Now that the trial has officially ended, it almost feels almost like a graduation. This has definitely been the most challenging 30-day trial I’ve done to date, but I can’t say I’m sad to see it end. I’m looking forward to eating something — anything — other than fruit tomorrow. I feel like I’ve eaten enough bananas to last a year!

As a side effect of logging this experiment, apparently I also did a 30-day trial of blogging every single day. Consequently, my web traffic hit a new high. Lucky for me my webhost recently announced they’ve permanently upgraded all the accounts — for free. Now I’ve got a juicy 2TB/month of bandwidth available (previously 1.5TB). Incidentally, ServInt has been a fantastic web host, and I highly recommend them if your site has outgrown a basic shared hosting account. StevePavlina.com has always been hosted by them, over 3 years now… and a while before that with my games business. That’s probably the longest I’ve ever stayed with a single host.

Urine pH

I ran several pH tests on my urine throughout the day with some pH strips. The results varied with each test, but they always ranged between 7.4 and 8.0. A pH of 7.0 is neutral, greater than 7.0 is alkaline, and less than 7.0 is acidic. I didn’t bother to do any pH tests before this trial, so I can’t tell if there’s been a long-term change, but at least for today it’s definitely on the alkaline side.

I read that most non-vegetarians have acidic urine, which supposedly increases the risk of kidney stones as well as a few other maladies. Of course you can also run into problems if your urine is too alkaline.

If you want to test your own urine, you should be able to find some pH strips at a local drug/vitamin store. They’re fairly inexpensive.

Blood Pressure

Today’s blood pressure reading was the lowest of the whole trial: 110/65.

Weight Loss

My weight dropped 0.4 pounds to 178.0. Net weight loss is 8.0 pounds in 29 days. I’ll do a final weigh-in tomorrow morning before breakfast to get the official 30-day result.

Breakfast

1. green smoothie: 4 bananas (662g), spinach (102g), 1 cup water
2. blueberries (264g)
3. blackberries (114g)

812 calories, 4g fat, 204g carb, 14g protein

Morning Snack

1 small watermelon (908g)

272 calories, 1g fat, 69g carb, 6g protein

Lunch

1. salad: mixed greens (158g), cucumber (76g), grape tomatoes (120g), avocado (38g), lime juice (22g)
2. fresh juice made from carrots, apple, Asian pear, celery, lime (24 fl oz)

387 calories, 7g fat, 81g carb, 8g protein

Afternoon Snack

green smoothie: 4 bananas (494g), spinach (106g), 1 cup water

464 calories, 2g fat, 117g carb, 8g protein

Dinner

1. green smoothie: 4 bananas (416g), spinach (112g), 1 cup water
2. 5 clementines (386g)

577 calories, 2g fat, 146g carb, 11g protein

Evening Snack

3 clementines (240g)

113 calories, 0.4g fat, 29g carb, 2g protein

Daily Summary

2626 calories, 17g fat, 644g carb, 49g protein

585mg sodium, 82g fiber, 382g sugar

5% of calories from fat, 7% from protein, 88% from carbs

Whew!

I’ll write up a final postmortem/summary of this experiment with my final thoughts. Be patient, since it may take more than a day before it’s ready to post. I have quite a lot of info to review. In retrospect it feels a little strange having a complete food record of everything I ate for the past 30 days posted on the Internet. Quite a number of people emailed me to say they’ve been eating more fruit since I started — the photos made them start craving it.

Tomorrow should be an interesting day, since I do intend to eat cooked food once again. I’m not sure what I’ll eat yet. Last time I came off a raw food diet, cooked food tasted dead and lifeless to me the first day, but it didn’t make me sick or tired or cause any noticeable problems. I’ll have to remind myself to eat much less food. I imagine that scarfing down eight pounds of cooked food in a day would be a bit much.

I’m really looking forward to writing about something that has nothing whatsoever to do with food.

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© 2008 by Steve Pavlina. If you find these ideas helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.

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For a change of scenery, this morning I went to the Strip to do some writing. I typically enjoy writing in public places where lots of people are roaming about, but this time I found it very distracting and left early. It felt uncomfortable for some reason. I’m not really sure why. I brought lots of fruit with me, but I only ate a couple of bananas and an apple during this time.

At lunch time I came really close to quitting and eating some cooked food. With only 36 hours left in the trial, I didn’t expect any major revelations to happen that would influence me to continue beyond day 30. I figured the only reason to continue at this point is just the satisfaction of finishing the whole 30 days instead of stopping at 28-1/2. I gave it some thought and decided to finish off the full 30 for one particular reason: Completing the final day and a half will be good exercise for my self-discipline muscles.

Every time you successfully complete a 30-day trial, even if the final result is that you choose not to continue beyond that point, it builds your discipline and makes it easier to take on more challenging trials. If I attempted this trial ten years ago, there’s no way I’d have made it this far. My willpower would have been too weak to push through the resistance.

The fact that I’ve finished 29 days and still feel a lot of daily resistance tells me this particular diet isn’t right for me, at least not right now. Whenever I’ve made permanent habit changes, such as going vegan and vegetarian, the resistance was all but gone after the first week. After 30 days of those trials, I knew I’d found something that would stick.

Dry Skin

Here’s a photo showing some of the fingers on my right hand that are still swollen at the joints and plagued with dry, cracked skin. There’s a cut on my middle finger that keeps splitting open and bleeding a little. It appeared about 2 weeks ago when the skin cracked from excessive dryness, and it just isn’t healing properly. You may also notice a small horizontal cut on the joint of my ring finger that is very slow to heal as well. The fingers on my left hand don’t look much better.

I’m still experiencing a lot of itchiness too all over my body too. Hopefully my skin will return to normal after this trial.

I didn’t have any skin problems during my early raw food trials, all of which had a significantly higher fat intake, so this problem appears unique to the low-fat version of this diet.

Hunger

During the past few days, I’ve been feeling much hungrier. I used to eat about 2,000 calories/day before this trial. Now I’m pushing 2,500-3,000, and I still feel hungry often. I’m not pushing myself to eat a certain number of calories — I just eat based on appetite. If I pushed myself to eat more, I could easily surpass 3,500 calories/day.

Having to eat so much food has gotten pretty annoying. Eating is basically my second career. Even if there were some impressive long-term health benefits, having to sacrifice more time to food prep and eating doesn’t seem like a great trade based on my experience thus far. I’d rather eat smaller, less frequent meals and get more work done.

Weight Loss

My weight went up 0.4 pounds to 178.4. Net weight loss is 7.6 pounds in 28 days. I weighed this same amount 10 days ago, so it certainly appears the weight loss has stalled.

Breakfast

1. green smoothie: 4 bananas (448g), spinach (80g), 1 cup water
2. celery (60g)

426 calories, 2g fat, 107g carb, 8g protein

Morning Snack

1. 5 bananas (670g)
2. Fuji apple (212g)
3. 2 oz walnuts (56g)

1073 calories, 39g fat, 190g carb, 16g protein

Lunch

1 small watermelon (876g)

263 calories, 1g fat, 66g carb, 5g protein

Afternoon Snack

green smoothie: 4 bananas (476g), spinach (102g), 1 cup water

447 calories, 2g fat, 112g carb, 8g protein

Dinner

1. green smoothie: 4 bananas (396g), spinach (104g), 1 cup water
2. blueberries (272g)
3. blackberries (182g)

610 calories, 4g fat, 151g carb, 12g protein

Evening Snack

okra (76g)

24 calories, 0g fat, 5g carb, 2g protein

Daily Summary

2841 calories, 48g fat, 632g carb, 51g protein

317mg sodium, 90g fiber, 360g sugar

14% of calories from fat, 6% from protein, 80% from carbs

I had an interesting conversation with Erin about an idea for a different kind of dietary trial — eating all my favorite foods, regardless of nutritional considerations. In other words I’d eat like I was in a lucid dream and could conjure up whatever foods I wanted. For me this would be some variation of the vegan diet, since I don’t look upon non-vegan items as food anyway, not even in my dreams. I’m curious what would happen if I stopped looking to food as a source of health and aimed to simply create health from within, regardless of what I ate.

One pattern I’ve seen again and again in successful long-term raw foodists is that they don’t have to force themselves to eat raw. They eat raw because their favorite foods happen to be raw, so they’re simply eating what they like best. That’s exactly what happened when I went vegetarian and then vegan — I dropped the foods I wasn’t particularly attached to anyway and started eating more of the foods I liked better. But that didn’t happen with this raw trial; in this case I stopped eating a lot of foods I liked and began eating more foods I wasn’t as fond of, ostensibly in the quest for better health. Now I wonder what will happen if I test the opposite extreme.

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© 2008 by Steve Pavlina. If you find these ideas helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.

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