My eating habits are (and have been for almost two years) almost exclusively mono-sweet fruit. My main staple is pineapple, and I sometimes eat apples, grapefruit, persimmons, mangos, or green grapes.

I really love wakame, nori, carrots, tomatoes, lemons, limes, kale, spinach, chard, dulse, laver, ginger, cayenne, shiitake mushrooms, nutritional yeast, kombucha tea, and fatty things like avocadoes, nuts, and seeds.

Unfortuately, I feel heavy, bloated, and depressed when I eat something other than sweet fruit. (Green juices are fine, and some greens, carrot and tomato is slright too.) However, when I've only eaten pineapple (and maybe other fruit and/or green juice or carrot/greens/tomato) for several days I crave my favorite recipe:

4 oz dried wakame
sundried tomates
juice of 1 lime or lemon
1/2 cup of nutritional yeast
1/4-1/3 cup dulse flakes
a kettle of 100 degree water

This makes a delicious soup. I also enjoy putting ground flax, hemp, or sesame seeds in it, or an avocado. I've cut out the fat to see if that helped me to digest better.

I take two cascara sagrada vegan capsules daily and walk frequently.

Also, I am in a very tough financial situation. Thusly I am going to need to drop my pineapple habit- I can't continue to buy 6 per day anymore, even though I get them cheap at a farmer's market. It looks like all I can afford fruit-wise will be apples, with pineapples, grapes, oranges, and grapefruit only occationally. I can proably still get greens, seaweeds, nutritional yeast, shiitakes, and sundried tomatoes, but I am afraid that I will not feel well if sweet pineapple is no longer my staple. Do you think that I will feel less well if my daily menu changes to something like this:

8:00 breakfast: 4-6 apples
12:45 lunch: 4-6 apples
6:30 dinner: large dish of greens, some carrots or beets, tomatoes, sundried tomatoes, shiitakes, celery, and dressing made with 1/2 cup nutritional yeast, lemon or lime juice, and dulse flakes.

What if I had my seaweed soup for dinner? What if I start eating nuts, seeds, and/or avocados?
Please let me know.

Oh, and I am a 5 5", 110ish lb. female.

Hi Mallow,

I don't have a proper answer for you. You could try plugging in the food intake into fitday.com and see what the nutritional differences are and find a way to balance it.

You could also try to ease into your new diet regime and see how your body reacts.

Sorry about your financial situation. Personally, I eat what I can afford.

Good luck.
Therese

do you take the sagrada EVERY day? if so, why? it's a laxitive, useful for healing on occasion when needed but taking medicine when you are not sick isn't wise.

as for the diet, no one can tell you how it will affect you at all, that's entirely up to your physiology. try introducing new things one at a time and see how you feel. keep a food journal with your observations and try things again at different times to note the changes. you'll find a balance.

Hi mallow

Maybe drop the nutritional yeast.
Pre raw I had IBS for 15 years. I was constantly bloated, belive me I know how that feels!

Adding nutritional yeast to recipies will make me bloat.
It then takes several days for my system to settle, causing cravings, irritability, low energy etc.

I also have to be careful with dried spices.
I can get away with it if i use them sparingly.

I also food combine. If i dont it can sometimes lead to bloating.
Hope this helps

mallow, I can fully relate to your problem. My raw family of 2+2=4 eats lots. Managing our budget has been really hard. We all find that without fruit, life is not worth living ha ha. Well, seriously, other foods do not digest so well. Fruit seems to be the optimal food. We eat also greens and non-sweet fruit. I make some raw treats for the kids (cinnamon rolls and like), but this is not the staple. Not long ago, because of the money issue, I was serously considering inluding some cooked foods back into our diet, but after visualizing or tasting some of the stuff, I realized that I hated the idea. Cooked foods do not seem appealing anymore. Also, I considered lowering the amount of fruit that we eat. But, that would mean eating more fat, and I could not stand that either. In the end, I decided to try to minimize the budget under the constraints of eating a high fruit diet. That means shopping around and trying various options out. And, not buying the expensive stuff when there are better options around. And yes, I discovered that apples can fill me up AS LONG AS they are ripe and SWEET. Oranges are perfect too, very filling, again as long as they are SWEET. Basically, any sweet fruit is good as long as it is truly ripe and sweet. Anything else is a waste of money (unripe fruit makes me feel sick). So now, I make effort to buy within the budget, and make sure that there is enough sweet fruit to feed us. On the days when the budget is really low, I resort to less variety of fruit, and kids will eat more stuff like cinnamon rolls. When we have more money, then our kithcen is a fruit bonanza.

I really recommend that, if you can, you grow some of your fruit and greens. Perhaps a community garden? Greens in the pots? Also, options such as buying wholesale or local farmers markets can help. And, aren't bananas cheap where you live?

Some say that it is better to eat steamed vegies than high-fat raw foods. This may be true, but I tried steamed vegies and I am not very keen...

Also, I read that those who eat a high fruit diet, after some time experience that they are able to eat less than at the beginning. This can be explained by better digestion and hence utilization of nutrients. Hence, patterns such as eating the first meal as late as about noon, not eating late at night etc, are observed.

Gosia


RawGosia channel
RawGosia streams

Thank you all for your responces.

In reply to rawgosia, I am in college, living in the dorms, and thusly have no access to a garden. As far as bananas go, they make me feel unwell, even when I eat the spotted ones. They plug me up and make me feel bloaty.

I hope to hear from Bryan too, he usually has interesting information to share.

Could removing yest and dulse from your diet help at all? Maybe you can tweak your favorite recipe using something different?

Hi mallow,

Nutritional yeast is a cooked product. It is deactivated brewer's yeast that has been grown in molasses. Some nutritional yeasts are fortified with cyanocobalamin, an artificial B-12, that as part of its metabolism in your body creates cyanide, which is poisonous to you.

What you are craving in your favorite recipe is salt, probably from the wakame and the dulse flakes. Some sundried tomatoes sometime have added salt, though this is not always the case. If you took out all the ingredients that had salt in them, you will find that your soup is much less interesting.

Try eating more celery and tomatoes. Make sure your sundried tomatoes don't have added salt. Its funny, as tomatoes are pretty high in natural sodium and don't need added salt.

If I want a recipe to taste salty, I will use ground up sundried tomatoes to make them taste salty. Some people will dehydrate celery and grind it up in a coffee grinder to make a salt substitute.

I have a hard time with apples, they are a bit rough on my digestive system, and I wouldn't last very long with apples as my main fruit. Right now, in the winter, I am eating a lot of citrus: navel oranges, satsuma tangerines, orlando tangerines, nova tangerines, and a little later in the season honey tangerines and murcott tangerines. Later in the winter I like to eat mango, especially the ataulfo and the Madame Francique from Haiti.

To reduce bloating: cut down on fats, hard to digest raw greens (kale, hard, cruficerous), and increase easy to digest greens (lettuce, celery, spinach).

I hope this helps.

yikes, sounds really expensive! yummy but ouch in the wallet area for winter.

did you know that there is actually another taste group beyond sweet, salty, bitter, and sour? the japanese call it umami which means all over good mouth flavour. it can be tasted in kelp (which is where msg the infamous flavour enhancer comes from), parmesan and, you betcha, tomatoes. those things, when added to food, enhance the all over flavour like nothing else can because they belong to a taste group all their own. neat hey?
so, add those tomatoes. they boost flavour like crazy.