Inspiration

Well, it's just over a week since I finished the challenge and I've just come down from my sugar high!

Just kidding. I've been pretty good.

I think.

I won't lie, I did have the poached eggs I was craving and I also had a piping hot pizza with delicious melted cheese all over it. And you know what... It wasn't that exciting. It felt heavy and over-salted and a little like a big dead weight in my stomach.
I certainly didn't feel like I was eating the most wonderful thing in the world. And trust me, when I started this challenge, I thought that if you removed pizza from my life entirely I might just die.

What I have noticed is one thing that is AMAZING. When I eat cooked food, it tastes dead. I know, that's a very harsh term, but it's the only way I can describe it. When I was only eating raw, I didn't notice that the food felt particularly alive, but once I mixed it up, cooked food tasted somewhat bland, dead and simply not full of goodness.

That's super exciting for me, because if I can remember that taste and those feelings, it's incentive to keep feeding my body with healthy, alive food.

Raw food just bursts with goodness when you eat it. And, the more you tip the balance in that direction, the better it tastes and the worse processed food tastes. It really does. You'll have to trust me.

I also have not had any coffee - yay, can you see my halo from where you are sitting? You should be able to.

I don't know how that has happened, but the minute I woke up after the challenge I did not run downstairs and brew the biggest pot of coffee I could. I just haven't bothered. I've stuck to my green and peppermint tea - peppermint is my favourite, yum.

But, all that aside. The real reason for this post today, is because I want to thank everyone for all their support.
All you guys around the world who have left comments, or asked questions, or left me messages on other message boards and blogs (yup, I've had a hard time finding some of those, but I think I've got them all)....

Your words and your kind congratulations have encouraged me to stick with this. Many of you have said I've inspired you (wow, humbled) and I want you to know that you are inspiring me.

You really are.

So let's keep doing that. Inspiring each other.
And the world will turn a whole lot smoother. Actually I'm not sure how it will affect the whole world, but it will make my world turn smoother.

I am listening to your questions and your concerns and this is what I'm going to do. I'll actually address them. Yikes, I know.

Well, I'll answer them if I can. Or I'll just make something up.

But I'll tell you if I'm making it up.

Over the next while, I will go through what I'm trying to eat daily (I still can't give you recipes from the book because of copyright and all that you understand), but what I'm going to try and do is continue to experiment with recipes that are freely available.

If I find recipes I like, I'll post them.

Now remember, I'm not promoting anyone, or being sponsored by anyone, so anything I post is just because my taste buds liked it. Yours may not. But, on Pink Passion Flower, my taste buds rule. That's how it's going to work.

So, if you have questions, ask away. Trust me, I'm learning along with you.

DAY 30... Yes you can...

Eat too much raw food! I'm not kidding. Last night I ate too much. Yes, I did. I ate too much buckwheat...

Oh I know, pick yourself up off the floor and stop laughing. Funny isn't it. No seriously, dry your eyes, stop the convulsions, get rid of the post-hysterical-laughter hiccups and look at me seriously. No mirth allowed here.

Boy how things can change in 10 days. I never thought I would hear myself say 'Gee, enough already, curb the buckwheat!'. But I have an excuse, really I do. Let me explain.

Although I celebrated getting through one week of raw, the book Minisizeme, celebrates after 10 days. It makes sense really. It's a 40 day plan and 10 days in is a quarter of the way through. So because I am a person of excess, I like to celebrate both occasions - after every 7 day week and then because I'm following the book after every 10 days too. Hell, why not? I may as well get all the excitement I can it's not like I'm going to crack open a bottle of champagne or anything.

So on day 10, The Book (I'll now refer to my Minisizeme guide as The Book) gives you a recipe for raw pizza to celebrate. Raw pizza huh? Yes, I thought the same - yuk. And let me tell you, it's one of the more complicated recipes because of it's timing. Soak the buckwheat for 30 hours, prepare the 'cheeze' (that's a raw word for cheese) and let set for 2 hours. Man, it was like orchestrating a dinner for 20 people.

Anyway, as I am prone to do, I followed the recipe diligently and completed all the steps in the order I was supposed to. And, the more I sliced, blended, chopped, mixed, grated and mashed, the more I thought "This is going to taste disgusting".

As my prep time got longer, my hopes and dreams got shorter. Here was my big celebration dinner, the first pizza I'd eaten in 10 days and it was going to suck.

Let's face it, cheeze made from pine nuts simply isn't comparable to cheese made from cows milk. And pizza sauce made with red cabbage is not the same as the red goo oozing out from that piping hot Dominoes pizza that gets delivered to your door now is it?

Big fat NO is my answer. Yes, I used the word fat. Fat, fat, fat - big fat no!

But I forged ahead, because that's what I do, I forge. And, because the ingredients were really expensive and I simply hate waste. And, because I had spent what seemed like ages making this, I wasn't going to give up. And, because I'd promised my husband, my lovely husband who held my hair back when I puked on day 2, pizza for dinner. And, after 10 days of salad for dinner, if I didn't deserve pizza, he certainly did.

So, I made my buckwheat crust, and I topped it with red cabbage pizza sauce and covered that in pine nut cheeze and held my breath as I cut it using a pizza wheel (talk about hanging onto another life and living in hope) and I mentally wondered how quickly I could whip up another raw dinner at 7:30pm because I knew after the first bite we would throw it out and still be hungry.

My husband giggled nervously and said 'why don't you go ahead and have the first piece, you worked really hard to make it, and after all, it's your celebration.' And I knew then, he was preparing for a fall. He wasn't going to touch that stuff until he had seen the expression on my face.

I took a deep breath and bit. Then chewed and chewed and chewed. In that moment, I realised that my life still lacked trust.

When I went to my first yoga class all those years ago, I had to let go and put myself in the hands of the teacher - that teacher happened to be Siri Datta. And she held me, and helped me and nurtured me through those first trembling steps.

When I went to my first yoga retreat alone and was exposed to different ways of looking at life, and different ways to heal and different ways to eat, I had to trust. And Siri Datta, again stepped up and guided me through the uncertainty.

And when I was ready to try my first bite of raw pizza, I should have trusted that the very same Siri Datta would not have suggested something disgusting for me to eat on this new journey into health. And she didn't.

My eyes flew open, a smile spread across my lips, ' this tastes just like pizza I almost screamed', losing some of my topping down the front of my shirt at the same time. 'It is soooooo good'. And I gobbled and gobbled and gobbled until I had eaten just a little too much of this raw pizza, in exactly the same way as for years, I'd eaten just a little too much of cooked pizza whenever I'd eaten it.

Now let me add a little disclaimer here. Hubby did not feel the same way. He kept mumbling something about 'where's the cheese?', which he had every right to mumble about. But he hasn't been totally raw for 10 days. And he isn't the one who has committed to not eating a smidgen of cheese for 40 days. And he isn't the one who thought that the word 'pizza' was out of his lexicon for good. So, I think I can safely say he had a little less invested in this dinner than I did.

For me however, this was a momentous occassion. Raw pizza, who would have thought? And so that is how I came to overeat a buckwheat-filled pizza crust.

So do you know what I'm going to do today? I think I'll have some left overs for lunch and I'll deal with the over-excess of buckwheat a little later.