Life is Too Short to Eat Green Bananas

I've noticed I'm NOT getting my ass beat by the cold weather so far, even though I we only keep our house at about 60F. I am finding that as long as I don't short-change myself on calories from fruit, I'm staying resilient to the cold and funk. However, our house has been so cold these days that my banana stockade for Y3K is NOT getting ripe. Dang!

A brown banana can either mean bruises or ripeness. These are bruised-- too green for my taste. 

While I wait for my bananas to ripen, I'm trying to 1) improve the energy performance of the home and 2) I'm having to buy a lot of expensive persimmons (which are the world's most delicious food), also mangoes, grapes, figs, or melons or I'm just having to eat green bananas. And we all know life is too short to eat green bananas.

Cincinnati's most exotic fruit for Cincinnati's most exotic dancer. My persimmon and my dance moves are my favorite.

Prepping to insulate and air seal my kneewall cavity for efficiency and ripe bananas.

Making sure to install air-tight plugs between the floor joists beneath the kneewall so I don't get ice dams on my roof or have to eat green bananas.

R38 fiberglass batts now insulate the ceiling of the room with bananas.

I've tried putting a few banana bunches on my supply registers to heat them into ripeness (by mimicking tropical conditions). This method has actually kind of worked, but supply air temperatures hit about 130F from my furnace so that's becoming a partially-cooked banana if I leave them on there too long. Plus, my cat hates the naners taking "his" spot.

After last week's snow, I can see I did NOT get ride of the icicles yet. This entire wall (back side of bathroom) still needs to be air sealed and insulated for optimum banana weatherization. If my bananas-on-the-duct are getting cooked, I can see why the uninsulated supply duct in my kneewall is literally cooking snow off my roof-- dang!

GOOD STORY-- BAD ENDING
For my two-hour commute Friday, I packed a lunch of a date/celery smoothie, a bunch of green grapes and a bunch of green-stem bananas. I ended up eating the bananas anyway-- GROSS! They left me so disappointed that I stopped at the grocery to see if i could find some discount fruit. Lucky for me they had just put out a ton of spotted (ripe) "reject" bananas for sale. They only cost about $2 for 12lbs!! That's $1 for 6lbs... $.50 for 3lbs...$.25 for 1.5lbs...~$.05 per banana!!!!

You gotta love the discount stickers

You can imagine what happened next. I overdosed. I ate 17 medium sized bananas between Yellow Springs, Ohio and Cincinnati.

Friday was my first OD on bananas.

Then something strange happened. The pendulum swung the other way. After 5 days in a row of being completely low fat raw vegan (LFRV) (minus one meal at my parents) I got VERY angry and hungry-- I think they call it "hangry".

I started craving the naughtiest foods I could imagine-- nachos, potato skins with bacon, bloomin' onions, etc, etc, etc. Cooked, greasy, slippery, deliciously-addictive fat!

Now, fat cravings should not come as a surprise to me, since, for my whole life, as a percentage of total calories consumed, my fat consumption was about 40-50% like most Americans...EVEN IF I was vegetarian or vegan-ish. Worse still, since going raw, for several months my fat intake was probably up near 70%! on some days, with all the nuts and avocados and oils I was eating.

I love nuts too much. I love the density of calories but I don't like percentage of calories from fat. Fruit has been a better source of energy for workouts and cold-tolerance.

That night, back in the 'Nati, we went out for my brother's birthday to a Mexican restaurant. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. The beans and rice burrito I ordered was exactly what I was craving. But the strange thing is, I left the restaurant feeling more hungry than when the meal started and my belly was totally distended and bloated. And immediately-- the MUCUS! It felt like my throat and sinuses clogged up like I had a sinus infection.

Why did my body react so strongly and so painfully in spite of the good taste and my obedience to the craving? Lifelong addictions? Excito-toxins? My body going into self-defense mode? Bacteria cultures in my GI and blood becoming acclimated to raw? Maybe a combination of them all?

As I'm becoming more and more aware of these sorts of responses on a meal-by-meal, food-by-food basis, I am growing more convinced that if I could eliminate these sorts of physically-taxing episodes, then my body would better use all the raw nutrients more efficiently and spend it's energy on repairing itself of past damage done as well as recover quicker from workouts. 

I can't yet explain how I to stave off the "hangery" cravings. As I was banana-drunk-driving home Friday the only other thing I was craving was romaine hearts. So, maybe I'll try that, or just eat fewer green bananas.