I've been on a high raw diet for seven months now, which means between 75 and 100 percent of my diet is raw. In these seven months there have been four breaks of about a week each where I was eating light but mostly cooked food while travelling.

I still have some cravings for cooked food. Now, when I say cravings I do not mean that I overeat or cannot control myself from eating something. Perhaps a better word is desire. I feel that my body desires cooked food. More particularly, it desires something warm, soft, dense and moist.

One of the really fascinating things that has happened in the raw journey for me is that it seems that because of the transition to raw, in addition to being a sattvic vegetarian and off caffeine and alcohol for 12 years, my tongue has become an amazingly sensitive organ that seems to communicate to my brain and my other senses what my body needs. What tastes good is what my body needs, and what tastes bad is what is not good for the body. Not always, but more often than not.

I cannot take the extreme amount of spices and salt and Sugar that most people seem to eat day in and day out. It also seems that I can tell when I am eating something because the body needs it and when I am eating something because I want a psychological experience. For example, I eat a very large quantity of dates but my body seems to need it. I say this because when i eat them the sensation on the tongue is different - more alive - and there is a tense, undulating, burning, opening sensation in the esophagus and throat, which I understand to be hunger. But I can also sometimes eat something with a strong flavour because of the psychological experience I get from eating it, even in the absence of the sensations I described above. Like last night, I ate some sapodillas even though I was not hungry, but I was happy and excited. The latter is something I do occasionally now.

Having said that, I wonder why I have this desire for cooked food. It seems unlikely to me that it is an 'addiction' to cooked food, which some writers and posters here talk about. It am more inclined to think that cooked food is usually more warm, dense, soft, moist than raw food, and my body needs that. First, because I am strongly a vata type in the Ayurvedic scheme of things, which means my body needs khapha foods which have just those qualities I described above. Second, it is winter and very cold where I live in India, and the heating is not really adequate. The season, therefore, increases the craving. So I eat some lightly cooked vegetables with little or no spices. They form about 20 percent of my diet these days.

What do you think? Would you agree with my understanding of food and cravings? Where could I be going wrong?

Does the vata constitution especially need something non-raw? And the winter?