Food in May 2010

tomatoes !!!

cucumbers

dill !!!

parsley !!

green onion !!

young garlic !!

peaches !

nectarines !

oranges !!

bananas !!!

grapes !

avocados

lemons

cherries !

March 2010

~After coming back from Thailand I decided to try and continue being fruitarian for some time. My food list is so short right now!

grapes (usually dark)

oranges

tangerines

apples

tomatoes

cucumbers

I know it's all not seasonal in my area and I'm really looking forward to June-July-August-September, when there are cherries, good tomatoes and cucumbers, and peaches, mmm.

I don't think I'm ready to stop eating the greens completely and after just 1 month without them I feel like having some lettuce and dill.

~Since childhood my lungs have been the weakest part of my body, so whatever dis-ease is around, my lungs are affected. From the books by Batmanghelidj I learnt about dehydration and I believed Dr B. So I'm aware of the reason - my water consumption is again very low because all of a sudden I just didn't like the taste. I really hope I'll get used to distilled water.

http://www.watercure.com/

~I came across a great source of knowledge and inspiration on youtube. Starting from here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhDlXhDjjsE It's amazing (well, actually not - everything we need comes at the right time) how my thinking and my view of the world is in line with hers on so many topics. From her I learnt about quantum touch. This is something I'm going to learn!

~I downloaded a film which they say is a good continuation of The Secret. Looking forward to watching it.

~ During the last couple of weeks I walked several times for some 4 hours. At last I walked for more than 1 hour. Good.

~I usually remember to be grateful for everything in my life, I'm working on forgiving, started with myself. Oh, that's so powerful! They say it's a way to clean the emotional body. And I feel changes.

My way to thank the world for the money is basically a mix of Bob Proctor and Jasmuheen's wording. "I am so happy and grateful now that money comes to me readily and easily in increasing quantities, through multiple sources, on a continuous basis, in dollars, euros, pounds, rubles, bahts, francs, yen, pesos etc. Thank you, thank you, thank you".

Stages in diet

omnivore -> ... vegetarian -> strict vegetarian=vegan -> raw foodist -> mono raw foodist -> fruitarian -> liquidarian -> breatharian

In this chain, the diet is getting lighter and lighter.

The body goes through intense cleansing during the raw stages, intuition improves, and it will signal you when you are ready to stop eating, but not before the physical health has been gained.

Where am I in this transition? It's somewhere here: raw foodist -> mono raw foodist -> fruitarian

January 2010

~

buckwheat (sprouts and just soaked) !!! ~2.5 kg/month

red pepper (paprika) !!!

bananas !!!

lettuce (Iceberg, "салат листовой в горшочке") !!!

apples !!

parsley /dill /coriander (just a bit this month)

tangerines

pineapples

The list of items is getting shorter every month!

water at least 1 l a day, usually 2 and more

~

Felt cold several times, and it wasn't -24C, it was -15C. So it doesn't really depend on the weather per se, but on all these changes in my body and perception that are going on.

~

Found a nice way of washing hair: using shikakai (Acacia Concinna)

Not really raw, but still natural: boil several halves in 1 l of water for 15 minutes (the water becomes brownish), then let it get lukewarm, squeeze well the halves so that they give all their soapy properties to the water (the most important part is the inside).

~

Found a wonderful piano teacher and had the first lesson! Talked to one person who wanted to sell her piano and gonna get it next week!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

December

~My list is growing less:

parsley !!! (some 200-300 g a day)

bananas !!

tangerines !

avocado!!

dill

green onion

garlic

lemon (juice)

coriander

green lettuce (4 different types)

pomegranate

dried apricot

sprouts

apples: would love to find some nonwaxed apples, but with this frost I go shopping to the supermarkets only

~

water-water-water

~

Ekadashi

~

Went to that yoga centre and found out the prices and timetable. There is something for me there!

~

14/12/10 -16-20C, but I wasn't cold!!! Dressed properly, of course, but even my nose didn't feel cold... This real winter is going to last a week or so. He-he

Music/ Dreams / Fast / Diet

I've been to a concert where my classmate Tatyana Kolesova was a soloist. She played the famous Tchaikovsky's Concerto no.1. The other hour it was Dvorak's cello Concerto, and it's the first time I've heard a cello solo not recorded. At first I didn't like it, but after some 5 minutes I felt something in the stomach area - the area which I perceive as the solar plexus chakra and which is the part of my body that gives me signals when I visit a sacred place. And there was a moment when I felt tears in my eyes... Who could tell me a couple of years ago I would enjoy classical music??? Well, I liked several pieces of music like Grieg's Morning mood but I wouldn't digest a classical music concert. "For the times they're a-changing", and I'm changing, too. (btw, I love this version of Bob Dylan's song)

I haven't learnt to meditate, not yet, can't organise, can't concentrate. But the images I already receive/see when I close my eyes while listening to some quiet and/or harmonious music or thinking good positive thoughts, - these images are great. Sometimes I can direct the stories, but usually I'm just passively watching and enjoying them. Sometimes they are full of colours, sometimes there are only a few colours, very seldom I see it in brownish&greyish&whitish. Usually the speed of actions is the same as I'm used to, ie not very high, but once in a while I receive images that alternate extremely quickly. Sometimes a new understanding of familiar ideas comes to me during this cartoon-watching experience.

My dreams are a bit different now. Sometimes when I wake up I physically, with my skin, feel what I was doing in the dream, for example hugging. It kind of surprises and puzzles me but for now I like it. =)

I can't fast more than one day :( The second day I feel too bad in the morning and a classical remedy glass of water doesn't help. But drinking 2-3 litres of schungite water a day is no longer a problem!

I tried eating a lot of nuts in the evening (mainly cashews that I ordered from London and pistachios, a bit of hazelnuts and walnuts) and yes, you can gain weight eating raw!!! (the question is Do you want to?)

99% of what I've been eating recently is:

-different sorts of apples (!!!)

-grapes (!!!)

-dried apricot halves (!!) (finally found a good supplier, untreated apricots)

-cabbage (!)

-carrots

-dill (!)

-parsley (!!!)

-green onion (!)

-melons (!)

-pomegranates (!)

-tomatoes

-cucumbers

-nuts

-lettuce

-persimmon (last year this month I was eating tonnes of persimmons, this year I've had maybe 5 pieces...)

Buckwheat, wheat, chickpea are bought for sprouting in winter.

One of my favourite countries

*I'm about to finish the book by Kapten, it's very good, with good overview and practical advice.

*Tried Turkish bananas, they are very good, sweet, but not mawkish.


Ate watermelon, figs, nectarines and peaches.


Not raw: ate Haydari (yoghurt with garlic dip) with warm Turkish bread right from the oven and felt really bad afterwards - no, not for me.

*Drank a lot of fresh orange juice, tried a mix watermelon-melon-apple-orange (or smth like this, tastes strange), tried melon juice (didn't like it)


*Enjoyed very warm waters of the east-Mediterranean and the wonderful air. Visited the Damlataş cave with the idea to breathe that special air (they say it's good for the lungs).

Two articles: on diet (EN) and apples (RU)

Here
key word: unprocessed

And here
healthful apples

August

I've been eating mainly peaches and nectarines the last couple of weeks. Fewer meals a day but considerable amounts of fruit each meal. Psychological dependence on food is significant... Sometimes I realise that physically I don't want any food any more (!) but psychologically yesss.

He-he, during the last three weeks: (just trying to recall everything)
1 peaches (from Azerbaijan, Crimea, Greece),
2 nectarines (very sweet, or very juicy, red, pink),
3 cucumbers (from different regions of Eur part of Russia, or what my relatives have grown),
4 tomatoes (from different regions of Eur part of Russia, pink, red),
5-8 dill, parsley, green onion, garlic,
9 apples (from Crimea, or from our parcel),
10 raspberry,
11 gooseberry (a lot, from our parcel, or from the neighbours'),
12 several young carrots (what my relatives have grown),
13-14 some cherry (from our neighbours' parcel), some sweet cherry (it's not good any more)
15 yellow plums (from my mum's parcel)
16 some grapes
17 hazelnuts (from South Ossetya)
18 a couple of bananas
19-20 orange juice, tangerine juice (when I work in the centre)
21 several melons
22 black currant
23-25 one white marrow, one green marrow (zucchini), a couple of very small pumpkins
26-28 lowbush blueberry of two types (черника и голубика), cowberry (брусника), cranberry - one Sunday we spent some three hours at the marsh just eating these berries! =)

It took me some time to type this list, maybe I still forgot something. Anyway, about 30 different types of food, with peaches+nectarines+cucumbers+tomatoes comprising some 70-80%.

Prices at the Preobrazhensky market

July is a wonderful month! It's warm, the daylight is long, and there are so many yummy things at the market. I've been focusing on fruit and berries recently.

1 EUR ~ 44.5 RUR
Cherries: 40-50 RUR a kilo
Sweet cherries: 50-80-100-120-150 RUR dark, pink&yellow. Yellow sweet cherries from Armenia 200RUR (my favourite)
Peaches: from Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, the Crimea (Ukraine). 40-70-80-100-150 RUR, my choice is 80 RUR
Nectarines: 40-80-90-120 RUR
Blueberry: from Vladimir, Murom (regions in Russia). 70-80-90-110 RUR a kilo
Raspberry: from different Russian regions. 100-120-150 RUR a box (~700gr)
Melons: Astrakhan, Uzbekistan. torpedo, kolkhoznitsa (varieties). 40-50-80 RUR a kilo
Hazelnuts: South Ossetya. a new harvest, those milky hazelnuts, sold still covered with the green part, love them. 150 RUR a kilo. Sold only at one stall.

Grocery shopping / Emotions, habits, traits of character

My monodiet development:
Fruits separately. Sprouts (wheat seeds and mung beans in germination) separately. Vegetables and root crops both separately and mixed, but already minimizing the number of ingredients per "salad". Dill, parsley, green onion, coriander and similar both separately and cut into "salads". Cucumbers, cauliflower, marrows, sweet paprika on their own. Tomatoes with garlic or with radish, or guacamole (tomatoes with avocado, garlic, lemon juice - could be without lemon juice). Korean style carrots.

Bananas: I guess the majority of bananas nowadays are GMO, and when I learned this I even avoided them for a while. But as for now I still do love them, and it's not good to suppress one's wants for a long time =) So I've been buying and tasting every brand I came across. Now I find tasty only one type of bananas, those with Gold Sun Ecuador sticker. I hope to enjoy a lot bananas somewhere in southern Europe when I'm there in late August (if I'm there...)

Tomatoes: I remember the pleasure I got from tasting Turkish tomatoes in Istanbul after my long Dutch experience. It was a drastic change then. Turkish tomatoes sold in Russia are really bad, and the tests by Roszdravnadzor (a governmental agency for health and all kinds of safety issues) show in many tomatoes a very high residual chemicals level, above the standards (but still they are on the market - it's Russia...). These are actually the only tomatoes reported to contain a high residual level of fertilizers on the market. I doubt it, as there are tomatoes from Spain and Holland which don't smell or taste like tomatoes. We avoid them. The tomatoes that taste good are imported from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, and the prices range from 150 to 250 RUR now (1 EUR~44 RUR) while other tomatoes cost 100-120 RUR a kilo.

Young garlic: just wonderful. Smells nice, contains much more water than late summer garlic. Yes, it's possible to eat several cloves in a monodiet way =) But usually I squeeze it on tomatoes.

Weekend market: summer is coming and the choice is bigger and bigger, and finally there is radish (it's not common to have radish in winter here, only at some supermarkets, looked at as very "artificial"). They all claim on their price-tags it's from Krasnodar (the most southern region of the RF), and I believed them. The second time I came to buy radish I saw some small Israeli packets with radish beyond the counter lying in the same place where the very big packet with what they called Krasnodar radish. They just opened the small packets and put the radish into the big packets from which they eventually took it to weight for the customers. I don't have anything against produce from Israel (I am not very familiar with it, usually it's not bad, their sun gives it all its love). But I try to minimize my chemicals intake =) so my first choice is produce from the countries of the ex-USSR. When I commented my finding to the seller, she just asked me with a sigh if I was taking that or not. I felt offended and went away. A women at a stall nearby was honest with me and said her radish was from Poland. At another stall radish looked different and I was told that that one yes was from Krasnodar.

Changing the character and my reactions: everything is changing automatically, with all I've been reading and watching. But many of my traits of character and reactions need intentional and deliberate efforts to change, and it's hard. By now I have found the most important issues, not through a meditation, but through a systematic deep contemplation, have written them down and realized that I had never seen them so pronounced in me before nor has my mom. I believe learning oneself is the most interesting thing on Earth (the second interesting thing is exploring Nature). The most destructive emotions and habits are as follows: feeling shame (испытывать чувство стыда), censure (осуждение), envy (зависть), pity/compassion (жалеть, жалость). I know that according to the standard modern paradigm it's good to feel compassion and shame. According to many healers it's not as it is self-destruction on the energetic level which passes on to the physical level (physical health, life in the material world), so the way to improve the energetic level is to change the habit from feeling pity etc. to shedding love to everyone. I believe the healers. Their words are in line with Hinduism and Christianity. But although I understand what to do many of my reactions are changing extremely slow.
I have also started to realize what my fears are. An enormous amount of work is ahead. Every time I learn something new about the world and about me I am happy for a while but then realize that there is even more to know. And the world is getting bigger and bigger! A wonderful sensation!

My mango experience %)

Wow! I already eat much less than a month ago! For example, today I had 2 apples for late breakfast, 2 apples for lunch, 3 ripe bananas when I was in the centre in the afternoon, "super intense salad" (tomatoes, dill, red onion, green onion, a lot of squeezed out garlic, a bit of lemon juice - what a mix! just wanted something bitter) for dinner, a small Thai mango for late dinner, a glass of water during the day. Yesterday it was just several big apples and about 1 litre of water and "infusions" during the day. This is a change, the next step =)

I got a small sum of money quite unexpectedly and, to pamper ourselves, I went to the most expensive supermarket (can't help but mention that their website is so badly translated into English) and bought 3 small Thai mangoes. They are sold only at one chain (to my knowledge) and are expensive (~200 RUR each, 1 EUR ~ 44 RUR). I'd been wishing to taste the Thai variety since I first saw it in a supermarket in winter, but the price ... Now, done! It's delicious! very soft and exquisite, with almost no fibres. The colour is nice, entirely yellow, with no green or red parts. The next variety to taste on a special occasion is Australian (there are not many Australian varieties on the Moscow market, so I am generalizing). I saw it the first time today, in the same supermarket. It is ssso big! and it is even more expensive than the Thai one (850 RUR a kilo, so 1 item would cost ~500 RUR). Mmm

Dehydration/Water

My condolences to relatives of those who suffered in the earthquakes in central Italy, but here I'd like to comment on just one thing said on tv (Euronews, for example). So I heard some reporters talk about dehydration of those whom the rescue teams helped (are helping and will help) after the first 24 hours. Dehydration after 24-36-48-72 hours? Dios mío, those guys don't know what they are talking about! Now I noticed this disinformation, but just a year ago I would have believed those reporters.
In the modern European society it is uncommon to abstain from food and drink during certain periods. In the Muslim world many people fast in the month of Ramadan abstaining from food, drinks, entertainment etc from dawn to dusk. In the Hindu religion all the manifestations of their divine beings to lay people at a date in the past, all deaths of their holy people etc. are celebrated by a short fasting till midday (not eating, not drinking, no entertainment etc); plus there are 2 ekadashis every month when they don't eat or drink 36 hours (night+day+night). I don't say everybody is following all these traditions, but at least they are familiar with the concept, so everybody knows it's fine not to drink for 36 hours. My personal maximum of abstaining from both food and drink is 3 days (about 72 hours) by now, and I wouldn't use the word dehydration to my condition then. In general it is good to be sure that you can survive several days without food and drink while having enough energy for something apart from staying in bed and it is good to practice this as well.

I haven't drunk water for quite some time. My very old Soviet juicer still works and makes me apple juice every day. Then oranges and cucumbers are very juicy. I believe I must drink water, because making juice is unnatural (no animal can do this), but somehow now I can't make myself drink water. The water I have access to doesn't taste good to me.

Prices/Exotic Fruits

Almost everywhere in the world today the prices are going down, in several countries including Russia, they are going up, at a high pace I must say. The forecasts are not nice at all. By the end of the year fruits&vegetables&root crops are going to cost the final consumers 150% more than now. As far as I know, at present a raw foodist who economizes well can spend on food 4000 RUR (1 EUR ~ 45 RUR) a month in Moscow, but this means almost no fruits. My expenses when I count well are 5000 RUR for 2 weeks for 2 people, which normally can be extrapolated to 1 month (I have never calculated for a whole month). When I am not on such a strict budget I spend 7500 RUR per month per person. We'll see the surprises of December.
I have started to learn Portuguese on my own, I bought a CD and downloaded a lot of stuff. It's easy for me after Spanish, but many basic vocabulary words are different. As I had done with Spanish, I made a list of food I may want to eat in Portuguese. And after searching for the translations I explored the variety of fruits&vegetables in Wiki. Brasil is one of the countries which can be called a paradise for fruit lovers! I am not familiar with a vast majority of what I have read about. Brasil will certainly be on my list of countries to visit in the Americas =)

My food preferences now

Basic stuff (from the regions nearby or neighbouring countries):
apples from the Lipetsk region (to the south from Moscow)
our own pumpkins (grown in the Moscow region)
white cabbage
carrots
hazelnuts from the Lipetsk region
dill from the Moscow or Kaluga region
sun-dried persimmon from Georgia (incl. Abkhazia)
sun-dried apricot (both with the freestone, урюк, and without, курага)
mung bean (green gram, маш) in germination
wheat seeds in germination
sunflower seeds

Products from faraway regions (need to minimize):
sun-dried dates from the Mediterranean region
citrus from Morocco
pineapple from Costa-Rica
mango from Peru
pears from Argentina

There are some products I would love to consume but they are not seasonal meaning too many fertilizers are used (cucumbers from greenhouses in nearby regions or Central Asia, tomatoes from Central Asia and paprika I don't know where it is from). But sometimes I do eat these.

Food

2 kg tangerines from Morocco (waxed, yes), several oranges from Brazil, bananas 3 pieces, some strawberries, dates 2 pieces, 400 g almonds from Italy in the evening, some other nuts for breakfast.
Woke up at 5:30 and couldn't sleep more, but during the day slept several hours.

Today

Today I went to the supermarket early, at 8 o'clock, and tried some freshly baked warm bread, 3 types (small broodjes). I did like all of them, but felt that one was too salty or felt provançal herbs in another one.

It seemed to me so warm outside, but my neighbour returned several minutes after me, well dressed, but complaining about the cold and with really cold hands. According to buienradar.nl, it is 7.8C now. I was absolutely fine, without gloves.

35.7C in the evening.
As for other food, again I ate a lot.
Different nuts, bananas, tangerines, oranges, strawberry...

Temperature and food today

37.1C in the evening.
Today is my smoothies day. A mix of vegetables ground in the morning; nuts, bananas and strawberries in the evening. I am very far from the mono diet now. More than 1.5 kilo oranges from Brazil, 1 galia melon, more nuts.
I think the tastiest bananas are those with many brown dots, not those that get brown by parts of surface at once, and today I enjoyed such dotted bananas =)

Food

Not that much as yesterday =)
1 very small galia (budget) melon, a standard galia melon, nuts, 1 kaki, leek, 5-6 Fair trade bananas (these were very tasty)

Food today

Eat too much...
Hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans, almonds, bananas, kakis, dewberry (bramen), salad (lettuce, leek, paprika, cucumber, tomato, cauliflower, green onion, alfalfa, lime juice), wild tomatoes. Bought a litre of Evian in a glass bottle, drank 2/3.
Fresh dates from Israel.