Personal Development for Smart People^TM

Today was good overall, although I ate a couple ounces of walnuts this morning and then got really drowsy a few hours later. A short nap restored me completely. Walnuts didn’t have that kind of effect on me before this trial.

For a change of scenery, this morning I went to the Strip to do some writing. I typically enjoy writing in public places where lots of people are roaming about, but this time I found it very distracting and left early. It felt uncomfortable for some reason. I’m not really sure why. I brought lots of fruit with me, but I only ate a couple of bananas and an apple during this time.

At lunch time I came really close to quitting and eating some cooked food. With only 36 hours left in the trial, I didn’t expect any major revelations to happen that would influence me to continue beyond day 30. I figured the only reason to continue at this point is just the satisfaction of finishing the whole 30 days instead of stopping at 28-1/2. I gave it some thought and decided to finish off the full 30 for one particular reason: Completing the final day and a half will be good exercise for my self-discipline muscles.

Every time you successfully complete a 30-day trial, even if the final result is that you choose not to continue beyond that point, it builds your discipline and makes it easier to take on more challenging trials. If I attempted this trial ten years ago, there’s no way I’d have made it this far. My willpower would have been too weak to push through the resistance.

The fact that I’ve finished 29 days and still feel a lot of daily resistance tells me this particular diet isn’t right for me, at least not right now. Whenever I’ve made permanent habit changes, such as going vegan and vegetarian, the resistance was all but gone after the first week. After 30 days of those trials, I knew I’d found something that would stick.

Dry Skin

Here’s a photo showing some of the fingers on my right hand that are still swollen at the joints and plagued with dry, cracked skin. There’s a cut on my middle finger that keeps splitting open and bleeding a little. It appeared about 2 weeks ago when the skin cracked from excessive dryness, and it just isn’t healing properly. You may also notice a small horizontal cut on the joint of my ring finger that is very slow to heal as well. The fingers on my left hand don’t look much better.

I’m still experiencing a lot of itchiness too all over my body too. Hopefully my skin will return to normal after this trial.

I didn’t have any skin problems during my early raw food trials, all of which had a significantly higher fat intake, so this problem appears unique to the low-fat version of this diet.

Hunger

During the past few days, I’ve been feeling much hungrier. I used to eat about 2,000 calories/day before this trial. Now I’m pushing 2,500-3,000, and I still feel hungry often. I’m not pushing myself to eat a certain number of calories — I just eat based on appetite. If I pushed myself to eat more, I could easily surpass 3,500 calories/day.

Having to eat so much food has gotten pretty annoying. Eating is basically my second career. Even if there were some impressive long-term health benefits, having to sacrifice more time to food prep and eating doesn’t seem like a great trade based on my experience thus far. I’d rather eat smaller, less frequent meals and get more work done.

Weight Loss

My weight went up 0.4 pounds to 178.4. Net weight loss is 7.6 pounds in 28 days. I weighed this same amount 10 days ago, so it certainly appears the weight loss has stalled.

Breakfast

1. green smoothie: 4 bananas (448g), spinach (80g), 1 cup water
2. celery (60g)

426 calories, 2g fat, 107g carb, 8g protein

Morning Snack

1. 5 bananas (670g)
2. Fuji apple (212g)
3. 2 oz walnuts (56g)

1073 calories, 39g fat, 190g carb, 16g protein

Lunch

1 small watermelon (876g)

263 calories, 1g fat, 66g carb, 5g protein

Afternoon Snack

green smoothie: 4 bananas (476g), spinach (102g), 1 cup water

447 calories, 2g fat, 112g carb, 8g protein

Dinner

1. green smoothie: 4 bananas (396g), spinach (104g), 1 cup water
2. blueberries (272g)
3. blackberries (182g)

610 calories, 4g fat, 151g carb, 12g protein

Evening Snack

okra (76g)

24 calories, 0g fat, 5g carb, 2g protein

Daily Summary

2841 calories, 48g fat, 632g carb, 51g protein

317mg sodium, 90g fiber, 360g sugar

14% of calories from fat, 6% from protein, 80% from carbs

I had an interesting conversation with Erin about an idea for a different kind of dietary trial — eating all my favorite foods, regardless of nutritional considerations. In other words I’d eat like I was in a lucid dream and could conjure up whatever foods I wanted. For me this would be some variation of the vegan diet, since I don’t look upon non-vegan items as food anyway, not even in my dreams. I’m curious what would happen if I stopped looking to food as a source of health and aimed to simply create health from within, regardless of what I ate.

One pattern I’ve seen again and again in successful long-term raw foodists is that they don’t have to force themselves to eat raw. They eat raw because their favorite foods happen to be raw, so they’re simply eating what they like best. That’s exactly what happened when I went vegetarian and then vegan — I dropped the foods I wasn’t particularly attached to anyway and started eating more of the foods I liked better. But that didn’t happen with this raw trial; in this case I stopped eating a lot of foods I liked and began eating more foods I wasn’t as fond of, ostensibly in the quest for better health. Now I wonder what will happen if I test the opposite extreme.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Goals & Goal Setting, Health, Personal Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.