In March I completed a 30-day raw food trial to find out what it’s all about and as a challenge to see if I could do it. I was inspired by Steve Pavlina’s raw food trial last year, and after watching Food Matters several months ago I knew it was something that I’d have to try at least once. The main reasons I wanted to do the diet was to experience the extra energy and metal clarity that people talk about after going on the diet, not for the weight loss or long-term health benefits (although the health benefits are a nice side effect).

I ended up quitting on the 28th day because I felt I’d experienced the full effect of the diet and didn’t see any point keeping it up for 2 days (over the weekend, which I found to be the hardest days) just for the sake of getting to 30. Here are a few ‘highlights’ of the trial.

Detox

The detox was one of the main things that I was dreading before I started the trial. I have a pretty good diet normally but just eating normal cooked and non-organic foods introduces a lot of toxins that are often stored in the body as it tries to cope with eliminate as many toxins as it can. None of the detox systems were bad enough that I needed to take any sick days, or felt like my productivity was affected in any way, but there were a few that I didn’t expect.

From about day 5 until 12 I had a pretty bad sore throat like what I expect tonsillitis to feel like. I’ve never had tonsillitis before so it wasn’t just a coincidence. I read comments from raw foodists on forums and apparently it’s a pretty common symptom early on in the trial. Also from about day 20 until a few of days after I finished I had a weird dry cough. I didn't have any other symptoms of the flu so I don't know what that was about.

One of the main symptoms I experienced during the trial (mostly in the first half) was that I often felt depressed for no good reason. Most of the time I was able to shake it off by thinking about it logically, but it still affected me a fair bit.

But the worst (and most embarrassing) of the detox symptoms was the complete drop off in sex drive. Basically after the first couple of days on raw I had no interest in having sex or masturbating at all. I wouldn't even wake up in the morning with an erection (sorry for the over share, but that’s a pretty good indicator) which is pretty unusual for almost 4 weeks. I don't know what caused this, or if it was just a chemical imbalance or something, but I'm glad to say that after a week on cooked food again, it's back :)

Weight Loss

I’m pretty tall at 190cm and I’ve always been fairly skinny at around 76Kg (168Lbs). Before the trial I didn’t expect to lose much weight but in the first week I lost about 2Kg (4.4Lbs) and over the month I lost a total of about 6 Kg (13Lbs).

This was scary for me because I didn’t restrict myself from eating anything that wasn’t cooked (heated over 48°C). I ate a lot of fruit, raw nuts, raw honey, avocados, and used a lot of oil (extra-virgin olive and coconut) as dressings so I was getting a lot of fats and sugars.

Extra Energy

I didn’t notice much of a boost in energy while on the diet, but that may have been because I was expecting a massive increase. I expected it so much that straight away I started going to bed later and getting up earlier. I guess because I was able to survive on less sleep (maybe 30 mins to an hour a night) than I usually need, this was a success.

I also noticed that my energy was level throughout the day and didn't have the highs and lows like it usually does. This was because I wasn't eating energy loaded bread and sugars which give a short boost of energy, and also because I was eating a lot more throughout the day rather than in 3 big meals.

Mental Clarity

This is a hard one for me to judge. Many people I’ve talked to have said that going from being a meat eater to vegetarian gave them a massive boost in clarity but I didn’t find the same thing when I went vegetarian for about 3 months in 2007. Steve has said that the difference is even bigger going from vegetarian to vegan, and bigger still going from vegan to raw. The one thing I did notice was that I was able to concentrate for much longer periods of time. Normally I’ll get fidgety and get up to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom as a distraction, but while on raw food I found I wasn’t doing this at all.

Food Preparation and Variation

To me, this was always going to be the hardest part of the trial. I don’t like preparing food and I hate cleaning up afterwards. Because of this, I arranged for a local Brisbane catering company (that just happens to be where my girlfriend works) to prepare lunches and juices for me during the week. This helped enormously and I wouldn’t have lasted a week if it wasn’t for this. It was also good because my girlfriend was doing the diet with me so she had a vested interest in trying different recipes and adding variation to the food she was preparing. Staple food were salads, smoothies (banana + baby spinach or banana + frozen mixed berries), vege juices, and mushrooms with a guacamole style topping, but we also had “pasta” and chocolate tarts.

The variation in food was OK for me. I think of food as fuel so I’m happy to eat the same thing every day as long as it’s healthy, quick, and easy. The part I loved about the diet were the smoothies and juices (if I could get everything I needed through a straw, I would). The parts I hated about the diet were Friday and Saturday nights, trying to think of what to eat and knowing that we couldn’t go out and pick something up.

The Social Life

Because of the shops and markets we were going to, we met quite a few other people who were all interested in raw food. This is a huge help and they were able to give us a few tips that we don’t get from the books. On the other side though, we basically didn’t see any of our normal friends for the month because many of our social outings revolve around food in some way and there are no places in Brisbane that cater to raw foodists.

Was It Worth It?

Absolutely! I’m glad I did it and I think I’ll do it again sometime in the future. At this stage I’m not ready to go 100% raw permanently, but I’ll definitely try to keep pushing up the ratio of raw foods that I eat until I get to 80 or 90%.

I’m not convinced that the rawness of the food is what makes this diet so healthy. There is truth that heat destroys a lot of nutrients in foods, but I think the main reason is that because you can’t eat anything heated, it rules out all processed foods.

Tips for getting through the 30 days

If you want to give the 30 day trial a go yourself, here are some recommendations to make it a bit easier to get through it.

• Read all of Steve’s posts on raw food. He documented everything from what he ate to the detox symptoms he felt every day for his 30 day trial.
• Get yourself a copy of The Lazy Raw Foodist’s Guide. It has some good recipes plus a lot of information about what to expect and what to watch out for.
• Get a good blender, juicer, and food processor (all three if possible, but if you can’t then get them in that order).
• Go to your local organic markets and organic health food shops and talk to the people there. You will often find other people who are interested in / already on the raw food diet.
• Try to convince your partner and some family or close friends to do the trial with you to share the responsibility of preparing food (like sprouting chickpeas to make hummus which takes about 4 days) and also to have the support.

I hate waiting the 3 or 4 minutes after logging into Windows for it to load all the background applications and become usable. It’s just such a waste of time. Most of the programs that load are ones that I use on a daily basis (Skype, SugarSync, PhraseExpress, etc) but don’t need to be used as soon as you turn on the computer. They aren’t actually that resource hungry but when they all try to load at the same time it slows down the time it takes to open applications that you actually want to use, like Firefox.

This is where Startup Delayer comes in.

Startup Delayer allows you to delay the loading of the applications that start when Windows does, and spread them out over a period of time.

To test it out I timed how long it would take Firefox to load normally, and then with Startup Delayer configured. It took 3 minutes and 40 seconds normally but with Startup Delayer configured it loaded in just over half of that at about 2 minutes flat.

What I did was

• Removed all applications that I didn’t want to load in the first place like the iTunesHelper, QuickTime Task and all those other apps that I didn’t ask to be there.
• I then pushed the non essential applications back down the time and spread them out evenly over a period of 2 minutes (with a 2 minute delay before any of them start).
• I also added Firefox to the startup routine so that it would load as soon as I logged in, without waiting for me to click the icon in the quick launch bar.

That’s it.

Do you have any tips to cut down the amount of time you’re left waiting for your computer?

Over the Christmas break I decided that I’d had enough of hard coding theme functions to add attributes to specific menu items in Drupal, so I finally took the time to write a module that would do the heavy lifting. The outcome is the Menu Attributes module.

All the module does is give you the ability to add attributes to the menu item <a> elements, but this has been something I've wanted in Drupal for a long time now.

The main reason I wrote the module was to add the rel="nofollow" attribute to certain menu items (learn why you should be using nofollow to direct PageRank to high value pages), but it made sense to allow users to set other valid attributes as well. So far I have included the Id, Name, Target, Rel, Class, Style, and Accesskey attributes which can be added to any menu item. If you think other attributes would be useful, let me know I’m happy to consider including them.

In the next couple of weeks or so I’ll be releasing an update to include an admin page so that you can choose which attributes are available on the menu form so as not to overcrowd the form with items that you’ll never use.

It’s worth noting that the actual attributes are stored in the menu_links table in the options field of the menu item itself so no new databases are needed and no additional processing done when building the menu. The one drawback of this is that there is no way to mass reset the attributes you’ve set using the module, because it is stored alongside other attributes that are set by other modules.

If you’ve got any other uses or feedback for the module, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

If your company creates a lot of documents, forms, white-papers, etc it’s very handy to have a specific Word style set that matches the rest of your company branding so all your documents are consistent. In this post I will go through the steps on creating your own style set and deploying it through your organization using Word 2007. If you are using a different version of Word, the process will be very similar, but the clicks might be slightly different.

If you don’t know what styles are in Word, chances are you’re wasting a lot of time formatting your documents. Styles basically allow you to name certain types of text and apply that formatting over and over again. It also allows you to change the formatting of the style and it will apply it to all instances of that style throughout the document. Oh, and if you’re still creating headings by just increasing the font size and changing the color of normal text, then for the sake of anyone who has to edit your document in the future, learn to use the styles feature.

Creating your own style set in Word 2007

You can create your own style set in Word by simply modifying the normal styles and setting your new ones as the default. To modify the styles, simply download this document (.docx | .doc) which contains most of the different styles you’ll need to modify. To modify each style, simply right click on the style in the ribbon snd click modify.

Once you’ve modified all the styles and you’re happy with it, simply click the “Change Styles” button and select “Set as Default”. From now on each new document you create will have all those styles available by default.

Making sure everyone in your organization is using the same style set.

Now that you’ve got a nice style set to use, you’ll want to make sure everyone else in your organization is working from the same style. Simply send them a copy of the styles document that you created (based on the downloadable template above) and ask them to:

1. Open the document and make sure they’re looking at the new styles
2. Save the style as a new Quick Style Set by clicking Change Styles > Style Set > Save as Quick Style Set.... Choose a nice name for the style (e.g. Schoonzie) and from now on this style set will be available to apply to any Word document you open. Just click Change Styles > Style Set and choose the style set you just saved in the step above.
3. Make that style the default style set that Word uses by clicking Change Style > Set as Default so each new document you open will use that style.

That’s it, you’re all done. If you’ve got some nice styles that you have created in Word, I’d love to see them, just email nick at schoonzie dot com.