to handle those cravings is by eating avocado with mediterranean sea salt and fresh ground pepper on it. Two birds with one stone.


Bill

Celery juice works well for me. An 8oz glass is good!

Even sea salt or Himalayian salt is not good for you - try to avoid it as much as possible.

Utopian Life Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Even sea salt or Himalayian salt is not good for
> you - try to avoid it as much as possible.

Darn it! I'm going to want it more if you say I can't have it!

-Bill

If you want to stop craving salt you need to stop eating all salt. Including seaweeds and olives. You have the right instincts, salt is indeed bad (sorry even himalayan and celtic which are still mostly NaCl). Whenever I eat something salty my face is puffy for days. Salt is a poison. Kills cells! Causes stomach cancer! It's a preservative! How can something be deadly in larger amounts but healthy in small amounts?

Eat more celery, greens, and vegetables, for their natural sodium.

pampam

Quote

I have been trying to change my eating from someone who eats everything to eating only raw foods for two years now. I have been sucessful for a few months at a time but then I will give into some sort of temptation and then feel I am on a spiral down and find myself binging

Me too. I take a bite of cooked food and its like taking a step off the raw path and right off a cliff. I go into free fall eating more and more cooked food until my percentages are dismal. My "slips" have been in the weeks not days and include binges where I eat to much. This has never happened on raw foods only on cooked. Its weird the way the body can crave something that is bad for it like heroin and other substances including non-organized salt and dead cooked food. I have had to claw my way back up the slippery slope to get back on the raw path and its taught me one thing for sure -- watch out for that first temptation of addiction because its just like a Chinese finger trap. [en.wikipedia.org]



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/06/2009 09:20PM by EZ rider.

thenewguy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
My favorite
> way to handle those cravings is by eating avocado
> with mediterranean sea salt and fresh ground
> pepper on it. Two birds with one stone.

Oooooohhhhh YUMMMM! That sounds yummy!! I could go for that right now!!

*****************************
"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."
—Thomas Jefferson

pampam Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I have been trying to change my eating from
> someone who eats everything to eating only raw
> foods for two years now.

I could use some encouragement as well. A few months ago, I came off eating mainly beans and rice meals because I was in braces for nearly three years. I needed something soft and easy to make, and having braces and wondering when they were coming off was VERY STRESSFUL. Fruit just wasn't cutting it in the evening.

You mentioned falling off a cliff. For some reason the ledge on the face of the cliff which I catch on the way down is ALWAYS fruit during the day. It is so ingrained now that I cannot eat anything but fruit until afternoon 1 or 2 on a stressful day, and usually I wouldn't eat a cooked meal until about 5 PM or after. I just turns my stomach to think about eating it in the morning. Bean burritos at 10 AM? Pancakes at 9 30 AM. I no longer understand it, and have not for a very long time. I just wish my stomach would turn thinking about eating this stuff regardless of the time of day. I have noticed that I can't eat pretzels anymore (the runs). I think that as the body gets exposed to natural eating more and more, it becomes less tolerant of past eating faults.

I wonder what it would be like when I become free of my short-term debt position early next year... Would I sleep better, eat better? I hope so!

Stephanie

Regular salt has some iodine added to it, and it also contains some dextrose which of course if sugar to bind the iodine (or it would just evaporate readily) to the salt. But by the time you are eating the regular salt most of the Iodine is gone anyway depending on how old your salt is..and who can answer that?

So, maybe one reason for wanting salt is your body wants the Iodine as it will do what it can to get what it needs thru any means at hand.

Maybe try a little kelp or try some bladderwrack tincture that you can find in your health food store. See if that helps your salt addiction. Also, you might try eating something like pumpkin seeds as they are a natural deterant to parasitic infestations in your digestive system and those things don't like salt or pumpkin seeds as they work mechanically in that they rip up the parasites or worms.

Sometimes things that seem simple often are really hidden and it's hard to decipher what our bodies really are looking for or craving.

Love,
Prism

ahhhh the mad salt addiction...to salt or not to salt... good or bad???... there is so much discussion about it...but it definitely can be trigger to eat more...I have always allowed my self this one vice... I will admit freely to most that i am a salt addict... now that being said i have gotten better... i only get Real pink sea salt... and i use quite a bit less then i used to... but what i notice... if i have too much sweets... even simple fruit sweets... i feel a need for salt... i don't know if it's a balance thing... but i think there is definitely something to be learned here about the balance......

of course you also have to ask yourself are you also an emotional eater??? using salt as the excuse or fat or sugar...or even cooked foods... thereby not owning the emotions you are trying to stifle by eating... or some part of your life body mind soul that feels empty and so you must fill it... another thought is what does salt symbolize to you?

i haven't had any salt now for about 8 days... now i have been on a fast for most of that time...but as i start eating again... i am trying to see how long i can go with out it... but i have this funny feeling in me...a nauseous feeling that i have had through out the fast... and what i am craving is salt... and i feel as if salt might make that feeling go away... sort of like drinking a ginger ale to quell the upset...... and as some of you talk about stomach cancer and such... it makes me wonder...what it is that i am cleansing... or what it is i need to make this feeling go...

but as many say... and i agree... don't beat your self up over it... you are to precious a person to wast your time being negative towards yourself... if you eat it... enjoy it... accept it as something you need to do at the time you do it... and then just add more raw foods...

love laugh and dream

Craving for salt = eat more celery, greens, and vedge! Pretty important to get the natural sodium from these. If you completely give up salt the cravings do go away, and our taste buds get used to it pretty rapidly.. so much so that if you haven't eaten salt for a long time and eat something salty, it's CRAZY salty, practically burns your tongue.. personally that tells me something.

The body is very good at conserving its sodium, it just needs awhile to get used to an actual natural diet. Yo-yo'ing to and from salt is not a good idea. Another thing about going saltless for a while is your sweat becomes no longer salty.. this also tells me something, that the cells are no longer expelling salt any chance they get. The claim that we need salt to rebalance what we've sweated out is a myth. All we need is about 500mg/day of natural sodium from plants, I believe.

Sometimes a salt craving is not for salt at all. My naturopath has a book that lists the nutritional deficiencies that go with cravings. My craving for potato chips was resolved when I started a good calcium supplement. I thought it was the salt I was craving from those chips but not so.

We do need salt and if you really are salt deficient you could try the solution I use. I got Himalayan salt from Life Enthusiast Co-Op on the internet, I am not selling for them, just sharing, and I put the rocks in a glass jar and filled it with water. I put rocks in until they would not go into solution any more. Now I had Brine. 26% salt in the water. I take a tsp of this and it gets right in my system and keeps me from peeing all my water out all lday. The tsp of brine is equivalent to 1/4 tsp of granulated salt. That's all it takes to keep my body keeping the right amount of the water I drink. I hope this information is helpful to you. Best wishes, Mys Benson

Hi Pampam

I quite understand your cravings for salt - been there!

Do have a look at my articles on salt here. They're pretty comprehensive, will help you understand why you crave salt, and also offer practical suggestions for how to cope with it.

Also, 'the new guy', all of the essential minerals found in salt can be found in plant foods. In Pt 2 of the article, I list 'the 84 minerals' and discuss this. If you read the article, you may wonder how Carol Alt can describe sea salt/Himalayan salt as 'good'.

[debbietookrawforlife.blogspot.com]

People can get into real trouble on a very low sodium diet, which is what a strict fresh food approach sometimes means. Take the example from another forum where they were doing mono watermelon while keeping an extra liter of water per day habit, resulting with two posters coming down with splitting headaches, one of them in such pain that he/she was "talking to angels and demons and making deals with God". It's hyponatremia, the brain can swell and having nowhere to go cause damage and even death.

It can take from 7 days to 7 weeks, as I recall, for the body to transition to a very low sodium diet, young people having more tolerance for change.

The Himalayan salt folks, as mysbenson pointed out explain how to make sole (so-lay) which seems to me yet another good way to get minerals that might be lacking in a strict fresh food diet, especially for those transitioning.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2009 12:46PM by loeve.

I do agree with Loeve that the body can take some time to adjust to a sudden decrease in sodium - one of the things I discuss towards the end of Part 2 of my article.

I'd suggest gradually reducing salt - perhaps halving amounts used initially.

loeve:
There's a huge difference between a true low sodium diet (extended watermelon diet) and a proper diet which gets a proper amount of natural sodium (lots of fruit, lots of greens, and lots of vegetables). They weren't lacking salt, they were lacking sodium. It is never necessary to ingest salt.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2009 06:03PM by rawpreston.

raw preston,
An extended watermelon diet wasn't the concern so much as a watermelon *and extra water* diet where if taken to excess a person might get up in the morning fine, be sick by noon, comatose by three and dead by evening due to water intoxication (hyponatremia) caused by the dilution of sodium in the body. It's an extreme scenario, sure. A large watermelon contains about 24 cups of water. If a person is avoiding salt, drinking an extra liter of water a day (on top of their 'normal' liter or 8 cups, and if they compulsively run thru it all by noon then they just might come down with that splitting headache.

I agree with you that sodium is the issue in this case (and too much water). A diet that is *too low* in sodium, even for a day, is unnecessary in my opinion when sodium is so readily available in salt. Celery, carrots and spinach all have good sodium levels. Watermelon, tomatoes and romaine lettuce not so much. A varied fresh food diet can supply all the sodium we need certainly, but does it easily do so, and is our diet forgiving of our mistakes and circumstances? Like you say it needs to be proper.

Hi Pampam
I cook for my family too. It wasn't easy, I sort of resented the time it took at first, but got over that!
I also believed that my path would be easier if i didn't have to cook for them every day. The temptation.....
I started making larger batches of food, so that some days i only needed to reheat instead of start from scratch. I also introduced much quicker, simpler meals slowly.
I never tasted the food. I asked family to taste for seasoning etc. That really helped. I never cook when I'm hungry. I always eat first.

It was my choice to eat raw food. My family were and still are very supportive. They eat much more raw fruit veggies and salad these days.
Hey, we even have a raw vegan dog! I would never have imagined that a few years ago!

As regards salt, a daily dose of celery juice works for me.
As mysbenson pointed out, it may well be worth looking at deficiency.

I also focus on the journey, not the destination!

Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and remember that right now you can start all over again. It really sets you free!

Much love and hugs to you.
ffx

I don't know if someone has mentioned it yet, but you could try magnesium chloride or potassium chloride...they are healthier and even more salty.
You can get your iodine from Lugol's solution...as we are all iodine deficient and cannot rely on kelp for boosting iodine as it may be contaminated with arsenic.

You may try a little Seacrop in your drinking water to boost your mineral reserves. SEA-CROP concentrate is a soil and plant stimulant containing over 80 natural source minerals and active organic substances from deep sea Pacific Ocean ...
www.sea-crop.com/

Try a juice of 1 zucchini, 1 beet, 3-4 stalks of celery, 1 medium-large apple. Tonya Zavasta drinks a veggie juice similar to this every day (I think she adds broccoli). Celery is her only source of sodium. This tastes pretty decent to me.

I used to think that raw foodists who were against salt were just nay-sayers, until the day when my body randomly rejected Nama Shoyu. I used to LOVE that stuff! My body just rejected it. It suddenly tasted way too salty. Maybe your body will eventually tell you the same thing too.

If not, pay attention to your body (as I'm sure you are). Are your ankles swollen? Probably too much added salt. I had that problem with puffiness in the face and sometimes ankles, and it took me awhile to make the connection.

Also, be wary of imitation sea salt. When I do have salt (still don't tolerate Nama Shoyu very well), only herbamare (sp?) affects me the least. We have a "Mediterranean Sea Salt" that is "dried on the ocean beaches of France" or something like that, and I swear my body knows the difference. My throat feels a little sore after consuming that stuff.