Introduction and day 1

Hello! Welcome to my blog chronicling my raw food adventures over the next 7 weeks. I've waited for this for a long time! Yippee-yi-yay!

First, an introduction:

I am a 31 year old mum, photographer, teacher, runner, and vegan. My favourite colour is pink (it makes my skin glow!) and I am learning to sew. My favourite thing in the world is the feeling of my babies' faces pressed against mine, or sleeping on my shoulder.

Today I've started doing something really fun! I've joined The Garden Diet's 21-day Cleanse, to be followed by their 28-Day Transition to Raw program (check the programs out here: http://www.thegardendiet.com/).

I've been checking out these programs for the last year and a half, and reading Jinjee's daily inspiration emails, and finally the time is right for me to join in and go for a complete raw transformation. Thiw time is right simply beacuse I feel it to be so - I am ready and excited!

So what am I hoping to transform? Firstly, I want to lose the remainder of my baby weight, a couple of dress sizes, so that I'll once again fit into all the beautiful clothes I wore before I had kids. After I had my son nearly 4 years ago I did lose all the weight, but I did it by simply not eating much. I ended up very slender but I also had dark rings under my eyes, picked up every cold going around, and lacked the glowing energy that people who eat raw foods seem to have. My daughter is five months old now, and this time I want to lose weight in a healthy way, expand my boundaries and my experiences, and have fun along the way!

Apart from weight loss, other goals are:

1. Change my perceptions. I want to move from viewing raw food as part of a healthy diet to considering it as a complete cuisine unto itself, which offers everything I need both nutritionally and spiritually, without me 'missing out' by not eating cooked foods. I want to walk past cooked foods without even considering them as applicable to me. I know it;s possible, because I've done it with animal foods and I don;t even look twice at them now despite having had a strong love of cheese and yoghurt in years gone by.

2. Glow glow glow and feel vibrant, healthy and energetic.

3. Integrate exercise back into my daily life - I was once fairly fit and I long to recapture that feeling.

4. Get over thinking about food all the time in a negative, guilty, deprication-oriented way and instead bubble with joy at the beautiful raw foods I am lucky enough to be able to enjoy.

So this is day 1 of the program!
I started off behind the 8-ball as I had forgotten to shop for the program's ingredients before the New Year's weekend. As a result I woke up today with no oranges for breaky... I felt amazingly positive though, and happy, and solved that problem without a worry. I had a couple of cups of sun tea, popped the kids in the car and went shopping for the first few days' ingredients. Came back and made that juice - mmmmmm! Now I feel abuzz with motivation and energy. My husband is not at work today and so I'm looking forward to a beautiful family day together. Bliss!

So here is a 'before' photo:

Hmm I didn't realise how tired I look. I am *really* looking forward to the 'after' photos! :-)