Thanks for the info Phil!
DR is a fruitarian right? I never felt good eating a lot of fruit. Eating that diet would have done me in a very long time ago. I have gone for many months without eating any fruit at all. Just about every person over a certain age in my family got diabetes. I think that getting rid of all processed sugars was one of the best moves I ever made for my health - trumping every other experiment. Fruit in small amounts I feel good from but if I go over a certain line it becomes bad rather quickly. I can't even eat too much honey. A little good, a lot bad.
I wonder why I felt good when most everyone else seems to have done so poorly? Maybe it's relative. I grew up on a really lousy SAD diet so by the time I got to eating health oriented foods and eradicating the bad stuff I just felt better and better over time.
Maybe I generated my own b12 after working so hard to regenerate my gut flora early on? Maybe I just changed my diet before the symptoms started? I think I have eaten raw very differently than most of the people I have read about recently. I didn't make green smoothies or follow any rules. I ate as much fat as I wanted. If I wanted 3 avocados in a day covered in a fatty dressing - I ate it. Tomatoes and avocados and similar fruits I can eat en masse and have no problems. I didn't eat much fruit otherwise. I soaked all my seeds/nuts and then ground them. I needed them ground to digest them well - but ate a lot of them and usually would eat any fruit I had along with ground seeds. I drank lots of teas and used plant medicine a great deal to get lots of nutrients and would forage for weeds. It took a great deal of effort really. When eating cooked veg grains did not make me sick - I just didn't feel quite as good as when eating raw. The first bites after going from all raw to cooked were pretty bad, often thrown up, but it was better than staying in the hyper-kinetic energy state I got into eventually when eating all raw vegan.
The times I have gotten sick were when eating junky food. Raw food made me feel really great, but the baseline of just not eating standard garbage was strong after the initial healing period. Raw food felt different than what most people I think consider being "healthy" to be - as in not sick - to me. I guess health can be a relative term.
I have always had the expectations that if I could figure out how to stay all raw long enough in a way that was sustainable that I could get to a new level of health.
Health to me is NOT never getting sick. For decades now I haven't gotten colds or flus and all that jazz that others all around me get. After the last traumatic year with the extreme stress and so little sleep - going sometimes a week without sleeping more than a few minutes here and there - I feel that I used up all my reserves. My diet is not all raw at this point yet due to practicalities and plain old grieving processes and my priority is helping my husband and eating along with him..... but as his health is improving soon I should be able to really key into what is best for me and go for it. I feel a great deal of hope that eating all raw with animal foods included could bring me back faster to the health I had before the traumas and beyond that level of health even.
So far, it seems that eating raw red meat has made something in my right eye detox. Hard material came out of it (actually was tricky/dangerous there for a bit) and now my eyes are becoming the same size which they haven't been since I was a child. I'm hoping that maybe my eyesight will improve as that seems to be my only real health issue - slight nearsightedness - and if I can get back to all raw long enough I'm hoping that my teeth will regenerate as they were earlier. With the trauma my hair went gray but it is starting to come back again. Funny how my Mom's hair went from pure silver back to her youthful black color when I was giving her ionic minerals to fight her cancer and when I stopped giving her the minerals her hair went back to gray - but all at once - not growing slowing in - the gray all the way from top to bottom turned black and was starting to go back to gray again. It was weird. My hair grew in gray - but now as I get minerals and am no longer under such extreme stress my hair is going back to its former color all at once. Bizarre.
I feel that for me I was lucky as eating a good deal of plant foods is a good match for me and I landed into a place that wasn't as deficient or imbalanced as it would be for so many others - obviously. I think that my form of paleo is going to more plant based than most people here - but even those small amounts seem to be essential judging from what happened to my eye. Eating too much meat seems to imbalance me similarly to eating too much fruit and unlike other foods eating cooked meat makes me feel really bad so eating cooked paleo would be as likely for me as becoming a fruitarian would.
The big thing here is that my husband is feeling better. That will do more for my health right there than any diet of mine could for me! He is sleeping better by the way Zi - thanks for asking.
By the way - I eradicated getting raw milk because the milk smelled of plastic even though it was only put in the plastic the same morning for shipment and I took it out as soon as I got home. Since I've incorporated meat my already outrageously strong sense of smell has gotten stronger. That's another change - but who knows in our modern world if that's a good thing or bad thing!
I'd like to add in closing a general thank you to all those that make this forum exist and function and all the individual advice, info and help that I have received already.
