For the next 5 days, I have decided to return to eating raw vegan. Let’s just say I went off the rails during vacation with my vegan cooked foods and kept it up for a few days afterwards.
I usually like to make huge salads for dinner while raw and seek a recipe from the internet or something store bought for the dressing but tonight, with inspiration from recipes I’ve seen online, I decided to go ahead and make my own.
Ingredients I blended for my homemade dressing!
Here’s the recipe:
1/2 cup of water
1/2 cup of raw cashews
2 tablespoons of nutritional yeast
1 tablespoon of juice from olives (you can even throw in a couple if you choose).
1 tablespoon of spicy brown mustard
Blend together and enjoy this creamy dressing with your veggies!
This week’s word is “cleansed.” Even though I am very busy during the week, I made the decision to move myself a bit more and incorporate more fruits and veggies via smoothies and juices. I ended up with a 8.4lb loss but that wasn’t the best thing about this week. It was how clean I felt. I was more clear, energetic and focused. I started to think about setting fitness goals like a race and it seemed more real than ever. I don’t want to get too excited. I am guilty of signing up for a couple things I wasn’t prepared to complete in the past so the next time I do it, I want to feel confident.
Knowing rather than guessing is best so I will keep putting in the work and accepting the results peacefully.
It’s the only way to I know to truly love and honor myself during this process.
Tonight, I made raw vegan tacos using walnut “meat” and used Romaine hearts as the shell. I have used walnut before but never made fresh pico de gallo and cashew sour cream. The recipe came from mydarlingvegan.com. Everything came out well but I needed to add a bit more sea salt to the cashew sour cream and let it sit in the refrigerator a bit longer. I also added more cumin and hot sauce to the walnut mix. We fell in love with the pico!
To make the walnut meat, blessings d all taco meat ingredients in a food processor until walnuts break down into small crumbs. Do not over mix, they will quickly form a paste. Remove from processor and set aside.
Combine the ingredients for pico de gallo and refrigerate until ready to use.
If making cashew sour cream, drain and rinse the cashews. Transfer to a high-speed blender with remaining sour cream ingredients. Blend until completely smooth. Transfer to small container and refrigerate until ready to use.
To assemble tacos, place 2-3 tablespoons walnut meat on the bottom of a leaf of romain lettuce. Top with pico de gallo, avocado, fresh cilantro, and cashew sour cream. Once assembled, serve immediately.
Today is the fifth day of my July Raw Food Challenge. I have eaten a raw food diet before for a short period of time. The biggest difference I see this time around are the detox symptoms. I did lose weight this week (4.6 lbs) but parts of my body are covered in red rashes. Apparently, it’s a common symptom that I never experienced before. I had fatigue and headaches in the past but watching myself breakout like this has been jarring. I think because of my psoriasis the thought of my body being covered in something I can’t control unnerves me.
It doesn’t mean I will stop. I am telling myself that it will go away in a matter of days. I just have to wait it out. I am holding onto the benefits and staying excited about my results at the end of the month.
Your turn:
Have you ever experienced any detox symptoms? If so, how did you cope with it?
In July, I am embracing a raw vegan diet which is fruits, veggies, nuts and seeds. I have tried it before but could never make it stick long-term. I am not interested in adopting it long-term but hoping this challenge will springboard me into incorporating more raw foods. Over the past year, I realized I depend on vegan processed food a bit too much. That has been harder to let go of than meat and dairy by far.
This past week, I lost 2.8 lbs. I still ate a mixture of raw, cooked and processed food. And it was all great–the vegetarian festival, the vegan potluck with friends and our regular meals at home.
At the veg fest this past weekend
However, I know if I don’t cut back on processed foods I may never heal the conditions I sought to in the first place. I am excited to see what this month brings–one raw meal at a time.
Your turn:
Have you ever tried a raw vegan diet? If so, what did you think?
I never thought about it until psoriasis came for a visit and never left.
I barely ever wore any kind of powder or foundation and rarely got pimples.
I basically had the luxury of rarely thinking about it.
But then psoriasis came to visit and never left.
Even though it came slowly and didn’t seem threatening at all, it did eventually ravage my body. And no steroid could fix it and I am not fond of exposing my body to biologics. In fact, I have spent most of my life scared of all medications outside of OTC and antibiotics.
So after fielding multiple questions such as “What happened to your face?” I started to delve back into plant-based healing and learning about the devastation inflammation brings (for me, psoriasis and PCOS). So even while I waited for the flares to become less frequent, I had to figure out how to cover the pink and red flaky patches on my face. Of course, it was makeup and if for some reason, I didn’t have my makeup brush and Dermablend with me, my spirits would sink. I remember on one particular day not wanting to get out of the car when I parked at church. I drove away and found somewhere to cry.
I felt like a monster without my “face.”
The pain of an itchy scalp, raw thighs and a scarred face sometimes felt like too much of a strain on my mind, let alone my body. I often smiled through a lot of it but I felt like I was wilting on the inside.
As we all know, we can’t escape our own mind or body.
It took a long time to start to see some improvement and I don’t have flares as often as I used to but damage was done.
People who meet me now will never know what I used to look like and it seems like a small thing but it was a real adjustment. I believe my smiles are more genuine now. It’s funny that I am actively pursuing a profession that puts me front and center when I can remember feeling like that’s the last place I really want to be or should be.
I think it took blogging and writing classes and prayer and fruits and vegetables and talking it out over and over again with my husband, family and friends for healing to start taking place. I know I have a long road ahead of me but I think I found a formula that works.
On Saturday, I went to a women’s health fair where the focus was on physical and mental health. There was a plethora of great advice on how often to keep active (150 minutes a week), the importance of an accountability partner, fitness activities such as Zumba, walking or kickboxing and the health benefits of incorporating more plant-based and unprocessed food into your diet. I loved that it was from the perspectives of a nurse, Destinee King and a holisitic wellness coach, Yvette Leverette. What better way to bring traditional and alternative methods together?
Pictured from left to right: Tyrell Clayton, Jamia Mills, Yvette Leverette and Destinee King
What was particularly impactful for me was Tyrell Clayton and Jamia Mills’ (Heart to Heart Mental Health Services– http://www.heart2heartva.com) presentation about the importance of taking care of your mental health. I especially loved how they stressed treatment measures by asking us if we had cancer, would we wait to get help? Would we put it off, hoping it would go away? Then why do we do dare do that with depression and anxiety disorders? These conditions have the potential to spiral into something else entirely that could threaten not only the quality of our life but our very life. They also outlined the 8 dimensions of wellness and spoke about how mental health is the origin of everything (positive and negative). I was moved that I was hearing about treatment being a fully integrative approach from a clinical social worker, a young Black man open to talking about his experiences on his mental health journey. Jamia’s perspective and story was valuable, too as women are 40% more likely to develop depression.
After leaving the fair, I had many thoughts come up (some influenced by the event and others were a reflection of what’s going on with me) and I want to share them here:
Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.
Keep going to the events (sometimes you can’t make it but you know what I mean).
Keep educating yourself.
Keep supporting others’ events.
Keep buying others’ books and products.
Keep writing.
Keep exercising–even if it’s marching in place or dancing around the living room like a maniac.
Keep praying.
Keep trusting that you will find your place.
Keep confiding in trustworthy people.
Keep working at your relationship, marriage, friendships..even if you have to put your pride aside to ask something as simple as…”What happened?”
Keep reading.
Keep taking classes.
Keep getting help whenever you need it and keep giving whenever you can.
Keep your ears open even if you have to close your mouth.
Keep shouting..there’s a place for silence and there is a place for a VOICE.
Be open to whatever this world has for you….it will let you down, lift you up and teach you over and over again until you become the lesson.
Hubby and I did a lot of running around today so we started off our day with one of his signature smoothies. He loves making green smoothies for us and provides smoothies for his co-workers. When we got married, we both started making smoothies and juices. We also have done a couple of juice cleanses over the years. I wanted to feature a smoothie because we decided to get back to drinking them more often for breakfast.
Tonight, I decided to do things a little differently. Hubby and I are big smoothie lovers and I realized I’ve never featured any on my Meatless Monday posts. I decided to make pesto for the first time, too. I definitely had become a little too dependent on tomato and vegan Alfredo sauces so it was time to change things up. I got the recipe from greenevi.com and the Honeydew and Lime Smoothie was inspired by a YouTube video from Health with Kisha. I don’t remember her exact recipe but I remembered Honeydew melon and limes and I figured I could adjust according to my own taste.
We used a container of honeydew that was 1.17 lbs, the juice of 3 limes and blended it with ice.
Here’s Hubby hard at work juicing the limes for me:
We used organic red lentil penne pasta for our vegan pesto pasta. We love the Explore Cuisine brand for red lentil and black bean spaghetti.
Here’s the recipe:
INGREDIENTS
Pasta of your choice
1 cup of cherry tomatoes
¼ cup of pine nuts
1 cup of fresh basil (tightly packed)
1 clove of garlic
¼ cup of olive oil
1-3 tbsp nutritional yeast
salt, pepper
½ lemon (optional)
INSTRUCTIONS:
Prepare your pasta according to package instructions.
Meanwhile roast pine nuts in a skillet until lightly toasted.
Add basil, garlic, toasted pine nuts, nutritional yeast, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper to a food processor and blend until smooth. Mix pesto into pasta and add cherry tomatoes. Enjoy!
Pine nuts toastingAll the ingredients. I blended them instead of putting them in the food processor but the pesto still came out great!
Hubby has already said he wants to me cook everything again next week. I fell in love, too. The honeydew and lime smoothie was incredibly refreshing. I can see making that regularly especially when summer hits.
Let me know in the comments if there are any new plant-based recipes you have tried or want to try.
It’s our third day in Carlsbad, CA. A part of me would rather just sun myself at the pool or the beach but another part of me is glad to be sitting here writing. I know it’s because I am proving that no matter where I am, I am making posting here a priority. When you are on vacation, staring lazily at water and palm trees, the last thing you may feel like doing is whipping out a computer. But I know how committed I am to this process. I want to write through anything anywhere. I want to live up to my own expectations.
I am not sure if there is any other time in my life that I would have been able to truthfully write this but the time is now. Maybe this is what it is like to fall in love with what you’re pursuing. In my marriage, we would do anything to keep growing together. That’s part of the allure of travel. There’s a shared experience, a treasure of memory that no one can take from us.
With writing, there is a similarity. I am invested in my growth. I want to keep my schedule. Keep my word. I look forward to witnessing the fruits of my labor. There is a willingness to keep trying new things like adding Meatless Mondays or taking classes.
I don’t want to get out. I want to work through it all. Fail forward. Leave excuses behind.
So no matter how gracefully the fronds of the tree sway or the heat threatens to wilt my will to keep my commitment going this week. I won’t give in.
Kristina Hamlett writes to connect, heal, and be a force for change. 
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