One New Habit a Month Challenge #6: 100% Raw Vegan

This month I will be focusing on maintaining a 100% raw, vegan diet. I will do it primarily in order to boost my psychic abilities.

Today, as every month, I had a hard time choosing my new habit. I made a huge list of all the awesome habits I want to have some day, and asked my Higher Self:

- Is there a habit that I can adopt this month, that I did not list here, and that would be better aligned with all of my goals than all those listed here?
- Yes.
- Oh. Which life area does it belong to?
- Psychic development.
- Cool! I love working on my psychic development. Which habit is it?
- Eating 100% raw.
- Whaaat?!

In my eyes a raw diet belongs to health matters, not to psychic development. But it is true that my Higher Self keeps telling me to eat raw in order to improve my psychic abilities.

Some people say their diet doesn't affect their psychic abilities. But it definitely does for me. I guess there are people with various degrees of sensitivity towards foods. Some people also say that they notice no overall difference on a raw diet. For me, the difference is huge, though. It's like being sick vs. being healthy. I am particularly sensitive so I guess I really, really need to pay attention to my diet. Looks like this is not only about my health!

On June 1st I went back to 100% raw. After six days raw, I connected to my spirit guides and for the first time was able to talk with all of them. It was absolutely awesome. The communication was so clear! The experience swept me off my feet. Later I slipped up and went back to eating some cooked food. I'm still over 75% raw, but not 100%. And now, I'm not really able to connect to my guides anymore. I can, but the communication is extremely foggy and difficult. It was so frustrating that I gave up until I'm raw again.

So I can see how a raw diet does relate to my psychic development indeed. What an interesting shift in perspective!

The last time I connected to my guides, I asked

- What can I do to connect to you more easily?
- GO RAW.

It's not the first time I hear this! My Higher Self also keeps repeating this advice in a patient but DAMN PERSISTENT way. When I was eating cooked food between April 10th and May 31st, and struggling to go back to raw so much, I asked

- What can I do to make it easier for me to go back to raw?

and got the answer

- Just do it.

... which kinda annoyed me. :p

At first it did irritate me to be told to go raw this month. I know this is going to be a helluvah lot of work and take a helluvah lot of time. I'll need to entirely shift my mindset about a lot of things. I'm already very busy shifting my mindset about money, plus taking classes, working through books and audio programs, trying to blog productively, and a lot more. I was hoping to pick a "cool" habit this month, one that would not take much time, like meditating twice a day or getting up early.

Of course our spiritual resources never tell us what to do. I asked for information and got an answer. Now I can do with it whatever I want. We have free will, and I am perfectly free to say no and pick another habit. But I will listen to them.

Deep down I just know they're right. Solving the nasty diet issue once and for all now is the most obvious next step on my path. I can chicken out and ignore this truth, but it won't make it any less true, and I know it.

Plus, my goal is to grow. Picking a different habit would not be completely stupid, as they all are awesome and conducive to growth. But it wouldn't be the maximal growth I am capable of. So, let's go raw at last.

I'm looking foward to tackling this challenge!

Raw Vegan Strength Training

As you know, I dream of being very strong. The new habit I'm adopting this month is "at least five minutes of strength training every day". Things are going great so far!

The second project I have for my body is weight loss. I've had mixed feelings about both my overweight and the idea of losing weight in the past. I wanted to lose weight, but also refused to lose weight, thought I couldn't lose weight, but should lose weight, and simultaneously didn't care about my weight! Consequently, my weight has been going up and down in a quite chaotic way. But now that I'm befriending my body and getting to love it the (overweight) way it is, I find myself better able to formulate clear wishes and goals about it. One of them is to reach my ideal weight.

So I am now starting a challenging project: fat loss + muscle gain. I'm starting from zero (untrained and overweight), and want to end up with little fat and lots of muscle. The challenge will be to do it on a 100% raw, vegan diet.

I officially started on April 1st. Every month I will post a report about both the weight loss part and the muscle building part of the project.

April 1st report:

Weight: 68,4kg
BMI: 27,2

Weight loss report:

I have no target weight. I said I want to reach my ideal weight, but I have no clue what this ideal weight is. I've been overweight (even obese for a few years) for all of my adult life. Having never been thin as an adult, I have no clue what my weight should be. I do not even know what I look like as a thin adult. This is exciting but also scary.

What's going to be difficult for me on this journey is that I'll have to address a bunch of limiting beliefs and fears about weight loss. Losing weight definitely is a scary thing for me. When I went raw I lost so much weight initially that I had to take a break from the raw diet after three months, simply because I couldn't stand the quick melting away.

Now I am determined to lose weight, but I know I'll have to overcome serious blocks and probably a psycho-energetic reversal as well. Maybe I'll write about that in another post.

The weight loss part of the project won't be difficult from a physical viewpoint: I automatically lose weight when I'm 100% raw anyway, without having anything special to do about it. However, I expect it to be very challenging psychologically. I'll share what comes up.

Muscle building report:

Here it's the contrary: I expect it to be challenging physically, but very easy mentally. I love lifting weights! I feel so happy when I'm training. It just feels right. It feels like I'm doing what I'm meant to do. No problem.

I'm still in the input phase, learning a lot and randomly trying things out. What's sure is that I train daily, but with varying intensity (varying weight and/or varying numbers of reps). I tend to alternate "fit" days with maximal power and "lazy" days where I do about half as much or less. I don't try to progress every day. I also do not train to failure. Instead I focus more on being fully concentrated and on learning the proper technique. And on having fun. :-)

I do a few bodyweight exercises, but I admit that I prefer training with weights and with my kettlebell. Yesterday I bought a few new weights and have now a 28kg barbell. And a big problem! Because the barbell is both too light and too heavy. 28kg isn't heavy enough for squats or deadlifts. I could do much more. Unfortunately 28kg is also way too heavy for me to get the barbell on my shoulders! I have no problem with lifting it up to my waist. Once it's on my shoulders, I have no problem with squatting. But there's no way I can get it from my waist to my shoulders alone. Every time I want to squat, I have to ask my friend Tom, who's currently staying at my place, to first place the barbell on my shoulders. >:-(

From now on I will be keeping a training journal, just for the record. I won't put it online though, this would be boring for you. I'll just post my current weights in my monthly reports. It won't mean much to you, it's just to keep track of my progress. Here are they for April 1st:

Squat: 28kg
Deadlift: 28kg
Shoulders: 10kg
Triceps: 4kg
Biceps: 8kg
Back: 2kg
Kettlebell: 12kg (swing, one-handed swing, clean)

And since I said I'd post more pictures, here is what I looked like on April 1st:



Admire the soccer player legs. ;-)

Grounding for Vegans and Raw Fooders

A dear friend of mine recently went high-raw and completely vegan. He told me he feels mentally too light now, and has a hard time concentrating on deep thoughts.

I know this phenomenon very well. Cooked foods, and especially meat and dairy, are very heavy. They sit in us like stones and drag us down. So when you quit eating them, you might take off like a rocket. This can be very confusing!

I had a hard time dealing with this lightness too when I went raw. It felt so unusual and even scary. I had concentration problems, sometimes I could not even hold a thought long enough to think logically.

If this is happening to you, don't worry: it'll pass. Or rather, it won't pass, you will remain that light. But you will get used to it. After a while it feels normal, and your mental abilities will come back.

What helps is to eat heavier raw foods, like bananas, avocados, nuts, dried fruit or sprouts. Depending on which raw diet you chose this might not be ideal, but it'll help you not to freak out.

Here's also an exercise I've put together from diverse sources. I find it very useful in order to stay grounded. I do it every time I feel I'm "taking off". Maybe it can help you too?

1) Stand with your arms hanging down passively. Breathe white light into your belly and then breathe out forcefully, imagine you breathe dirt out. Let your shoulders hang heavily while breathing out. Do this three times or more. Every time you breathe out, you normally sink into the earth a little bit more and become heavier.

2) Then stay in this heavy position and feel the energy in all your body parts, one after the other. Feel the energy in your feet, in your legs, ... and so on. Then feel your body from inside as a whole energy field. Feel it vibrate. Go deeper and deeper into your body. That's basically what Eckhart Tolle explains in the Power of Now and it's also the first part of the Presence Meditation I'm talking about here.

3) Imagine enormous roots growing out of your feet and into the earth, miles and miles deep, anchoring you solidly into the ground. Imagine the same "roots" but made of light reaching very high up into the sky to act as a sender/receiver for your connection to the Universe (or Source or God or whatever else you believe in).

4) Hold your hands as if you were praying and center yourself. Feel centered in your axis. If you're still floating around at this point, let energy flow from you upper chakras into your lower chakras.

5) If you want, imagine a bulb of shining white light surrounding you to protect you.

The energy healers I met said to me "The more you're grounded, the more you'll be powerful".

Hope this helps! I wish you a wonderful day today. :-)

PS: A note on "raw fooder": I generally don't use the term "raw foodist" because the suffix "-ist" is often used to designate the follower of an ideology. That's an association I'd like to avoid. For me, eating raw foods certainly is based on ethical and political reasons among many others, but I see it primarily as a simple lifestyle choice. I'm someone who happens to eat raw foods, so I'm a raw fooder, just like someone who smokes is a smoker and someone who enjoys dancing is a dancer. You don't talk about dancists or smokists, do you? :p