hey everyone-

i need a buddy to share brief, daily email with so i can get back on track. i always feel best when my diet is mostly raw, and i am having such a hard time getting back in the flow. anybody out there want to hang out with me a for a little while so i can get back on track? i am craving crap and giving in over and over..... thought i'd try this approach.

thanks!

Maybe you should try some kind of detox/cleanse if your cravings are that bad. Colon cleanse or a 3 day fast or something.

yeah, i've thought of that. you know how many times i've done those? and i might go for it again. i was thinking it might be healthier though, to just maintain a healthier diet instead of fasting again.

thanks for your thoughts. i appreciate it.

depending on what you are craving might help you to determine what path you need to take to correct the problem

Dme

My first impression regarding this request
is that it sounds more like your issues are
those involving motivation. A motivated person
doesn't have these problems. A motivated
person doesn't have excuses why he can't
stay on a particular path; nor does he have
problems with relapsing. He has an iron
will and nothing can stand in his way.

Having been where you seem to be right now,
I can tell you that the solution to your
problems are as easy or as hard as you want
to make them to be; and it has little to
do with food, or cravings, or detoxing.
Those things are just surface issues that
mask the real cause.

Over the years, I've posted thousands of
messages on this board, and I saved some
of them. Including a few messages on this
very topic. So I just read through a few
of those past posts and here's one I wrote
over 9 years ago about this very subject:

The will to know and the will to grow
Author: Steve 04-25-02 13:40

Hi Beth!

Yes, we are all in this together. And if I can share some insights with others, I'll be happy to do so; and vice versa (is welcomed and greatly appreciated!).
Beth, after reading your post, you seem to have a good idea about what it takes (intellectually) to have what you want in life. But it sounds as if something is not working as you would like.

My story:
I know all about the supposed insidious nature of cooked food. Oh how I know. Oh how I wanted to be entirely raw, and nothing I tried worked. I even knew that the food was not to blame. It was me. It was me. It was me. Me! Me! Me! Me! God-damn it, it was me! So what?

I wanted cooked food. That was the problem, not the food. I wanted to eat that stuff. (It was a problem for me, because I told myself I did not want cooked food, but (emotionally) I consistently proved otherwise; as is the case with those conflicting actions in our lives. Rarely do we say we want unhealthy/undesirable behaviors, but then we proceed to do them anyway. Helping to perpetuate a never-ending state of war [to varying degrees] within ourselves. Making us miserable, to the extent we live that inner war, in the process.) Why do we do it?

The real issue here isn't so much one of cooked food. That's often a scapegoat. (I'm not suggesting that it's entirely healthy, but we raw-fooders make eating it such a big, big, big deal, that I'm sure regular cooked food eaters would be wondering, if they saw this site, what the Hell is going on!) My point is that I think we're way too focused on the food itself, instead of being focused on how and why WE REACT TO THE FOOD the way we do! The blame here does not lay at the kitchen door, with the food. It lays entirely within ourselves, and our reaction to food.

What's really at the heart of the matter here is, that for some of us, eating cooked food causes us pain; and yet we do it anyway. This makes us feel out of control. And, I know that having this pain is no way to go through life. It's no fun. And fun is something we all tell ourselves that we want. Fun is, well, FUN!
When we want to live the straight and narrow, and we don't allow it to happen, what goes wrong? Why do we do it to ourselves?

It happens because we allow our (typically) repressed, negative emotions to run amok internally. We let these emotions run roughshod over (and even ruin) our lives. And it doesn't have to be that way. These negative emotions, in effect, act in a programmed way to sabotage our well-being; in the exact opposite way that positive, healthy emotions help make life so wonderful and fascinating.

Unless we override these negative emotions with our own conscious efforts, they will continue to wreak havoc on our lives. These negative emotions continuously "prove" that you really are, e.g., shameful, worthless, fearful, angry, etc.. They have the affect of reinforcing (an often) subconscious belief that you do not deserve to be happy. (Which, of course, is not true at all.) Happiness is not only our BIRTHRIGHT, it is our DESTINY!

If we choose it to be. In my case, I didn't entirely believe that I deserved be happy. My actions (or lack of them) clearly demonstrated such a subconscious belief. (I'd say this is true of just about everyone [to varying degrees] on the planet as well. We don't act as if happiness if our birthright and our destiny. We push away healthy thoughts, actions, and people in our lives.)

This is really what shame is all about: a sense that you're not good enough. You don't deserve what you want. You'll never have true love; nor real, meaningful success; nor authentic self-fulfillment. You don't deserve any of it! That's the big internal lie we (often) unconsciously, and repeatedly, act out. Day after day after day after day. It's all a lie. Yet, like good little soldiers, we march in obedient lockstep to that SELF-INFLICTED inner message. UNTIL we decide to STOP, and start living as though happiness is indeed our true calling in life!

Yeah, I played the games. Pretending that I wanted to stop. Hell, I even tried the Anthony Robbins' aversion therapy method: linking pain to some habit you don't like; such as eating cooked food. And if you don't change, it's because you "haven't linked enough pain" to eating these "evil" foods. After that didn't work, I decided that the most painful thing to me was death. So I linked killing myself to eating cooked foods. (This is how crazy it became.) If I ate cooked food ever again, I said I would kill myself! (Hey, it doesn't get any more painful than that, does it?)

As you're probably aware, I did not kill myself. Though, of course, this did not get me to stop eating cooked foods. Negative-based motivation is certainly not the solution to anything. It's only a band-aid solution.

The real solution, as I stated in my most recent "Weird" posting, is inside of you. It's you taking effective control of your emotional, intellectual, and behavioral life. And that really is easy, once you understand the dynamics of it. But having that knowledge, apprehending it, and integrating it, well that's the hard part; because no one is teaching us these skills or giving us this knowledge.

For once you have the knowledge, and you assimilate it into your life, you will get the incredible, invincible, and imperial (how's that for alliteration) results that you want! You see, we seek control of our own existence. We have a need to feel in control. Why?

Because feeling in control brings us pleasure! Yummy. Yes, feeling in control makes us feel ohhhhhh soooooo good.:-) That's why, e.g., when you're truly good at something, you feel in control; and this has a tendency to bring you pleasure.:-)

When we do something well, such as score the winning goal, close that lucrative deal, or get a "yes" to that marriage proposal, we feel absolutely fantastic! We have this need. It is essential to our well-being. This is why a healthy person seeks to achieve, regardless of how much he already has in life. He wants more, because more makes him feel good. The need for pleasure is built into our nature. And the more (healthy) pleasure we experience in life, the more life seems worth living!

Conversely, the polar opposite is pain. It comes from feeling out of control. That's the nature of all addictions: we're really out of control, yet the addictive behavior is used as a feeble attempt to feel in control. Addictions are merely an unhealthy, destructive way to feel good.

One problem with addictions is that they don't facilitate happiness. They just create more pain. Instead of improving and increasingly one's capacity for joy and happiness, the addiction can get worse; sometimes destroying our lives and/or our relationships in the process. As with all dysfunctional behaviors, the consequences are the opposite of the supposed intentions. We do them because we think (at the time we do them) that they make sense, and that they will make us happy. They don't on both counts.

When we're out of control with our eating, we try to get a sense of control by gorging on junk food. But this only brings temporary pleasure while we're getting our quick fix. Yes, we feel in control during the time we are gorging on that junk. It's only afterwards that we have to deal with the pain of feeling out of control. Take the bulimic person, for example. He/she eats to gain control, then suddenly feels out of control AFTER the bingeing, and then (to regain a sense of control) he/she tries to get rid of the noxious substances! It's a vicious cycle. Binge-purge binge-purge-binge-purge, etc., etc., etc. What a nightmare.

Similarly, but taken to the extreme of dysfunctional actions, is serial killing. The killer gains a temporary sense of control/pleasure by killing. He may say he does not want to kill. He may know it's wrong. But he is driven to kill nonetheless. He needs to kill. This is how he tries to feel good and get control of his life.

Or how about pedophilia? People feel driven to dominate and have sex with those less powerful. And on and on and on. Again, underlying all of the perversity is the need to feel in control, which is directly correlative to our need for pleasure. This need can either work for us or against us. It is our choice. Fortunately we can teach ourselves take our need for pleasure and us it to our advantage.

Beth, you mentioned the importance of values, and that is so, so crucial to this issue. The more your values are consistent (as opposed to contradictory), healthy (as opposed to unhealthy), and integrated (meaning you're living them and not just pretending to live them), the greater the likelihood that your thoughts, feelings, and actions will work for you, rather than against you. And these values are not etched in stone. Anyone can, at any time, adopt these healthy values, and start living in accordance with them. They are all consistent with one another, as well as virtuous. Living them brings increasingly greater levels of joy to your life.

And, as I mentioned previously, your emotional life really is the rudder of your ship. (Though this is not to diminish the importance of rational thinking and healthy behaviors.) Nevertheless, the bottom line is that you need to feel deeply to think clearly. You need to know what you're feeling in order to make decisions appropriate to a particular context. This is most often where we err. As is the case with blocked/repressed emotions: we don't know what we're feeling, and henceforth, we can't possibly know what to (effectively) think.

Yet, if we choose to deal with our negative, repressed emotions, and allow ourselves to simply FEEL them, we can then go into manual override and enable our thoughts and actions to work for us, regardless of our feelings. Our feelings are (ideally) our guide in the decision-making process. Not being aware of them makes us a slave to them. Whereas understanding them helps create the greatest likelihood that we will act in a positive, healthy manner in any given context.

It's important to understand that WE MUST HAVE THE WILL TOKNOW OUR FEELINGS to think rationally. (Do you know why machines can't think? Because they can't feel. They have no feelings. And, to the extent we're cut off from our feelings, we can't think either. And we needlessly suffer accordingly.)

In my case, I let repressed fear and shame essentially rule over important aspects of my life. Both are powerful, destructive motivators. Left to their own devices they will sabotage your attempts to get what you want; as well as
cause to to drive healthy people out of your life. That's why we need to know that it is our feelings working against us when our actions conflict with healthy, emotionally-mature values.

Most often, the cause of our pain is that we don't take responsibility for awareness of our emotions. That is, we don't even know that we block out awareness of our emotions. Thus, we don't even know that we're, e.g. afraid; or ashamed; or full of rage and hate; thereby making it all but impossible to consistently act in a healthy manner in those situations involving these emotions. (We need to feel as well as think about our feelings. This is not a difficult process, and it becomes automatic once we develop the simple skills.)

Our lack of awareness, after we do something hurtful, leads us scratch our heads. We're often bewildered as to why we could do such a thing; especially when we say we want something entirely different in our lives. I often hear people say, "What was I thinking?" But the fact is that they were not really "thinking" at all. By not being aware of our emotions, we become a helpless pawn by default. Just by becoming aware of, and fully feeling our emotion(s), we begin to control (to the extent we develop these skills) of our emotional world.

So how did I get control of my emotional life? Taking greater responsibility for awareness of my inner life. (This actually had nothing to do with the food issue. Though I parlayed what I learned into an across-the-board bonanza!) Once I realized that most of my unhealthy/undesirable actions were primarily the direct result of either repressed fear and/or shame, AND I WAS WILLING TO FEEL EACH AS THEY OCCURRED, I could then begin to recognize my behavioral response patterns - and go into manual override (with my thoughts); permitting me to decide what to do about the emotion, despite my fear and/or the shame. Now I still get these feelings, but I have less and less of them as I mature and grow. And this empowers me to take greater control of my inner life, and thus feel more pleasure.

The point, and I can't emphasize this enough, is that I became acutely aware THAT I WAS (in fact) AFRAID AND/OR ASHAMED at certain, often predictable times and situations. I simply made the conscious effort to know what was truly going on inside of me, and this allowed me to make appropriate actions, despite the unwanted feelings. And what a world of difference it makes!

(Please understand, these were my issues. Others may have significantly greater/different problems, including fear and shame, but also, e.g., guilt, rage (which is very common), etc. What I'm saying is that you can get control simply by recognizing that it is one, or a combination of, neg. emotions at the heart of your counterproductive, undesirable actions (in any context). Then, BY HAVING THE COURAGE TO KNOW (AND FEEL) YOUR PARTICULAR EMOTIONS, YOU CAN START TAKING MORE CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE! YOU WILL ALSO BEGIN TO DISCHARGE THE PENT-UP FEELINGS INSIDE OF YOU! Thereby allowing yourself to (over time) rid yourself of those feelings; while simultaneously teaching yourself how to manage your emotional world! To the extent you do this, everything in your life changes for the better!

By simply taking greater responsibility for your consciousness, you create a snowball effect that positively affects every aspect of your life! Yes, the solution is, indeed, within you.

Now this is not to suggest that being armed with this knowledge will make you a perfect person. That's not the point. In fact, the nature of life is not to be perfect, but rather, it's to CHANGE AND GROW! This is an never-ending process. Increasing levels of happiness, not perfection, is the goal. Meaningful happiness is the achievement of our highest purpose.

Thus, it isn't really cooked food that is the problem in the life of a 100% raw-fooder-wanne-be. The real issue to be addressed is how we manage our lives. Eating cooked food, when we don't want to do it, is merely a symptom of an inner problem that needs to be dealt with if it is to go away. Thus, eating cooked food really isn't that big of an issue. (People do it every day, even at every meal, and they often live to see another day.) We make it a big issue by how we deal with it. We choose to bring this self-inflicted pain into our lives.

Fortunately, we can make that pain go away. Previously, I have said that I now give myself the permission to eat as much cooked food as I want. Of course, I no longer have the will to do eat any of those things. Time and time again, I have put myself into situations that I formerly would have used as an excuse to blow it - leading me back down a path of cooked-food debauchery and decadence for months on end. (Brown rice, whole-wheat, potatoes, popcorn, etc. were my enemies. Only, I loved my enemies. I couldn't stay away.) But now I'm not the least bit tempted to eat that stuff. I don't want these things anymore. That's the key. If we want them, it will be difficult to stop.

If you truly want to begin or to stop some action, you need to create a strong will within you to motivate yourself to start (or to cease engaging in) an activity. You can create an iron will to do something (or to not do it) that is impervious to temptation. This is something that can be learned. It's a skill, like any other skill. As you practice, you just get better and better. And that
skill becomes, over time, second nature. Thus, I think we could say that happiness is a learned skill. It doesn't come without learning how to do it.
This is something that everyone is (theoretically) capable of doing with their own lives. It all starts with having the will to know yourself, having the will to grow as a person, and then taking responsibility for your emotions, your thoughts, and your actions. That happens as a consequence of having the requisite values as I've discussed above (and in other postings over the past few days) on this site. By having some semblance of those values, you attain (as you practice and integrate healthy, virtuous values into your life) the will to know and the will to grow. And you begin to fully understand just how wonderful life can be!

And that's a magnificent feeling!

Steve
[www.meetup.com]
[www.rawgosia.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/16/2011 05:31AM by paragon1685.

Thanks, Steve--erudite and inspiring

Good article there Steve.
I copied and pasted it in my inspiration folder.

Vinny

wow. thanks. that was great. yes, clearly for me this has been an issue of motivation.

when the board was down, and i had no resource of support that i knew of anywhere else, i just got real with myself and decided to take some baby steps in the right direction.

of all places to begin, i started with shots of wheatgrass juice- just a 2 ounce shot on the morning. that was such a concentrated blast of raw goodness, and it gave me such a good feeling, i naturally "craved" better foods. within a very short time, i became mostly raw.

i am in a very good flow with my diet and my health right now. i have come to absolutey love wheatgrass juice, and it is the cornerstone of my health-building positive lifestyle. i grow my own now, and am noticing minor yet lonstanding health issues beginning to heal.

the greatest thing about this shift for me, is that i developed the inner strength to make this change. the buddy i was looking for to get me motivated and hold me accountable is within. i feel really good, and i know it will only get better.

thanks again for your insights and your thoughtful response.

oh yes , the first and foremost best friend i think we should cultivate is within ourselves

once we love ourselves, loving others (and letting others love us) is simple

im glad you found your inner-buddy

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist