Chocolate Pudding For Shana

Here is a great snack when you are craving sugar.

Chocolate Shana-banana pudding

1 banana
2 Tablespoons Cacao powder
2 or 3 Tablespoons Currants
1 Tablespoon Coconut oil

Put it all in a bowl and mush with a fork. The currants give a brighter flavor than raisins. If you are in a bad way, you can add honey but really the currants give enough sweetness.

I got the idea for this recipe from Ani Phyo's book 'Ani's Raw Food Kitchen'. But her recipe uses an avocado which is a bit weird ( even for me!) so I changed it and added currants etc.

I find that as I keep on my raw diet ( about 97% raw anyway!) that a lot of the eating that I do is emotionally based. I am not an emotional wreck by any means so I started to ponder what was up. This is what I came to- in our culture, food equals pleasure. I know that this is not big news but we can think about it a little more. We are not a culture that traditionally eats the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner, day in and day out. When the big Whole Foods opened near my house, I spent hours wandering the aisles in a daze, thrilled that anything that pleased me, I could take home.

The combination of eating to satisfy our nearly insatiable need for pleasure combined with the very real physiological reactions to processing sugar ( and white flour) in our systems makes us very reliable consumers. When I was eating 'normally' I found that after about 3 or 4 hours I became unbearably hungry and weak. This was the result of my blood sugar dropping. It doesn't drop back to neutral, it drops below that and then comes back up to neutral. Low blood sugar is very uncomfortable, it made me feel weak and confused.

If you are able to curb or break your addiction to sugar when you are hungry, eating becomes an option instead of an emergency.Eating raw, I do get hungry. I try to carry an apple with me for lunch. Most of the time though, I can just have a drink of water and in about 15 minutes the feeling of hunger will pass away. Another benefit of eating really well.

Enjoy!