Diet Update

Eating cooked food on January 31st after 30 days of 100% raw foods didn’t go well for me. As I posted in the Day 31 update, I was feeling poorly with a mild fever by the end of the day. I could barely sleep at all that night, and the next day my fever spiked to 103.2. I felt totally dilapidated and nauseous and stayed in bed most of the day. The only foods I ate were an apple, 2 clementines, and 2 bananas (about 370 calories).

The next day (Feb 2nd) I felt a little better. My fever dropped but was still over 100. I also had headaches cutting in and out. I ate mostly raw fruit that day, but it wasn’t much because I had no appetite. I was constantly thirsty and drank many glasses of water, but it didn’t quench my thirst as well as the fruit did.

I didn’t take any medicine because I know from experience that I recover from illness faster when I let my body heal itself. Drugging myself to suppress the symptoms only prolongs the illness and won’t improve the underlying condition.

Last night my fever finally broke, and my temperature is back down to 98.8. I have a mild sore throat.

It’s been 3 days since I ate a cooked meal that included less than one clove of garlic, and my body still reeks of it. I woke up this morning covered in garlic sweat and tasting garlic breath. I couldn’t stand the stench of myself and quickly hopped in the shower. Even after a light all-fruit breakfast, I can still taste garlic on my breath.

I gained a pound after my cooked food day, but due to this illness, I lost 5 pounds back, so I’m down another 4 pounds from the end of my original 30-day trial, 12 pounds since the start of the year. Some of that is probably due to dehydration and having very little food in me.

I’m feeling better physically now, but I’m still mentally foggy, so I hope this update is semi-coherent. I’ll try to eat more food today, but I’m not feeling very motivated to eat. For breakfast I ate an Asian pear, a banana, and some grapes. That was all I could stomach.

The dry skin on my fingers seems to be getting better, albeit very slowly. Most of the cuts have completely healed now, and the dry skin is starting to flake off and reveal healthy-looking skin underneath. My hands are looking younger than they did a week ago. I’m not sure if this is because I ate some cooked food or because I ate more fat or because I’ve been rubbing some coconut oil on my hands for the past few days. Or maybe it was just a matter of time.

It’s not at all uncommon for people to have a negative reaction to cooked food after going raw for a while. I thought it wouldn’t happen to me because this was my 5th raw trial, and I never had such problems in the past when I returned to cooked food. But on my previous trials, I was including a lot more fat, dried fruits, dehydrated foods, onions, garlic, spices, hot peppers, oils, and other items I cut out for this recent trial. That seems to have made a big difference.

I find myself much less attracted to cooked food now vs. a week ago. I feel very drawn to keep eating fresh fruit. I’m actually a little turned off by bananas and attracted to juicier fruits like grapes, watermelon, Asian pears, cherries, and berries. Bananas seem too dry and pasty right now unless I blend them into a smoothie. Maybe it’s because I’m dehydrated from the fever. I notice the juicy fruits quench my thirst in ways that no amount of water can. I can down a large glass of water, and I’m still thirsty a minute later. But when I eat some juicy fruit, the thirst is finally satisfied.

I ate some popcorn yesterday, and on one level it tasted about the same as I remembered. But it also seemed like something was missing. It was so incredibly dry and just sucked the moisture out of my body. The experience of eating the popcorn was incomplete. It satisfied my taste buds but nothing more. It didn’t give me the same kind of deep satisfaction my body gets from fresh fruit.

I think my body went through some subtle changes during the course of this trial that were too gradual for me to notice until now. Despite the illness I’m glad I ate some cooked food again because it gave me a new perspective. The thought of going without cooked food doesn’t seem as big a deal as once did. I’m still coming to terms with what that means, so I can’t say for sure what I’ll do next. I’m going to have to take it one day at a time. Right now I don’t want to eat anything but juicy fruit.

I also want to see what it’s like to go a few days on the low-fat raw diet without the detailed measuring and reporting I was doing. That extra work may have negatively skewed my impressions of the diet.

I’m going to head to Costco soon and restock my fruit collection.

I’ll be sure to post an update down the road to let you know how I’m doing. I plan to get the 30-day trial postmortem online for Monday, assuming this fog of brain doesn’t get any worse.