30 Day Experiment

So, yes, I'm going to incorporate a lot of raw fruits and veggies into my eating for 30 days and see how I do. Here's what I decided so far...

1. I don't have a juicer but I do have a blender, so I'll blend one fruit smoothie and one green smoothie per day, and the other food will be straight up veg and fruit eaten whole.

2. The exceptions to this will be fish, if I feel like I need it, cooked light. If I really crave protein, I'll eat a couple bites of something lean like steak.

3. The only real cooked food besides the fish will be bone/meat/veggie broth homemade, if I feel I need it. I'll never stray very far from the Weston A. Price thoughts on the benefits of these. Bone broth has had a very soothing effect on my joints and any aches. Oh, and I will use some of that 100% juice cranberry juice from the store, which I'm sure has been heated before bottling, but so far I'm using it to moisten the fruit before blending into smoothies.

4. No preservatives.

5. If wilting a green or dehydrating some pureed veggies makes it more palatable, I'm likely to try that.

6. Haven't decided yet if I'll take a once-a-week break and have a shabbat meal with whatever I want (as long as nothing processed). I'll figure that out by this Friday, but if I do it, it won't count as one of the 30 days.

7. I'm trying to keep it 80% raw. I'll guesstimate the percentages. I'm a firm believer that some foods simply are easier for our bodies to assimilate and absorb nutritionally when cooked. A good example are some tropical tubers and greens, which often have concentrations of things that would act as poisons if not cooked and drained first. But for now I'm choosing foods I know are fine without cooking, because I want to nutritionally pamper myself and regain all my old energy back. I'm looking to lose weight as a result, but that's not my sole motivation in doing this.

8. I will track the way I feel and if I lose any weight.

9. Drinks will be water, lemon-and-stevia or lime-and-stevia ades, tea, and herbal teas. Mostly water, though.

10. I'll be trying to figure out Florida again, to find which of these things would actually be grown during this season. I know I don't have it together enough right now to adhere to the best practices in tracking down solely local and in-season produce. That's my ultimate goal in how we should eat. But baby steps. For now I need to educate my body to want a range of greens (I feel sure we have those here year round) and to a much greater degree...and raw foods, which I almost never ate at all.

11. Fats are nuts, avocados, olive oil, flax seed and flax seed oil, seeds.

12. No restrictions on quantities, but striving for balance and staying active.

13. I'll stay on my regular meds, the hyaluronic acid supplement, and an after-shower refresher of spritzing with some water with tea tree oil drops added in before toweling off. That should help mitigate cleanliness as my body detoxes via my skin.

What can we use from what we have growing in Bucketville?

We don't have any standard crops growing right now, mainly due to my sucky illness that lasted so long. But we do have some non-standards ones that I can't wait to use daily, namely the Moringa and the Cranberry Hibiscus (using the leaves of each). Moringa leaves are supposed to be a nutritional powerhouse rich in so many things it would take a paragraph to list, and also high in protein....and we sure have plenty of those growing on the lot next door, hooray! The cranberry hibiscus has a bright lemony flavor and gorgeous magenta color with of course nutritional benefits of its own, so I'll use it in smoothies along with other players, and I'll blend it to include in the Stevia limeade or lemonades. I'll explore tomorrow to see what herbs and plants are still looking good enough to harvest and add to this list as I go. Even without a standard late garden, we still have about 11 tropical pumpkins/calabazas I can utilize.

I'll keep my thinking cap on, and I really need to study a planting chart again, because I still can't always get my head around when to begin things here...it's still very strange to think of growing things in the winter. But I'm not complaining!

I'll talk tomatoes in my next post, maybe. I've made a short list of the easiest things we've grown so far for this climate, and since next year may be full of this and that, I want to have the basics planned out in case we can't get more ambitious with the garden while busy. I still want us to have a nice rotation, still using the buckets for the baby plants. I'll take some pics soon, as there's a really big difference in the soil since two years ago before manure and compost applications.

All that later.

Oh, and I'm keeping the 30 day raw experiment details here...Raw Green Blender Queen

Let's see how this goes!