A Week Off the Wagon

Last week, I spent the entire week in the old-flourescent-lit, windowless, rat-infested basement of Moscone South, editing articles for the JavaOne conference. I arrived in the AM, and stayed through the late PM, four days straight. Sun bought all my meals. Oh. My. God. I had no idea, really, how amazingly, wildly different, my diet really is. I mean, sure, I knew, but after a while, what you eat is what you eat, and you lose track of it being anything but normal. It has been three days since we got home, and I'm still feeling like crap, despite cleaning my diet back up. (Doesn't help that I threw my neck out due to hours of staring at a monitor, and I'm on icepacks pretty much constantly). I had read about "cooked food hangovers", and thought them to be exaggeration. But I am now, officially, a believer. What's cool is that Jason is too. He felt crappy enough that we ended up buying Thursday night's dinner ourselves, and headed out to a raw food restaurant in the City (Alive!). It was both detox and comparison shopping. I had sorta wondered how what I prepare compares to what other raw fooders do, and came away pleased with myself. So that was nice. So after four days, the total triage report:

• lower energy
• increased body odor (I don't use deodorant at home, and after two days on cooked food, I needed it)
• increased mucus production (that gross coating on your tongue? Ugh! and random snotty nose upon exertion)
• mental fuzzyness (which, in desperation, I tried to fix with a Dr. Pepper. Stupid!)
• irritability
• whacko milk production
• achey and stiff
• digestive difficulties (I'll leave that to your imagination)

As far as Kestrel's ECing, it went straight out the window. Several stealth nighttime pees, totally variable poop pattern; we haven't gone through so many pairs of Poquitos since he was a newborn. Ridiculous. If ECing was like that, I'd have trouble keeping up, no doubt. What's stupid is that I even made good choices, from what was offered me. Fruit for breakfast (mostly melon, which is part of what threw Kestrel off. Rowan's pee frequency also increased, but he's totally on top of it), salads for lunch when the opportunity was there, tortilla-less fajitas on the day that was lunch.... I really did modify intensely. And it still killed me. Sometimes, it takes a brick to the head to provide motivation. I came home and bonded intensely with my CSA-delivered veggies. I've been living on salads and smoothies since we got back. And I'm recovering. But I'm totally in shock, wondering how most people *function* on the kind of food that was being provided (which most of my coworkers thought was "pretty good".) Pass the kale.