Drifting toward a better, more natural me

[Polyvore]

I am an ex weightlifter, after having sustained injuries snowboarding I stopped to rehabilitate myself. After I left home, I attended uni for 4 years, ate rubbish, lost strength, size, mental capacity/clarity and turned into a total slob. I mostly ate roast pork + potatoes, and oreos, normal milk and soft drink the entire time.
I have been slowly tidying and diversifying my diet, and I started eating more vegetables, then leaner meats, then went raw vegetarian for a while but never got through the initial gut-adaptation and so was dealing with massive amounts of gas, irregularity and all sorts of weird things. To be honest I felt great whilst I was on it, in terms of mental energy levels, and I felt healthy for the first time since high school. Even high school I didn't feel top notch.

Eventually I drifted toward a paleo style diet, which has worked for me best so far. Cutting out bread/pasta, eating more seeds and fruits (which restored my diminishing apetite and lost bodyweight). Started eating meat again, but decided to not eat any factory farmed meats, so now I stick to mostly lamb, free range pigs and free range chicken. I plan on moving on to grass-fed beef but I need to find a good supplier.

I have also been experimenting with my sleeping patterns since university started a long while ago. If you have heard of polyphasic sleep I have been doing a variant of everyman for a long while now, and I am feeling good.

Recently I have been taking fish oil, nootropics, and coconut/mct oil, and I am feeling better than ever! I am now going to be dabbling in raw meats... which brought me here!

Hi!

[aLptHW4k4y]

Nice, keep it up!
For how long have you been doing everyman?
I've tried polyphasic a few times and have always failed, with bad consequences on health.
I'm not going back into that even if I'd get money to do it.

[Polyvore]

Years now. I used to sleep somewhat polyphasically in high school before I knew what it was, but then when uni started, I also started sleeping 9-10 hours a night as I had no real schedule, and felt pretty bad for it (waste of time, sluggishness, etc). So after some research I found out everyman and uberman, and I tried and failed uberman, but then I went to everyman after the failure and now I feel great. 3.5h and 3-4 naps throughout the day.

The uberman adaptation had quite a few similarities to 'detoxing' doing raw vegetarian, when I was eating whole foods and not blending. I think this is because unblended/uncooked vegetables simply don't digest, and so I got a starvation euphoria, which is a type of deprivation euphoria (like sleep deprivation euphoria).  Now I blend all my uncooked vegetables and haven't had anything like it since.

I am basically eating a large smoothie (spinach, banana, carrot, berries, coconut oil) an hour pre-workout. I drink a casein hydrolysate mid-workout. Then I eat cooked meat in butter, raw nuts/seeds, for the next few hours.
Every few days I have a cheat day including sticky rice, sweet potato, cheeses, chocolate, yummy stuff etc.
The first step I will be taking is eating raw salmon, then raw grass fed beef, then I will try a few other things depending on how I go.

I have a question: I can't buy raw butter or raw milk where I am, can I eat lots of cultured pasturized butter if it is from grass fed cows? I think I can get raw milk, I used to drink a lot of normal milk and be fine, but I might cut down on milk (just for teas and coffees) until I can find a good source for raw cosmetic milk.

[Alive]

Hi Polyvore, one idea during transition is to at least behave better than you used to and make the foods you are eating more paleo than what you used to, so for me eating sour cream and raw bacon would be a step closer to paleo than the addictive junk carbs (which just seem to make me much hungrier later).

[CarnivorousApe]

Potato and roast pork don't sound too bad to me
Hm, do you have any information about polyphasic sleep being used during paleo times or by modern tribes?

[Polyvore]

Not really, but I did read somewhere that some tribes that don't get much sunlight tend to be polyphasic and only ever have naps and short sleeps. I certainly wouldn't presume they then sleep like uberman like some people do! If anything I would assume they have 2-3 1.5h naps and 2-3 20 minute naps a day. It would be a leisurely lifestyle! I don't take things too scientifically, I just go by what feels good, and what I do feels good!

I am not really addicted to carbs, I just eat them socially, and also because my wife cooks dinners sometimes.

Eating just roast pork and white potato for 2 years straight really took a toll on me - I became more and more brain dead over time! My anarobic exercise was fine, but aerobically I went down hill a lot! I also started getting a bit of asthma-like symptoms, which still haven't entirely cleared up.
Even just starting to take a multivitamin helped me a lot at the time. I probably was deficient in omega 3s, lots of different vitamins and I was getting no other non-vitamin micronutrients!

Is sour cream a raw food? And what about pasteurized cultured foods?

[Alive]

Wise Traditions magazine reported that live blood inspection showed that cooked pork created platelet clumping, while cooked bacon and marinated/pickled pork did not. No mention of raw pork though...

[CarnivorousApe]

Yes, roast pork and potatoes is not the best food, especially if eaten almost exclusively.  But.. not the worst definitely and it is actually paleo.

For me the worst things were fresh milk, wheat and legumes. By removing them fixed 80 percent of problems.

As for sleep, I really miss siesta and feel like I don't get enough sleep at night due to artificial lightning. Biphasic sleep seems natural to me but even one nap a day hard to maintain.

Ah, sour cream and fermented foods. They are lifesavers. Must have.

[Polyvore]

In my pork and potato days I was also eating barley soup. I never liked bread, since high school when I was eating half a loaf every day in sandwiches, when I slowly stopped producing saliva. Has anyone heard of curing salivation problems? I produce saliva, but not any more than 'base' levels, even when chewing and eating, so when I eat bready or dry foods I have trouble when they soak up all my base saliva.

I have also been interested in eating clay (after hearing it from Daniel Vitalis). What is the general consensus here about that? I could get some quality clay just an hours drive from my home where I will be getting spring water.

[Dorothy]

Nice to meet a polyphasic sleeper here. I got into learning about polyphasic sleep when I had to take care of my mother 24 hours a day with literally no continuous sleep for more than a few minutes for about half a year. I was able to train myself to go directly into REM even if I had 5 minutes sitting up. If it weren't for raw salmon and raw eggs all night I'm pretty sure that would have caused some damage.

I keep on thinking that one day I will experiment with something like Uberman once I've completely healed up from the stress of that experience and gotten some other healthy habits fully entrenched. I personally think that sleep deprivation without a superb raw diet rich in fats and extreme nutrition and hormone balancing could be quite dangerous. The problem is that if you are in the midst of the experiment you need to have someone outside of yourself that you trust to recognize if you are slipping mentally/physically because you can't trust yourself. If your brain starts to malfunction you can't trust it to tell you that you are in trouble because it is malfunctioning.

Everyman at least gives you that one good full cycle a night so at least you won't see any immediate serious repercussions like you can from Uberman. Everyman as a matter of fact I think is something that a lot of raw foodists naturally start to fall into as they start to need only one full cycle. Raw vegans I'm afraid sometimes think their nerves being on edge - wired on sugar - and not being able to sleep is actually stopping the need for sleep because they are such supermen and then the brain can suffer and they don't even realize that they are terribly off balance. Again - the most important aspect I think of doing polyphasic sleep is to get someone outside of yourself and your assumptions/beliefs to evaluate you - and I think that goes for diet too.

I can't even imagine, to tell you the truth, eating the diet you are eating with "cheat" days ever few days (which to me I would consider just part of your regular diet) being able to sustain any polyphasic sleep cycle and stay brain healthy - but maybe that's me.

I guess some people say that they can eat a regular diet and drink coffee and do it - but there are so few cases that last for long and no really long-term practitioners as of yet.

The only way that I think I would experiment with polyphasic sleep is fully raw for at least half a year first. That would be a strong enough base I'm guessing. And then - I would make sure that I had more than enough great raw fats at my disposal 24/7. That's my plan anyway. I believe that you have hit gold coming here. Having done something more extreme than Uberman myself - I'm convinced that raw animal foods was/is the key.

[Polyvore]

Ok, so my first meal is prepared for tomorrow morning. I bought a fillet of kangaroo, and some duck fat. I am going to leave both out overnight so they are room temperature, and spread the fat on to the kangaroo (because kangaroo has no fat). I also have some pig lard to try, and some coconut fat, and maybe even egg yolk. I will be seeing what they all taste like, slicing the kangaroo fillet into small pieces and putting a bit of lime juice on it.

Kangaroo should be fine, despite being in the normal supermarket, as it is a game meat, so must be grass-fed etc.

Everyman actually gives you two good slow-wave sleep (SWS) cycles, not just one, along with a short REM cycle in the last half hour!

[Dorothy]

Sounds like some really good food!

I'm confused - isn't everyman one 3 hour and then some short naps?  Maybe I've gotten things mixed up as the only cycle that I've ever been really interested in was the uberman.

[Polyvore]

Apparently everyman is 3.5h and 3 naps, because the body's second SWS phase ends AT 3h, and it is really hard to wake up straight from SWS. If you make your core regular you end up sneaking in another REM phase within the half hour after, too. I always meant to do 3h cores, but usually ended up sleeping 3.5h anyways, so these days I just sleep 3.5h normally.

Hmm now that it has come around, I am thinking I will try the sour cream with the duck fat. I have had my morning coffee+mctbutter, I will wait an hour or so then eat.

[Polyvore]

When preparing my raw meats, and eating them, do I need to disinfect cutlery or anything? If the cutlery has been washed in the dish washer it should be fine, right?

I just had my first cut of meat... and I prefer it without the duck fat. The duck fat just gave the mouthful a weird texture and a strange taste.
It was surprising, because I expected the meat to taste somewhat unique, but it just tasted like a soft rare steak without the sweet searing on the outside! And I like my rare steaks! I might put on a bit of salt next time too.
The sour cream would have been better with vegetables I think, like some carrots or some cucumber. I ended up eating the rest of the sour cream on its own with a fork.

What do people generally eat with their raw meat once they are used to it?
What are some ideas on how to get my fats in enjoyably? This will be the hard part, I think, as I am used to just drinking MCTs in drinks.

[TylerDurden]

You don't need to disinfect the cutlery. Long-term RVAFers are fine with just washing in water, especially since they become sensitive to the nasty chemicals from disinfectants.

Also, most long-term RVAFers don't bother with adding anything to the meats. You could always look at online recipes for raw animal food dishes and replace the processed condiments with equivalent raw ones.

[Polyvore]

What are some good ways to eat fats besides eating raw animal fat then? I can only think of avocados.

[TylerDurden]

Durian is the only other plant food rich in fat that I know of.

[Dorothy]

You can use eggs to make sauces or just put a raw egg yolk on your meat - maybe with a little seasoning. I grow my own herbs and dehydrate them at low temps and powder them - so they are of a different order than powdered herbs I can buy in the store. Marrow also can be made into a nice sauce. I put marrow in my raw vegetable soups. Most people don't like suet plain - but mine comes frozen so I slice it thinly and put it back in the freezer and chew on pieces. I like raw olives a lot. Avocados of course. I'm one of the few here I think that does really well on soaked nuts and seeds and eat those every day.

You might want to try making your fat into a sauce with seasonings (at least at first). Hubbie seems to really love chili and curry seasonings with his meat. What's your favorite kind of seasonings/ethnic foods with cooked food? That's often the first direction to try with spices.

[Adora]

Did you see Inger's recent post for whipped eggs with honey, berries, and butter. Coconut butter is good too.

I love clay. I always soak it a couple of days and start just drinking the water after it settles then adding more water. Thoth suggested I brush with it. In brushing with green clay now, but I think it is too abrasive. I like the less grainer bentonite best. Post what you think when you try. I'd like to read it.

[cherimoya_kid]

What are some good ways to eat fats besides eating raw animal fat then? I can only think of avocados.

Olives, if you can get them raw.