Half-way point

I am now in my third week of the 30-Day Raw Challenge. Today I will use the descriptor challenge because it does not feel like a feast. The fall weather is chilly, the office is chillier, and the thought of cold food for lunch was making me grumble. But, I made it through lunch without giving into my desire for the three cheese pizza and its heavenly smell that wafted around me throughout the entire meal. So why did I want to eat the pizza, and therefore why did I choose not to?

I believe the desire to chow down on the cheesy pizza came from the association I make between its smell and past happy pizza-eating memories. I link pizza with relaxed, fun times with friends and family, with parties and late night talk sessions, and all of these memories are bathed in warm lighting. The urge to eat pizza is not for the actual pizza itself, but for the associative emotions.

So why didn't I eat it? I reminded myself of the simple fact that we eat (or we should eat) for nutrition. There is no nutrition in a piece of pizza. The crust is dead (sometimes rancid) grains stripped of all nutrition, the sauce is processed (heated at high temperatures) and therefore inactive, and the cheese is most probably pasteurized (heated at high temperatures) and therefore dead as well. There are no live, active enzymes in the pizza. It adds no value to your body, and, even worse, requires that you spend energy digesting it. So instead of giving you energy, it depletes you.

Yes, you can argue, but it tastes good. Does it? Our mouths are trained to enjoy the tastes we feed it. If you eat salt on every meal, you will need and crave more salt for the food to taste good. Likewise for sugar and fat. And it works the other way too! Eating crunchy fresh vegetables and juicy fruits trains your mouth to crave natural sweetness, textures and flavors.

So I steered away from the pizza and headed to the salad bar. Made a big bowl of carrots-cucumbers-tomato-lettuce-pumpkin seeds-alfalfa sprouts, and added lemon juice on top as I find its acidity really helps cut down on mouth cravings. One of my objectives for these 30 days is to retrain my mouth and break mental associations with food. I have made it for 16 days, I am more than half-way there! Just need to make it through today...