Sometimes even the best of us need a little kick in the ass to get ourselves back on track. And although I feel that we haven’t done that terribly in regards to our diets lately, my group of friends and my family decided that needed to do a little internal cleanse. The terms? Three solid days of eating raw foods. Plus drinking much more water. Plus exercising more. Plus external detoxing methods.

Since we mostly eat fruits and veggies anyway this wasn’t too much of a stretch from our regular diets, although I do admit that it did take bit of planning and a lot of self control.  It took some training to convince my brain to stay away foods that, despite being healthy, were off limits due to being cooked.

What have we been eating?

So what did we eat, exactly? And how did we cleanse?  To prevent this blog post from turning into an entire book I decided to make a Pinterest Board with the recipes I’ve used and the cleanses that we’ve done. You can see the board here.

Day 1

If I had to summarize this day in one word it would be “Hamburger”. Despite going pretty much meat free over the winter, and so rarely craving meat since then, something in my head was triggered when I began telling myself what I couldn’t eat.  I guess I just don’t like being told what to do, even if it means a battle with myself.

Day 2

Today was just… tiring. So tiring. It may have been the three-mile jog the night before (the first time in a long time that this has been attempted), the lack of caffeine, or simply the change in eating habits.  Although I wasn’t by any means unhappy and certainly not unproductive, I seriously considered caving. Luckily for me by caving I’d have to admit defeat, so I persevered.

Day 3

3 days? Already? Not too bad! I’m looking forward to a big sushi dinner to celebrate.  I’d shed the heavy, bloated feeling that triggered the cleanse initially.  By the time day 3 was over my skin looked amazingly better. *After stopping the raw food diet and going back to traditional foods my skin went back to its previous, blemished state.

Followup

The question that everyone has been asking is: will we continue eating raw? Not fully. I love the thought of our diet depending primarily on fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.  I prefer the flexibility of choosing when I would like something to be cooked, however. I will continue the stretching, extra water drinking, and exercising and probably continue to do multiple-day-stints of raw foods every couple weeks.