I'm finally starting on the diet; I've been thinking about it for a while now. I'm going to start by going off of grains, dairy, and legumes. I'll work on the raw part later (I tried raw eggs and a slice of beef and nearly tossed my salad at the taste. No cold turkey for me [pun not intended]).
I'm aiming for a diet of mostly meat, with limited carbs from vegetables and fruit, but I don't really know where to start.
I know fats are important, but, other than the fat laced within meat, I'm not sure how to go about getting it (suet is mentioned a lot). I won't be doing any online ordering; it'll all be through Whole Foods and local grocery, with the occasional farmers market. Also, I'll be cooking it, so is excess fat a bad thing? I'm not sure what kind of effect heat has on it. Does anyone know?
My understanding is that mixing up the kind of meat eaten is ideal--not eating just beef or fowl. I love raw fish (I always thought it was wrong to cook it), so I'll definitely be making that a staple. Low-mercury, ideally.
And what kind of ratio of organ meats to muscle meats should I go for? I think I can down heart; maybe liver if it's mixed with something--anything else I'm not sure I can eat at this point.
Some people find it best to just ease into the diet slowly - getting rid of dairy, grains and legumes is a very good start. In this regard, I have a few further standard suggestions:-
First of all, try any raw foods that you already like(that should be mostly raw fruit and one or two raw veg like raw carrots). This may mean eating lots of raw carbs at first, but that doesn't matter at this stage.
Re online order:- Online ordering, especially in bulk, is, IMO, really important re doing this diet. Unless you are lucky enough to have a good local farmers' market selling organic, grassfed meat, the former option is the best as it'll save you considerable time otherwise spent on shopping, and if the food is bought in bulk then the delivery-costs aren't so onerous. I've heard that farmers' markets in the US are usually nowhere near as good as those found in Europe, but it's always worth checking.
*I should mention that I've only been once to the only WholeFoods store in the UK, and I found it horrendously expensive, with very little if any organic/grassfed meat sold, and what nonorganic meat was sold there was far too expensive, given its low-quality. In short, supermarkets are a ripoff. If you buy direct from farms, they get a much better price than they would get from supermarkets, and you get a much cheaper price as the farmer in this case, unlike the supermarkets, doesn't have to add extra retail-costs for the food.*
Plus, with farmers, unlike with the supermarket, you can usually ask them NOT to cut the fat off before sale, whereas supermarkets usually do that automatically before putting the meat on the shelves.
Cooked animal fat is generally viewed as the worst food to eat, with raw animal fat, excluding from dairy/eggs, the best food to eat.
There's plenty of Info on the rawpaleodiet yahoo groups Links page, where there are dozens of different scientific articles listed showing the harmful effects of eating cooked-food.You can also Google any studies for AGEs in cooked foods (short for Advanced Glycation Endproducts), NSAs(Nitrosamines which are found in preserved and smoked meats), and HCAs(HeteroCyclic Amines) and PAHs(PolyCyclic Aromatic BHydrocarbons(found in grilled meats and various polluted environments), and you should find several 100 re these issues. The general concensus re all these is that the more you cook the meats the worse the effect on health.
The usual standard suggestion is to start off by cooking your meats as you like them, using as many sauces as you like, and then gradually over days/weeks/months, reducing the average cooking-temperature and the amounts of sauces(or replacing processed sauces with raw sauces) until you can eventually eat meats raw at room-temperature with no extra sauces added.
It's always a good idea to include variety. The big problem with some rawists is that they include so little variety - this is usually because they don't try to get used to the foods(eg:- raw meats/organ-meats) that they initially dislike , and go in for huge amounts of "easier" raw foods such as raw dairy or raw fruit, thus causing inevitable side-effects.
re mercury:- The whole mercury issue is nonsense. Here's a website which debunks the mercury myths plus a link to the best study to date on the subject which shows that mercury in food doesn't cause any damage:-
http://fishscam.com/http://www.rochester.edu/pr/releases/med/mercury.htmThe only exception to the above is if you happen to live in a coastal area where there's been a recent industrial spillage of mercury (eg:- the Minamata Bay Incident) - otherwise you don't need to worry one bit re this issue.
Re organ-meats:- People usually start off with the muscle-meats(I found raw fish and especially raw shellfish the easiest to get used to), and then start including small amounts of organ-meats. Most people take longest to get used to raw liver, with raw tongue and raw heart being the easiest. Just try small amounts at first once you're used to the muscle-meats, and, over time, you will start to tolerate and then enjoy the taste of them. (It should also be obvious that the less cooked-food you eat in the same period, the easier it is to get used to the different raw foods). So don't worry re the issue of proportions as yet. Though, it's best to make sure that you get enough animal-fats in your diet(ie get hold of fattier meats or add things like raw tongue/suet etc.) When I can't get enough in the way of such fats, I use eggs as a last resort, but I don't recommend using eggs as a main source of fat in the long-term.
Another tip re getting more easily used to raw foods is to eat them in a socially-acceptable setting like a restaurant. You could eat raw fish at a local Japanese Sashimi restaurant or steak tartare at most French, Hungarian or Russian restaurants etc. Once you get the idea that it's OK to eat raw animal food in public in certain circumstances, you'll find it much easier to get over the ridiculous subconscious social conditioning we all start that states that :"raw meat kills you" etc.!
