After a particularly harrowing night involving lots of unhealthy things, Jolie woke up this morning (un)freshly resolved to tiptoe back into the raw diet waters.  The following press release appeared in my inbox from a publicist friend of mine, detailing a yummy recipe from our very own Kim Snyder of Envision Beauty, creator of the celeb-favorite The Solution!  Celery is well-known to be a detoxing vegetable (my health-nut little brother P. has drilled this one in my head for years), so if I’ve piqued your curiosity with the recent raw posts, pull out your blender when you get home tonight and give the recipe below a go!  I’m a little skeptical about the claim to banish under eye circles–but, hey, you never know.  (I must add, by the way, that my skin had never been so excellent as while I was in the middle of my raw diet.  Predictably, a couple of weeks after returning to “regular”, non-organic and inevitably pesticide-laden food, I’m experiencing a host of breakouts.)

Kimberly’s Creamy Raw Celery Soup
“Celery is a cleansing and detoxifying vegetable, full of organic sodium, B Vitamins and Vitamin C, folic acid, potassium and calcium. It also contains phytochemicals known as coumarins, which helps fight off migraine headaches! Celery is loaded with fiber and water, so promotes detoxification in the body.”

How to Make:
- 2 cups almond milk
- 6 stalks of organic celery
- 2 tsp. Celtic sea salt
- pinch of Cayenne pepper
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 1 clove of garlic

Blend all ingredients until smooth. Serve in warm bowls, and garnish with some parsley.

“Bonus: Celery helps get rid of under eye circles as well! Under eye circles can be caused by having too much potassium-based foods in your diet, such as bananas and dried fruit. Adding more celery into the diet can correct this imbalance. Celery is full of organic sodium, which will balance the potassium overload.”

It was a tough few weeks, but Jolie’s Raw Food Challenge is way over–praise Jesus!  I originally meant to do it for 6 weeks, but after 3 brutal weeks of sticking to it, I was a bit more lax on myself for the last few weeks, reintroducing cooked foods and animal proteins back into my diet, and also reincorporating alcohol.  (Okay.  I can live without steak…and can even do without chicken.  But no wine?  No margaritas?  I draw the line, people.)

Overall, I lost about 5 pounds, and I’m confident this was not water weight but true tummy-and-face-pudding that I’d managed to accumulate over the past several months of cramming pasta, stuffing and sugary crap into my mouth as fast as my little hands could shovel it.  (Death in the family!  Slack must be cut!)  The weight very slowly, but very surely, melted off, and in the past week or two, I’ve had several people comment that I looked thinner–a step on the scale, not to mention the fit of my jeans, confirms this to be true.  So, nice bonus.  I’m still eating healthier, although am now on the “normal-to-lazy” side of healthy.

Here’s what I loved about the raw diet: I felt great.  My pores felt cleaner, my tummy felt lighter, my (ahem) business was all good, and things felt more in sync.  I developed a love for kombucha and seaweed nori, and can now make an entire delicious meal out of greens and sprouts and spirulina and other rabbit food.  I also haven’t had coffee or (barring a few Sour Patch Kid incidents) sugar in months, and don’t even miss ‘em.

Here’s what I didn’t like: I became obsessed with food.  When you are limited in your palette, and when you’re a food lover like me (I want expensive cuts of grass-fed steak!  I want sauce reductions!  I want complicated seven-course meals at Daniel!), you start focusing on what you can’t eat.  My mornings, afternoons and nights were devoted to plotting my next meal, to evaluating my hunger levels, to stressing about how I was going to feel full while lunching with colleagues at a pasta and steak restaurant that had only one cheese-smothered salad on the menu.  As long as my weight is healthy and my clothes fit, I don’t really care about how skinny I am, and I didn’t like how food became an obsession.  Sure, I love to eat healthily, but I don’t want to live to eat healthily, and that’s what it started to feel like.  For some people, living an all-encompassing raw lifestyle is what it’s all about…but it just wasn’t practical or manageable for the ol’ Jolie.  Plus–and this was a big problem for me–it is expensive.

On the whole, I really loved my raw experience; I’m much healthier overall now, have been exposed to some great new foods, and my skin is super clear and glowing.  I would recommend it, but with caveats.

If you’re curious about raw, try sliding into it; Kim Snyder’s blog is a great place for advice and tips.  Have a Green Smoothie for breakfast every day, and start eliminating alcohol, dairy, processed foods, sugar, and animal proteins over a couple of weeks.  See how you do with that, and increase the number of organic greens you eat.  Swap your coffee for tea, and swap your sugar or Splenda for Stevia or Truvia.  Avoid your microwave.  The less sugars and unhealthy foods you eat, the less you’ll crave them; the more healthy foods you introduce, the better you’ll feel.

Just make sure your wallet can take it!

Thanks to T. for reminding me to update on my raw food challenge! 

I just landed in Philly after a semi-brutal 12 hours of traveling–bad when you consider that it was only supposed to take five hours, but not too terrible in the grand scheme of airport delays.  Stop one on my book tour is the University of Pennsylvania; I’ll be at the UPenn Barnes and Noble bookstore at 2pm tomorrow reading and signing, and then the Penn SDT chapter is hosting a private event for me in the evening.  Thanks, ladies!

So far, it’s been exciting: the hotel is gorgeous, and HarperCollins provided me with an author AmEx for meals and incidentals.  While I was clutching my author packet and riding up in the elevator to my room, I was struck by a feeling of the deepest happiness and gratitude.  Even before the current economic meltdown, the publishing industry has been shaky, and book tours are rare nowadays; so the fact that I’m getting to experience one is pretty damn cool.  Walking down the hallway (okay, here’s where Jolie turns a little batty!), I could have sworn I felt my mother’s presence alongside me, as if drawn to me by my silent moment of thanks with the universe.  (Thinking of you, mama!)  I dedicated Confessions of a Beauty Addict to my mom Nancy, and one of the things I will cherish forever is the fact that she saw a copy with her dedication page in it before she died.  She was only about halfway through the book when she passed, but both she and my father told me she cried when she saw I’d dedicated it to her.

For those of you keeping track, by the way: yes, I am still on the raw diet!  I was a total crazypants on the plane today, and actually brought along a bag of food to keep from getting derailed by the gross airport grub.  I stopped at Whole Foods before my shuttle picked me up and bought a raw “sandwich” and raw salad, some bananas and apples, flaxseed “trail mix” and a few raw fruit bars to nibble on if I’m suddenly hungry.  Kim Snyder from Envision Beauty has been checking in along the way, and sent me a list of tips for a raw diet while traveling and on the cheap.  (Actually, I just checked her blog, and she posted the tips, so thanks, Kim!)  It’ll be tricky sticking to the diet while on the road, but I’m going to do my best!

Today, my skin exploded.  I’ve been chugging along the past month or two, relying heavily on Green Cream, a high dose retinol product, with amazing effects–my complexion hasn’t been this clear in years.  (I use the Nude Cleansing Oil twice a day, Green Cream at night, and Fenix Rehydrating Sunscreen in the morning.)  I switched my night product a few days ago, however, and am also on this damn raw diet, and all of a sudden, this morning, I woke up with four zits.  Count ‘em: four.  Please allow me to self-diagnose and say this is because all of the toxins are zooming out of me at lightening speed…otherwise, Jolie is not such a happy camper.

In other news, I kind of cheated the diet today.  My doctors invited me to lunch, and at the restaurant we went to (where Scott Baio spent five minutes outside the window feeding his parking meter and puffing heartily on a cigarette), the only options were pasta, more pasta, or a tuna tartare.  So, I went with the tuna tartare, figuring…hey, it’s raw!  And nobody ever necessarily said I was doing a vegan raw diet…right?  Interestingly, within two bites of eating it, my stomach felt heavy and full, the exact opposite of the light and airy feeling I’ve been having since last night, which is rather pleasant.  I also kind of cheated by having caffeine today, but it was in the form of tea, and I’m not going to lie–it banished my headaches, full stop.

Earlier tonight, I met up with friends at the House of Blues and Skybar, and I happily sipped club soda with lemon all night long; my body is genuinely feeling cleaner and I want to see if I can maximize the benefits.  The fact I was able to exercise such willpower and not give a damn makes me feel like a rockstar, albeit a very, very sober one!

Dizzy…headachey…spaced out…fun!  Day two of my raw diet was hardly a picnic, but it was a feast, seeing as I ate about seventy billion pounds of food.  It’s hard to stay full on this thing, and I’m nervous about not ingesting enough calories (Jolie eats every meal as though it may be her last!), so I’ve been stuffing my face silly with goji berries and nori and Kombucha and other weirdly named things that I’m not entirely sure are actually food.  Interestingly enough, everything tastes delicious, and not surprisingly, I do feel a certain lightness and physicial cleanliness.  (It’s hard to explain, but my pores actually feel less dirty.)  It’s probably mental at this point, but I hope that tangible physical benefits will come about soon.

Yesterday, I met with Kimberly Snyder, founder of the new buzzed-about skincare line Envision Beauty that counts several Hollywood makeup artists and celebrities (notably my personal girl-crush Kristen Bell) as fans.  Kimberly is only a year older than me, but has already lived a lifetime of experiences, moving to Australia after college for work, then spending three years traveling to fifty-seven countries.  (Color me seriously impressed.)

I shared with you a few days ago the fact that I’ve been gaining weight at a rapid pace–about twelve pounds since Thanksgiving, aided by the comfort food I’ve been turning to after losing my mother, the oodles of Splenda and creamer I add to my endless cups of coffee to keep my energy up, and the lack of exercise I’ve been getting since finally buying a car and suddenly dropping my habit of walking four miles per day.  Kimberly, whose passion for natural yet efficacious beauty led to the creation of The Solution (it’s received unbelievable press, but I’m only just trying it myself tonight for the first time, so updates to follow), is also a renowned yoga instructor and raw food devotee.  While showing me The Solution and talking about her background, she fed me yummy raw goodies and we spent 45 minutes talking about her raw lifestyle.  I’m probably in a “biting off more than I can chew” mood here, but I thought, “I can do this.” I mean, please, I live across the street from Whole Foods and in the vicinity of about 35 haute cuisine raw food restaurants.

So, off to Whole Foods I went, mental shopping list in hand, and into the cart the leafy greens, goji berries, Kombucha, spirulina, lemons, olives and avocados went.  I bought a blender this evening to make her famous veggie-and-fruit-laden Green Smoothie, and Kimberly’s going to offer a little support along the way as I try this thing out for six weeks.  Today was step one: no coffee, but instead Yogi Rooibos tea flavored with stevia. I felt lightheaded and slightly out of it as the day wore on and I began craving caffeine.  Truthfully, though, I’m expecting my body to be a little weird for the next week as it gets used to life without toxins.  (Well, most of them, at least–I’m clinging to my red wine, baby!)

I’d love to keep you posted on my progress as much as possible.  Conscious attempts to reform my body are hard for me, in part because I actively detest the asinine, pervasive Western notion that a body is only beautiful when it’s at its tiniest size and state.  My body will never be tiny and I don’t mind that–but it also isn’t very healthy right now, and that’s what I do mind.

Special thanks (and probably a few curses, too, but only in passing!) to Kimberly for giving me the courage.  Let’s do this thing…