Diet meanderings

I have always tried to eat a fairly 'healthy' diet. Although what is healthy to one person is unhealthy to another. I became a vegetarian at 15. Then at 21 I was diagnosed with coeliac condition, which meant that gluten was out and along with it most processed foods. I therefore started moving away from processed foods and towards home-made food. However, in terms of health, I think this was probably my unhealthiest period as the home-made food I was making (like many newly diagnosed coeliacs) was gluten-free equivalents of the cakes and biscuits I was now seemingly deprived of. However, even at this stage, I would forgo pre-packaged gluten-free cake mixes with there long lists of refined flours, stabilisers and preservatives, in favour of blending wholefood flours. It was also around this time that I started incorporating a little fish into my diet, as I was finding it increasingly difficult to eat out and not only be a coeliac but also a vegetarian (times have since changed and it is much easier to eat out, but back then people weren't as aware of the condition).
Putting on some weight from all of the wholefood, home-baked cakes jolted me into reading a couple of books by Patrick Holford on optimum nutrition and 'You are what you eat' by Gillian Mckeith and I started to realise that my 'healthy' baked goods were not doing me a whole lot of good. I therefore started to leave my baking tins in the kitchen cupboards and eat a bit more fruit and veg. Still not as much as I knew I should be, but better than I had been.
Fast forward a few years to the 'black' ME period. My hubby invested in a juicer and started blending me weirdly coloured concoctions of fruit (with a little veg thrown in for good luck, and maybe some wheatgrass), into which he would add some spirulina. We also started to eat a little more raw veg (not tons, but instead of steaming or boiling broccoli to have with a nut roast, we would chop it and have it raw). I tried to eat a little more fruit than I had been, but it was a struggle, as I couldn't get that excited about the taste or texture of an apple, when for so many years my palate had been delighted with gluten-free muffins. I also started sporadically sprouting seeds and pulses, although not to any great degree. So a typical day's menu would be something along the lines of a gluten-free muesli and milk for breakfast, lunch maybe rice cakes and hummus with a juice, and dinner would be something like lentil bake, boiled potatoes and some veggies or quorn in a tomato sauce (made using tinned chopped tomatoes, garlic, onions, herbs) with gluten-free pasta and veggies.
Which brings me more or less to where I was until a few months ago. I can't remember exactly where I started being aware of a 'raw food' or 'living food' diet but the awareness seems to have snuck up on me. I seem to recall a few years ago reading raw, vegan recipes in Lifescape magazine, which always seemed to need specialist equipment like a dehydrator and involved hours spent soaking, sprouting, preparing and dehydrating ingredients. Life was too short, I felt. Around this time I was then introduced to Conscious Chocolate's divine raw chocolate bars and learnt that if you are going to eat chocolate, then raw chocolate gives you lots of goodness which is missing from 'normal' chocolate bars. The raw chocolate sparked my interest and I added a 'raw chocolate' recipe book by American raw foodie Kristen Suzanne, to my Christmas wish list last year, as I was tempted to have a go and make some raw goodies myself.
This book led me to Kristen's website and blog which sparked a certain curiosity with raw food and the lifestyle which seems to surround it. This curiosity was fuelled by the constant feeling of tiredness I had, even though I thought I was eating a good diet which should be energising me. This also coincided with a decision to start trying to a family, which led to me raiding the library for any information I could find on how to ensure that I was healthy as I could be pre-conception.
Again, books by Patrick Holford seemed to make a lot of sense, and I decided to give up caffeine ( I was drinking about 10 cups of tea and 2 of coffee daily), incorporate flax, hemp, sunflower and sesame seeds into my diet to ensure that I was getting enough essential fatty acids, as well as trying to up my intake of raw food (although alongside my 'cooked' veggie meals). Kristen Suzanne's blog drew me in, as she is currently expecting and talks about how she is eating a high raw diet to ensure that both she and the baby are as healthy as possible. Other sources of information I devoured included The Fresh Network's Get Fresh magazine, Briggite Mars' book Rawsome, Kate Wood's book Raw Living and Ani Phyo's book The Raw Food Kitchen. From all sources the same message of 'raw food = more energy' was extremely appealing. I therefore decided to take some tentative steps towards a more raw, living diet...