Listen to Your Body!

So in my last post I was talking about the dark days of my raw food journey . . .

About 2-3 weeks into the high-raw way of eating, I started feeling nauseated at night. I’d feel fine by the next morning. I also started having intermittent upper right abdominal pains. And my skin started itching pretty badly. After a few more weeks of this, I had one day where it all exploded.

I was driving my boyfriend to the airport one morning, and drinking a green smoothie, my usual morning meal. I started feeling nauseated as we drove, then when I dropped him off I was really feeling badly. By the time I got home, a 25 minute drive, I was shaking and in pain. I barely made it in the house and into the bathroom before I got sick. Not fun.

It was so bad, with sweats, vomiting and pain, that I thought I was seriously ill. After a couple hours of that, it finally calmed down enough for me to drive myself to the walk-in clinic to be seen by a doctor. She listening to my symptoms and without really checking anything about my body or asking questions, said my gallbladder would have to come out. I said I didn’t think so, unless there was no way to heal it. She sent me for an ultrasound which she expected to show stones. There were none that were visible on the ultrasound.

Not only were there no stones, but when I did eat high fat meals, nothing happened. It was only greens that made me ill, not high-fat. To this day I’m not sure what happened but suspect a strong detox or a gallbladder function issue, made worse by a lot of raw veggies and greens. After all, I had simultaneously dropped a ton of fat and sugar out of my diet and added an almost 100% raw and healthy diet with lots and lots of cleansing greens and fruit. All that fiber alone could possibly have been too much on my system.

The moral of the story is to transition more slowly if you need to. Some people go 100% raw overnight and are fine. I wasn’t. I should have listened to my body and stopped the high-raw when I started getting ill. Maybe if I’d backed down to around 50% my body would have been able to keep up with the clean-out? I’ll never know!

Listen to your body!!