Funny thing is when I came home, I only had a small glass of green smoothie (some left overs from the morning) and then I wasn’t hungry that night at all. I went to bed without eating dinner.

It is day 2 only and I already have the clarity I need. I am going to quit my job. I guess I am feeling kind of stressed out because I don’t know what I will do without a job quite yet – but I have a very strong prospect of a new job on the horizon already. I just need to take this head on. The energy in my current job is so negative, the environment so toxic – I just can’t take it anymore! Change is so hard (for me anyway), but, my gut is telling me leaving this job is the right thing to do… and I know I will be fine.

OK, here’s what I had today:

Breakfast: 1 smoothie (1/2 lb greens, 4 bananas)

Lunch: salad (1/4 red cabbage, 1 pear, 2 mangoes)

Dinner: 1 glass green smoothie

Snacks: 1 orange, 1/2 cucumber, grapes

I really craved something heavier and non-sweet after lunch…. I also missed snacking on flax crackers and nuts. I snacked on fruit again, but I really wanted to have something non-sweet. By the late afternoon, which is when I usually dip into the non-raw snacks at work, I had one very strong case of the munchies. I decided to come home early, have dinner and just relax for the evening.

Smoothie : 1/2 lb greens  (rainbow chard and black kale), 4 bananas, 1 orange

Salad: 1/2 lb spinach, 2 papayas, 3 strawberries, bit of cilantro

Dinner: Smoothie (1 honeydew melon, 5 strawberries, 2 bananas)

Small salad (1/4 cucumber, 1 tomato, lemon, ginger, 1 chard leaf)

Snacks: 1/2 cucumber, 2 cups grapes

6 cups of herbal tea, 2 L water

1 lb organic lacinato (black) kale,  1/2 lb rainbow chard, 1/2 lb collards

1 pineapple straight from Costa Rica (made me think of Frederic Petanaude who is organizing the Green Cleanse, as that’s where he lives)

30 bananas

10 oranges

2 cucumbers

box of fresh strawberries

box of guavas

2lb of green grapes

3 papayas

5 mangos

2 melons

5 lemons

4 pears

Very heavy!

My plan is to have a green smoothie for breakfast (about 1/2 lb greens, 3-4 frozen bananas, other fruit for variety, and water). For lunch I will have a salad for which the base will be greens (most likely spinach) with the addition of some fruit such as papaya, melon or strawberries, some  with a bit of lemon juice and some fresh herbs.

To snack, I will have veggie crudites and fruit.

For dinner, I will again have a green smoothie. I may also have a veggie juice or cocktail.

To start, I will  have 1/2-1 pound(s) of greens and work my way up to 2 pounds. I often consume 1/2 pound of greens in a day.

Since I already eat a lot of fresh food, I don’t expect a major detox symptoms or a healing crisis.

To congratulate myself on this decision to cleanse my body and accelerate my health, I had raw chocolate pudding for breakfast (with caco nibs).  Yum!

Now I am ready.

Reasons I am cleansing my body:

• Insomnia I have been having a hard time sleeping lately. I want to establish and maintain healthy sleeping habits.
• Staying raw Ever since I started this blog many months ago, I have been in and out of raw. When I’m on, I love it, but miss cooked foods. When I’m off, all I want is to get back on again.  Even when I am eating cooked food, I still eat at least 50-70 raw. But it’s just not the same. Particularly in the past month or two, that cooked 30% of my diet has really turned crap. However, I feel ready to commit to Raw – for good. After the cleanse, I am going to do a very high raw diet (90% +) and commit to sticking with it!
• Clarity I need clarity – and fast. I have some major changes happening in my life and I need the utmost clarity I can get. Big personal decisions need to be made – soon. I will write more about this as time goes on.

The basis of the detox is eating an abundance of fresh greens and fresh fruits and vegetables. Types of foods I will be consuming are:

• Green smoothies
• Fresh fruit
• Fresh veggies (tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis)
• Herbs (cilantro, parsley etc.)
• Water

I will not be consuming any type of fat on this diet (avocado, nuts, seeds or oil), or anything cooked (this is a 100% raw detox!).

I will be documenting everything that I eat and any changes which may be occurring. Well, I’m off to the grocery store to load up on lots of produce for the week!

I decided to be in the program after I checked out Jo’s website and viewed her video – her wonderful authenticity, positivity, enthusiasm, passion, joy and love ALONE made me want to join. However, I finally decided to join because the idea of feeling great during winter is very exciting to me – I’m one of those people who want to hibernate during the winter, like a bear. My fitness regime usually goes out the window and I never feel fit by the time those Christmas parties roll around.  I’m also looking forward to meeting new wonderful ladies and having oodles of girly fun, all the while living a Raw lifestyle. This is why this program is totally awesome!

I’m really looking forward to it (almost as much as I’m looking forward to getting into that little black dress). Ok, I’m more than looking forward to it. I’m so excited I could squeak!

The fun starts in 3 days, and I believe Jo posted today that there are 3 spots still left, so if you’re thinking about it, just come on over and join us!

Do you like to camp or backpack? Ramble in the back country, mountaineer, climb or ski? How to survive in the middle of nowhere on raw food? This article will address the issues of surviving and thriving on raw while in the middle of nowhere, but it can certainly be applied to car camping as well.

When I first considered a raw vegan diet, I had no idea how I was going to make it work in the bush. First of all, veggies and fruits are heavy. When backpacking, the weight of every item is critical, because as all backpackers know – it all adds up and the heavier your pack, the harder it is to achieve your goals in the mountains (I even had a friend who replaced the holder on his pot with a string, just to decrease the overall weight by a fraction of an ounce). Even if I were willing to take on the extra weight, there was going to be only a limited number of days that the produce would stay fresh. I had no knowledge of edible wilds (and no courage to try). I did not own a dehydrator. In addition to all of that, I would also need to consume a lot more calories per day than usual, as the trip was going to be particularly active. It was time for our annual week-long trip in the heart of beautiful British Columbia and myself, my boyfriend Jason and my sister Ula planned to bag several peaks in the the course of five days in the Stein Valley, B.C.

The Food

It was the middle of summer and I had been consuming a high raw diet (80%+) for about a month. As it turned out, to my own surprise, my diet totally worked while backpacking! It was actually quite easy. It did however, require fore-thought and  preparation. Here’s how I did it and what I ate.

Raw Vegetables and Fruits
The best vegetables to take are those which have the least water content and as a result
have more nutrients per pound and  keep well. This chart shows the vegetables and fruits with the lowest water content:

Percentage of Water in the least watery Fruits and Vegetables
Corn, Sweet Fresh – 74%
Bananas           – 76%
olives            – 80%
Cherries          – 80%
Raspberries       – 81%
Grapes and pears  – 82%
Raw peas          – 81%
Pineapple         – 82%
apples/apricots   – 85%
Oranges           – 86%

The ones with the highest water content are cucumbers and radishes and most raw greens (over 95%). I ended up taking some apples, oranges and radishes, just because they were the easiest to carry. I had a pocketful of radishes as snacks on route, which my friends thought was really funny.
I ate nothing but blueberries during our five hour drive to the trail head. Jason and Ula joked that they will not be able to distinguish bear scat from mine. They were kind of right!

Freeze Dried Vegetables
My raw food expedition might not have worked as well as it did, had I not visited a whole food store  (Famous Foods) a day or two before the trip. I was so happy and surprised to find things there which I never expected, such as raw granola and crackers.
Of course, now I know that you can easily prepare those things yourself with a dehyrator.
But I made another wonderful discovery at Famous Foods – freeze-dried vegetables!
The beet and spinach I took along were a great addition to my outdoor raw food menu.
I left the store a little bit poorer (prepackaged raw snacks can be pricy), but very prepared at the same time.

Freeze Drying vs Dehydrating
During dehydration, low temperatures are used to dry out the product. Freeze drying is a process that removes water from the live product by using low temperatures and pressure.   But how does it work? Well, first you put a product into a freeze-drying machine and freeze it. At a normal, sea-level pressure, the ice would stay solid. But then all the pressure is sucked out of it, causing that water to turn directly into gas by a magical process known as “sublimation”.

During freeze-drying, there is no heat applied, therefore the structure of the food remains 100% intact. The product is dry and totally raw. No preservatives of any kind are needed. Nothing but water is removed. It retains its original taste, smell and nutritional value. It lasts for as long as you want it, even in very high heat, and is super light-weight. And, most importantly, you don’t need hot water to rehydrate the vegetables. Cold or lukewarm water will do the trick just as well, although it make take a little bit more time. That’s not a problem however. Place the freeze dried stuff into a container or bottle with some water when departing camp in the morning, and your high-energy enzyme soup will be ready for lunch or dinner.

Hemp
Hemp is one of my favorite foods, as I have mentioned before. It is so high in its nutritional content and, in its powdered form, very light-weight. So I brought along one of my favorite hemp chocolate-flavored superfood blends (Vega ). Every day for lunch I would mix the equivalent of ¼ cup of the hemp powder with water and drink it up, or just add some to my water bottle and sip on it throughout the day. I used hemp, however any powdered green superfood would do the trick.

Trail-Mix
My trail mix was very high-powered. It included nuts and seeds of all sorts(protein!), many dried fruits (carbohydrates!) and a lot of shredded coconut (fat!). I brought a lot of it and snacked on it whenever I felt hungry.

My Daily Meals
For this trip, I brought exactly five giant apples, one for every morning of the trip.
I would cut up the apple into pieces and have it with my raw buckwheat chocolate granola for breakfast. For lunch, I would have my hemp drink, eat dried fruits, raw nuts and seeds and goji berries. For dinner, for the first day or two, I had some red peppers, avocados and Nori sheets which I used to make myself sushi. When those ran out, I’d have flax crackers with raw hazelnut butter.

Because of all of the dried foods I was taking with me, my backpack was the lightest of everyone in the group. My boyfriend’s backpack was so much heavier in comparison to mine. He joked: I wish I were on the raw food diet!

Raw in the wild is fun
I really enjoyed this trip. I enjoyed the food I ate and it more than met my caloric requirements. I had tones of energy, woke up happy and ready to go every morning, my backpack was lighter than ever, I spent less time preparing my meals and no time cleaning up after my meals.  In comparison, my partners had to set up their stove, light the stove in the wind, spend 20 minutes cooking, after they finished eating, they had to look for a water source and scrub and clean the pot by some creek somewhere in the dark, in the cold, with moss and rocks. While they were doing this, I took the time to relax and get ready for sleep. It was great