Sunday, November 30, 2008

The wheels of change

The wheels have slowly started their rotational journey bringing my life onto the pathway of change. I’m not entirely sure where I am heading with all this but I like challenging myself when faced with the unknown.

After reading a rather interesting post by the
paleo runner last week in which it lead me to read about Tim VanOrden and what he has achieved with running by adhering to a strictly 100% raw vegan diet has inspired me to make some changes in my own nutritional habits. His site also led me on a path to other raw eating websites, communities and podcast interviews and my interest has been captured.

My reasoning behind thinking about making the transition from the paleo diet to a largely raw vegan diet is based on a number of reasonings.

The main issue I have at the moment while following paleo/primal eating guidelines is that while the diet has provided everything that I expected from it and what others have claimed it would. It’s just not giving me everything I need. The diet stabilized my energy levels so that I don’t experience the post-carb lows that I used to have before but the trade-off was that I don’t seem to be experiencing any highs - physical, mental or spiritual. Everything feels just a bit - how do it say it - BLAH. I am also missing what I will call my vitality or life energy. Running is not the only thing in my life that defines who I am and what brings me joy and I am in need of feeding my other personas.

Vitality is something that I experienced strongly during my university years (my mid 20’s) when I ate basically as a vegetarian/vegan for three years and during the period of time I regularly practiced periods of fasting and raw food eating (mainly fruits). I read a lot of
Arnold Ehret’s work I don’t ever remember thinking about my lack of energy for any of the numerous physical pursuits that made up much of my day. Perhaps too much at times when class lectures needed to be attended.

Arnold Ehret has been described as inspiring many prominent people in the raw food movement including Gabriel Cousens and David Wolfe amongst others whom I am yet familiar with. I still have on my bookshelf at home two of his books – RATIONAL FASTING and THE MUCUSLESS DIET HEALING SYSTEM. During my first year at uni these books became my bible. At the time I was searching to rejuvenate my physical, mental and spiritual aspects of my life and over a period of 12 months I had completed a big change.

Other reasons for wanting to make a transition are based on some changes that we have made in respect to the health of our children. We have virtually eliminated all preservatives from our menu due to health reasons and have introduced some non-dairy items as one of our children appears to be lactose intolerant. Our shopping cart is also being filled with more and more organic products as we are questioning the way products are grown and produced. This is also leading us on an ethical journey as our family is questioning how our food reaches the shelves of the supermarket and into our homes. I won’t go into ethical arguments here as there is a lot of information out there to provide some interesting reading for those so interested.

And finally on a last note I’m just starting to get sick of cooking and consuming large amounts of animal-based proteins. I’m even losing the taste and smell for it. It’s like listening to new music released on the radio – it sounds great at first but after listening to it over and over again you end up not being able to listen to it anymore.

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