AboutRawPalaeoGuy Expertise I can answer most questions on Raw Animal Food Diets such as the Primal Diet, an organic, raw-meat-based diet and a number of similiar all-raw or partially raw Paleolithic diets, such as the Instincto, Weston-Price, Neanderthin, Paleo and Stefansson Diets. Can also offer advice on
how to resist social pressure to eat cooked foods etc. For further info on Raw-Animal-Food diets, feel free to browse through this website:-
http://www.rawpaleodiet.com/
Experience I have been 8 years on a 99%+ raw version of the Palaeolithic Diet and experienced numerous health benefits as a result, being fully recovered from my previous symptoms from my cooked-food days. My own individualised raw, paleolithic diet routine is mostly based on Aajonus Vonderplanitz's Primal Diet(ie 99% raw, usage of "high-meat",no processed supplements, using primarily naturally-reared, organic or wild sources of raw foods) but, for personal reasons, I have also been, to some extent, influenced by ideas from:- Instincto(ie:- taste/instinct,no raw dairy/no raw veggie juice), Weston-Price(eg: preferring grassfed meat to grainfed meat, incorporating a wide variety of raw organ-meats into my diet along with the usual muscle-meats, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson(high-fat diet, pretty high proportion of (raw) animal food), but also eating some raw carbohydrates such as raw organic/wild fruit/veg/honeycomb etc.). I'm also a firm believer in the feast-and-famine idea (ie Intermittent Fasting) as regards boosting one's energy levels, and giving my body a rest from constant digestion.
Organizations Rawpaleodiet Community(Comprising rawpaleoforum , rawpaleodiet yahoo group and the rawpaleodiet.com website among others).
Publications Allexperts and Rawpaleodiet.com
Education/Credentials BA(German) 3rd; No nutritional qualification(I don't believe in standard(misguided) nutritonist doctrine, so I don't feel the need).
Question I have a bunch of liver the fridge. What sort of time scale did you
become accustomed to raw meat on? And what is the best way to start?
Should I start by eating a little each day and build up to a lot?
Should I stop all modern/cooked foods and basicly fast until I can
stomach meal sized portions? Will I be able to develope a desire for
raw meats if I'm also eating modern foods? I would like to just stop
all modern food from this day foward but I'm hungry (or am I just
addicted to modern foods?) and can't get down enough liver to feel
satisfied, it tastes/feels too gross.
So if i CAN transition from modern into RAF, how long does it take
to reach that 'higher level' of eating pleasure? Days, weeks, months?
OR
What did you do? Did you just force yourself until you felt it
helping you?
Being so accustomed and conditioned to basing my cravings and eating on flavors and textures created by the 'science' of cooking and totally unrelated to my internal sense of what i need nutritionally, how do I best undo that conditioning? I guess thats my main question. How can there be raw meats I would enjoy while I'm still conditioned for modern food?
You've been such a great help,
Chris
Answer Hello again Chris,
I notice that you've been posting quite a bit on the livefoods group. Don't worry about the low response-rate. 97% of the members of any Yahoo! group are just "lurkers" who read the messages but never respond. Sometimes you'll get as much as 30 replies, sometimes none, it's a random thing, depending on the topic, availability of people etc.
First of all, don't be obsessive about food. By all means eat only a little each day, if that's what you need. Since the raw food has a far higher amount of absorbable nutrients in it than cooked food does, you really don't have to eat as much as before. I personally follow a gorging-and-famine routine but that's probably not the best approach for you right now. DO NOT FAST unless you are gorging yourself at alternate times. By itself it's bad for your body in the long run.
Secondly, drop the liver, and try something else. Most people find it very difficult to accustom themselves initially to raw liver as it has such a rich taste. People who've been on cooked-food or raw vegan /fruitarian diets for decades are used to a certain lack of taste in their foods(which they consider normal) and are simply overwhelmed by the taste of liver at first.I personally found raw tongue and raw kidney instantly tasty and avoided raw liver until I got used to those first(provided I left them out for a day or so to tenderise the meat and provide flavour- make sure, incidentally, to leave the organ-meats in a sealed container to avoid flies). I found this easy as cooked food had anyway increasingly started to feel tasteless to me over the years, but you will no doubt have a much harder time of it.
You must remember that your aversion to raw food is simply a conditioned response. As it's built-in during your childhood it is extremely difficult to shake off. Therefore I would recommend that you don't include any cooked or processed foods in your diet. This will mean eating raw food will become a habit until you start to throw off your previous conditioning. I do admit to eating a small amount of cooked food at the start of my RPD diet(1 small cooked dish every 8 weeks to 3 months ) as I wanted to test my progress on the diet and didn't want to be too fanatical in my approach. As I got healthier, even that small amount of cooked food made me feel increasingly ill and lethargic after eating it, so I stopped that practice after two years. Most people either go cold turkey and do a 100% RPD diet immediately or start at 10% raw and build up. I figured that for me the former 100% purist approach was too difficult to sustain for the length of time needed to change my sense of taste,due to social restraints, and the latter approach is extremely difficult to reach 100% raw with, as the continual eating of cooked foods doesn't allow your sense of taste to change so that you continue to find raw animal foods disgusting.
You have never mentioned the reason as to why you have decided on an RPD diet. I myself was forced to choose this diet as my body was breaking down and I was faced with extreme ill-health and much-shortened lifespan and all the other diets had been useless. Whenever I passed a restaurant or other place of temptation, at the beginning of the diet, all I had to do was think about what I was like in my cooked food days:- how unfit I was, with the massive stomach pains I got from eating any cooked/processed animal product(meat, eggs/dairy etc.), the endless pains in my joints during sleep etc- and I would compare it with the health I'd gained on my RPD diet. After doing this regularly I found that after about a year, on the very rare occasions I ate cooked food,I felt a high degree of digust and revulsion at the sight and taste of it) During all this time, I increasingly became accustomed to eating raw meat, and started really liking it after 6 months on the diet (about 3 months after giving up raw dairy completely). My point is that the avoidance of pain is a more powerful stimulus than the seeking of pleasure(such as taste). Therefore follow either my 95% raw approach or the 100% purist approach, if, like most RPDers, you are recovering from a serious illness. If , on the other hand, you have no major health problems at the moment, then I suggest you just start at 10% raw, avoid being fanatical about the diet, and just gradually increase the raw component of your diet over the years whenever you feel like it. Also, disregard the time-frame I've given you re my own transformation - after all everybody is different and you cannot possibly expect to have the same experience with this diet.
The second reason why it was so easy for me to change from cooked to raw foods was that I kept on trying to vary my diet by spending a lot of money on finding suitable sources of food. I first started out eating raw foods which I'd already eaten in the past, such as steak tartare(minced beef muscle-meat with raw egg), sashimi(=raw fish; I prefer raw mackerel above all else) and raw oysters(I have to use a hammer(!) to break the shells open,I can never seem to use an oyster knife properly). I then searched hundreds of shops, fish markets and farmers' markets and bought very small amounts of everything raw they had in stock, especially if it was food from wild animals(as I correctly guessed that they would taste better than organic-reared or factory-farmed animals). The result was that I found that 97% of the raw food tasted foul or was indigestible(eg:- raw squid!), but the remaining 3% was wide enough in variety and tasty enough to enjoy- over time of course I started liking most of the raw foods I initially couldn't tolerate. I found personally that seafood(fish/shellfish) was much easier for me to handle taste-wise at the start as it seemed to me that the taste of things like swordfish didn't change much from cooked to raw. Here's a tip:- there's a peruvian dish called Ceviche ( mentioned in Aajonus Vonderplanitz's book "Recipe for Living Without Disase" - I hope you've read the book by now). Ceviche is basically just raw fish steeped in raw lemon juice for 8-24 hours. The lemon breaks down the raw flesh until it has a taste similiar to the cooked version, apparently. I've only had it once or twice, and only in my cooked food days but it was delicious.
I even tried this variety gimmick with raw foods I intensively disliked. For the first year on the diet I found that the taste of raw duck and chicken eggs was truly revolting, so I found a regular source for raw goose eggs and found them delicious. After about 6 months of eating raw goose eggs I started finding raw duck eggs rather tasty and I found that while I still considered chicken eggs to be bland and tasteless, I didn't find them as bad in taste as before.
My point with this variety idea is that, first of all, tastes change much faster than normal on an RPD diet due to the body's changing needs at any time, and secondly, like with cooked food diets, there are always going to be plenty of raw foods that each particular individual RPDer will dislike on a permanent basis due to different tastebuds. Don't imagine for a moment that ALL raw foods are great to eat just because they're raw. So for the first 2 years of your RPD diet keep looking for new sources. I had to waste a lot of my weekends in my first 2 years looking for the right food sources. The result is that I've been able to get hold of very exotic and tasty items in recent times, such as raw wild boar liver, raw pheasant eggs and even wild male duck breast.
There are two other pieces of advice I can give you. The first is to ignore this whole issue of taste to a certain extent. It really isn't important. I love the taste of my raw food, but I, like a number of other RPDers, often find that bolting food down like a dog can actually help in digesting the food faster than if you chew it and taste it. While I still far prefer to chew the foods I like for the taste, when I eat something I like only a little bit (like ox heart) or something I find pretty bland(eg:- ox brain and sweetbreads[=pancreas]), I prefer to just bolt down large bite-sized chunks with hardly any chewing. With cooked food it's best to chew in order to expose the food to the body's enzymes and stomach acids, but since raw animal food already has its own enzymes which help to break it down, it's actually better to just eat it in large chunks without chewing.As I understand it, animal handlers vastly prefer to feed their animals with chunks of food rather than pureed food. Obviously only bolt down raw foods you don't like all that much.
Lastly, the RPD diet does require a lot of will-power during the transition from cooked to raw, which is why more than half(75%?) of RPDers come to this diet after suffering terminal illnesses and the like.If for any reason you simply cannot handle the transition from cooked to raw, then why not compromise? You could perhaps sear your meats on both sides while leaving the middle part raw. There are also people on the RPD diet who have found that they can handle raw animal foods if they've been warmed to a temperature just below the point where the enzymes start to break down(39 degrees Centigrade if I recall rightly).
