According to my 23 years experience as well as others experience, it’s easy as long as you systematically decline any offer to eat any processed stuff, telling yourself and others you’re doing a limited duration experiment and want to do it seriously. Start with a few weeks, then perhaps 3 months if you choose to still go on. After that 3 months experiment duration is over, you can either stop it, revert to SWD or whatever, or choose to go on for another 3 or 6 months prolongation. Then perhaps decide to continue for a year… and so on if you wish. This way, you feel free and your unconscious pulses to eat the addictive cooked food again are put to the waiting room. After 10 or 20 years of such a strategy, you may no longer need it in case you’ll have been able and still wanting to eat 100% raw.
Thinking and telling others you’re on for the whole rest of your live is a bad idea. They will, and your unconscious will also, restlessly try to get you eating cooked or processed foodstuff. But doing a limited duration experiment 100% raw is easy, socially and for oneself as well.
It gets much more difficult once you start to do some exceptions to your 100% raw decision. What happen generally is a slow drift towards more and more exceptions to finally end up in a total abandon of the raw paleo diet. It may take several years, but we have observed that in so many cases here in Switzerland and in France… Grain, dairy and cooked food are addictive stuff. To stop eating that is alike to stop smoking or stop taking dope.
Thank you so much for your awesome advice. I struggle with food habits/addictions and proceeding RPD as a 3-week plus or 3 - 6 months'-experiment-at-a-time sounds so reasonable, doable, and healthy.
When I think I need to eat a certain way "from now on" or for the rest of my life with fewer "mistakes," I do tend to freak out and literally jump off the bandwagon into, like, fried chicken and ice cream... (um, like last night...)
I'm doing better not beating myself up, but I know myself well enough that exceptions and "cheats" don't work too well for me. I actually believe in exceptions/cheats as occasional indulgences/treats in moderation for some people, but I don't know how to do that! It may be due to emotional eating and self-destructive tendencies (sometimes I binge not just because the food is so tempting and so good, but to punish myself or be self-destructive - junk food would be my "drug" of choice), but I cannot have just one donut. Or a few or even several chips. Or one pastry. (I have to have 4 donuts, or the whole bag of chips, or 3 pastries. And then more later, because I'm on a roll!)
That's why I've learned that it's way better for me not to have a little exception, because they don't turn out little for me.
It doesn't matter that I feel like crap later - if I eat out of stress and to be self-destructive, the hurting part later is part of the process. (It could be part of sometimes low self-esteem... not feeling that one deserves to feel one's best or treat oneself with the greatest care; just the cycle of habit/addiction; and/or avoiding other issues and filling some inner void with food/crap.)
But I'm still learning to manage it all (besides nutrition, personal development is important to me) and I loved your advice. All of this is a learning experience, I do care about what I feed myself (in all areas of my life), so I will continue to experiment.
It's life, it's an adventure. I feel that I can definitely do "limited duration experiments." That sounds great, doable, self-constructive, and non-overwhelming... thank you again.
(tears of joy and appreciation)
