Greetings HB, welcome to the forum. I do CrossFit so I can identify with your predicament somewhat, although the workouts we do might be a bit more intense than what you do.

As for gaining fat from eating fat, I don't think you need to worry about that. My understanding of fat gain is that our body tends to store excess sugar as fat, so people put on fat by eating carbs, particularly refined sugar. Fat that is eaten is generally used as fuel or broken down into fatty acids that are used as building blocks for tissues and hormones. On that same note though, I'm not sure your pursuit of 13-14% body fat is a particularly healthy one. While I'm certainly not advocating for obesity, having too little body fat can be detrimental too as it can push the body towards various hormone disorders. As an individual, I don't see any practical value in pushing my body towards the ultra-low body fat percentages seen in professional fitness models. I myself don't find those types of physiques particularly attractive, either on men or on women.

As far as your digestion goes, you are right in that it can take time for the body to adjust to a new set of eating patterns and start producing the proper enzymes in the proper proportions. A couple more ideas you might consider: first, take a sip of vinegar before eating. The vinegar can promote production of HCl, which can help with digestion. A lot of people in the US suffer from too little HCl production, and this deficiency is often misdiagnosed. Second, make sure you chew your food very well. Raw foods have a range of enzymes in them that can help to break down the food item. These enzymes are degraded in the highly acidic environment of the stomach though, so the only time they can do their work is while you are chewing and swallowing. So chew your food well and let those innate enzymes do as much work as they can, which will take some of the load off of your digestive tract.

Another point: I tend to have one bowel movement per day and sometimes one every two days. It wouldn't occur to me to say that you suffer from constipation based on the info you provided.

Finally, I don't worry too much about counting calories or calculating my macronutrients. Unless you plan on trying out for the Olympics, I don't think counting calories is necessary. Just trust your body. If you're hungry, eat what you're hungry for. If you aren't hungry, don't eat. I suspect that I probably eat around 2,000 kilocalories per day, with about an even split between protein, carbs and fat. I need the extra carbs because of the highly anaerobic workouts we do in CrossFit, and a lot of these carbs come in the form of raw root vegetables like jerusalem artichokes, potatoes, burdock root, sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, etc. I generally work out in the morning, and walk into the gym having fasted since the previous day. First meal after a workout is generally 100 percent raw protein, though it usually isn't a very big meal. I usually eat one or two larger afternoon meals that are dominated by plant foods, particularly the raw root vegetables I mentioned above for the carbs and the dietary fiber that's good for my gut microbes. My final meal of the day is usually a mix of plant foods and raw animal foods, with the latter making up the bulk of the calories. Tonight's dinner, for instance, will be wild-gathered purslane and lambs quarters with sliced carrots and jerusalem artichokes topped with olives and about 6 ounces of raw wild coho salmon. This pattern has worked for me reasonably well, although I am still experimenting and may tweak it yet.

Great post Derek. I have a few thoughts to add:

First, in the United States the label "Grass Fed" does not mean all that much. A label that says only "Grass Fed" just means that at some point in the animal's life it was fed grass, which can include hay. A label of "Grass Fed" doesn't necessarily mean that an animal ever actually ate fresh grass (or fresh forage more generally) at any time in its life. I think this is one reason for why the taste and texture of "Grass Fed" meat can vary so much.

"Grass Fed" meats in the US can also be finished on grain for the last months of their lives to fatten them up to slaughter weight faster without having to acknowledge this on the label. If you want an animal that has never been fed grain, you need to look for a label that says "100 % Grass Fed" or something similar. Even this label doesn't guarantee that the animal ever ate fresh forage, just that it was never fed grain. A confined feedlot could earn the "100 % Grass Fed" label by raising cattle in a barn and feeding them hay. There are other more stringent labels that pertain to the diets of marketed ruminants such as those by the American Grassfed Association and the Food Alliance, among others, but there's no requirement that a seller meet the standards of these third-party labels in order to use the term "Grass Fed" in their marketing.

Having worked with a number of grass farmers in the Northeast US I have pretty much decided that it's nearly impossible to find high quality meat available on commercial markets. The economics of grass farming don't work very well. To make money grass farming a farmer must rely on forages with high protein or sugar content to force animals to grow fast enough to send them to slaughter in a reasonable amount of time. Any diet that forces an animal to grow fast isn't really all that good for its nutritional value. The best beef I've eaten comes from hobby farmers who raise for taste and texture specifically and can afford to give a half-dozen cattle 50 acres to roam around on. These are generally wealthy people who care about the food they eat and not about turning a profit on it.

I don't hardly buy beef anymore in the US Northeast as our landscape just doesn't work for them. Grass farmers in this part of the country literally have to force the land to be pasture, as it so desperately wants to grow back into forest and start the long process of healing itself from years of overgrazing by dairy farmers and from the tillage practices used by vegetable farmers. I do sometimes buy Icelandic sheep as they seem to be better adapted to the landscape from an ecological standpoint, and I'd also buy goat if I could find someone who didn't heavily supplement their goats diet with cheap grain.

So, it is impossible for permaculture farms to produce high yields per acre?

I won't go so far as to say it's impossible, but I have yet to physically visit a permaculture farm that does it. Maybe there's one somewhere out there that can pull it off.

I've often wondered that myself. He's an interesting case, as he has several decent selling books out and gets primo speaker fees. It wouldn't surprise me if more than half his annual income is from off-farm ventures like writing and speaking.

Found the documentary here: The Great Dance: A Hunter's story

Public assistance, apparently.

Interesting, if short, article: There's Only One Person Alive Born In The 1800s - And Her Diet Is Incredible

Good Lord, David Wolfe was a total bastard, it seems... Almost all these diet gurus seem to like being the one and only diet guru around for their followers and rarely mention previous influences.

Anyone keep up with Daniel Vitalis' Rewild Yourself Podcast? It used to be really great, very philosophical. Season two started earlier this year, and now he's much more of a salesman. One of his most recent podcasts was a blatant commercial where he 'interviewed' a sales rep from a company that sells the $10,000+ bed that DV now swears by. So much for 'transcending domestication'!

I also train in CrossFit, and am surrounded by women who are perfectly capable of lifting heavy weight and have phenomenal physiques. I was sad to read in the article about how Brando attempts to comfort women by saying that lifting heavy won't bulk them up. What's wrong with a women having a powerful physique? I'm so sick of all the gender-based double standards people have.

For those who are interested, over the past couple months I've posted twice on my blog about my experiences taking Wim Hof's online class on using cold exposure to reset the body's hormonal and immune systems. The two relevant posts are Embracing the Chill and The Art of Pushing Beyond. I will probably post about raw paleo topics too, although my time is consumed by other projects right now.

I imagine you'll be buckling your seat belt from here on...

I would expect shellfish from the ocean to be far more polluted than terrestrial insects.