Ten Days In: Report on my Fast from Bread

My Tenth Day of Fasting from Bread

It is the tenth day of my fast from bread -- from all grains, actually.  

This is not the same thing as my other fasting.  In this blog posting, I'll be talking about 2 different fasts that I'm currently doing.  (1) Since I learned of Michael Mosley's report of the research on longevity I've been doing a total fast twice a week (usually Monday and Friday).  While I continue to fast twice a week, I am now also (2) fasting from bread, even on those days when I eat.  For the last 10 days I have attempted to eat no grains, and only raw fruits and veggies as well.  This means, I avoid all animal products, including eggs and dairy, and I avoid all caffeine and salt and sugar.  

And no alcohol.  (I had to add that last one.  It only occurred to me after writing most of the rest of the blog.  It never occurs to me to drink alcohol anyway, so I don't even consider it as something for me to give up).

Societal Pressures

I haven't entirely succeeded on the raw diet.  Last Saturday I attended a wedding, where the vegetarian meal I was served had cooked vegetables, over a bowl of rice soaked in soy sauce.  I scraped off the rice that was sticking to the veggies, since I didn't want any grain.  I wouldn't have eaten any of this veg, if I could have avoided it socially, but I was seated next to the mother of the bride, and I didn't want to offend her too much.  I pushed around the rice so it looked like I had eaten some but was just being picky.

I wasn't the only one who left food on their plate.  I noticed the meat eaters had left most of their vegetables on their plates when they were finished.  Incidentally, why do meat eaters get more veggies than vegetarians?  Seriously.  I would have been far happier with their plates, but without the meat, than I was with what I was served.  I also noticed that these same meat eaters were not sated by their huge slabs of blood-red beef and chicken.  Within an hour, they eagerly helped themselves to bowls of candies set in the foyer, filling bags with sugary mints and gooey jujubes.  "How could they still be hungry?" I wondered.

Even worse, the salad I was given was drowned in oil.  Again, I wouldn't have touched it at all, except that the next chair was the groom's new mother-in-law, and she was paying for the catering, and I didn't want her to think that I wasn't being fed.  That salad didn't appeal to me in the slightest; but that should come as no surprise to those who know me.  I usually will order salad with no salad dressing, I always did.

One other thing I should mention, since it represents another societal pressure.  I've had to lie to my mother-in-law.  On mother's day this year, I had to work, but my wife visited her mom, her mom had a cake, and so she sent home a piece for me.  I was asked on the phone by my mother-in-law if I ate the cake.  I evaded the answer, and said, "Oh, right, you made that cake.  Thanks."  A little white lie.  Of course, I didn't eat it, I didn't even see it.  My wife gave it to my brother-in-law.  She knew I wouldn't have eaten it.

There will be other weddings, this summer.  I won't be able to realistically and slavishly follow this diet forever.  There has to be some flexibility in social situations in any diet.

How much fruit?

Other than that social episode, I've been able to follow this fast fairly well, although it remains a learning process for me as to how much food I am actually eating.  The amount of fruit I consume seems outrageous, to someone who has never eaten that much fruit and veg.

Still, it apparently is not enough.  Douglas Graham tells us that the amount required to sustain someone who is active and athletic is substantially more than what we in the western world are accustomed to eating, when it comes to fruit.  We actually have to train ourselves to eat enough raw fruits and leafy green vegetables, since we are not used to that amount of bulk.  We are instead, more accustomed to fat.

Raw whole food eaters say about 30 bananas a day is the appropriate amount of calories for a typical man who needs 2000 calories/day.  This gives you an idea of what might be expected, in terms of volume.  Broken up into the standard 3 meals a day, this is about 10 bananas per sitting.  Very few of us who were brought up on a western diet of high fat, lots of grain, would be able to conceive of doing this.  And so, one must transition into this volume of fruit.  But remember that 3 meals a day is just a convention -- and one largely invented for meat (and other cooked food) eaters.  If you ain't cooking anything, eating a banana is just a matter of peeling it, whenever and wherever you are.

The idea of a meal just changed.

WTFructose?

Although I still drink vegetable juices, and like them as a transitional diet modifier, I don't recommend fruit juices or smoothies.  One often hears the warning about eating too much fruit, that one's triglycerides will rise too high, because the liver has trouble with the high amounts of fructose in fruit.  Many slow-carb diet plans warn specifically about too much fruit, and fruit juices in particular.  For example, Timothy Ferris (author of "The 4-Hour Body") says you can have some fruit once a week, but no more than that.

Of course, Douglas Graham promotes the whole fruit, because the fiber of fruit can temper the release of the sweetness into the bloodstream.  Graham also says that triglycerides are only a problem in someone who eats a high fat diet, and this is not the case with raw vegans who eat primarily a fruit-based diet that is very low in fat.   He says the studies on raw vegan whole food eaters have simply never been done.  All studies about triglycerides done so far make the assumption that everyone eats a typical high fat, western diet.  All he can do is point to the anecdotal health of many athletes who have tried this diet.  

While this doesn't seem terribly reassuring, he makes a fair point.  Because of the well-known dangers of triglycerides adding to one's chances of increased cardiovascular disease, one ought to take this as a profound warning to those transitioning into this diet; you cannot eat a primarily raw fruit-based diet and continue to eat fatty foods like meat, eggs, dairy and processed oils.  Graham advises the use of whole fruits, not juices.  He doesn't like nuts and seeds, which contain a lot of hidden fat, and are often the staple of a  raw vegan diet.  And he even cautions against the overuse of fatty vegetables like avocados, olives and coconuts.

In his book "The 80-10-10 Diet" Graham gives an example of some of the non-whole food raw vegan recipes and diets and salads and analyzes the fat content of them.  In some cases, he says, the fat content of this diet can be far worse than that of a meat-eater's.  But (he maintains) you'll do all right if you stick to raw, whole foods, and the foods that you would eat if you found them in the forest -- meaning fruits and primarily leafy green vegetables (but no, or very little nuts and seeds, which are high in fat, and of course absolutely no cereals, no sugar or salt, and no processed oils).  If you can do that -- and perhaps not everybody can (I'm still not sure I can) -- you are virtually guaranteed to eat far less fat. 

Woah, Candida

It may not be easy to eat that much fruit, for other reasons: fruit contains a lot of natural sugar, and when one begins to eat this much, the candida in the bloodstream blooms and gives us trouble.  Douglas Graham suggests that the candida are doing us a favour: since the body's cells cannot consume that amount of sugar, the yeast take care of it and systemic balance is restored, without causing undue stress on the pancreas.  But here's the thing: the only reason our own cells can't use all the sugar is because we have eaten too much fat to begin with: the fat lines our arteries and other blood vessels, and pervades our body, blocking the glucose from entering the cells properly.  Our bodies do their best to clear away the glucose, but when it can't get into the cells fast enough, the candida take what we can't use.  The usual remedy for candida flareups would be to go completely off anything sweet, especially fruit, and make up those calories with more fat -- but Graham says that would be a terrible mistake.

Still, some transitioning has to take place.  If one can't go cold turkey into the 80-10-10 diet, because of candida flair-ups, or other problems, one should not abandon hope and return to a high fat diet.  Graham always said that this ratio he proposes is a target, a direction, not a recipe.  I personally didn't have problems with candida when I began this fast from grains, but realize that I've been fasting twice a week on my standard lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet for about 6 months, and have lost some weight.  Now, before this 10-day fast from bread and my undertaking a raw diet, my weight seemed to have stabilized.  I hadn't lost any more weight for the past couple of months (except for a few pounds during a fast day, which was likely water, and which I gained back again when eating the usual bread fare; see this blog entry for details).  If I had to suggest something for someone who was having a candida problem and unwilling to try this mostly-fruit diet, I would suggest trying what I did.  Or if you found twice-a-week total fasting difficult, you could drink nothing but green vegetable juices on those fast days, twice a week.  

Then, like me, you could try a 3-day fast from bread, and see how you feel; and if you feel better, you are almost half-way to a full week away from bread; try that.  And if that makes you feel better, try 10 days without grains on a raw diet.  And if that seems possible to you, then consider a month.  And if that's okay, then consider Douglas Graham's challenge of trying the raw bonobo diet of fruits and leafy greens for an entire year.

If even the prototypical exorphin junkie can do it, you can do it too.  But let's take this one day at a time.  I've only managed 10 days, so far.  And I still call this a fast, not a diet.

How Much Better Do I feel after 10 days?

Here are a few things that I've noticed.  Warning: I mention a couple of nasty things.

• I'm losing weight.  I thought that I had finished losing weight, on my bi-weekly fasts, but on this raw mostly fruit diet, I continue to lose pounds.  Now I have no idea where I'll end up.  I might end up being quite skinny, if this keeps up.  I'm starting to think about doing some weight training again, to stress my muscles to build some strength.  I may have to rethink my bi-weekly fasting.  Douglas Graham doesn't recommend it -- although he does recommend periodic water fasts of lengthier duration (I think I've heard him mention as much as 23 days of fasting from everything except water, somewhere).
• Some people wonder if I'm sick.  Most people who lose as much weight as I've been losing are in fact sick and full of cancer.  No one asks me directly, but my wife gets approached, and my co-workers get approached; people who remember me overweight (but I was never obese) are asking: "Is he all right?"  Actually, I feel fine.  However, on a fast day, my face can look quite gaunt, the lines fairly deep, the wrinkles more noticeable.  I force myself to drink water on a fast day, but over the day the loss of water is substantial, and it is most noticeable on my old wrinkled face.  When I eat fruit, the lines on my face are less noticeable.  I have had people tell me I ought not to lose any more weight.
• Mango fibers get stuck between my teeth, when I nibble the fruit from the rind.  I'm going to have to floss more.  This suggests to me that the claims that raw dieters have no teeth problems is not completely accurate.
• The base of my spine may be developing skin problems -- again.  I remember when I was a vegan for a year, when I first became a vegetarian, and I developed something like psoriasis.  Coccyx, elbows -- these were the spots that became raw and itchy first, as I recall.  If it is happening again, I will have to stop the fast right away, and return to some egg or dairy products.  Is this raw spot (no pun intended) on my spine an early indication of a developing deficiency?   Or is it just a bit of "yoga burn" from my last yoga session?  I'm not as padded on my ass as I used to be.  I guess I'll have to wait and see if its a nutritional deficiency.
• I feel the cold more.  A cool day causes me to be quite chilled.  Is this because my metabolism has changed?  I definitely don't burn as hot as I used to.  I like to sleep naked, and oftentimes under the blankets I'm quite cold now, especially in my fingers and feet, whereas before I was quite hot.  I may have to consider wearing pj's.  This is a concern for me; I was thinking that, if I cleaned up my capillaries, my bloodflow would be better.  But my extremities are not as warm as they used to be.  Does that mean they are less perfused?
• Some people don't like it when one alters one's diet this drastically.  Everybody wants to get their nose into my business, and tell me I'm crazy, especially those who normally wouldn't give me the time of day.  I suspect this is one of the things that makes us human.  It is a primate thing that defines us.  We share food.  When one of us breaks from the usual fare, one is immediately classified as an outsider.  A suspect.  A traitor.  
• I don't wake up with a bad taste in my mouth, but wake up with fresh breath.  The one exception to this, during these 10 days, was the morning after I ate all that salt and oil at the wedding.
• My poo is greener than ever before.  I suspect that this is the green juices I've been consuming.  There is a substantial amount of fiber in it, but it is quite different in texture than the fiber I've been eating with my whole grain breads.  It is not ripping up my insides when it passes.
• I can bounce upstairs without any ache in my legs.  I could always bound upstairs, but there was always a tiny ache in my femur.  I've already mentioned in a previous blog, after only 3 days into this fast, that my hips don't hurt; now I notice my legs don't hurt.  I'm not talking about muscular aches, which come and go, but rather deep bone aches that I was not even aware of, until it went away.  Curious that these larger bones feel better: it makes me wonder if these are the bones that the body was drawing upon for its calcium?  The raw food gurus all say that calcium levels are depleted through the ingestion of grains and cooked foods.   It makes sense that the body would scoop some calcium from its largest store in the larger bones first, if there was a need for calcium because the bran was drawing it from the body through the bowels.  Ever wonder why so many elderly people fall and end up hospitalized with fractured hips?  Ask yourself whether the fracture is the result of the fall, or the cause of it.  Years ago, I stopped running because my knees hurt.  I'm now thinking about running again.
• After working all day in the hospital, when I come home I don't have boogers in my nose if I've been eating a lot of fruit all day.  I think my bloodstream is better hydrated, my body is not all dried up.  It used to be, there was a lot of stuff in my nose that had to be cleared out.  I've tried many things to keep the nares free of stuff, because I hate to have impeded airflow.  I'm sorry to have to report that fingers seem to be the best choice.  (Don't worry, I'm a nurse, I also wash my hands.  A lot.).  I've noticed my coworkers are often stuffed-up when they work on our unit too.  It seems to be quite a toxic environment.  We all do our best to keep hydrated, but it is so very, very dry.  Is it all the more dry for those whose food is generally cooked (dried out), and laden with salt and fat?
• My spine feels more flexible.  I suspect that this is due mostly to the better hydration of my internal organs, perhaps because of the loss of visceral fat around those organs.

My son says that some of these healthful effects I mentioned to him may be little more than the placebo effect.  He also added, "but don't forget, the placebo effect is real."  I wonder if he thinks I expected to feel better, on this diet.  But in fact, I had no idea that I would.  I rather suspected I would be hungry all the time, and never satiated without bread.  I suspected I would be weaker, not stronger.  I thought that 3 days would be torture, bread free.  I thought 7 days would be torture without bread.  I thought 10 days was only doable after I completed the 7 days.  I'm still not sure about a full year on this diet, but I'm starting to think it might be possible.

My brother-in-law says what's the point of fasting and avoiding foods you like?  What's the point of life if you are not enjoying it?    This is the same argument of a person who is never able to buy a house or any other major purchase because they are always renting and spending their money on frivolous things that distract them.  Never able to put money away to be able to afford a down payment on the big purchase, they can't see beyond the present moment.  I hasten to add that this is certainly NOT a description of my brother-in-law; I've seen him ridicule those who have no self-discipline in buying things that aren't needed, but who can't afford important stuff.  But he doesn't see the same lack of self discipline when it comes to eating.  Here's what I mean: let's imagine that your old age is your big purchase.  You have to save something to be able to afford it.  So you avoid purchasing too many little things -- candy, bread, cooked foods, meat and dairy -- until you have enough health stored so that you can have the coin for when you get to the point of your big purchase -- when you arrive at old age.  Listen to me: people are living longer now, and you definitely don't want to live the second half of your life without your health.

I do enjoy life.  I'm learning to avoid bread because clearly I'm addicted to it, and I suspect that it is draining me of life.  I wish to experience more life.  I'm trying to save some health.  I see so many people with chronic diseases who linger on into old age, debilitated.  I'd like to avoid that scenario, if I can.

I still occasionally crave my bread.  I may always crave it, I don't know.  For now, these moments pass quickly when I eat a piece of fruit, or drink some fresh vegetable juice, or eat some celery or lettuce.  I suggest others try the same thing: eat some fruit or veg first, and then if you are still hungry, then and only then, if you are transitioning into this diet like me, eat some bread as a last resort.  Or better yet, some steamed rice.  But stay clear of the fats you want to put on these cereal carbs for taste.  Keep as close to the 80-10-10 diet plan of 80% carbs, 10% each of fat and protein.  Don't get sucked in to eating fat.  Try to avoid cooked, salted or otherwise processed foods -- and that pretty much means all cereals, and all those oh-so-clever vegan recipes that use dehydrators and blenders.

For now I am calling this my fast, rather than my diet.  I'm clearly not sure whether it is going to be completely sustainable for me.

What I actually eat, while on this "fast from bread"

The book "The 4-Hour Body" by Timothy Ferris makes a couple of interesting suggestions, about dieting.  "Take a snapshot before opening your mouth," he writes.  That becomes a way to measure your progress, and any measurement will have positive effects on your choices.  I have just finished taking a picture of each bread that I made for the last 4-5 years, and posting it on this blog, so this should be a fairly easy thing for me to do -- take a picture of everything I eat -- at least for one day.  

I chose today, as today represents for me a goal reached that twelve days ago I would not have thought possible for an exorphin junkie to reach.  It's also not a very active day for me.  I can relax and take as many photos as I need without pressure to do other things.  I can use this photo record to determine how much fat is in my diet, and how many calories.  I won't do this on a regular basis, it is far too time consuming.

Today is Tuesday, the 10th day of my fast from all bread and grains, on a raw diet inspired by raw food guru Douglas Graham, author of "The 80-10-10 Diet."  Note that I'm not too worried that I failed to implement all of Graham's suggestions.  I still drink fresh vegetable juice.  I still drink water.  I still drink hot herbal tea.  I eat a whole avocado if I want to.  At least I'm trying to eat low fat, with a target of 10%.  

At each sitting, I eat until not hungry.

Breakfast ~0500

A glass of green juice, made from the following veggies.  This amount of veggies made 2 glasses, and the second glass was refrigerated for my lunch:

• 1 full stalk of Kale
• 1/3 of a celery, about 5 stalks
• 3 med carrots
• 1 cucumber
• all the petals of 1 artichoke (which doesn't give much juice, by the way)

In addition to the juice, I ate these fruits:

• 6 guavas (never eaten guavas before.  They have  a lot of seeds, not that much food value.  Probably a fair amount of fat.  Texture of pears, when you can find a bit of seedless flesh)
• 1 banana
• 2 mangos (these are cheap right now, so they must be in season somewhere.  I love mangos, and took one to work this week, even though they are somewhat messy to eat.  One of my co-workers said she "hates mangos" and I was astonished.  "I've never met anyone who doesn't like mangos" I told her.  Mangos are like the prototypical fruit that humans evolved with.  See "The Nature of Things" TV series on "The Fruit Hunters, part 1" to learn that there are over 600 varieties.  I only see two varieties in my local grocery store, ever -- if I'm lucky.)

And in addition to the juice, I also drank:

• 1 glass of water

MidMorning ~1000

• 4 apricots
• 1 apple
• 1 glass water
• 1 glass cold lemon-ginger tea (made yesterday)

Lunch ~1230

• 1 glass of vegetable juice.
• 1 Romaine lettuce heart
• 1 red grapefruit
• 1 banana

MidAfternoon ~1600

• ~8 strawberries, with the mushy parts pared out (these were cleaned thoroughly but although I began with 10 of them, I stopped from eating the last two.  They weren't organic, and to me they tasted off - bland, unripe, and too much like chemicals.  I tossed some out)
• 2 apricots, in place of the strawbs that I tossed
• some hot licorice yogi herbal tea

Dinner 1730

• 1 Romaine lettuce heart
• 1 tomato
• 1 avocado
• 1 mango
• 3 cups of hot herbal tea

Snack 2200

• 1 banana

Weight Update:

A couple of blog entries ago, I commented on my weight fluctuation following a fast, and determined that it must be all water, and that the fiber in the bread bran that I was eating, or possibly the salt, was drawing water from the cells of my body to join it in its pass through the colon.  I was now curious about my weight after 10 days of fasting from bread, following a day of total fasting.

As usual, I did a total fast on Monday.  My weight is now somewhere around 170lbs, not 180lbs as reported just 10 days ago.  I'm not doing this for weight loss, but the weight loss still seems to be happening.  Not sure yet where it will end up.

	Fast Day 1	Commentary
am weight	172	After 10 days of mostly raw fruit and veg, my starting weight seems to be a couple of pounds less (remember, 10 days ago, I said my weight was 180lbs, or slightly less)
pm weight	169	Even though I continue to push myself to drink on a total fast day, I still lose a bit of weight in water.
	Following Day	(This is the day that this blog is about, the 10th day of my raw food fast)
am weight	168	Overnight I've only lost a pound, far less water/weight loss than I used to on the bread diet.  I think it shows that the fiber from the fruit I am eating is far more hydrating than the bread and cooked foods which used to dry me out.
pm weight	168.5	After eating everything listed in this blog in one day following my fast, I have regained about 1/2 a pound, over the day.  I've eaten until I didn't want any more food, at each sitting, and have snacked on fruit during the day.  I'm not hungry.  I can fall asleep without craving bread.

Here is the full tally of things I ate this day.  I have had to struggle through the databases at the usda for this info, and I might have made several errors, but its the best I can do.

Quantity	Food	Calories, Carbs, Proteins, Fats (each)	Calories, Carbs, Proteins, Fats (total)
1	apple	Calories=72; Carbs=19.06;Proteins=0.36;Fats=0.23	TotalCalories=72; TotalCarbs=19.06;TotalProteins=0.36;TotalFats=0.23
6	apricots	Calories=17; Carbs=3.89;Proteins=0.49;Fats=0.14	TotalCalories=102; TotalCarbs=23.34;TotalProteins=2.94;TotalFats=0.84
1	avocado	Calories=34; Carbs=2.22;Proteins=0.63;Fats=2.85	TotalCalories=34; TotalCarbs=2.22;TotalProteins=0.63;TotalFats=2.85
3	banana	Calories=105; Carbs=26.95;Proteins=1.29;Fats=0.39	TotalCalories=315; TotalCarbs=80.85;TotalProteins=3.87;TotalFats=1.17
1	grapefruit	Calories=(52x2)104; Carbs=(13.11x2)16.22;Proteins=(0.95X2)1.9;Fats=(0.17X2) 0.34	TotalCalories=104; TotalCarbs=16.22;TotalProteins=1.9;TotalFats=0.34
6	guava	Calories=37.4; Carbs=28.3;Proteins=4.7;Fats=4.4	TotalCalories=224.4; TotalCarbs=169.8;TotalProteins=28.2;TotalFats=26.4
2	romaine heart	Calories=(2X20)40; Carbs=(0.33x20)6.6;Proteins=(0.12X20)2.4=;Fats=(0.03X20)= 0.6	TotalCalories=80; TotalCarbs=13.2;TotalProteins=4.8;TotalFats=1.2
3	mangos	Calories=124; Carbs=31.01;Proteins=1.70;Fats= 0.79	TotalCalories=372; TotalCarbs=93.03;TotalProteins=5.1;TotalFats=2.37
8	strawberries	Calories=((4+6)/2)5; Carbs=((0.92+1.38)/2)1.61;Proteins=((0.08+0.12)/2) 0.1;Fats=((0.04+0.05)/2) 0.045	TotalCalories=40; TotalCarbs=12.88;TotalProteins=0.8;TotalFats=0.36
1	tomato	Calories=22; Carbs=4.78;Proteins=1.08;Fats=0.25	TotalCalories=22; TotalCarbs=4.78;TotalProteins=1.08;TotalFats=0.25
1	water	Calories=0; Carbs=0;Proteins=0;Fats=0	TotalCalories=0; TotalCarbs=0;TotalProteins=0;TotalFats=0
5	herbal tea	Calories=0; Carbs=0;Proteins=0;Fats=0	TotalCalories=0; TotalCarbs=0;TotalProteins=0;TotalFats=0
2	vegetable juice	Calories=?; Carbs=?;Proteins=?;Fats=?	TotalCalories=?; TotalCarbs=?;TotalProteins=?;TotalFats=?
-	-	GRAND TOTALS:	TotalCalories=1365.4; TotalCarbs=435.38;TotalProteins=49.68;TotalFats=36.01

Notes on this table:

For calories: https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR25/nutrlist/sr25a208.pdf
For carbs: https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR25/nutrlist/sr25a205.pdf
For protein: https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR25/nutrlist/sr25a203.pdf
For fats: https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR25/nutrlist/sr25a204.pdf

For grapefruit, I doubled it, because the database only provides amounts for 1/2 grapefruit.  For lettuce, I'm guessing there are 20 leaves in the romaine hearts.  For strawberries, I take the average of the two berries provided in the database.  Unknown how many calories, carbs, proteins and fats are in my juice.  No info on guava in the database.  Guava info in my table comes from nutritiondata.self.com

You can see by the daily total of calories that, without knowing what's in the vegetable juice, I am a bit low on calories.  I should have almost 635 MORE calories to reach 2000 calories on this day, and I doubt very much whether the vegetable juice provides that much.  Had I managed to eat that quantity of leafy greens that I put into the juice, perhaps it would have.  But frankly, eating that much leafy bulk would have added a long time for meals.  Perhaps cooking was invented by humans as a way to save time chewing all that raw veg!

Because I'm not eating enough to sustain my weight, the extra days of fasting are going to cause my weight to drop even further -- and that, of course, is what I'm seeing.

I did not use Graham's Appendix D in my efforts to figure out the ratios of this day's meal, which succinctly explains the complicated Atwater method of calculating the calories per gram of each macronutrient.  Instead, I used the usual formula, i.e. that Protein is about 4 calories/gram, fat is about 9 calories/gram, and carbs are what's left over (100%-protein%-fat%).  

With that method, today's food gave me 61.7% carbs, 14.55% protein, and 23.7% fat.  So I'd have to do a lot better to hit Graham's ratio of 80-10-10.  No more avocados or guavas; fewer mangos.  I think it also shows that hitting these targets is going to be pretty challenging, even for a raw vegan.

I'm not sure how long I can keep it up, or even if I should, for any length of time.  Or is that just the junkie in me talking, and saying to myself, "how nice it would be to have a whole wheat bread with cheese right about now?"

I'm going to keep this fast up a bit longer, and see if I can hit the target of 80-10-10 ever.

Notes to Myself

• While I wrote this on the 10th day of the fast, it took me some time to get together the data on the foods that I ate, to determine their fat and calorie content.
• I really like Romaine hearts.  I can buy a bag of 3 that are organic.  I can wash an entire heart, leaf by leaf, without tearing it apart for a salad, and shake the excess water off it.  I can transport it like this to work in a bag.  I can nibble away on those leaves and make it a meal.  Who cares if my co-workers are laughing at me?  "Plates?  We don't need no stinkin' plates."
• Follow the breath.
• Is this a blog about bread?  Or is that changing?  Is this becoming my diet, or is it just a fast?
• Here's a YouTube video about someone who challenges the healthiness of the 80-10-10 diet

The First Bread I Never Ate: 23.5% Rye with Wheat Sprouts

 23.5% Rye with Wheat Sprouts

I made this bread, but this is the first bread I ever made that I didn't also eat myself.  I gave one to my friend, and my wife ate part of a loaf, before I could explain the reasons behind my fast.  She may not finish it.  The chickens might get the rest.

about a cup of wheat berry sprouts

steeped dough

• 765g wheat berries
• 235g rye kernels
• 160g wheat sprouts
• 200g sourdough starter
• 18g salt
• 770g water
• 50g water with salt
• 50g water with sprouts
• 50g water to steep

She says it tastes fine, but you can see that there is a tiny spot of crumb where the bread didn't fully develop where the loaf sat on the stone.  Perhaps the stone wasn't hot enough, who knows?

The Lost Tale of Star Trek

When I was a young boy, I was a big fan of Star Trek, the original TV series, and someone gave me one of the early books for my birthday.  I read "Mission to Horatius"  by Mack Reynolds several times.  This  book is sometimes known as the "lost book of Star Trek", because it was originally published by Whitman Books, not Pocket Books, the company that published James Blish's novels based on the series.  Pocket Books later released a facsimile edition of "Horatius" with an introduction by John Ordover.

"Mission to Horatius" was never made into a TV show because it rambled on about an illness infecting the crew of the starship Enterprise called space cafard, which derived from the boredom of living in a tin can among the emptiness of interstellar void.  It didn't really make for an exciting tale.  Considered a kid's story, "Mission to Horatius" can be found online now.

However, the online version does not contain the forward to the story -- perhaps I had the facsimile edition, so I'm not sure whether this was written by Ordover.  This forward explained a brief and thrilling history of humans and their leap to the stars, in the Star Trek universe.  I remember a line in that preamble said something like, "with the invention of faster-than-light warp drive engines, suddenly the word 'parsec' came into common parlance."  I remember the word 'parsec' sent me to the dictionaries.  There was no Google then.

One thing Reynolds (or Ordover) said in the forward to the book I found quite unsettling.  I found I couldn't actually come to terms with it, when I read this, even as a youngster.  Reynolds said that humans had shown amazing adaptability, and had discovered ways to thrive in every environment -- and now, that included space.  That didn't sit well with me.  

I reflected that, as far as earth environments were concerned, this seemed to be true.  Humans had covered the globe.  They could live in just about any environment on earth.  Beduins could live in the desert.  Hawaiians could live on a lush Island.  The Inuit survived and thrived in regions of the earth that were inhospitable.

But outer space was another matter entirely.  There is no air, no water, no food, in space.  The temperature is not conducive to life as we know it.  Dangerous cosmic rays travel through space and when we leave our protective planet's atmosphere, we are unshielded.  Is it truly adaptation to build environments like starships that replicate earth gravity and earth atmosphere?  To me, even as a young teenager, that did not seem to show "humans adapting to an environment", but rather "humans adapting their environment to suit them."  As a young child, the only way I could reconcile this dilemma was by thinking, "perhaps he means that our intelligence allows us to adapt the environment to make it livable.  Perhaps the intelligence of humans allows for a more generalized adaptation, one not tied to a specific environment. "  

But I still didn't feel as if this were the whole answer.  Was Reynolds (or Ordover) using the right word?  He knew words that I didn't -- words like 'parsec' -- but his use of the word 'adapt' seemed just plain wrong.

I looked around at my own home.  The winters were hard here in Canada.  Without this house, I couldn't live here, year round.  I wasn't adapted to this environment, like the deer, or the coyotes or the raccoons in the forest.  Even the Inuit were not truly adapting to the extreme north, although they'd lived there for generations beyond counting: without those furs which they stole from other animals who had truly adapted, they wouldn't last more than a few minutes naked on the snow in the depth of winter.  "Is adaptation different for humans than it is for other animals?" I wondered.  Just because we can survive somewhere, and we change the environment to make it somewhat hospitable, does that mean we have adapted to it?  Or has our intelligence merely allowed us to live here temporarily in an environment that we could never adapt to?

Our Home and Native Land

As an adult, I have been dabbling in organic gardening in my backyard, in the hopes that I can someday, somehow, provide a substantial part of my diet from my own property.  

But winters are extremely problematic for me.  Half of the year at least, I can expect no produce from my own garden (and the other half of the year, I'm not really self sufficient, as much as that might once have been one of my goals).  I can't really grow enough on my tiny residential lot to feed myself and my wife.  So even though we've put down roots, we are not entirely indigenous here, and never will be.  We're not natives to this lot we live on.  And that disconnection from the earth is troublesome to me.  This is the place where I was born and raised; this is the home of my ancestors, going back six or more generations.  Although that is nothing in evolutionary terms, it is important to me.  But now I'm wondering if I truly belong here.  To adapt to this environment, I have to be able to feed myself.  And what if I am not fully able to adapt to the food that is available to me?

How does any of us become indigenous where we live?

The Provenance of Hygienists Ideas 

I've been thinking about all this recently since I learned of the work of raw food proponent Frederic Patenaude.  Recently I blogged about Patenaude, from whom I first learned of the Bonobo diet; and after reading some of his work, I've been going back to his sources, and I'm beginning to unravel the thread of history that makes up the alternative health theories of the "Natural Hygienists."  Patenaude has been deeply influenced by Douglas Graham, who was influenced by T.C.Fry* (who likely originated the idea that the primal human diet -- the one we evolved with -- most closely resembled the Bonobo diet); Fry in turn was influenced by Herbert M. Shelton.  Shelton's influences were Isaac Jennings, Sylvester Graham and Thomas Allinson, but it was Shelton's extensive work on fasting and raw food that consolidated this alternative, natural medicine of prevention, and it was he who named it orthopathy.  Not all of the proponents of these ideas have been doctors; some have been chiropractors, some nutritionists, some have had no degrees at all.  Some have had great success from their own experience (e.g. Nathan Pritikin), without apparently being directly involved in this chain of influence, or idea transmission.  Unravelling the influences seems almost as pointless as discovering the provenance of an idea from an early Star Trek novel.  

Orthopathy (a name which apparently hasn't caught on -- mostly people use the term "Natural Hygiene" instead) doesn't seem to be an organized hierarchy or accredited field, after all, but rather an ideal to which some people aspire.  Virtually anyone who claims that eating a healthy diet can go a long way toward preventing disease and illness falls under its umbrella, but there is a wide range of opinion over what a healthy diet actually is.  Some, like Patenaude and Shelton, have refined their thinking over their lifetime: Patenaude was eating raw veg for many years but used dehydrators and complicated raw recipes before changing to a raw diet that was simpler, and based on whole foods (mostly fruits, leafy greens, some vegetables), like Douglas Graham.  Shelton gradually gave up dairy products over his lifespan.

Today's authors have even changed some of the core ideas of some of the founders, but the field is still vibrant.  One of the more respected modern authors who work in "nutrition-based treatments for obesity and chronic disease" is Dr. Joel Fuhrman (who can be seen in interviews in Joe Cross's movie, "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead" -- but whether Fuhrman follows the chain of influence I've outlined here remains to be seen.  Eventually I'll get around to Fuhrman's books, I suppose.  I say he is 'respected: I'm sure he's drawn some criticism, but I haven't found anyone out there who is working to destroy him, the way some of these other earlier natural hygienists were.

In the meantime, many interesting books in this field, from all of these older authors, are available online in the repository currently housed at The Soil and Health Library.  I'm dipping into them as I'm able, but there is a lot there.  And because many authors changed their ideas as they aged or developed their thinking, a lot of work would be required to sift the wheat from the chaff.  

Horne's Pain

As an Exorphin Junkie who has been fixated on bread for the last few years, I found this book in the repository to be most interesting to me:  Horne, Ross (1988) Improving on Pritikin: you can do better. Happy Landings Pty. Ltd. Australia.

It may be that my own thinking on whole grains, the last few years  -- my absolute steadfastness in baking whole grain breads, in the face of an entire bread baking culture that refused to make it the way I wanted it -- has been influenced by Pritikin.  I may have read some of his books (or perhaps Ross Horne's other book, an early version of "The Health Revolution") when I was quite young and impressionable, the same way I read Star Trek books and anything else that was within reach.  I seem to recall one of his books in my hand when I was a teenager, and I must have absorbed some of his ideas.

Horne was a Pritikin devotee for many years, but eventually he came to speak out against what he felt was wrong with the Pritikin diet, and the Macrobiotic Diet and many other diets.  In principle, these diets saw health-giving results because they were on the right track away from the Standard American Diet (SAD) of cooked meat, high fat, high protein, low fresh fruits and greens.  However, Horne found that cooking itself, and excess intake of grains was ultimately detrimental to human health.  "Improving on Pritikin" was Horne's attempt to fix what he saw were some of the more subtle problems of the Pritikin diet.

Horne, more than any other author on the subject who has written on this, has convinced me that cooked grains (and what is bread, but that?) are ultimately unhealthy for humans.  As Douglas Graham said in his booklet "Grain Damage," "In an orchard of ripe fruit, you could eat to your heart's content.  In a ripe field of wheat, you would starve to death."  We did not evolve eating grains.  As Horne says, "grains are for the birds."  

Humans have tried to adapt grains to our use as a food source -- using our intelligence and many ingenious devices to plant, nurture, grow, harvest, grind up, and cook them -- but we haven't really evolved to use them efficiently, and they end up hurting us.

Horne writes, "Grains are not vegetables, and a person who eats them is technically not a true vegetarian."  He cites Shelton, who said, "The advocates of whole cereals in preference to the de-natured kinds, did their work too well.  Vegetarians are usually great eaters of cereals.  They would receive less harm from moderate amounts of meat."  Horne suggests: "abandon grain products completely for a week or so and see what happens."

For me, it didn't even take a week.  On the fifth day of my fast from bread and dairy products, I began to realize that I had been carrying a small chronic ache in my hips when I walk, something which I was unconscious of, until it disappeared.  On my fast from bread and dairy, this chronic ache is now gone.  Why was the ache there?  Was it the beginning of arthritis, or osteoporosis?  Could it have been due to calcium being leached from my bones to make up for the calcium that the extra bran was scooping from my GI tract?  Was it because I was now simply better hydrated, or that more minerals were being absorbed via my diet?  I don't know.  All I know is the tiny ache I wasn't even entirely aware of, is now gone.  In short: I'm healthier.  I can already tell.

Is it possible, in Canada, to eat year round Fruits and Leafy Green Veggies?

Horne says, "Good quality fruit costs a lot more than bread or oats or spaghetti but you will find in the long run it is money well spent."

The Bonobo diet -- a raw food diet that is mostly fruit, some greens, and a few vegetables (concisely detailed by Graham in his book "The 80-10-10 Diet") goes back even farther than the recently popularized "Paleo Diet" in human history.  Sure, prior to the advent of agriculture, when we first started eating grains in abundance, members of our human tribe were hunter gatherers, and cookers of flesh, subsisting on wild game and whatever fruits and leaves we found along the way.  But we didn't evolve as hunter-gatherers.  We evolved like the other primates, eating mostly fruit and leafy greens.  So before we were ever meat eaters, before we ever cooked our food, we ate a raw fruit and leafy green and partial vegetable diet.  And that is all we ate for millions of years before the paleolithic humans changed it all.  So the raw food eater following Graham's diet returns to food that can be eaten without cooking, yes, but also without processing of any kind.  Throw away your juicers, your dehydrators, your fridges, your stoves and ovens.  All you need is fruit, a few leaves, a few veggies, and a water source.  You should be eating 80% carbs, 10% protein and 10% fat -- that is a target, a direction -- and you get that when you eat mostly fruit and some greens (according to Graham).

Humans seem to have adapted to other meal plans besides raw fruits and veggies as they began banding together in tribes to hunt.  When wild game and foraged food became scarce, they began banding together in towns, surrounded by fields where agriculture was first tried, and as soil depleted they moved out over the earth, terraforming, until now we have humans banding together in cities, surrounded by a rural landscape of monoculture grains, which largely sustains millions upon millions of us.  The adaptation hasn't been entirely successful, as our bodies are still designed to eat raw fruits and vegetables.  And so, when we eat cooked meat and grains, we will end up with chronic diseases and acute illnesses because we eat too much protein, too much fat, and we denature all of our food.  On meat, dairy, grains, and processed foods (what most of us eat), we automatically get too much fat, too much protein, and too much that is toxic to our bodies, with not enough micronutrients.  Our bodies "adapt" to this diet by making us overweight and sick.  

I have seen so much cancer, so much heart disease, so much death.  I have watched families ripped apart as they struggle with the fading personalities of their loved ones who have succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease, or the physically debilitating Lou Gerig's Disease, MS or other chronic degenerative diseases.  In nursing school we were taught to look upstream for the causes of these ailments, to stop the holocaust at the source, not downstream where we find the dead bodies floating toward us.  The cause has to be diet and our environment.  It has to be.  We are poisoning ourselves.  We are not adapting. We don't have another billion years to evolve.  We have to start now and eat the way we were meant to eat.  

How far back do we have to go to achieve the diet we were meant to eat?  Do we go back to Paleohumans, who killed game and foraged for fruits and veggies?  Do we go back to the Mango groves, where bonobo-like proto-humans first evolved?  Or do we go back even farther than that?  Were our evolutionary ancestors more like the Colugos (a herbivore) before we defended from the trees?  What were those ancestral Euarchontoglires eating, before we became differentiated?  Has the eating of meat or grains changed our brains, given us more intelligence, caused us to somehow become self-aware?  Would that adaptation be worth the chronic diseases that cooked meats and grains have also given us?

If humans insist on eating cooked foods, grains, meats, will we eventually adapt to this diet?  What will it take to adapt to a diet?  How many millions of years before cancers and heart disease and immune diseases are eliminated as natural selection finally does its work?  Will our intelligence learn to transform our foods to what we need, or will we evolve into a species that is able to live entirely on these things?  What will be the cost in terms of individuals who never make the transition?

How many extinct species of mammals never made it because their food source was obliterated while we terraformed our way to a world of monoculture grain?

My Journey
Everyone says eat more vegetables and fruit.  When will we?  How can we get more?  By removing the more harmful things -- the meat, the dairy, the grain.  For me, I had already given up meat.  The dairy and grain have been much much harder to give up.

Today is just the sixth day of my fast from bread and dairy, almost having completed Horne's challenge of going one week grain-free.  Already I'm considering taking up Graham's challenge of doing this for one year.  Already I'm wondering if I can sustain this diet here in Canada, where fruit and leafy greens simply do not grow year round. Transporting them here is prohibitively expensive, even in ecological terms.  Humans don't really belong here.  But pretty soon, they won't belong in the greenhouse-gas superheated equatorial orchards where proto-humans evolved, either.  I'm afraid we're screwed, as a species.  We don't have time to adapt.  We'll never make it to the stars.

All I know is, on a personal level, I'm already starting to crave fruit and naked lettuce.  Have I broken my bread addiction?  Will I be able to afford expensive fruit and veg year round?

For now, the Exorphin Junkie is signing off.  Today, I'm throwing out my sourdough starter that I've kept viable for bread-making these last five years.   As of today, it is compost.

I think I'm becoming a frugivore.  

But like any junkie, I'll have to just take this one day at a time.  

Bye-Bye, Bread

The Final Crumb Shot

Unbaked spot: the final imperfection

Notes to Myself

• * Since he seemed to be an original thinker, I was most curious about T.C. Fry who believed we evolved like the Bonobo, eating similar foods, but there is no longer a wiki about him.  T.C. Fry is most well known for his book, "The Great AIDS Hoax," (Here's a YouTube Video about it) but he has also written "I Live on Fruit," "The Miracle of Living Foods: The Curse of Cooking," "Program for Dynamic Health: an introduction to natural hygiene: the only true health system" and "Laugh your Way to Health."  Apparently towards the end of his life, he believed he was uncovering details of the shadow government behind the New World Order.
  
  Fry, along with Herbert M. Shelton, was also a mentor to Marilyn and Harvey Diamond, who wrote "Fit for Life."
• See Kass, J. (2013) The evolution of brains from early mammals to humans. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci Jan 4(1) ;; 33-45 for info on where primate brains came from.
  
  

Steeped 20% Rye Loaf (that I can't stop myself from eating)

I'm still making and eating bread.  I made this loaf mostly for my wife and my friend David, who is aware that I will soon be starting a detox or fast from bread for a time.  However, after my fast day, although I tried to eat only fruit, I ended up reaching for a slice or two of this bread.  I wanted the bread.  

I'll have to try again -- to fast from eating bread.  I'll start off slow, by seeing if I can go three whole days without bread.  It sounds ridiculous, I know.  Three days should be nothing.  But this is a challenge for me.  My bread is pretty darn good.  This one in particular doesn't look like much, but it is, it is.  It is so good, my wife would not let me give one of the loaves to poor David.  She wanted to keep it all to herself.

This bread was a 20% rye, made with the same technique I've been using lately, i.e. getting the hydration up by "steeping" the dough during stretches and folds.  Details follow:

Ingredients

• 200g Rye
• 800g Wheat
• == 1000g grain (100% flour)
• 200g Sourdough Starter
• 19g Salt
• 770g Initial water
• 50g water added with salt
• 50g water to steep
• == 870g total water (87% hydration)

Method
I ground the kernels of rye and wheat into flour, added my whole wheat sourdough starter (which is always at 100% hydration) to the initial water and aerated it by stirring vigorously with my hand.  I added the water-sourdough mixture to the flour, and mixed it until it was all incorporated.  Then I kneaded it for about 5 minutes just to get the gluten started.  A short autolyse of 30 minutes or so occurred before I added the salt with another 50g of water.  I incorporated this by mixing and kneading, and returned the dough to the bowl for one more stretch and turn.  Then the dough sits another 30 minutes, is kneaded again briefly, and is returned to the bowl.  At this point I add another 50g of water to the top of the dough, and let the dough sit in this water.  Over the course of the next few hours, I will stretch and fold the dough in the bowl, not worrying about that last amount of water; if the dough wants it, it will draw the water into it.  If the dough doesn't require it, some will stay in the bowl  Usually after about 2-3 hours, I find that the dough has absorbed it through the many stretches, folds and turns.  The dough is turned out onto the counter, divided into 2, preshaped for a bench rest, then shaped for the proofing basket.  About 2 more hours in the basket (depending on the strength of the starter it could be longer), and the dough is popped into the oven on a preheated stone at 450 degrees F with steam, for 40 minutes.  That's my recent method.

The dough is so wet when it hits the oven, if it isn't sitting perfecting on the stone
(like the one at left), it might drip over the edge (like the one on the right)

The blob that fell off the loaf into the water tray at the base of the oven was still an edible bun

Sure, I ate it

Let's Talk about BMs

I've been noticing something curious, regarding my weight.  Normally I weigh around 180 pounds, or slightly less.  After a fast day -- a day in which I eat nothing at all, but continue to drink water and herbal tea -- I can weigh as little as 172 lbs.  After a day of eating (bread, fruit, veggies, greens, etc.) and drinking whatever I want (juices, water, herbal tea), I can weigh as much as 176.

Now, in the hospital, when we see a change in someone's weight that significant over a single day (either up or down), we tend to say that "its all water."  And I'm not really changing the amount that I drink on a fast day that much; in fact, when I eat, I probably drink even more; when I'm fasting, I have to force myself to drink, because I don't crave it.  I don't necessarily feel thirst, so much as habit, when I'm reaching for something to put in my mouth.  So what is happening to the fluid, when I eat, to make me retain it?  My guess is that the whole grains in my gut -- the bran, the germ, the fiber, etc. -- are drawing water to them as they pass through the length of the GI tract.

Some people say that grains are constipating.  That has not been my experience, at all, at all -- but my grains are almost entirely whole grains, whereas most other people who eat grains use polished grains and extractions of grains, and that could be the difference.  My only experience with constipation was in the early days of when I started to fast.  For the first couple of months of my fasting, when I didn't drink enough on fast day, I'd get constipated -- and thus I've learned that when I fast, I have to force myself to drink more fluids.

I'm wondering now if those who find grains are constipating are becoming somewhat dehydrated from the grains.  I'm guessing that if I didn't drink enough fluids with my bread, all that fiber would draw water from my body fluids, in order to help keep it moving.  I certainly might be dehydrated, and/or constipated, if I didn't drink enough, while eating bread.

And perhaps the salt that I add to the bread has something to do with the way the water is attracted to the bread-chyme, too.  I don't know.  All I can assume is that when I eat bread, the water and other fluids I take in are retained in my bowels.

Now, going back to my first year nursing anatomy class, I seem to remember that the lower bowels are where most of the water is reabsorbed into the body.  Is this not happening with me, when I eat bread?  Yet my stool, although soft, is not loose.  Is that TMI?  Am I done talking about my Bowel Movements?

To sum up my observations: when I eat a diet that is usual for me (i.e. a lacto-ovo diet with my homemade whole grain sourdough bread), I retain water in my bowels.  This water comes from my body tissues, or from what I drink, and it seems to be the major reason for my weight fluctuations on days that I eat or days that I fast.


This Bread
tasted very good.  On Friday, when I tried to avoid it, I ended up eating a slice anyway.  On Saturday, although a slice was toasted for me with a soup of lunch, I did not eat it.  I survived on mostly fruits, vegetable juices, and a couple of cooked vegetarian meals -- I haven't told my wife yet that I've been reading a lot about raw frugivore/vegan diets, so our meals still reflect the way we've been doing things up til now.

Could not resist

I feel confident that I can ignore this bread on Sunday, as well as perform the usual fast on the Monday.  So I should be able to go three days (or 4) without eating bread, and when I look back on my progress with detoxing from grains, I should be able to say that this bread was the first bread that I successfully avoided for 3 whole days.


Update : Experiment with Fasting
I was just about to post this blog entry, when in the Notes to Myself I wrote the following:

Try an experiment: following a fast day, examine your weight in the morning, and again at night -- only don't eat bread or milk products on that day that you break the fast -- only fruits and vegetables (a typical bonobo or proto-human diet as suggested by Douglas Graham in his 80-10-10 diet).  See how your weight fluctuates then.  See if you retain water.  See how you feel.

My curiosity about whether or not I would retain the same amount of fluid if I ate a high-fiber fruit and vegetable diet, with no grains, made me devise this experiment for myself.  I was still determined to go 3 days without bread, so I figured I'd try it this way: go without bread for two days (Sat/Sun) before the total fast, then fast as usual (Mon), and then instead of breaking the fast with a usual diet of bread (Tues), just eat raw fruit and leafy vegetables.  And simply check my weight, at the beginning and end of the days.

Here are my results: the first is the fast day with the normal lacto-ovo bread diet, and the second is the fast day with the bonobo diet (of no bread, and entirely raw fruits, leafy greens and veg):

	Fast Day 1 (Followed by LOB* Diet)	Commentary	Fast Day 2 (Followed by BONOBO** Diet)	Commentary
am weight	176	On LOB diet	176	I was on a LO diet *** at this point, having gone 2 days without bread (while still not raw, I did eat a boiled egg -- but I had little dairy, except what was in the spinach soup)
pm weight	174	I've lost 2 pounds over the day, likely water even though I forced myself to drink	174	As usual, the fast caused me to lose 2 pounds over the day, and again I suppose it is all just water.
	Following Day		Following Day
am weight	172	This seems really weird: overnight I can lose 2 pounds.  How does that happen? I assume it is because although I'm only sleeping, I'm not drinking to keep up with the amount I lose through the skin and the kidneys.	172	So far, nothing has changed.  Except today, I eat BONOBO - no dairy, no eggs, no processed food, especially no bread
pm weight	176	By the end of the day, my weight has stabilized -- the water I've lost has returned -- to my bowels, likely attracted to the bran in my gut	173	By the end of the day, my weight has stabilized -- but the amount of water I retain is less, because my bowels don't need as much, due to the fact that the fruit fiber is different than the grain fiber.  And I can feel the difference.  There's not as much bulk there.  But I've still eaten to satiation.  I haven't lost any fat, I don't think.  At this point, we are just talking about water.

* LOB Diet refers to my standard Lacto-Ovo-Bread vegetarian diet, not raw.

* BONOBO Diet refers to a raw diet of fruits, and leafy vegetables
*** LO Diet refers to Lacto-Ovo diet, but fasting from bread

At the end of the day after the second fast, I realized that I had achieved my goal of going 3 days without bread -- in fact, I had gone 4.  That was almost 5 days.  And 5 days is half-way to 10 days.  So I decided to do a 10-day fast from grains entirely, just to see how I'd feel.

Because how I feel is going to be a whole lot more interesting to me than my weight, to be honest with you.  I'm not trying to lose weight, I'm trying to be healthy.  I thought I felt healthy before.  But I feel okay -- so far -- without eating bread.

I suppose I can do it.  Because of the success of the last few days without bread, I know I can go without eating it a bit longer.  There are times when I think it would be nice to just have a slice, and there is that next loaf that I've already made that is just sitting there waiting for me to slice into and take a crumb shot; but as long as I'm experimenting, I think I can restrain myself.

One day at a time for the Exorphin Junkie.

Notes to Myself

• Try making a bread with a vegan salt substitute, e.g. one made from dehydrated celery which is supposed to have lots of organic sodium (its just not NaCl).  That way, perhaps you won't require so much water -- IF it is the case that it is the 2% sea salt that is causing the stuff in the GI tract to attract more water to it...
  
  That is, if you ever want to make bread again.  Do you?