[Rose of Cairo]

What I'm currently doing is this: I make sure that I always have several sorts of greens at home. At least two or three sorts of lettuce, spinach and rocket. I wash them immediately when I buy them, and store them in the fridge. They are the base for all my meals.

I have two meals a day. Meal one is some fruit plus a salad with these greens. Which fruit that is varies depending on my mood, what my body craves and what I have at home. I just eat the fruit in its entire form in my hand. As for the salad, since the greens are already washed, I just grab a bunch of rocket, a bunch of mixed lettuce, a bunch of spinach, throw everything in a bowl and that's it. Preparation time: two minutes.

Meal 2 is either some veggies like a pound of peas or a carott salad, plus the same base greens salad, or it's only a big salad made of the base greens salad to which I just add whatever it is that I feel like eating or have in the fridge: fennel, nuts, seeds, an apple, sprouts, more greens like field salad or dandelions, bell pepper, tomato, cucumber, celery... Preparation time is a bit more when I have a big salad, but it's not much either.

This works fine for me. I don't get bored of these many salads and since they are very different every day I think it's fairly balanced. But that's just me. Maybe you'd need something completely different.

Steve, you need to let go of your need for controling this with your mind. Deciding what to eat by thinking about it is highly ineffective. You're not as smart as your body when it comes to that. Figuring out what to eat shouldn't be a cognitive burden, but rather a matter of listening to what your body wants. When you're hungry, or when you go shopping, just let go of all control and simply feel deep inside of you what foods you are attracted to in the present moment.

Who says you have to eat "balanced"? If you listen to your body, there's nothing wrong with repetitively eating the same foods. Maybe that's what your body needs now. The point is just that what you eat repetitively must be what your body really needs, not something that you chose out of intellectual reasons like productivity or some theory.

In the 12 steps to raw foods book, Victoria Boutenko writes that her son Sergei, shortly after going raw, was eating tons and tons of mangos and blueberries every day. Not very balanced that! Then a physician told her which nutrients Sergei needed in order to help him overcome his diabetes. Turns out that exactly these nutrients are found in mangos and blueberries...