Thank you for the post Steve. It is very helpful that you describe all your experiences and research in as much depth as a blog post allows. It will be good to hear some details about how the trial progresses over the next month and its good, bad and ugly parts - perhaps in short regular logs on the food eaten and the experience, followed by one or more proper blog entries evaluating the experiment.
I have done some raw and non-raw food tests, and a low fat raw diet did feel amazing for a short time. It was very difficult to get calories on it and I had to fall back on boiled potatoes, bread, legumes, etc.
The experience from my tests indicate that my personal optimum is somewhere along the lines of the 80/10/10 diet - so I would gladly join the experiment of figuring a raw diet that can work in the long term.
One thing I found missing in the post was what the plan for things to eat is - the rules were mostly about what what was not to be eaten. However calories, fats, proteins (even if much less than most believe) and micronutrients have to come from somewhere. My first step into starting the diet would be to make a good plan about what is to be eaten and where all the essential nutrients will come from - a rich non-exclusive list of what the diet will consist of. It is good to have ready variety of answers when hunger strikes and another kilo of bananas feels like just too much. Also we are trying to switch to eating the best possible food, rather than limit ourselves from the poorer food we are currently eating (see ps)
I will take a bit of time to make the list of foods and decide on the approaches and will post them then.
Cheers
PS. On a side note - When doing a change in habits I have found that it is much more effective to thinking in terms of what you begin to do and its good effects rather than you are quitting or limiting yourself from. An example for smoking would be that you begin non-smoking instead of quitting smoking. I think that your mind in this approach is focused on the new experience and its benefits and is working on making them a habit. In the other scenario, when you focus on the old habit and trying to force-quit it, the very focusing on it is counterproductive as it activates the mental schemes related to the habit (doing it and getting something from it) which is the opposite of the final effect that you are pursuing - deactivating them.
Any habit - even the obviously self-destructive ones have benefits, otherwise they wouldn't be attractive at all. As one wouldn't give up something that has benefits, the best way I have found for dealing with this is to become aware on a deep level of the greater benefits that the habit gets in the way of. There must of course be such greater benefits, or one wouldn't feel a need to discontinue the habit in the first place.
... a ps that became longer than the rest...
