My "New" Diet

I am a type 1 diabetic & have been raw most of the last 4 1/2 years. I have had a lot of problems with insulin resistance (which isn't normally a type 1 issue) & other health challenges in those years (although some of the health issues existed before that, too). Not only have I had health problems, but in the last year and a half (since I was hospitalized for complications of diabetes), I have put on almost as much weight as I lost in the first three months of eating raw. Weird. Anyhow, I recently experimented with eating more cooked foods as I wasn't feeling great eating raw & thought maybe I was missing something. In August (while continuing to eat lots of cooked whole foods as they made me feel better than my raw diet had), I started using herbs, supplements and some amazing essential oils, which helped a lot in how I felt, and my insulin sensitivity has been gradually improving since then. I still hadn't lost weight, though. In fact, I was only three pounds away from my highest weight ever - which was pre-raw. I found Dave the Raw Food Trucker on Youtube, and watching him I felt like maybe I should get back to raw, but do a low-glycemic raw diet, since my body wasn't processing high-glycemic carbs well (I would eat a piece of fruit & get really irritable & crash & have to sleep for an hour). I recognized that I'd been drawn to low-glycemic cooked foods, so I wondered if maybe low-glycemic was the key I needed. I went to eating a low-glycemic raw diet, and I drank loads of fresh green vegetable juice for two or three days. I have never felt good/healthy being vegan long-term, but I felt that there was an element of truth/power for in Gabriel Cousens's eating plan, so I was planning to stick with the low-glycemic raw vegan diet for 6 months to see how I felt. Well, after six days, I felt a shift - that I didn't need to do it any more because I had reset the body-mind connection and now wanted to eat just what was best for my body, so I didn't need the rules any more. I added some grass-fed beef and a few more carbs into my diet & continued to feel better. At some point in this self-discovery process, I remembered a discussion about agave (months ago) in which I became aware that most of my crazy blood sugar issues started at the same time I started using agave. I dismissed it at the time, but it came back to me this past week. I use muscle-response testing (kinesiology) in my practice as a holistic health coach, so I decided to muscle-test myself to find out if there was/is a certain diet I need to follow, or if I can just eat intuitively, etc. I tested specifics of my ideal diet, based on the thoughts & intuition I'd had, and I discovered something amazing, which shouldn't have surprised me one bit! The diet my body wants is the exact diet I was following the first six months: when I lost weight, had more energy & experienced lots of health improvements (including better insulin sensitivity). One of the main things about this diet is NO AGAVE. I am eating plenty of carbs again, I have energy instead of crashing afterward, I get more energy every time I eat...in short, I feel better from my food than I have in the last four years since I started using agave. I have also finally started losing weight - seven pounds in the last two weeks since I got back to "my diet" - mainly raw but with no agave.

Catching up - 5/09/09

Okay, so I experimented with Phase 1 according to Gabriel Cousens. Had weird symptoms & switched to phase 1.5 for a few days. I then remembered something I had heard before about enzymes & not being able to always eat the same foods, and I wondered if my body is just tired of agave & cashews, and if maybe it doesn't have much to do with the sugars in the fruit/agave. So I licked my fingers after cleaning off the edge of thehoney jar, and I didn't have any bad reaction. The next day, I ate my yummy marinated cauliflower salad (the marinade had 1/2 cup honey in it), and no heavy feeling like I was getting with high-carb stuff before. I had lots of energy. So I'm back to "listening to my body". I'm still feeling heavy after eating agave, but I've used it a little in order to get lots of other nutritious goodies into me more easily.

Saturday, May 9

Breakfast: Don't remember, sorry.

2 quarts of green veggie juice: lettuce, celery, cauliflower stems and cucumbers

Lunch: flax crackers

Dinner: zucchini noodles with macadamia nut "cheese" sauce, falafel & diced tomatoes
orange chocolates: cacao powder, coconut spread/butter (this is ground-up coconut meat & not just the oil), orange flavor oil, and agave

At a wedding celebration: strawberries (I asked the server if they had any that weren't dipped in chocolate yet & she was happy to oblige!) and more of my orange chocolates

Bedtime snack: the meat of a young Thai coconut