Some background before we begin

I think its important to give some background to catch everyone up to where I am before I go into the details of my experimenting. I like being extremely open and forthcoming with all the details of what is happening to or within me and will do my best to report all my findings bad and good alike. First hand experience is truly unbeatable and compiling this type of information will do us better than any tightly controlled clinical trial ever could. Though it is exactly these types of trials that I use to as my springboard to other dietary adventures.

I want to reiterate, that one main purpose of this blog is to find and explore different methods than what you will not conventionally see in the paleoverse. There are already an abundance of bloggers and ways of eating that have helped countless souls re-establish vibrant health. If you have found me, then surely you have found the others, so I would advise you to read them for more conventional paleo wisdom. I do all the time. Hopefully, the experimenting seen here can inspire others to let go and try something new, if they are stuck.

So, here I am, 13 months away from 30, 5’11 on a good day, weigh around 185 and have been plus or minus 10 pounds of this since college. I had no interest in nutrition until I happened to haphazardly read Good Calories, Bad Calories by the great Gary Taubes in August 2008 during a brief period of erudition and have been stuck, addicted to investigating all there is to know about what will lead to excellent health .

I have yet to find any method of eating that has lead to any long term sustainable good health, though I have had a few brief periods where I felt my health was accelerating forward, but as it stands now, I feel not too dissimilar to when I started my journey 20 months ago. Before reading GCBC, I had never experimented with dietary changes and never connected diet to well-being. My main concern has always been about energy, and the apparent lack there of. Unable to efficiently provide fuel to myself has left me feeling crippled as though I’m dragging behind a pile of sledgehammers. This unfortunately has no carry over to strength training and is rather annoying. I’ve also suffered from irritable bowels for a number of years along with a number of other minor health issues that I’d like to explore and find the underlying cause of these nasties.

I won’t bore you with details here but will direct you to my online journal if you want to look up more details. I would like to leave this blog open for my own personal essays.

My Journal: http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/journals/round-2-from-addiction-to-recovery/

Rawring to experiment

This is my journey of eating raw meat.

More accurately, this is my narrow path of eating raw animal fat with some raw meat and token amounts of everything else. Eating raw meat has been a topic that has largely been ignored or avoided in the paleoverse and when its talked about it doesn’t seem to be given a fair chance. And worse, few people have self-experimented to test whether raw foods could provide better health.

From all that I have read, and from whatever methods my primitive mind has decided to do with these inputs I have chosen to follow a diet of mainly animal fats and meat. It is not my goal to go through and breakdown why I don’t eat grains or legumes or sweets. There are now a vast wealth of articles and books written that dissect these matters far better than I ever can and will link to them when appropriate. Instead of rehashing all this information again, I am going to concentrate on examining issues that I have seen little information blogged on within the paleo\low-carb verses and add to the fringe of this ever growing group by experimenting with raw animal foods.

Since I have already decided, for better or death, I will not keep reaffirming my journey by concentrating my efforts on finding out more information about foods that I know I will avoid no matter what. I do not have time, or resources or enough smarts to be able to search through every single dietary path that people have come to believe leads to perfect health. I can only concentrate on a very limited few paths, which themselves actually have nearly infinite variations as you will see in the future. I am not interested in what is tolerable for the human body, but for what will produce significant results. So, what I can do, is expand the reaches of this paleoverse by experimenting on the fringe and occasionally in the unknown.

I have no clue as to what path to follow that will lead to the best health for me but I am willing to explore and self-experiment in a multitude of ways as long as I conclude that what I am doing is safe. The sources for my dart throwing are not particularly important and so virtually nothing is out of the question. I have subtitled this blog, “steaking it to the ego” since I believe ego can be a huge road block for those not willing to experiment and to those averse to changing plans that aren’t working. Being able to let go of methods of experimenting that are not producing results is a very necessary step. Some of the best methods I have found for self-experimentation have come thanks to the likes of people who eat very dissimilar to me. From thsoe who challenge the ideas about what I believe have the highest probability of leading to excellent health such as vegans or Gary Taubes haters.

My interpretations of science should be vigorously questioned and not taken as fact. I’m no scientist. I will be wrong quite a bit, perhaps nearly all of the time. But, if I can be right a few times that exponentially make up with my failures then something special can come out of all this. I am extremely interested in finding things that work. Quantifiable methods that can work. Explanations can be saved for those smarter than me. This does not preclude me from speculating on what I think is going, which is quite fun. A good storyteller is something we can all have fun with.

Another main theme that will be thoroughly espoused throughout this blog is the idea of minimizing the amount of work that the body has to do to process nutrition. Similar to getting the best gas milage for your vehicle.

Upcoming articles will include thoughts on why I’d choose a diet with the worst “metabolic advantage”, limiting protein to 10% or less of diet, the brains and bone marrow diet, and a twist on the high everything diet.