Any Participants?

Hey guys!
So how's the raw lifestyle going? Any interesting things happening? Like slipping and pigging out on cooked food. haha. It's going to happen quite a bit in the beginning. Alex and I started eating a lot of fruits and salads in the day and then in the evenings we would eat a cooked meal. Usually a homemade cooked meal, which consisted of anything from alex's delicious beef stew to corned beef, cabbage, and carrots, to my mom's recipe of chicken hekka, we also ate a lot of steamed vegetables(artichoke, beets, asparagus). After reading " The Essense Gospel of Peace" everything made sense!!! I thought to myself I need to try this. We were both already incorporating good living foods into our diets, however, we hadn't made the commitment to go completely raw. Completely raw, meaning not tampered with, fresh fruits, vegetables, and nuts.
It was before bed when we actually talked about going raw. We told ourselves we were going to try it. We wanted to try this for strength and for mucus cleansing. In the beginning we were still completely new to this lifestyle and I believe for some it will take longer than others to get familiar with. Research is the key!!! So anyways, in the beginning we were blessed with a lot of freshly picked mangoes. Freshly picked by Alex the greatest Mango picker!!! I only love him for his mango tree!!! These mangoes were from Diamond Head, we made use of all of them;) and are continuing to make use of the avocados as well :) We've been blessed with fruit. My Dad gave us about 3 banana tree full of bananas...the exact day after we ate our last banana we came across a mango tree with the best mangoes ever, and guess what??? The owners don't care to pick or eat!!!!! haha....mangoes galore!!!!!!!! We are currently surviving on mangoes...Mangoes being my favorite fruit this diet was easy!!!! Another raw living food that we ate a lot of was corn on the cob, uncooked. I made the conclusion that eating corn on the cob, which you can buy at your local supermarket, (times the best)taste much sweeter and fresher uncooked. This was also one of our foods of choice that helped ween us off of cooked food. We also incorporated drinking a gallon of water a day. To me this was hard because I wasn't used to drinking that much water. This was very easy to purchase, buy a one gallon empty container and fill it up daily with purified water. I got my gallon at down to earth and still use it to this day. If I feel like I'm forgetting something when walking out the door, it's usually my gallon water if it's not in my hand.( I'm always walking out the door with it, it's become a habit!) Drinking water daily helped because it made me realize that sometimes we're not really hungry just thirsty:) And you can never drink too much water! especially now days when we have so much bad food going into our bodies. Our bodies are craving water!
Because hiking koko head is in our schedule of workouts every week, usually after a long day of hiking up koko head we would feel the urge of cooked food. Our first attempt to hike koko head 2x on a Saturday morning, (and let me remind you that this has been one of our goals that we've been trying to accomplish, after seeing people going up and down 2 to 3 times a day)we did it in no time and felt great. It was actually easier going up the 2nd time. This is after we've been eating raw food for about 2 weeks, maybe a week 1/2. We were feeling stronger than ever and nothing could stop us!!!! Unless of course it was cooked food!!! (hold on alex is getting sad as we speak because we can't eat at olive tree anymore and I'm sitting here laughing....)ok back to business...I had to confirm with him how many times we ate at olive tree before going raw. That day was the perfect day, we did koko head 2x, went to spend time with alex's father all day, and then came home showered and made our decision to celebrate eating out at the olive tree....mmmmmmmm humus, pita bread, lemon soup, and baklava. We did it, ate cooked food!!!!!!! I felt fine, nothing new just overate. The olive tree was our cooked food haven. Whenever we felt like falling we were eating at the olive tree. You can never go wrong there, good grinds that satisfies the craving!
It was after reading "The Essense Gospel of Peace" when we talked and made the commitment to go raw for 1 month. 1 month has turned into 2 months now. We have our ups and downs, but we know better not to run to the olive tree. I've never stopped researching, reading, and learning new things about this raw lifestyle. It helps everyday. Makes me stronger mentally and it's very interesting as well. I'm lucky to have been introduced to this lifestyle, and been able to have the time to read and get to know the different things I know today, without knowing these valuable essential details I would be very ignorant. I feel bad for those who have no idea what they are putting into their bodies. We should at least have the right to know what's going into our bodies as well as what food does to our bodies, and from there we can make the decision on what we want to eat. It's our own body, our ONLY body, we only get one, we might as well make the best out of it!!!!
I'm so lucky, but so are you!!!! Lucky to be involved in the raw food lifestyle and getting to know your body. I'm currently reading "The Sun-food Diet" by David Wolfe, I highly recommend it to everyone. This one has good stuff, very good stuff, very helpful stuff!!!!!! Hope all of you are enjoying your food;) Let us know how it's going we want to know. Hopefully soon we can all get together and enjoy a raw potluck together. Wouldn't that be fun!!!
P.S. I'm very jealous that most of you have either a vita mix or a juicer!!!!
But hey we got a dehydrator, lets get together and we'll have it all:)
Love you guys.
hiki