Day 7. LAST DAYYYYYYYY! Wow, that was kinda fast. This is how today went:

7.45am: Pranayama and short yoga practice.

8.20am: Hot water and juice of 1/2 lemon.

8.40am: - Red and Green smoothie. With winter purslane (kinda sorta similar taste to spinach), rhubarb, celery, strawberries, parsley, avocado, lemon juice, hemp protein powder, milled flax, maca powder, acai powder.

This ended up being pretty tangy coz of the rhubarb - it probably didn't need the extra hit of lemon!

Made enough to bring another 500ml to work.

- Supplements: Wanted to take a Vitamin B complex and Zinc. But forgot while rushing off to work. When you're pretty much on a vegan diet, vitamin B12 is an essential nutrient that will be missing as it's only found in animal products. The plant forms of B12 are the inactive form, and you won't get any nutritional benefit from the plant analogs. Because the B vitamins all work synergistically with each other, I find it's better to take a B-complex. I forgot to take these this morning anyway. Ha.

9.30am: - Breakfast. Buckwheat-Oat-Chia Porridge in coconut milk. Soaked overnight with goji berries and raisins. For recipe measurements, check posts from Days 1 - 5. I really like goji berries when they're pre-soaked. The flavour's a lot more mild than when they're straight out of the packet, dry and hard. - Multivitamin supplement. (I leave some at work in case I forget to take them at home, like this morning's scenario.)

Time-saving tip: What I do is pre-soak everything in a mason jar in the fridge. That way, it's instantly ready to transport the next morning if I end up being late and need to have breakfast at the office.

12pm: Snack.

-Half of the Red + Green smoothie I brought to work. - With a handful of sprouted almonds - soaked overnight, then with their skins peeled off, then dehydrated again. Yup. This is a bit mad, even for me. But it increases the nutritional content of the nut, since soaking/ sprouting them kickstarts the germination process and releases a flood of enzymes in the nut. And because almond skins contain enzyme inhibitors (which would negate the good you've just done by sprouting them), I peeled them off and rinsed before dehydrating again. Read more about it here.

12.30pm: Lunch. Rawlicious Brazil Nut & Thyme crackers with raw pumpkin seed butter, avocado and hemp seeds. I hadn't prepped anything the night before for lunch today and figured this would have to do.

Umm... this was a SUPER RICH lunch coz of all the good fat in it from all the nuts and seeds. But would you believe this simple meal actually turned out to be a tad too rich for me? (Err... TMI, but it basically gave me the runs about half an hour after eating. That's how sensitive my gut has now become. Damn.)

4.30pm: Remainder of the red + green smoothie.

5pm: Gym. 2.5km treadmill run. 2km on the rowing machine. Followed by half-hour of yoga. I usually teach a lunchtime yoga class at the gym at work on Mondays, but as I had a client meeting at that time today, it's rescheduled till tomorrow.

6.30pm: One banana. Some raw almond brittle pre-made last week.

For some reason, bananas and me don't seem to go so well this raw week. Once again, I felt really full, bloated and heavy after eating that banana. It's the weirdest feeling as I've never had any aversion to bananas before.

7.45pm: Dinner. Zucchini and red pepper noodles with spicy sesame sauce. Adapted from This Rawsome Vegan Life's "Rainbow Noodles with Spicy Jungle Peanut Sauce".

I didn't have the raw jungle peanut butter, so used tahini instead. Still tastes great. This chick makes really simple and rawsome recipes. LOL.

I also added some home-made mung bean sprouts to increase the proteins and a side of home-made kimchi with this.

The noodle recipe along with the kimchi pretty much gave me a GARLIC PARTY in my mouth. It tasted soooooo good while eating, but the aftermath of dinner was giving me a headache from my serious garlic breath. Sooooo foul.

Then I remembered a tip I picked up at school: Parsley removes garlic odours! I chomped on a few sprigs, making sure to chew it up to small pieces, really breaking it down and swirling it around my mouth before swallowing. Guess what? It works! I had to chomp down a total of 3 mouthfuls of fresh parsley before the garlic breath was mostly gone. My guy was the smell tester of "before" and "after". Bless him! Hahaha. ;p

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THOUGHTS ON DAY 7:

1. While eating this dinner, I took my time to savour it. Almost like it was my "last supper", coz it pretty much is the last thing I'll eat on this raw week. I MADE IT! Except for a rookie mistake on Day 1, where I'd used rice paper rolls to wrap a roll, I pretty much was 100% raw. Oh, and maybe some seasonings used too, like dashes of sesame oil here and there. But where's the raw police?

2. I haven't felt any major shifts in anything from weight to skin appearance, the only real difference I can feel is my digestive tract feels "light and clean". Haven't had any bloating except for the banana I had today and earlier on during the raw week. Kinda makes sense though, this wasn't meant to be a hardcore cleanse... With previous fasting detoxes I've done, there was clearly a marked shift in skin (gets bad in days 3-4, then positively glows from days 5-7), weight, body odour, etc. but since those were more extreme on the body, it makes sense that there were rapid shifts.

This raw week has been gentler on the system, and maybe if I did it for longer, I'd start to see the external differences. Also - just coz you can't see something on the surface, doesn't mean a load of good isn't happening on the inside.

I think I'll take a couple more days to process the entire experience of what the past 7 days meant to me. For now, I'll just leave you with my observations of how I feel about it today.

While I'm glad I no longer have to plan ahead like crazy for the upcoming meals, I might actually start to incorporate some of what I've been doing in my regular day. For starters, I'm off to soak some raw chia and oats for breakfast tomorrow!

Catch up with you guys in a few days' time, once I've got some thoughts together post-raw week. Hope you've enjoyed being part of my daily updates!