"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." - Michael Pollan

Well, my 30-day raw experiment is officially over and I thought I'd write a bit what I learned.

• Aside from day 4, eating only raw food makes me feel amazingly good.
  
• I felt full with about 500 fewer calories a day than I would normally eat.
• I am still not sure whether the above is due to the fact that the food is all raw (and the whole enzyme theory of digestion, etc) or just that eating only raw food forces one to eat whole foods. (Unlike vegetarian diets, there is not much - any? - raw junk food.)
  
• There are people out there on the raw diet who take it to scary & extreme measures. Thankfully, these are not the only raw foodies out there.
• I did not miss dairy products as I thought I would.
• I learned that my body adjusted quite quickly...and was quite clear that it did not take kindly to suddenly going back to heavy or fried foods.
• On the occasions when I would cheat, I found that the food I thought I was craving - things like pasta - did not taste as good as I thought they would.
• I *really* missed sweetened iced tea from Tijuana Flats. Drinking water there was *not* the same.
• It is impossible to stick to just eat raw without LOTS of planning & preparation. If I forgot to chop up veggies or stop at the grocery store one day, it would throw things completely off since there's nothing in the vending machine or even at the cafeteria at work to eat. (Seriously! Pre-made salads - all with cooked chicken - and orange juice were my only options!)
  
• It is impossible to eat a raw diet on a business trip to Birmingham, AL. (The restaurants we were taken to there did not seem to be familiar with the concept of *raw* vegetables. Fried, sauteed - yes. One person actually told me that eating raw vegetables was dangerous due to all the bacteria.)
  
• It is hard to socialize with friends, family & co-workers and eat only raw food. I felt very difficult and found myself spending whole meals trying to explain the concept. The other alternative was to just eat "normally" (or as the raw foodists call it the Standard American Diet - aka "SAD") and suffer the inevitable consequences. (see #6)
• I really like the green smoothies that the raw foodists all rave about but I thought sounded a bit disgusting when I first heard of them. I avoided them for the first week and finally gave in and tried one. Even things I thought would taste nasty in a fruit smoothie (greens, etc) only neutralize the sweetness a bit. Smoothies of just greens are amazingly refreshing (and a good antidote to heavy food lapses).
• A lot of people told me that eating raw could not be healthy since there are limited sources of protein (pretty much raw nuts, sprouted beans and possibly sashimi). However, I found that I didn't seem to have problems I would normally associate with insufficient protein. My energy level seemed to stay constant (I expected to have more ups & downs due to all the sugars in the fruits) and when I gave blood about 2 wks in, my iron was higher than it normally is.
  
• My cholesterol level was about 50 pts lower than my average.
• I did *not* drastically drop pounds but noticed that my face was thinner and clothes fit better.
  
• I like oatmeal better raw. I soak it overnight in the fridge and eat it cold with lots of sliced berries or honey. Really quite good.
• I have become much more conscious of just how processed everything is! I knew this before - intellectually - but spending so much time scouring menus for *something* I could eat made me realize just how pervasive un-food is!
• I learned to differentiate a bit between what my body is craving and what my mind is craving (usually connected to associations rather than actual needs).
• I discovered that physically it's not difficult at all and makes me feel really good to eat 100% raw.
• It costs too much for me to do full-time in terms of stress (finding time to do all the preparation involved) and guilt, particularly when hanging out with friends (either for being "that person" or for not sticking to my diet).
  

I would like to try to go completely raw again sometime and stick to it 100% for a full 30 days just to see if you really reach the nirvana of weight loss, clear thinking and muscle definition claimed by the hard-core raw foodists but for now, I plan to return to being "flexitarian" and simply try to get 70-80% of my calories from raw food.

U2 in Boston!

Just found out that we got tix to see U2 in Boston in September! Pauline & I are going up to stay with Amy in Southie, no less. All Irish weekend, can't wait!

More good news - day 3 with Romeo out during the day with no problems! Good week so far.

I am feeling overwhelmed right about now. Came home to find that Romeo had done his best to escape from the bathroom as well. Bathroom floor & walls peppered with black dog hair and paint chips and pools of water everywhere. Door and door jamb all scratched up. It looks as though he becomes frenzied and was throwing himself around. What am I going to do with this dog?

To add to all of this, I took them to the new dog park thinking to at least give them some real play time before going out to dinner with Lantie. Fine for a while but then this annoying little dog started barking like mad at Roxy and would not stop. She finally got fed up and got into a little tiff with him. So I pulled her off, no damage done and took her outside the park to "cool off" for a bit. I returned to the big dog park just as two girls walked up with their dog. They were following us in but of course the annoying barking dog was right on top of us and squeezed his way out in between us. The owner starts yelling at me because his stupid dog has escaped. (Not far, he managed to catch the dog about 2' outside the gate.) It is a stupid set up for a dog park. Every other one I've ever been to has a staging area of sorts where you put on/take off leashes and generally just prevents that same scenario from happening but still, he was very rude - which I guess I should've expected after the rude behavior from his dog!

I promptly left the park and on the way home started crying. I know it's most likely just a cumulative reaction to the sleepless week, time stresses, worrying about Romeo, etc but still, it made me even more angry with myself that I let that stupid jerk's behavior get to me like that.

So now I have no idea what to do tonight with Romeo. Should I call & cancel? I would feel like a torturer leaving him in the bathroom again (not to mention the further damage to the door). I guess it'll have to be the crate since at least he only seems to scratch his nose there. Hopefully I won't be gone long enough to cause a problem tonight.

"Weekends are like rainbows. They look good from a distance but disappear once you get close to them." - John Shirley

Only a few hours (or 2 meetings, depending on how you look at it) to go until the weekend begins! Tonight I am meeting up with Lantie (my best friend from school days) who is over in St. Pete for a medical conference. I'm a little stressed contemplating the logistics (ok, if i leave work at 5:30, get home around 6:30, walk dogs, then drive back over to St Pete - what time do I say we should meet up for dinner? Is 7:30 wishful thinking? 8:00 is more realistic but seems too late to suggest. Should I try to leave work early to make it? and so on) but I am really looking forward to seeing her. It's been a long time since we've had a chance to do more than make small talk and I am looking forward to real soul-to-soul conversations.

The rest of the weekend isn't looking quite so exciting. Major cleaning is on the agenda since it looks like I will have company visiting for the next 3 weekends after that (!). The northerners must be getting to that "fed up with winter" time of year since they are all calling with Florida plans!

Dog Days

It has been one of those weeks. Not sleeping well (if at all) the last couple nights - maybe worrying about what to do with Romeo who seems to have developed full-on separation anxiety somewhere along the way. After paying $27 to the Hillsborough County Library for a book I didn't really enjoy anyway and losing several items of clothing along the way (random socks, a sandal), I started keeping him confined to the bedroom, making sure to do a sweep to remove anything that seemed to be even remotely chewable. This seemed to work for a few weeks until the day I came home to find my bedskirt & mattress cover in shreds (luckily the mattress itself was spared). So on the advice of numerous books & Kathy (the trainer I take them too), I broke down and purchased a crate.

They technically have a crate already and I *know* that dogs do not feel the same about crates as I do/would...but it's one thing, in my mind, to have a safe space available for them to hide and another altogether to confine a dog for multiple hours - especially given the typical length of my work days. But Kathy assured me that this is temporary and once he believes that this is his home (she says it usually takes a year before they fully regain their confidence), I should be able to dispense with the crate altogether. So I purchased an extra-large one wire one, supposedly indestructible, even for GSDs, and began crating him. For a while, all went well. He likes the crate and even goes in there at other times to chill out or gnaw on bones.

Then last week, there were several harbingers: first i noticed the water bottle dislodged from the holder two days and then came home last Thursday to find the bed in the crate all torn up. (I have noticed that he is worse on Mondays & Thursdays so am wondering if his fears are connected to the garbage truck?)

Then this week, Romeo discovered a way to break out of the indestructible crate entirely. I am assuming that either the GSDs cited in the reviews were older, calmer dogs or that they had only tried to chew through the crate. At first I couldn't even figure out how he was getting out because to all appearances, the doors are all closed and the crate appears intact. Then I realized that he is maneuvering it so that the elaborate hooks, etc are detached until he gets a corner worked loose that he can squeeze through. Genius.

So far this has been the extent of his endeavors, and aside from a very scratched up nose on his part, there haven't been any casualties but I fear the day that he adds back the random destruction of household objects to his routine.

Today I tried reinforcing the crate joins with picture frame wire. We'll see how Houdini does with that one!