Mmmm! Cooked food tastes SOOOO GOOOD! :-)

Ok, so here's the deal ... I'm thinking of renaming this blog to "Blue Skies Within: The definitive guide to the 80/10/10 high fat raw vegan omnivore diet"! Tee hee hee! Well, that's been my wacky life in the last couple days anyway, and I need to find humor in the experience somewhere.

I think intellectually where I'm having a great deal of difficulty is that it seems to me that if this was going to help with my cravings that they should get less over time, not keep getting worse. It was not comfortable the first 3 or so days, but manageable; then my cravings subsided a bit; then, right around the time that my thyroid started getting worse, my cravings got worse. I think I was craving fat the most. Couldn't stomach the thought of fruit. It just wasn't satisfying me AT ALL. I've been eating loads of fatty things over the last few days and feeling really imbalanced, although I've been not quite as fried feeling since yesterday. Yet it seems to me a bit of a "which came first" scenario, where I can't tell how things are related to each other, if at all. Am I feeling imbalanced just because the thyroid is on its usual down-slope (unrelated at present to the diet), or is something with the diet making me feel more imbalanced because it's stimulating an already-over-stimulated immune system? Doug Graham says your system will never turn on itself like that if you're doing everything right, but I'm not so sure.

It could be that my thyroid is going to keep declining no matter what I do. I don't want to be pessimistic, and haven't necessarily accepted this as definite truth, but I think I have accepted it as possibility. I could live with that -- taking medicine every day -- if I could just ever feel normal again. Unfortunately, I question whether it's ever possible to feel normal if you have to rely on a once-or-more-a-day pill to do something your body should do intuitively.

One of my biggest inspirations on this path is Richard Blackman. I really want to get in great shape like he is. In fact, I got out my Practical Approach to Strength Training book (by Matt Brzycki) last weekend. It's an excellent excellent book that turned me on to strength training some years back (pre-raw) and enabled me to train my upper body for the first time in my life. Since having kids and having issues around pelvic instability (resulting in my knee injuries) I have not been strength training. But this weekend I reviewed that book and got a list of exercises I can do with my free weights and weight bench (stashed out-of-sight-out-of-mind in the attic for the last 4 years), and I'm anxious to get started.

Despite the dietary and health setback, I still managed to take up running this weekend. I've never been much of an endurance runner due to collapsed arches in my feet which take the spring out of my step, but I can manage shorter distances. Yesterday I put on my running shoes and ran about a mile, slow - ly, and it felt good. I think it may have helped somewhat with my energy, maybe because it stimulates the adrenals. I went again today, baby in stroller, and he giggled all the way.

I bought some raw cheese today. While I don't necessarily see that as an ideal food by any means, I'm wondering if I need to ease into this more. I really want to succeed at this long-term, but maybe I just can't handle doing things too rapidly. If I ate some cheese or some other kind of fat for the first few weeks or a month, maybe it wouldn't seem so drastic, and it wouldn't be the end of the world either. Pondering that ...