Tribal hierachy

[Iguana]

If I understood well, she was vegetarian, not vegan. It's not the same :
What is the Difference Between a Vegan and a Vegetarian?

Ok, veganism is dangerous, it's a fact and we all agree on that. Vegetarianism is not as bad since it includes fish, eggs and dairy;  some people can remain in a relative good health while being vegetarians.

[Dorothy]

Thank you for inviting me back. 

I do type extremely fast, which can be a liability in some situations. I apologize.

Although some of what I said about my past diet has been misunderstood, it is clear that it is not pertinent to the diet being discussed here and the diet that I am eating now so I will not speak of it again unless I am asked to. It was a terrible faux pas mentioning it in the first place. I'm glad to be able to move forward.

I have not known well many vegans or vegetarians so I might not know what subjects are considered to be "their" subjects, so I apologize in advance if I should mention one. Please, anyone who notices, pm me and I will erase it.

Because my familiarity is limited except for my own experience, I can appreciate anger over what seem to be horrific experiences of members here and the desire to prevent others from going through similar ones.

I can fully understand wanting the forum to be informative rather than social and that important information can get lost in-between chatter. I ask you Cherimoya to please go back and erase any of my posts that you find to be distracting or that you feel do not add to the forum... even if it ends up being every single one of them.

See y'all around campus.



 

[KD]

Glad Dorothy is back. I also agree that these things might be done a bit more privately in states of less obvious trolling or spam. I do think however that the conversation around these things is good and important of how we function in comparison to other forums. To me, my beef with the forum is the exact more permeated problem with other forums which is the constant jabbering of theories of what should work in some ideal setting vs what is working. Often this comes from the same un-reflective perceptions of what is healthy divorced and inconsiderate of what tools and methods people are employing every day here or elsewhere to get healthier. How people can constantly spam the same garbage that X is unnecessary or that Y is automatically good based on some totally naive understanding of nature and not be moderated equally I do not know - particularly when they don't share actual self evidence of superiority or inferiority - even over standard diets. To me Dorothy was sharing what she was doing and where she was at...and actually in a far less 'mammas meatballs is the best' subjectivity than in some older members in the tribal hierarchy.

If people have some far out conception of what is good and it actually works and their health is clearly increasing...it doesn't really phase me much. Its when people deny various symptomology while saying that X is best because of some hypothesis of how people ate in nature that we then have no actual usueable yardstick and can point to any 30+ year vegetarian, vegan and junk foodists to prove their diets success on the same exact terms. Often being free of physical symptoms cannot be seen clearly as an assessment of health particularly while other even more "superficial" or less self-observable qualities like mood and brain stuff obviously are in the negative.

The big difference between 'successful' and non successful veg oriented diets throughout history is dairy foods. This is essentially a fact at this point that people would not survive through generations in a place like India without the necessary animal fat analogs in dairy foods. Trying to eat diets that lack these foods with and gearing towards vegetarianism in terms of even bulk of calories represents at this point an undocumented diet to our knowledge by homo sapien sapiens onward- and an experiment that routinely fails for modern human beings. This not just because it has problems nutritionally - as far less nutrient dense diets of junk can be far more 'safe' - but because it can't compensate for actually reversing problems caused by civilization and particularly the modern permutations and pollutions and often exacerbates these problems more than on a standard diet or even cooked vegetarian diet.

[cherimoya_kid]

OK, let me be very clear here.  The trigger for me with Dorothy was two-fold.  She was talking about losing the healing energy in her hands, and also talking about some terrible, unspecified pain she got as soon as she ate prosciutto.

I have a problem with "energy healing" because, even when it works (and I think it can), it's like a band-aid.  It's like taking an aspirin for a blood sugar headache.  The better solution is to change one's diet and lifestyle, and/or use other methods like movement education, NCR, etc. .  Why? Because the bad diet is probably causing hidden problems that will eventually manifest as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, etc..  

Fixing one's diet is a major step to both obvious good health, in the short term, and less-obvious good health in less obvious ways, which pays off decades in the future.  

Also, when someone has a weird, immediate reaction to a food, like she did with the prosciutto, that is a giant telltale sign of ungroundedness/spaciness.  Even if someone has been a "sensitive" their whole life, a vegan/vegetarian diet makes that "sensitivity" so intense and extreme that the person becomes ungrounded, and has trouble weathering the storms and stresses of life.

That's one of my favorite things about eating good-quality animal products...it calms, stabilizes, and gives confidence.  You become less of a scared little mouse of a person, freaking out at every little thing, full of anxiety.  You instead start having the emotional makeup of an apex predator.  You know you're dominant, and fearand anxiety are much less likely.

That's just how it is.  It saddens me to see people become frightened, dread-filled, anxious little shadows of their former calm, confident selves.  It happened to me, and I came BACK from it, thanks to raw animal foods, bone meal and clay, and vitamin D.  

Why would I want to see anyone else go through that?  How could I NOT make a gigantic stink every time someone starts acting like that excessive sensitivity is NORMAL?  It's not.  

I'm not playing around with you people.  I take this stuff very seriously.  The excessive sensitivity that veganism/vegetarianism causes is NOT, in ANY way, normal.

Anybody who has a problem with that statement DOESN'T BELONG here.   

[Iguana]

Anybody who has a problem with that statement DOESN'T BELONG here.  

With all due respect, CK, I do have a problem with your statement. Who knows? Everyone is different: some raw fooders have no reactions at all when occasionally eating cooked food while some others have strong and unpleasant reactions. A good friend of mine belongs to the second category. He’s 24, has eaten raw paleo (instincto style) ever since birth with massive amounts of meat. (I just went today to his place to take half of a mutton he slaughtered yesterday). He can’t eat anything cooked nor any commercial (grain and garbage fed) meat without having strong and nasty reactions. It’s the same for GCB, and it's precisely this phenomenon which allowed the development and fine-tuning of the instincto theory and practice, 45 years ago, by indicating which foods seemed to be ok and which ones were not.

So, according to our several decades long experience with hundreds of people in Switzerland first and then in France, it’s definitively possible that Dorothy had an awful reaction with prosciuto.

Cheers
François

[Dorothy]

Hi Folks. I do have almost instant reactions to foods. I am however not anxious, ungrounded or a shadow of my former self and if anything I get a bit over-confident - but you cannot know that unless you know me personally. I have gotten no feedback from others that I know in real life to indicate that I am so. I can appreciate fully that others have had this experience and I understand the indignation at any diet that created that for them and for others they know. I appreciate efforts to protect others. I have only spoken of myself and I make no generalizations.

The instincto diet that I have been reading about here does appeal to me greatly because it speaks to the way I tend to choose what to eat.

I'd like to repeat what I said before to round out this discussion - I have been having similar instant and powerful reactions to completely raw organic grass-fed meats - but all good. I'd be happy to elaborate if any one wants to know what they are.

My body reacts swiftly to weight-lifting, to exercise and to other things as well.

Cherimoya - I hope that we can get to know one another better over time. I can see that you only have the best in mind for those you care about, the forum and other people in general. Moderating a forum can't be easy. I understand why you banned me, I honor your motives, I am glad that I am being guided to speak more appropriately in this particular setting and I hope to learn from your experiences.

[Projectile Vomit]

...Anybody who has a problem with that statement DOESN'T BELONG here.   

I'm curious how you acquired so much power as to make such bold assertions and then hold everyone else accountable to them? Is this a standard that all moderators agreed on?

If Phil (for instance) mentioned he had food sensitivities and lost the "healing energy" in his dainty pink glove would you ban him?

[cherimoya_kid]

I'm curious how you acquired so much power as to make such bold assertions and then hold everyone else accountable to them? Is this a standard that all moderators agreed on?

If Phil (for instance) mentioned he had food sensitivities and lost the "healing energy" in his dainty pink glove would you ban him?

Eric, this is coming pretty close to trolling, don't you think?

[cherimoya_kid]

With all due respect, CK, I do have a problem with your statement. Who knows? Everyone is different: some raw fooders have no reactions at all when occasionally eating cooked food while some others have strong and unpleasant reactions. A good friend of mine belongs to the second category. He’s 24, has eaten raw paleo (instincto style) ever since birth with massive amounts of meat. (I just went today to his place to take half of a mutton he slaughtered yesterday). He can’t eat anything cooked nor any commercial (grain and garbage fed) meat without having strong and nasty reactions. It’s the same for GCB, and it's precisely this phenomenon which allowed the development and fine-tuning of the instincto theory and practice, 45 years ago, by indicating which foods seemed to be ok and which ones were not.

So, according to our several decades long experience with hundreds of people in Switzerland first and then in France, it’s definitively possible that Dorothy had an awful reaction with prosciuto.

Cheers
François

You're pretty close to being a vegan compared to me, and so is/was Guy-Claude Burger.  I eat a much higher percentage of animal fat and protein than you and he do, and the reason is that I feel ungrounded and spacey and less calm when I don't.

Seriously, you need to read some of AV's work.  He talks about how the fruitarian diet spaced him out, and created extreme emotional highs and lows.  It made him very emotionally unstable.

Veganism does the same thing, just more slowly.  It makes you more and more "sensitive"...until you just can't handle the stresses and strains of everyday life.

[KD]

right. what it comes down to is that these aren't issues of lacking foods per se.
Many or most - like people on this board, aajonus and other former instinctos up and change their philosophy (after experience) even to less enjoyable or nuisance 'diets' because just like pure veganism what is actually hypothesis and not real research doesn't line up with the reality. If one then needs to rationalize things based on a theory or living in line with a theory as some tautological proof rather than what is actually giving practical real life health to others then this just adds to the problem above.

(cooked) veganism is an extreme and a deficiency that should inevitably lead to deficiencies and problems at least long term but diets high in raw sugar whether they include meat or not seem to also all uniformly create the same or worse problems which require the same excuses. We already know people can live for over 40 years on raw vegan diets so we as a community need to actually address the minutiae of which programs are best at actually repairing problems AND for creating optimal performance or if they are even better or safer than standard diets. Most importantly not assuming that any non vegan version of a "natural" diet is good or assuming that diets that are 'extreme' or 'unnatural' are less good or less safe than diets that include foods and methods that may be way more problematic despite being part of our (modern) nature and control of such. To me we can look to all kinds of cooked paleo diets and vegan diets and figure out some common denominators as to which aspects are important and which things are largely insignificant.

A huge sampling examined objectively will show that people (like even chimps that are arguably more naturally suited to such) that eat high volumes of raw sugar and not enough fatty acids and proteins do not have it together to function mentally and often rationalize other clearly poor health through defensive excuses and redefining health away from something robust to something that is light and fragile. Its pure tautology.

[KD]

Its incorrect to assume that the healthiest person has an 'iron gut' that can handle pizzas and fried chicken and feel fantastic, but lets face it people didn't originally get ill when they started to use fire otherwise they wouldn't have kept doing it. Unless someone is to literally prove to me that they are far more cellularly pure than the uncivilized people now or just 100's of years ago and more robust to the point where their physical body could survive out in nature without illness or other rapid deterioration then it is unlikely that such sensitivities to basic food is a sign of health by default. Since some automatically deem cooking to be bad it could very well be a sign of something to avoid but then again it may not as even raw foods may indeed cause symptoms where the food (to others) is not at all bad or they might be facilitating something good that feels bad.

often high sugar diets which strive to remove all toxins cannot facilitate as much healing and repair as often even diets which include mediocre foods - even other veg or mostly veg diets. So that is one of many reasons for also removing natural sugars whether they were health forming or not for our ancestors. Based on the known science and practice, eating excess sugar by default makes difficult the other advantage to burn/replace toxic fat that regularly gets dumped when things are stirred up by fruits or just through the practice of being 100% (or around) raw. So this is another reason eating well avoids these sensitivities and erratic thoughts/behavior brought on intrinsically by higher carb and exacerbated by 'excitoxins' and other things being awakened internally on such approaches that arn't being facilitated properly. This isn't as important in cooked diets which are more homeostasis.

Also when people point to immediate reactions to foods as some signal that something is bad they ignore that their body is not necessarily in some idealized terrain to make such an experiment.

This can be seen in a vegan eating some meat, or a paleo eating dairy or perhaps a 'ZC' eater eating a piece of fruit. We know on one level alot of this has to do with bacteria in place to digest particular things but it is also how food is interacting with the rest of a wacked out system as a whole. To me this is why its important to understand traditions. Often discussions downplay the differences between needs of modern (sick) and ancient peoples as well as the obvious that many types of things were not creating illness. It may be very true that this is more the reason for sick people to avoid 'problematic' foods but in no way can one claim that its automatically their excellent health that is the explanation as to why people feel bad from such food. believing such rationalizes much of the vegan mindset. A huge part is also the power of the mind and how ideology effects everything. This was brought up most recently in the recent Kurt Harris talk where he as a physician and diet guru got all sorts of people complaining about symptoms from butter or something before it was even possible to be digested, assimilated and have such physical responses.

[TylerDurden]

You're pretty close to being a vegan compared to me, and so is/was Guy-Claude Burger.  I eat a much higher percentage of animal fat and protein than you and he do, and the reason is that I feel ungrounded and spacey and less calm when I don't.

Seriously, you need to read some of AV's work.  He talks about how the fruitarian diet spaced him out, and created extreme emotional highs and lows.  It made him very emotionally unstable.

Veganism does the same thing, just more slowly.  It makes you more and more "sensitive"...until you just can't handle the stresses and strains of everyday life.

Iguana eats a lot of raw meats. He's even regularly posted photos of raw wild game dinners in the "what are you eating" thread. So, while a lot of Instinctos do eat more raw plant food than raw animal food(German Instinctos particularly, it seems), some Instinctos do eat plenty of raw animal foods.

Personally, I reckon that a diet high in raw plant foods can be OK, provided there is a minimum of raw animal foods to provide all the complete nutrients needed by the body, such as vitamin B12 etc., which raw plant foods can't provide. Say, at the very least 10 percent raw animal foods in the diet? People who have additional, specific issues such as diabetes and the like definitely need much higher percentages of raw animal foods in their diet.

[KD]

Personally, I reckon that a diet high in raw plant foods can be OK, provided there is a minimum of raw animal foods to provide all the complete nutrients needed by the body, such as vitamin B12 etc., which raw plant foods can't provide. Say, at the very least 10 percent raw animal foods in the diet? People who have additional, specific issues such as diabetes and the like definitely need much higher percentages of raw animal foods in their diet.

for the record..I agree in theory. If one looks at the Kitavans one can see that such a (cooked) diet is arguably just as healthy or more so to any other traditional diet. The problem is that people aren't eating an actual diet that is tested in nature and essentially making the argument that since raw seems to be better than cooked that one can just replace cooked foods with raw foods. This just isn't scientific as to how food functions even in a perfect vacuum and leaves out alot of variables with such in viewing the whole picture for traditional or modern people. The other problem is when re-creating that diet they arn't actually compensating for what additional materials, tools (diets) and processes they need to just get to that baseline that allowed those people to be healthy. Just looking at the bare minimums such a diet would meet basic requirements (put out by the FDA and WHO) but its not compensating for that and also not looking at the detriments of the excesses needed to form the rest of a diet. In other words its ignorant or dismissive of the acquired wisdom of what actually often happens on such raw diets and often just talking about how on paper they should work.

Perhaps its true that the healthier one is to begin with this also wouldn't materialize as poor health but this even more would be less proof that the diet is sound in general or was fit to actually be medicinal for people that all inevitably have underlying issues.

So my take is I'm not in favor of saying such diets CAN'T be healthy based in some notion that people have to eat tons of fats or animal foods or something but more that often enough people believe they are automatically doing the right thing (based on some fairly recent ideas) despite clear signs to the opposite...that seems to be more the argument.

[cherimoya_kid]

Personally, I reckon that a diet high in raw plant foods can be OK, provided there is a minimum of raw animal foods to provide all the complete nutrients needed by the body, such as vitamin B12 etc., which raw plant foods can't provide. Say, at the very least 10 percent raw animal foods in the diet? People who have additional, specific issues such as diabetes and the like definitely need much higher percentages of raw animal foods in their diet.

The problem with high-fruit diets (and vegan/vegetarian diets), especially low-fat, is that you become so "sensitive" (which REALLY means "unstable and crazy")  that you start making decisions (life decisions AND food decisions) based entirely on your feelings, intuition, ESP, what-the-heck-ever.  You stop basing decisions on objective facts and common sense.

Guess what happens next?  You realize that the lowfat fruity diet is making you more "sensitive", and you decide stupid things like "my intuition is saving me from terrible things" and you eat even LESS fat and animal foods, which makes things even WORSE.

There's just all kinds of crazy shit vegans come up with, everything from "electromagnetic fields are hurting my aura" to "the mercury in fish is so high that even one piece of fish a year will give me mercury poisoning". 

The "sensitivity" just leads to crazier and crazier shit.

It's a vicious cycle. Also an embarrassing one, if you ever manage to come back from it, and look back on your previous behavior.

I've been there, and don't want anybody else to be. 

[TylerDurden]

Well, the absurd mercury-in-fish notions are sometimes even spouted by raw, zero-carbers as well. william, for one. And I've had some primal dieters complain about electric fields on the other forums.


Anyway, there does seem to be a very definite bias towards raw, low-carb on this site. The few who are high-carb at the start usually end up eating more raw animal foods, not less, after immersing themselves in the site for a while.

[miles]

Cherimoya, kid... Someone has health problems constantly e.g. joint pains, flatulence, stomach pains/IBS, constipation, acne, weakness, tiredness, hay fever etc... This person is not sensitive to foods, because they are always eating bad foods and always feeling bad. The same person then discovers paleo-lifestyle, they begin to feel better because they're eating good foods, and their health improves, but the underlying problems which made them so ill before still remain - long-term problems, but now from eating good foods they feel good. This person is now sensitive to eating bad foods, because they now know what it is to feel good.

The paleo-lifestyle did not make them more vulnerable to these bad foods, just more sensitive, it's very different... Though this person has become more sensitive to bad foods, they are probably in fact less vulnerable to their bad effects, as their health is generally greater.

There is long-term health and short-term health. If someone had poor health during their development, and/or generally for a large part of their life, they will have poor long-term heath. What you are eating/experiencing right now will affect your short-term health, and what you have eaten/experienced throughout your life will affect your long-term health. People with a bad long-term health but a good short-term health will be the most sensitive. By maintaining a good short-term health, some aspects of your long-term health can gradually improve as well, and you can become gradually less vulnerable to bad foods/experiences.

[KD]

Cherimoya, kid... Someone has health problems constantly e.g. joint pains, flatulence, stomach pains/IBS, constipation, acne, weakness, tiredness, hay fever etc... This person is not sensitive to foods, because they are always eating bad foods and always feeling bad. The same person then discovers paleo-lifestyle, they begin to feel better because they're eating good foods, and their health improves, but the underlying problems which made them so ill before still remain - long-term problems, but now from eating good foods they feel good. This person is now sensitive to eating bad foods, because they now know what it is to feel good.

Theres truth to this but the distinction is - is that people arn't saying that per se but actually saying that their 'purity' is an indicator of health and in some cases: being free of disease. When asked how they know they have the right diet vegans or non vegans will actually point to this as an assessment of what foods are good or bad based on how they feel without seeing the surrounding context or this above definition that is made up..which is not ok and can rationalize anything.

veg or not, these are also the same people that claim that by following whatever diet they deem is closest to nature that they can absolve just about ALL of such ailments and are less realistic then you present. These people are talking about some kind of health that no one has experienced in hundreds of thousands of years..and often showing that they are suffering problems even standard dieters today do not have. Part of this may be coming from poor health backgrounds..but certain diets and factors are also known to accelerate disease or prevent the kind of deep healing that is possible in recovering from IBS -> some cancers. Also anecdotally one sees that the people doing the best on such diets presented as IDEAL and INFALLIBLE tend to have the least history of such problems while on other approaches (raw or not) people do indeed come back form severe ailments and also can diverge from whatever diet is currently seen to be optimal by people today by individuals who can't possibly know the entire picture.

To me the issue is that this is a discussion forum..and if things were as simple as just eating natural food without the all the tools discussed here like LC/VLC, or whipworms, or clays, or other possibly strange specifics that work for individuals then all people regardless of health background would all be achieving the same amazing and progressive results. Its turns out this is not true and that often these ideologies corner people out of possibilities in diet and health tools. Veganism is just one obvious such thing in that it removes whole categories of food often based on spiritual reasons..but also on interpretations of biology. You see these same interpretations of biology all the time to even amongst not vegans to create the same kind of categories and remove tools and resources and these are often clearly removed from what is actually working for people.

I think what ck objected to is this idea that people will present totally subjective and 'un-questionable' information to validate a point of view even when there is physical evidence suggesting the problems of such.

[Dorothy]

What can happen is if a conclusion has been come to that is combined with an emotional charge because of deeply negative or positive experience, when conflicting data is presented it can be ignored, dismissed or ridiculed. It is part of the human tendency to compartmentalize. It is related to our advanced language abilities.

I agree with KD entirely that letting intellectual theories cloud one's perception is a danger. When real world results do not correspond to a belief system people do tend to adapt their perceptions to fit into their theories.

I imagine that raw paleo could be a purely positive paradigm that does not necessitate condemnation of other diets to be successful. If it is what I think it might be, it could stand on it's own long history and positive results as it is not a theory.

[KD]

What can happen is if a conclusion has been come to that is combined with an emotional charge because of deeply negative or positive experience, when conflicting data is presented it can be ignored, dismissed or ridiculed. It is part of the human tendency to compartmentalize.

I have been able to withstand stresses that I did not think were humanly possible and the people around me in the last year have marveled at my stamina. That is a data point that can be incorporated if allowed.  

Well said. Personally I think its definitely allowed as a data point. That was where I sort of was bothered personally. Really the issue with veganism or some of this other stuff is pretending to know all the answers and changing the very standards to fit ideological purposes so I would go as far to also say that if people present by default (without criticism) that X certain diet (even raw paleo on a 'raw paleo' forum) is necessarily better than a Tibetan yak butter soup diet that is not ok in my opinion unless we are literally comparing both quality of life and tissue samples and other physical assessments. Makes us just as bad as other forums.

Its when people are so personally wrapped up and defined in what they are doing that they often can't to see the forest for the trees...often even when presented with overwhelming statistics and evidence. Some people might too just be amazingly lucky and special (or just stubborn) and stick with things that seem less stable but then in my opinion should they have more empathy and understanding when others need greater strategies to restore health...not the insistence like on other forums that others are 'doing it wrong' and not meeting that ideal etc...

again..just speaking generally