DAY 4: SAD Sobriety

It is the end of my 4th day 100% raw and I know what's coming. I've been in this position enough times to know how my body will respond. Today, the thought of dead food (aka: cooked food) crossed my mind a couple of times. Tomorrow the craving will begin and won't let up until day 6 or 7. Once I make it past the 1 week mark, however, I'm golden. Every time I've made it that far in the past, the cravings went away and I was able to remain faithful to my diet until some social event or holiday convinced me to relapse, forcing me to start the whole process over again.
These cycles might be hard to understand if you've never tried a diet like this. Think of things in terms of addiction. Food of the Standard American Diet (SAD) is a drug that we become addicted to very early on. There are a lot of pathways that develop in our brain and certain foods become linked to positive emotions. "Comfort foods." That's our name for them. We feel bad and we learn to use the food to make us feel better. But with a long enough abstinence, these associations begin to fade. Yet they don't completely disappear and are brought back from the murky neuronal recesses to which they had retreated during our sobriety the moment we relapse and bite into that food that long ago we had enjoyed.
A friend asked me once why I didn't include a SAD meal every now and again, as it would be conducive to socializing (as much of that is done over food) and, after all, it couldn't hurt that much. "People spend there whole lives eating that stuff. One meal is not going to kill you." True. But some people also spend their whole lives drinking wine, yet I wouldn't recommend giving a glass of merlot to a recovering alcoholic.