Yesterday was the first day we went to having raw food for breakfast and lunch and a cooked meal for dinner.

For breakfast I had a banana, orange, strawberry and pineapple smoothie. Then I ate about 1/4 a cantaloupe. That was a pretty low-cal breakfast, so I snacked on mixed sprouted beans (available by the bag at my local co-op) and a few dried dates.

Lunch was strips of zucchini (meant to slightly resemble pasta) in a marinara sauce that we made with sundried tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, fresh basil, dried herbs and olive oil. We also each had a whole avocado.

Overall, I think we went a little light on calories. I was feeling a bit listless by the end of the day. The weirdest thing, though, is I didn't feel any real hunger pangs.

That night we all savored our delicious cooked meal of marinated baked tofu, wasabi mashed potatoes and steamed peas in pods. For the marinade I stuck to products that had very few ingredients listed on their packaging, and the potatoes I made without margarine and soymilk, just potatoes, wasabi powder and water. New recipes, ones we'll definitely turn to again!

AS and I weighed ourselves again this morning. I was holding steady but she had dropped another pound.

Ironically, all three of us have work lunch meetings during this cleansing period. Not a normal occurrence for any of our jobs, so Murphy decided to schedule them during weeks when we would struggle to find suitable food. AS has her lunch meeting today, so hopefully the 3 lbs. lost will inspire her to stick as close to raw as possible. NT's and my meetings are next week, near the end of the cleanse. By then I'll either want to cheat because I'm desperate, or I'll actually be enjoying the diet and want to stay as strict as possible. We'll have to wait and see!

I read an article in Yahoo! yesterday about a study that showed when people kept a food diary, they lost twice as much weight as those on the same program who didn't. I'm not going to clog up my finance blog with a food diary once my cleanse is over, but I may try to keep a diary another way, maybe in my Google documents. Here's a link to the article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20080709/hl_hsn/keepafooddiarylosetwiceasmuchweight