Day 15: Into the wild

I'll be out of the blogosphere for a few days while I go attempt to rest and recuperate in Lake Tahoe with my family. It should be fun, although I won't have the spousal support in dealing with the little guys (he's still in Texas: Sarah, would you guys stop using so much water so he can come home??). The kids will get to see real snow for the first time (I think), and I'm looking forward to that.

I'm getting my food all packed. Went to Berkeley Bowl yesterday and bought about half the red bananas on the shelf, plus I noticed they were selling "cut stem" yellow bananas for $.49/lb, so I bought a bunch of those too. I wonder what people think as I go through checkout with 80 bananas!

This will, I hope anyway, be one of my first successful escapades in traveling while raw. In the past, with my love of travel and restaurants, I have always, ALWAYS, without fail, failed to continue a raw food diet while traveling. This will be uncharted territory.

I haven't always been eating as much at meals lately, and have had some cravings as a result, but haven't really been fully tempted by them. I've just sometimes felt, "I wish I didn't have to do this," but never the thought, "Let's do something different!" It's not always comfortable, but I don't feel threatened at all. As to why I haven't been eating as much, it's partially boredom, and partially the fact that the need for bathrooms makes me have to plan ahead, so sometimes I stall eating longer than I should.

Marjorie posted an explanation from Dr. D to the peeing phenomenon on my comments the other day: "Basically, you are losing brine from all of those years of eating salt. AND as you lose fat, you'll also lose the water that was stored in your adipose tissue. And the diet is high water content, too. So, the answer is, you won't pee like a racehorse forever, but you will pee more than the average dehydrated SAD [standard American diet] eater." Great! I could eat cardboard all day and already do that. Hopefully it will settle down soon. I'll keep you posted. Thanks for the explanation, Marjorie! :-)

Yesterday I got invited to a Friday evening dinner on January 4th, pre-yoga-competition on the 5th. At first I declined, but then had second thoughts. My studio is going to pay for a hotel room for me down there, and I really think it will be a fun opportunity to meet others who are really into this yoga thing I love. I thought about it awhile, then called back to confirm. I don't want to miss out on life opportunities because I have this super strict diet. The dinner is supposed to be a buffet. Hopefully they will have a salad I can eat. I'll eat in advance and bring an avocado and hope for the best. I may try to get contact info and call down there to get more details next week.

It's things such as this where I find this diet super annoying, but I'm not sure what to do about that except just try to work around it as best I can. I was speaking to my friend Ela yesterday and she said that truthfully it's not about what you do on one occasion, but what you do every day, that counts, and I think that's true. But unfortunately at this point I can't "just have one meal" because that would turn into another 6 months of indulgence and put me back at square one. At least that's what previous experience tells me. So for now I have to stick to the straight and narrow as best I can. Especially the night before a competition after a month on low fat raw food, I bet my body would rebel something fierce if I tried to go too crazy. Yet still, I don't know what the outcome of that night will be, but I wanted to take the risk, because the payoff seemed good enough. If anyone else out there has experience with this type of thing -- how the heck do YOU deal with it??? -- I'd be happy to hear.

Many blessings over the next few days!

Weekly Numbers:
Weight: 111.4 (-7.6)
Body Fat % (according to the Tanita scale): 21.7% (-1.8%)
Hydration (according to the scale): 53.6% (+.9%)