Day 75 - 3/4

Time for a brief review...

I look back on 75 days of reluctant vegan raw foodism.

It has been challenging.

I have managed to stay 99.9% raw. I have knowingly and deliberately eaten cooked food once in the whole time - when my mum was here and cooked lots of delicious Ghanaian food. I stole a teaspoon of her Okra Stew. Heaven.

I have accidentally eaten processed sweetcorn on salad once or twice. And there are a handful of occasions where I may have eaten something cooked and I simply do not know (usually in restaurants where the interesting item I have been served almost certainly was heated above 43 degrees in the preparation but is now - I am repeatedly assured by the person serving me - cold).

Vegan raw foodism is a growing trend in Berlin. Just in the space of the last 14 days I have eaten in four different specialist environments:

• Boris Lauser - a gourmet Raw Food Chef who hosts private dinner parties in his Kreuzberg home (so good I ate there twice :-)
• La Mano Verde - a vegan restaurant in Charlottenburg that serves gourmet cooked food but also has a complete raw food menu
• "Rawfood Goes ..." events organised regularly by Rawger and held in Fujisan Bar in Wilmersdorf, and
• Gesund und Sündig, also in Wilmersdorf, apparently Germany's first raw food restaurant which only opened this month

Another place is due to open in a few weeks and it will serve raw food in Görlitzer Park, Kreuzberg.

All of which is pretty amazing.

But I do miss cooked food. And I am fed up of only having a choice of a large or a small mixed salad when I go out to dinner in bulk standard restaurants - and these days I even have to fight to get a tomato or cucumber on them.

I am suffering from my decision to stop eating meat & fish (The effect - I know that even when my 100 days are up, that lightly grilled salmon with butter & tarragon will not be on my plate, no matter how non-raw I am. Those Kentucky Fried Chicken Fillet Pieces they are advertising? Sharon can just walk on by. Seeing people sitting outside restaurants tucking into their steaks could almost make me weep. I am looking forward to eating cooked food again, but I will miss meat & fish terribly for a while to come).

And I am fed up of people commenting about how much weight I have lost.

And I have turned to alcohol again - my one sin - to make it through.

I am not a raw foodian in my heart.

This experiment has been eye-opening and I hope my health issue will have been cured.

But either way, I will cease to be 100% raw on Wednesday July 6th.

I cannot wait!

What do you think my first item of cooked food should be?