I already have the olive oil, garlic and sea salt, so no need to bring that I also have butter (both cultured and not), bacon grease and coconut oil. Yum!

I’m glad you liked the video. If your heart is in it, you should make your own video. It’s a lot of fun, and more interesting than a slide show. And it’s not too hard if you have editing software.

Best of luck to you.

My advice to you is to read up on vegan nutritional deficiencies, and make sure you supplement accordingly. You’re going to feel great for a while from just getting off processed foods and coffee, but over time you may suffer from nutritional deficiencies. If you run out of B12, you can cause damage that will take years to recover from.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and I hope you stick around.

You only tried the raw vegan diet for 5 days. You say you haven’t “found success, health or vibrancy of life with their recommended raw plant diet.” But girl, you’ve only given it 5 days! You’ve gotta stick with it longer than that. I’m into my seventh month on this diet and I would say that the good results (all that stuff you read about on the internet) didn’t start pouring in until the third month. The first six weeks were difficult. My body definitely went thru detox. I had cravings. It was not easy. But now, are you kidding? I would never go back. I get little flashes and glimpses of how I used to feel, before switching to this diet – I’ll suddenly remember how tired I used to feel for no reason sometimes, or how I used to feel sad and anxious for no reason, and often struggled for energy. I was addicted to caffeine. I would feel really, really awful if I didn’t eat clockwork regular meals – I definitely think I had some blood sugar issues going on. But now, all of that is gone. Now I will suddenly feel happy and optimistic for no reason, instead of tired and depressed.

I appreciate your site, I just can’t take seriously your dismissal of raw veganism when I feel like you haven’t yet given it a serious shot. Do you know it took me six or seven attempts before this? I’ve tried to go raw since I was 25, and it didn’t actually work til I was 34. I wasn’t ready to give up certain aspects of my life – big, cooked starch meals, alcohol, refined sugar treats, caffeine, etc. Finally I was ready, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it is unfolding for me.

Try again! Don’t give up! I can promise you it is so, so worth it.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/

Chris Masterjohn is also good.

The Inuit and Maasai go zero-carb and are none the worse for it. I’m suspicious that all that acid-alkaline talk means basically nothing. We get ridiculous amounts of minerals from animal foods. I think we do well with some plant food because we’re non-obligate carnivores, like dogs, who can also eat plant foods and benefit from them. (Probably why they were one of the first animals we domesticated–we relate well to them on several levels.) Primates, after all, originated as insectivores. “Insectivore” is a somewhat archaic phrase from a time when the definition of “meat” meant “food from a critter on the hoof,” which is why the Catholic Church allows fish consumption during Lent. We can get away with eating plants, but we don’t need them.

Likewise! I’m finding myself trending toward zero-carb (though I probably won’t go all-meat unless I have to for medical reasons), because every traditional native diet seems to have resulted in no significant health problems until the natives started eating “white man’s food” (refined carbs/sugars)…and the more fat and meat they ate, and the less of everything else, the healthier they tended to be.

Emergefit:

I struggle with [Paleo/Primal] as a concept, inasmuch as the concept itself suggests that the last 100,000 years or so of advancement in intelligence, business, agriculture, science, and technology are all for not.

Naught necessarily Agriculture was the root of a great deal of progress, but it also caused a demonstrable decline in human health. As Ken Kesey said, we should “take what [we] can use, and let the rest go by.” Something isn’t good/bad just because it’s old/new!

Our current food system does just what you say: deliver calories without nutrient. But then even home-based cooked meals could be problematic for many if we follow the USDA recommendations found in their food pyramid, which lists grains as the predominent energy source.

For two million years our species relied protein and fat for energy, and now, thanks to modern agriculture, it’s refined carbohydrates. And this switch has allowed our species to expand with few controls, but the heavy reliance on grains has caused its own set of problems.

Working at the restaurant, I was annoyed at how many dishes had pasta or bread in them. Every soup de jour contained a variation of pasta. But this can’t compare to going out to dinner as a raw vegan, and certainly not as an 80/10/10er. where most of the menu items are verboten.

If we stuck to plants for energy, we’d either be eating a lot of them all day, or we’d have to eat high-caloric plants, such as starches. If we remove such tubers and grains from our diet, where will we get the calories? From fats, which are found in nuts/seeds and/or meat. So the raw vegan eats lots of nuts. The paleo eats meat and nuts. One choice diverges from our ancestral diet.

My goal isn’t to join a trend and subscribe to or promote a specific diet. My goal is to get healthy, have energy, and find my optimum weight and teach others how to do that. The best way to describe the diet I’m on right now is to call it what others call it: the paleo diet. So far, it’s the only diet I’ve been able to adhere to with any success.

Would you please elaborate on your statement: “The name alone [paleo] has something in common with other fads”? And which features do you believe are overplayed?

From reading several blogs on paleo, it seems oils and fats are the key difference between the paleo diet and other diets. So that’s going to be my next subject of study. Ironically, the book Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill was one of the first books I ever read on health, and one I found so fascinating that I got hooked into learning about health. I had been reading only fiction up to that point and using Wesson oil, which I immediately threw out.