Question hi Jeoff,
Some questions has piled up so help me take in the situation.
i'd like to start with fruit consumption. Aajonus recommends to consume raw fruit with equal amounts of raw fat. This idea seems to be well reasoned. What do you think on this point? I've found you once stated here that you eat fruit with no raw fat and prefer eating one food at a time. Hasn't this practice changed yet? From your past experience when do you think it's better to have fruit meal. And if consumed with fat what kind of fat is better to choose bearing in mind the abstinence from dairy?
i'm also interested whether the excess consumption of raw fats, say bone marrow, my be harmful in some measure? Should i restrict myself od should i eat as much of this product as i want? Because since i've started eating bone marrow i never count any calories and eat it to the extent i crave.
As well i'd like to discuss some athletic build issues. Have you benefited in the muscle gain on this diet? To what extent? You said you was able to get rid of the potbelly, do you have the abs now after 5 and a half years?
It would be great to go into the question of intermittent fasting at large. IF in itself means eating on the alternative days. For how long have you been able to stick to this practice? How often do you do IF? Do you think skipping meals rather than going whole days without food might be enough to derive some of the benefit from it?
And, finally, it seems the best regimen is that one consisting of single meal daily. But do gorging on food have any ill-effects? In what particular order specific foods should be consumed?
thanking you in anticipation,
Yuriy
AnswerWhen people go rawpalaeo, they usually have a lot of digestive problems as a result of being years on various cooked-food or Raw Vegan diets. "Mono-Eating"(="eating just one food at a time, with a half-hour between different foods") is one way to put less stress on the body while the digestive system heals. These days I'm not 100% strict with this regime, as I often have raw fats like bone-marrow or suet(or, very occasionally, raw eggs) with my usual meats like wild-hare etc., but that's my only exception. I always have fruit on its own as it requires different digestive juices etc.in the stomach than in the case of meats, say - so best not to mix the two.
I always go for just one large meal a day, over a 4-hour period at the very most. Usually, this meal is eaten within only c.half-an-hour, but if I happen to have other things to eat that day, primarily raw fruit, I'll wait another half-hour before eating them(or I'll eat the fruit half-an-hour before).
So, just eat fruit on its own. As for best types of fat to eat, in general, raw dairy is the absolute worst, with several different types of health problems likely to result from its consumption - which are too complicated to go into, here.
Loren Cordain, the Paleo Diet guru suggests sticking to no more than 6 eggs a month,for fat, as Palaeolithic Man simply didn't have access to wild birds' eggs throughout the year(wild birds only lay eggs seasonally, as, unlike domesticated birds, they're not fed on artifical amounts of grain). Given that people sometimes develop food-intolerances if they eat the truly vast amounts of raw eggs that Aajonus recommends, it's a good idea to limit them. My rule is that I'll go in for raw eggs if I can't find a source for raw marrow or raw suet(which are the best fats), so often I get away with just taking the 6 eggs a month that Cordain recommends.
Also, based on mine and others' experience, I view vegetable fats, such as avocadoes etc., as relatively poor nutrition, by comparison to marrow/suet/hide-fat.
Re how much fat to eat:- This all depends on the individual. You really have to follow your instincts and experiment, to some extent, to find the right proportions. All I can say is that not even Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the pro-fat all-animal-food Palaeo-diet guru, suggested having more than 80% of all calories as fat. Loren Cordain, who preaches a 65% animal-food/35% plant-food Palae Diet, suggests a rough fat-intake of only 28-47% of diet - (this is based in terms of calories, not weight, and fat has 2.25(?)/2.5(?) times as many calories as protein or carbohydrate, last I checked).
In my own case, I have far too little free time mid-week to check the number of calories - I just make it a rule to have c.2-4 big, heaped tablespoons of raw marrow with my one large, daily meal of organ-meats/shellfish/wild-hare or whatever. Sometimes, due to food-supply-problems(or oversupply), I'll have as much as 15-20 tablespoonfuls of marrow/suet or no suet/marrow at all, but usually it's 2 to 4 full tablespoon's worth of marrow.
Re muscle-buildup:- Any diet-guru who claims you'll look like a muscle-bound bodybuilder through diet alone is lying - you still need lots of exercise, just as was the case with our Palaeolithic ancestors. That said, I had very poor muscle-definition pre-raw diet, with sagging muscles everywhere. My muscles started toning up within a few months of my cutting out all the raw dairy from my diet, and now I find that I'm reasonably muscular all-round re muscle-definition - even more so, during the summer, when I have more time/opportunity available for exercise outdoors. Most important of all, I no longer have the potbelly I had in my pre-raw diet days, and my endurance levels are very high - I can saunter up mountains, carrying a very heavy backpack for days, without any hassle - which is not something I could do 10 years ago, pre-raw. I find that I generally do better with outdoor physical activities(and simple exercises like pressups/crunches etc.) than doing weightlifting. Weightlifting is boring, and difficult to maintain for long, IMO - plus, weightlifting doesn't train the muscles in the right way.
Re IF: Intermittent Fasting consists of 3 different types:- One variant is to eat only one meal every 24 hours, usually in the early evenings or late at night if at all possible. Another is to eat all you want, at any time of day, on one day, and the next day you eat nothing at all, and just drink water. The 3rd variety is a mixture of the first two, where you just eat one large meal a day, fast the whole of the next day, and start the same routine over again ad infinitum.
I've been roughly following the first variant of IF, with just one meal every 24 hours in the evenings or late at night, for the last 4 years or so. I follow it relatively strictly(c.95%?) - this is partly out of necessity, as it's pretty difficult to eat raw food while at work. Sometimes, due to work commitments etc., I'll have fast-days where I'll eat nothing at all(perhaps one or two days within a fortnight(=slang for "two-week period") - at other times, I might have a sashimi(raw fish) meal with someone during the day in addition to my meal in the evenings. But, 95% of the time, it's just the one large meal a day.
I personally would like to follow the 3rd variation of IF on a constant basis, as it seems the most effective one. However, while I can easily handle the occasional whole-day fast, I find that I get uncontrollable hunger-pangs if I have too many day-long fasts, at a time. I have no problems whatsoever on my usual 1-meal-a-day routine, and have gotten completely used to it, without feeling hungry.
Generally speaking, it's quite tough at first to switch from eating 3 meals a day, because the latter practice is so ingrained in the daily routine of modern humans. So, by all means, start off with just 2 meals a day, you should get some benefits from that. You can then work down to just one meal a day, once you've gotten used to the 2-meal a day routine.
Re Gorging:- I wouldn't suggest wolfing down vast amounts of food. My mistake, early on in the diet, was to follow Aajonus' advice to eat lots of small meals throughout the day, every half-hour - my body was so overloaded with food, albeit raw food, that my healing was greatly slowed down.
All in all, you may well find, over time, that, in many respects, you will have to have a different diet routine than I have - for example, you may need more or less fat, or more or less seafood in the diet etc. Each individual has different needs. So constant experimentation is the key. In my own case, I eliminated dairy to see if that worked, I also tried all-raw-plant-food or all-animal-food diets etc. until I eventually found a combination that worked well for me.
Lastly, I noticed you didn't get much feedback on the livefood list, the last time you posted. I thought I'd mention that I own a Yahoo diet group, rawpaleodiet, http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/rawpaleodiet/
which might be useful to you, as it's usually a more active group, in terms of message-posting frequency. It's not focused towards Aajonus' Primal Diet, as such, as many group members have had problems with the raw dairy etc. that he recommends, but it is a raw-animal-foods list-group.
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