This weeks weigh in was a day late after a hectic Friday that left me battered, shattered and exhausted. Lost 3 lbs though (which is great after last weeks plateau). I need to drink more water though.

This weeks choice of the week, “Start with Water”.

That means whenever I am thirsty I will start by having a glass of water. If I am still thirty within an hour THEN I will have a juice or a smoothie. That should give me plenty of water.

For those of you who are not aware of Debbie McCormick Garners blog over at Vegan Family Style now would be a good time to go and check it out.

After giving it rave reviews Debbie, a certified Raw Food Chef with a family of 9, is giving away a copy of “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World” by Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero.

So if you want a chance to win 75 Dairy Free Recipe’s for Cupcakes That Rule head on over to the competition page by following this link, or the one above.

Good Luck

This one is pure decadence in a glass.

• 1 Cup Macadamia Nuts, soaked for at least 1 hour.
• 3 Cups Water
• 1 Vanilla Pod
• 2 Tbsp Agave Nectar

Blend everything together, then strain through a fine sieve, cheesecloth or sprouting bag.

This rich and creamy nutmilk I my new favourite. Cant wait to try it out in my MacPeach Smoothie for smoothieoftheday.com later on.

Almost without exception the first words I hear ,when I tell people that my diet contains as much organic fruit, veggies, nuts etc as I can get my hands on, are “but its so expensive”.

It seems to me that everyone is missing the point.

Is it because for the last 18 months of my life its no longer about the money that I see anything that goes IN my body as more of an investment than what goes ON my body?

Think about it for a minute, most people have no problem spending $100 on a pair of trainers that go ON their feet, or several hundred dollars on a big screen TV, or an excessive amount on a bottle of shampoo that has ylang ylang and essence of beaver nipple, right? So why are we happy to eat a dollars worth of fast food that actually goes IN TO our bodies solely because its cheap?

It doesn’t help that you can buy two or three cheeseburgers for the cost of a head of lettuce. It doesn’t help that virtually all the readily available convenient foods are more about making the company money than providing healthy nutrition.

Convenience foods may require us to part with less cash but its the other costs we should be more aware of. The cost to our health, the cost to our environment, the social cost of the production practices and ultimately the cost to the plants and animals as individual species that are hurtling towards extinction in their natural form as they get genetically modified to meet the demand that has been created.

Organic food may cost more financially but that is the only area in which the cost is high. Once you realise that its not all about the money, can you really afford not to eat organically?

Just posted the results of the second weigh in and all my numbers are moving in the right direction.

• Weight DOWN 2 1/2lbs
• Body Fat DOWN 2 points
• Total Body Water UP 2 1/2%

Ingredients

• 2 cups oats
• 1/2 cup Pecans
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1 tsp cinammon

Method

1. Using a food processor pulse the oats until finely crushed then transfer to a large mixing bowl.
2. Put the Pecans into the food processor and pulse until coarsely chopped.
3. Add the coarsely chopped Pecans, the cinammon and the raisins to the bowl with the oats and mix thoroughly.
4. Pour the maple syrup into the bowl and mix everything well until thoroughly coated.
5. Spread the mix evenly on a sheet to about 1/2″ thickness. Score according to whatever size you would like your cookies then place the tray in your dehydrator for 10-12 hours. If you want a crispier cookie dehydrate them for longer.

Nut milks have become the liquid staple for my uncooked diet, especially in smoothies. If you look at the smoothie recipe’s I post over at smoothieoftheday.com you will see that along with banana’s, nut milks are present in most of my smoothies.

Nut milks are simplicity themselves to make requiring two steps at most to create.

Step one: Place ingredients in blender and blend.

Step two: Strain into a suitable container.

Over the coming weeks I will be making many kind of nut milks from a variety of recipe’s and sharing them all with you, along with my comments on which ones I feel are best and why.

Well hopefully the most painful part is over. I have just posted the starting weigh-in here. The Christmas Holidays and the accompanying lapse in good diet put about 5lbs back on of the 10+ lbs that I had lost since going 90% raw.

This year though, I have chosen to go 100% raw. Previously my transgressions had been, in my opinion fairly small, the milk and sugar in my coffee, a taster of what I had cooked for my son, the occasional slice of pizza on a Friday night as part of our take-out-and-movie routine.

But no more.

While I will still be cooking for my son I am also trying to educate him into a better diet. Part of that will be switching to eating 100% organic when at home. Also we’ll be staying away from fast food chains whenever we eat out. With any luck he will start to notice the difference in the food that he eats and maybe even up his commitment from1 raw meal a week to 2, then 3 and so on.

So the first weigh in is done, it wasn’t as hard to go public with as I thought it might be. The numbers are higher than I would have liked to show people but it will just serve to show what can be achieved. For now I’m off to create a delicious raw lupper (Lunch/sUPPER = LUPPER).

Since hearing I’ve gone raw a lot of people have asked me why. On one hand its hard to explain and on the other its incredibly simple.

My decision to switch to a raw vegan diet was as a result of a number of things. lots of little pointers were cropping up in my life and one day I noticed them. That was the day that I actually decided to switch to a raw diet.

So what were the signs?

Well my weight was one sign that my diet wasn’t what it should be. But that was a sign that I had been ignoring every day for the last ten years as it slowly crept up on me in plain sight. What made me notice that sign though was when i weighed myself and for the first time passed 250 lbs. I’ve always been big and people had always acted surprised when I said what I weighed, even before I got to 250 so I just guessed I “carried it well” and didn’t look that bad for someone who’s 5′10″ and over 200 lbs.

The second sign and really the first one that prompted any sort of dietary change was heartburn. I started getting terrible heartburn. Initially I put it down to chocolate as it always seemed to happen after that Kit Kat Chunky that was a Friday night ritual. So I stopped eating chocolate, mostly, And the heartburn went away for a while. Then it came back. At this time I was also drinking lots of milk. I’ve always loved milk. As a kid my mother would tell me it would be cheaper for them to just buy the cow I drank that much. But I was growing then so it made sense. Then I was browsing RidiculouslyExtraordinary.com one day and cam across a link to this article all about how we shouldn’t be drinking so much milk. So I gave up drinking milk (at least outside of coffee) and my heartburn went away, and didnt come back.

One of the other benefits of giving up milk was the great improvement in the digestion of my food.

Coming across Karol Gajda’s blog at RidiculouslyExtraordinary.com was another little sign. Karol, as well as being a really cool guy, is a Vegan. His reasons for veganism are respect for animals and respect for his body. While my attitude to animals is different from Karol’s, it did prompt me to examine that attitude. For the longest time I have been disgruntled with the quality fo the meat that we eat. Chicken from the local supermarket typically looks like it died in a knife fight. Growth hormones, antibiotics and god knows what is a fairly typical part of every unorganic animal than is commercially farmed and ends up on our plate. Is it a coincidence that our young children are developed much further physically than we were at their ages? Then there is the environment in which commercially farmed animals are kept. There’s lots of press about fluffy animal hunts and elephant poaching but the bred-for-food brigade get very little press when it comes to animal cruelty. I upset more than a few people in Facebook when I made a comment on an anti-seal hunt post that someone made about ugly animals needing help too.

The final straw was an email I got from an EFT group I subscribe to. It was a typical marketing-centric email that I get all the time and normally bin but this one I read. It contained a link to a trailer for Raw in 30 days. For those who haven’t seen it the documentary follows 6 Diabetic Americans who followed a raw vegan diet for 30 days and were essentially cured of their diabetes. I ordered the video right away and while I waited for it to turn up I read the whole host of ebook freebies that typically get thrown in to the deal to sway the undecideds.

I couldn’t put them down. I thought raw food was salad and fruit. I though if I went raw that’s all I would have to look forward to, but instead I found all these gorgeous new foods with stuff that I had never heard of. I was originally going to wait until I ate the groceries I’d bought two days earlier but then realised I would just buy more of the same crap and never do anything to change my ways. That was the day I started my raw uncooked journey. Despite planning to go 100% raw from day one the first few weeks were probably 90-95% raw. I still had my morning coffee, with milk and sugar and now and again I would swipe a forkful or two of whatever I cooked my son. And once a month we would have a pizza. Other than that my diet is smoothies, salads, nut milks, flax krackers, dips, pate’s and “ice cream”. I use the term ice cream loosely because it cant get the cream part right yet, but I will.

As a result of the changes in my diet I have lost weight, I need less sleep, I am more alert and I feel generally great.

Because my change was a personal choice and not down to any certain conviction or a health concern I feel free to do whatever I want on it. If I want to “cheat” then I do, but to be honest I would rather eat my food 99% of the time than anything I used to eat.

I am now excited about the food I eat and spend more time thinking up recipes and trying new things than ever before. Its that enthusiasm that has helped me change my lifestyle and its that enthusiasm that is making this whole process, for me at least, an incredibly easy one.

Amongst my Christmas gifts this year were a raw cookbook, a sprouting kit and a set of bathroom scales. The scales apparently can tell my weight, my percentage of body fat and my percentage of body water.

Pretty cool huh?

Well I set them up and tested them and they say that I’ve lost another 8lbs since becoming 95% raw.

But in order to show everyone just how effective and easy the uncooked diet is I have decided to go public. I will step gingerly onto the scales on New Years Day and publish the results. New Years Day will also be the start of my going 100% uncooked. No more “taste testing” the stuff I cook for my son, no more “Large Double Doubles” on the way to a service call, and no more guilt free cheats either.

Every Friday I will weigh in, publish the results and post about how the week has gone. You can find out what I’ve eaten, you can of course see which smoothies I’ve had over at smoothieoftheday.com and I will also let you know about any other import things that come up.

The idea is that anyone interested in following an uncooked diet will get a warts and all progress report on just how its done. See how much weight I lose, what I eat and what I do for exercise. There really will be nothing hidden, and if you have any questions, as always just ask and I will do my best to answer them.