Day 20 - Pizza!

I made my first raw pizza today! :-)

Here are some pictures:

This is supposed to be a raw vegan "salami" (peperoni) in the preparation process. It consited mainly of walnuts and sundried tomatoes. The flavor came out great! :-)

This was my little loaf if cashew chesse. I had added some curcuma to give it a yellow colour, but that wasn't the best idea, since it came out a kind of grey-green colour, but the taste was nice too.

This is the pizza (the dough consists mainly of sprouted buckwheat and sundried tomatoes) with a tomatoe sauce, grated "cheese" and "salami"

Then I added some yellow bell pepper, red onion and marinated mushrooms

After that I added avocado, fresh tomatoes and rocket and dehydrated everything for about 15 minuted to warm it up a little and let the flavors combine.

So here is a picture of the finished product on our plates.
The tast was great, but it was a little bit dry, so next time I will make the tomatoe sauce a little more moist or sprincle some olive oil on top and some fresh garlic would have been nice too, but overall I'm very happy with what I created! :-)

Just across the street there is a huge center for expositions and there is an interior and design exposition at the moment so we went there to get some ideas for our new flat. It consisted of 4 huge halls with different themes, but it was sooo huge, we only got through half of the first one...
They always have special offers and prices there, so we had someone plan a kitchen for us, it's still quite expensive, but looks very nice, so we still need to think about that (we've got one week to decide in which we can get the special exposition offer)


What I ate today:

- 5 cinnamon balls

- 2 babybananas

- rasberrys

- 1/2 pizza

- we still had a little piece of cake left so we had that with a delicious strawberry sauce (somehow strawberrys seem to develog this really strong taste if you puree them...)

- a salad consisting of different kinds of lettuce, rocket, radish and apple with a rasberry-grapefruit-garlic dressing

- a smoothie with 1/3 banana, rasberrys and 1/2 apple

- 1 chocolate ball

- 1 date

Day 19 - movie review - Breakthrough

We watched the movie "Breakthrough" today from the people of thegardendiet.
This movie is about an all raw family and their personal story.
I found the movie a bit longbreathed at times and it could have been a bit more scientific (I'm a person of science - guess I'm on Jack's side here - lost-fans will know what I mean ;-) ), but except of that it was still a quite nice, interesting and motivating movie to watch and the kids were really cute! :-)
The only thing I really didn't like, was that there were a lot of scenes in which they went climbing with the kids without ropes or any other savety device. I'm a fan of all kinds of outdoor activities including rockclimbing (with ropes!), but doing something so dangerous should not be promoted in my eyes, especially if kids are involved.


Today's food:

- 1/2 small papaya

- a piece of cake

- 3 cinnamon-balls

- 1 chocolate-ball

- a salad with red and green lettuce, spinach, rocket, alfa-alfa sprouts, strawberries and an orangejuice-cream dressing

- 1 babybanana


I didn't take any pictures of today's food again, so here is a nice picture of a yellow bell pepper that I took a while ago:

Day 18 - snow...

The last few days it started to get slightly warmer (around 8 or 9 °C), but yesterday the temperature dropped again and there was heavy snowfall in the morning that later mixed with a little rain, so basically we got the kind of weather that will make your pants get wet up to your knees...
I love Vienna, it's a fantastic city, but the weather really sucks most of the time...

The smoke in the Pub on tuesday gave me a raspy throat, that grew into a slight caugh by now. :-(

Luckily there's also something fun to report about day 18.
Some of my friends have this show about animal rights once a week at a local radio station and Chris and I (and an other friend just started to help us as well) always record it and then put it online so that people who couldn't listen to the original show can listen to it later, but some shows from the last 3 years were still missing, so I went to the radio station to copy them from their archive. So, what's really exciting about it was is that they let me use a studio room to do so, so I worked in there alone (well almost - Snoopy was with me of course) with all the great professional sound equipment around me. :-D - very exciting!


What I ate today:

-I had to try all the nuts and other things that we got the day before, so I altogether I had quite a lot of those...

- 2 pieces of cake

- a peas and corn cream soup

- Chris made some fantastic pasta with spiralised zuchini and yellow carrots with a very garlicy oil sauce - very similar to aglio olio spaghetti! - and a side salad with a variety of leafy greens.

Day 17 - Cake!

On Day 17 we received a big box of raw nuts, bahree dates, agave, chacolate balls and cinnamon balls from Keimling (an online raw food shop in Germany).
I am absolutely addicted to the cinnamon balls... (but everything else we ordered tastes great too!)

I also made a cake. I made raw cakes before, but this was the first one since I started my raw food challenge, since I try to avoid eating too many nuts or fat, but you got to have some cake once in while! ;-)
The crust was made with brazil nuts, dates, cinnamon and vanilla, the cream was made with pureed coconut flakes (I'm actually nut sure if those were raw), bananas, blood oranges, strawberries, dates and maybe some other fruits that I can't remeber at the moment..., and the icing was made with mango, a little bit of orangejuice, and a teaspoon of melted cocoabutter.
I first wanted to make only a very small cake, but couldn't find anything to put it into, so I endet up using a quite big cake pan and therefore didn't have enough coconut flakes and kept adding fruit to my cream filling, so the cake ended up being too moist and didn't thicken up in the fridge, but it tasted nice anyways. :-)

Here is a picture:


Today's intake:

- a smoothie with 2 oranges, 1 banana, 1/2 mango, cinnamon and vanilla

- a very colourful salad with lamb's lettuce, corn, brown champignons (they have much more taste than the white ones), red bell pepper, red onion and herbs

- a package of Dr. Martin's green coconut juice

- 2 pieces of cake

- a cocktail made with the juice of 2/3 lemon and 1/2 orange and cillantro


sports:

- 30 minutes on the treadmill

- 30 minutes on the crosstrainer

Day 16 - St. Patricks Day

We'll move to a new flat next December (the house is being built at the moment), so we went to the installer today to choose a bathtub, washbasins and all that - boy did that cost a lot of money... :-(
We're already scared off all the other costs that are still to come...
But we're still looking forward to moving, since the new flat will be a lot sunnier, a bit bigger, warmer and hopefully we won't have such noisy neighbours anymore. ;-)

Well, it is St. Patricks Day, so we went to an Irish Pub with some of Chris' friends and had a lot of fun! :-)
We ordered an apple-walnut salad (but without the potatoes and cheesesauce that usually comes with it) and got a big mixed salad that had neither apples nor walnuts on it, but it was quite nice.

Oh, and I'm feeling great again, only my throat wasn't too happy about all the smoke in the pub... :-(
I really hope that there will be better smoking-laws in Austria soon!!


So here is what I ate today:

- I had strawberries for breakfast (they are starting to become flovourful)

- a big mixed salad with batavia, some red lettuce (I don't know what it's called), lamb's lettuce, corn and red onion

- a glass of fresh juice with carrots, apples and beets

- another big mixed salad at the pub with different kinds of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, onion, pinenuts and pumpkinseeds


I did not take any pictures of my food today so here is a picture I took a couple of days ago instead:

It's a hatching coconut!!!Unfortunately I had already gone bad when I opened it, thats probably the reason why the coconut meat did not stick to the shell, but that way I was able to take a funny picture :-)

My workout:

I didn't find any time to go to the fitnesscenter today, so I made a small but nevertheless intense muskleworkout on a fitnessmat at home.

Happy St. Patricks Day everyone!!! :-)

Day 15 - not feeling too well

I forgot to mention in my last post that I had this really stange feeling from my throat down to my stomach for the last few days... It doesn't really hurt, it's more a strange kind of pressure that comes and goes. I have no idea what it is. It started when I ate a salad with a little peanut oil (I've never had that oil before), but if it was some allergic reaction to the oil (I've never had problems with peanuts before) it should be gone by now since it's already been a few days...
Does anybody have an idea what this could be?

Today in the morning I also felt a bit dizzy and had a headache and I didn't have much appetite the
last few days...
But since about noon I started feeling good again.

It's been two weeks now and I've lost 2,7 kilos. I felt absolutely great during the first week, but I'm experiencing minor problems now, but as far as I know it's normal to go through such a phase, so let's just hope it will be over soon! ;-)

I also skipped the sports today, since I wasn't feeling well and I also didn't do as much as I should have last week, so I'll get back to my plan again tomorrow.

But except of this I'm having fun at the moment, I'm not craving anything at all and new ideas of what I could prepare are constantly coming to my mind. :-)

Oh, and something else quite funny I've noticed: Since I'm on the raw food diet early childhood memories keep coming to my head from one second to an other, no special events or anything just some really random situations... very funny!


What I ate today:

- A smoothie made with 1 banana, 1 orange, 1/2 grapefruit, gojiberries, cilantro and vanilla

- A salad with green and red lettuce, 1/3 avocado, a wild mango (they are very small and totally green on the outside, but have an orange-yellow flesh that is veeery delicious) and fresh herbs with a really nice dressing made with water, almondbutter, coconut cream, garlic, umeboshi, salt, a slice of ginger and some agave

- two cups of pea soup

Days 9-14 - the highlights

I did not blog for some days now, so I decided to just summarize the most important things that happened the last couple of days.

- best and most important thing first: Chris joined me on my raw food challenge on Saturday!!! :-)
He's actually the one who introduced me to this whole raw food thing (thank you Chris!), but when I decided to do this 100day challenge we still had a lot of non-raw things in our fridge that needed to be eaten up, but now they are gone and Chris is raw too! :-)

- I went to a restaurant being raw for the first time. Chris parents invited us to a new vegetarian restaurant and I war really afraid first that it would be really hard for me, but Chris convinced me to call there first, so I told them in advance and they made a really nice plate with different veggie sticks and dips for Chris and me.

- I had my first exam with a raw food diet, so I was very curious if I would notice any differences in my concentration level or in the time I needed to study, but to be honest I coudn't notice any differences... But I haven't been on this diet very long yet, so let's see if something will change next time.

- We went to visit my parents in Styria (a very rural region of Austria) since it was my father's birthday and my grandma's as well (she turned 80), so I had my first raw kind of travel experience. We took some fruit with us on the train, so we didn't have any problems there and we also found some things in my parents' kitchen that we could use.
We got my father to make some fresh apple and carrot juice (they hadn't used their juicer in years) and he was surprised how nice it was and said he would use it more often now. :-)
We also picked some very young wild garlic (delicious!) that we found and my mother collected some dandelion and some daisies for a salad.

- I made my first raw chocolate and it turned out really nice! :-)


Well here are some picures that I took during the last few days:

This is a taboule salad that I made with some quinoa sprouts, tomatoes, cucumber, onions, parsley and cilantro

This was one of my first raw chocolates that I made!!! :-)

This was the plate that we got at the vegetarian restaurant. The veggies were avocado, carrots, yellow bell pepper, turnip and fennel. The dips from left to right: a pumpkin seed oil dip, tahini, stawberry sauce and a garlic-lemon dip. I am really happy that my first expirience with going out on a raw food diet turned out so great! :-)

This is a carrot-sweet potato-"couscous" with blood orange and horseradish with a pinenut-coconut cream and black sesame seeds on top.

This is a picure of where I collected the wild garlic with my dad. It looked really pretty with all that white flowers! The wild garlic war growin in between these flowers, so we had to be very careful not to step on them or take some of their leaved by mistake.

I tried to take several pictures of Snoopy, but he was just racing around like totally crazy...

Here is a closeup of the nice springflowers

So here is the wild garlic we collected together with the daisies.
Chris and I already had some of the wild garlic all by itself on our way back in the car - wow sooo aromatic!!!

That picure was made in my parents' wintergarden by my dad. On the table you see a lamb's lettuce - dandelion salad with daisies on top, zucchini-fettuccine with a sauce made with mushrooms, wild garlic, sunflower seeds and an avocado (I wanted to make a cream out of the sunflowers, but all my parent's food processor managed were some crumbs... so I added the avocado), some fresh apple and carrot juice, Chris and my dad had some red wine as well and my parents had some (not raw) bread as well. I think they were afraid that raw food would not be filling enough for them...

So here is an other picure that I made, so you can see my dad on there as well (No he does not have a third eye, neither a bee-sting on his forehead, it's just a reflection from a mirror-mobile (not the one you can make calls with but this thing with a lot of little pieces of something on strings))

This was a really nice meal Chris made with patties made out of sweet potatoes, corn, red onin and ground rice, a sauce made with tomatoes and bell pepper and some salad. Sooo delicious!
The patties actually smelled like mushrooms when they were in the dehydrator. ;-)

Day 8

I had my first real cravings for cooked food today, but I didn't eat any greens today, so that could be the reason too.
I also have very sore muscles all over, especially in my legs from the treadmill yesterday and I've been feeling a lot more tired today than during the first few days... :-(


What I ate:

- a smoothie with 1 banana, 2 oranges, 1/3 mango, physalis, gojiberries, cinamon, vanilla

- blueberries
- a babybanana
- the rest of the indian-flavoured crackers I made on Thursday

- zucchini-fettuccine with a "cheesy" pinenut-almond cream (Chris loved them!)

- 2/3 mango


Today's workout:

- 10 minutes warmup on the crosstrainer
- full body muscle workout

Day 7 - 1st weeks resume

Wow, this is my first blog, that I'm writing on the actual day! :-)

It's been a week now since I got started on raw foods and I can already feel some tremendous changes! My body feels just so much better. I lost 1,7kg so far (700 gramms on the first day and since then 200 each day) and feel a lot stronger from my exercise. My mind feels a bit clearer, I feel more awake and my mood improved a lot too. :-)
At the moment I still have an appetite for some cooked foods when I think of them, but I'm not craving any cooked foods, so that's good too.

So altogether I'm doing great so far!


Today's food:

- a banana-mango-orange-smoothie
- 2 babybananas
- blueberries
- a slice of an apple
- 3 mangosteen
- 1/2 mango
- physalis

- Chris prepared another beautiful dish today.
At was a rocketcream consisting of rocket, blueberries, fresh orangejuice, oliveoil, oregano, balsamic vinegar and umeboshi with cashewballs made out of cashews, miso, garlic and fenugreekspice decorated with tomatoes, mango and parsley






I started sprouting some red jasmine rice a few days ago and it actually worked, so I tried to make a litte risotto out of it, but unfortunately it was way too hard to be eaten...
But the green parts of the sprouts were nice, so maybe I'll try to sprout them again, but wait till the "grass" becomes bigger so I can use it for something.


Today's exercise:

I went on the treadmill again today after quite a long while for an hour. I really noticed that I did not do much sports over the winter... So I decided to use the treadmill very often now, since it's probably the best thing for improving my condition.

Day 6

Day 6 was my first day of my challenge without exercise to give my body the chance to regenerate, so it became a really relaxing nice day. My beautiful boyfriend prepared some beautiful food, we took a hot bath, read books... :-)

What I ate:

- Chris made a delicious fruit salad for breakfast with papaya, banana, babybanana, mango, orange and mangosteen

- we finished the rest of the Durian ans somehow the alcoholic tinge completely went away by leaving it in the fridge over night, so that made me very happy as well :-)
I actually don't usually eat so much Durian all the time, but for some reason Chris found a nice one at the market right before we got the parcel from Thailand, so there was a lot of Durian the last few days, but that's definitely nothing to complain about! ;-)

- for lunch Chris made a very nice pate out of different nuts and seeds with spinach and rocket salad and some other things in it, and some tomato sauce with it. It came out veeery nice!

- 3 mangosteen
- blueberries
- a babybanana

- I made a little chocolate pudding with a banana, a babybanana, coconut cream, vanilla and cocoa powder as a litte dessert-snack

- for dinner I made a carrot-fennel salad on a bed of rocket

Day 5

Day 5 was a really great day! :-)
We got some delidious fresh fruit directly delivered to us from Thailand by "passion for fruit".
Here are some pictures of the freshly opened parcel (opening parcels is one of my very favorite things to do by the way! ;-) )









And a closeup of the fresh Durian that was in the sealed package in the right picture:The Durian unfortunately already was a little over-ripe. It already had a slight alcoholic tingle to it, but I was still very happy about it! It was a Durian after all! ;-)


I also had preparred some Indian-flavoured crackers the day before with sprouted buckwheat and sunflowerseedsprouts as the main ingredients (except of a lot of spices of course ;-) ).
Those were ready in the morning as well, after a night in the dehydrator.
Their texture turned out great, they were really crunchy, but we weren't sure about the flavour though. I found it ok, Chris really liked them, but Snoopy refused to even try them and he usually is a huge fan of anything that has an indian flavour to is... so altogether they turned out neither great nor really bad I'd say.
There's a picutre of them on the right.


So here's what I ate that day:

- a banana-rasberry Smoothie

- for lunch I prepared a quite nice meal for Chris and me consisting of some marinated king's trumpet mushrooms, creamed spinach and the greens of fenugreek, spiralised sweetpotatoe pasta with a pinenut cream.

- some of the crackers

- durian
- 3 babybananas
- 2 mangosteen
- a raw chocolat truffle

Here's a picture of our lunch:

My exercise:

- 10minutes on the Stepper
- full body muscle workout

Day 4

On Day four I felt slightly more tired in the morning than during the first three days, but I also slept less than usual.


Day 4's Intake:

- a banana-durian Smoothie

- a mixed salad with lamb's lettuce, batavia (I'm not sure if it's called like this in English as well... if not: it's a quite regular lettuce), avocado, red bell pepper, parsley and a lot of different sprouts


- a kiwi
- blueberries
- one package of Dr. Martin's coconut juice




- I made some Thai-flavoured sweetpotatoe pasta with red bell pepper, king trumpet mushrooms, parsley and coconut cream sauce


My training:

- 10 minutes warm up on the crosstrainer
- full body muscle workout

Day 3

On Day 3 I felt extremely energetic and awake the whole day.

What I had for food:

- First thing in the morning I already had a piece of Durian that was left from day 2 as breakfast and a "spicy" Smoothie consisting of:
- 1 banana
- ginger
- parsley
- 1/2 lemon
- cardamom


-For lunch I had a very nice carrot-fennel salad with lamb's lettuce and a coconut cream dressing - yummie! :-)

- In the evening we went to visit Chris' parents and he spoke on their answering machine beforehand that I wouldn't eat dinner with them, but they didn't check it, so Chris' mum was a little upset when we arrived and she had prepared dinner for all of us and I told her I wouldn't eat with them. So I guess those were my first social problems on a raw food diet. But it all worked out fine after all and she was gave me some fresh pressed orange juice and a banana.


My exercise:

I had very sore muscles on day three, since my body is not yet used to so much exercise, so I decided to take it a bit more easy that day and went for a litte trip on my inlineskates with my dog. We live right next to a huge green area in Vienna with an a few kilometers long road going through it with no cars allowed, so it's perfect for doing some exercise outside. Snoopy really enjoyed it, but it was still too cold and windy for my taste...
Here is a litte picuture I took of Snoopy:

Day 2

On my 2nd day I felt a lot more awake in the morning than in a long time, but still had a slight headache, wich luckily quickly disappeared when I had breakfast.

My intake:

- juice of 6 oranges

- I made a really nice tomato soup with quinoa sprouts for lunch.
The sprouts were only about 24hours "old" at that time. I put them on the heater the day befor (I was afraid it could get too hot on there for the sprouts, but it seems to work out great) and was absolutely amazed by how fast they grew!

- Chris (my adorable boyfriend) bought a fresh Durian at the "Naschmarkt" (a big old viennese food market), so I had a piece of that. Unfortunately it was not totally ripe...

- a green smoothie

- a carrotsalad on a bed of lamb's lettuce with an avocado-mulberry dressing

- a 2nd green smoothie




My Exercise:

- 30min. on the stepper
- 15min. on the rowing machine


It's already past midnight over here and our dog Snoopy needs a walk, so I will continue to write about the rest of the past few days tomorrow morning... :-)

Days 1-5

It's my 6th day of raw foods now and I just started this blog, so I will try to summarize all my experiences etc. of my first 5 days in this post.



Day 1:

I started my first day of raw foods by recording all kinds of measurements of my body, so that I can really see all the differences my new lifestile will cause.
So here are some of the numbers our scale told me:
weight - 56,8kg ; total body fat - 20,4% ; water - 59% ; total muscle mass - 42,9kg
and some of my measurements:
waistline - 65 ; belly - 86 ; hip - 97

I also had my boyfriend take my "before" pictures, but I will post them on day 10 together with the new ones and hope there will already be some visible changes, because I'm feeling quite uncomfortable with the pictures at the moment...
I know I'm not overweight, but I'm just very out of shape at the moment...


So here is what I had on day 1:

I started with a smoothie that consisted of
- 2 oranges
- 1 banana
- gojiberries
- blackberries
- some vanilla

Here's a nice picture of it in my favorite cup, which is also very applicable for my first day of my new life! :-)


For lunch I had a big salad of mixed greens







1 banana as a snack

another smoothie for dinner consisting of:
- 1orange
- 1banana
- 1/2 lemon
- ginger
- vanilla

My training:
10 minutes warmup on the crosstrainer
full body muscle workout


My experiences:

I felt generally fit and light, but got a strong headache at night, but I'm actually not sure if this was some sort of detoxification process or if it simply came from the loud tecno "music" our neighbours like to listen to... ;-)

I already see that this is going to get way too long if i summarize all 5 days in one post, so I will write about each day in an extra post.

Welcome to my blog! :-)

I've been vegan for 5 1/2 years now and became more and more interested in raw foods over the time and at the same time I haven't been really happy with the state my body and mood were in lately, so 6 days ago I just decided to change some things in my life by setting myself a 100 day challenge of eating only raw foods and exercising 6 times a week.

To make it easier for myself to stick to my resolutions and to also inspire other peopel to take steps towards a healthier and happier life as well i decided to blog about all the experiences I will make.
I will try to blog on a daily base and write about what I eat and how I feel physically and mentally and about anything else that could be of any interest. ;-)
Every 10th day I will take pictures of myself and note my current weight etc. to document all the physical changes I will go throug.

Oh, and I live in the beautiful (but at the moment still way too cold...) city Vienna in Austria, so English is not my first language, but I decided to blog in English anyways to reach a greater amount of people, so I hope you'll excuse all linguistical mistakes I might make...

Hope you'll enjoy my blog! :-)