RAWSOME

I finally found a way to maintain my weight loss without counting calories. I eat when I'm hungry and eat as much as I want. I've gone raw vegan; I eat 100% raw, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. For many years I believed complete proteins had to be obtained from animal sources or by strict and careful food combining to balance amino acids at each meal, I was convinced that animal-based proteins were better and easier to assimilate. With all my food sensitivities and now with my RA situation, I can no longer hold onto that view.

Last night I could see the situation with extreme clarity. We assimilate proteins as single amino acids, not as conglomerates of amino acids, as we find in animal products. When we eat animal protein, the animal has assembled the separate amino acids into protein structures that constitute it's flesh, milk, or eggs. When we eat those structures, we have to break them down into their separate, single amino acids in order to feed our blood, where they are then used as separate amino acids, to repair or build our own protein structures.
Look at it this way:

I could tell you I want you to build me a Lego ship, but first you have to make it from a few Lego airplanes, which you must take apart before you can make your ship. Or, I could give you the separate Legos, and ask you to make the ship. You don't have to take apart the the airplanes for Lego parts before you build your ship. This is like taking apart the chicken breast proteins before making your human skin, hair or muscle tissues.

Plant sources of protein are already mostly broken down and if we juice the plants, the amino acids are even more easily assimilated. There is no need for extensive dismantling and breakdown first, as there is when we eat animal proteins. You cut out one of the major steps to getting what you really needed in the first place, separate amino acids instead of already glued together amino acid creations, fashioned into steer muscle or egg whites that we have to disassemble in order to make our HUMAN body parts.

When things go wrong during the disassembling of say, egg or dairy, or parts of the protein in your steak, they can enter the blood stream only partially broken down, causing allergies and food sensitivities, which also leads to RA and other problems. I have developed sensitivities to egg whites, almonds, and dairy whey, all foods I used heavily during my body building days of daily weight lifting at the gym. They over-tax the immune system, especially the lymph glands. I'm now going through lymph drainage massage to address my own over-taxed lymph system. Cooking these animal protein creations harms or destroys some of the amino acids they carried, causing you to receive less than the complete protein (amino acid collection or profile) you anticipated.

GO DIRECT. Take out he middle-man of animals. You really don't need to take in all the amino acids that comprise your muscles or hair in one food product. A mix of living, raw plant foods really does provide the amino acids for skin, hair and organs. There is no such thing as a plant with zero protein content. Only factory-refined foods are made into dead, almost pure carbohydrate food products of starch or sugar.

TRANS FAT, Hydrogenated oil, Partially Hydrogenated Oil, By Any Name, the Shame's the Same

ABOUT TRANS FATS

In case you have not yet heard about them, here is the scoop: They are created by super-heating liquid vegetable fats and adding in hydrogen molecules. The result is a Franken-fat that is now saturated enough to stay solid at room temperatures, just like butter. Add a little fake butter flavoring and salt and you have margarine. Back during the cold war the USA gave this to the Russians as a gift. The Russians did the safest thing with it, they polished their boots with it.
When we eat it our bodies try to make cell walls with the stuff. The resulting cells are like little houses made with straw instead of brick, they are defective and weak. The wolves of disease can easily blow them down and worst of all, they make us look OLD. Screw that! We look old fast enough without adding in fats that give Twinkies a twenty year shelf life but rob us of any shelf life we might have had.

I know hydrogenated fats are convenient and make money for the big time food conglomerates, supermarkets, and chain restaurants, but count me out. Their profit strategies are apposed to our health, beauty, and longevity. You might even call it a war. After all, this stuff kills far more people than all the wars fought in the last hundred years. Cancer and heart disease have touched all of us, either directly or through our families and friends. I just wonder if we can go after them as we did the cigarette companies. With trans fats banned in many countries and some US states, it's not as if they don't know what these fats do to us.

My message to them is: Get the bad fats out of the food or the mother of all class action suits it on it's way to you. Hostess Twinkies still have hydrogenated fats in them! They know people feed them to children. They know how damaging they are. They just don't care. Save yourself. Read labels. If the ingredients include "partially hydrogenated" or "hydrogenated" fats, you are looking at trans fats and trans fats are poison, slow but deadly. Remember, one serving takes your body three months to dump and we don't know how much longer the damage it caused lasts.

hCG Resistance

hCH Resistance:
About six weeks ago I noticed that I was getting cranky and hungry even though I was increasing the hCH dosage from 150 IU to 175IU, then 200IU injections. I had lost a couple more pounds, but my weight kept bouncing back up to 155 pounds. I was breaking the diet and struggling. I realized that I had become resistant to the hCG. Even with the one day each week breaks, after about forty injections the honeymoon was over.

I've been on a break from the diet ever since. I was very afraid that I would balloon up to my starting weight in as little time as it took for the weight to be lost. I've been out to my favorite Thai restaurant a few times, eaten coconut ice cream more times than my husband knows about, and eaten actual baked potatoes with butter a few times. Still, I HAVEN'T GAINED ANY WEIGHT BACK!!!
This is amazing. In the past, fast weight loss always meant a fast gain as soon as I stopped whatever diet I was on. This is a miracle for me.


GOING RAW
Another thing I have done over the last month is transition into eating all raw foods. I have transgressed the raw rules a few times, but what is truly amazing is that my weight is rock steady at the point where I stopped the hCH diet. My husband is doing this too and he has actually lost a few more pounds since he stopped the hCG diet. We will be starting up again on the hCG next week. I'm looking for a raw vegan version of the hCG diet.

Lately, I stuff myself silly with nuts and fruit, plus decadent things like agave syrup, mixed with coconut oil and cocoa or carob to make raw fudge. I eat great piles of macadamia nuts, almonds and walnuts. Each morning I wake up and feel my back and belly to see if I'm the same. I get on the scale and I'm the same weight or sometimes a little less. I have never before been able to eat like this and not gain weight.
I ate a bowl of dark grapes for breakfast and I feel stuffed right now.
I have eaten a few cooked things this month...seafood, chicken, lamb, soft egg yolks,raw swiss cheese, raw milk, and a few potatoes. I am in transition after all.

The milk really messed with me, causing my joints to ache and some swelling. I have RA and certain foods, mostly just gluten-containing grains, refined sugars, sugar alcohols and dairy, cause flare-ups that can take days to resolve. I test (try eating them) every month or so, because I miss these foods, but the pain is just too much to make them worth it. I know when I have eaten a wrong food, in less than an hour because my ears begin to ring. Does anyone else have ringing in their ears when they eat a food sensitivity trigger? It's like having a bad food alarm in my head.

With less than twenty-five pounds to go, I look forward to another, and what I believe will be my last round on the hCG diet. I look forward to the loading days, even though I feel as if many of my days this last month have held enough food to qualify as loading days. This time French fries and burgers will not be on the menu, but Thai food and dairy-free coconut ice cream are a must. The scary thing about french fries is the oil used to fry them. It takes three months to get rid of one dose of hydrogenated fat (trans fat) and that's the usual fat used to make fries. THREE MONTHS! I'll fix them with fats that don't poison me for months.

The two day "eat all you want" hCG loading party is nice, but it really does make you feel so miserably stuffed, the first day of the diet is a relief. The hCG is in your system and the hungry, cranky, "I'm dieting" feeling is gone.

I am not in my twenties, but I wonder if I can or should go all the way back to those weights...the 120's... If so, round three will happen and I'll be done with losing weight and just stay. Raw food, even in huge amounts seems to keep people very slender, and the total calories end up looking like the numbers for the diet used to cause longevity. (CRON - Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition)