Hi...

[longhairlover]

Hm.  I just read the 'read this' post at the beginning here and it said to put your gender in your profile.  I've already been struggling to modify my profile but can't add anything at all to it - nothing is clickable or editable and there aren't any fields to enter things into.  I wonder if maybe it's my Opera browser not showing some options or something.  Oh well.  My name's Nicole.  I am a 38 year old woman in Pennsylvania.

Anyhow, hello everyone.  Right now I am on just about the worst diet imaginable because, for a variety of reasons, I can't cook for myself at the moment.  But I will be cooking again in the future.  And I just realized that I use the word 'cook' to mean 'prepare food at all,' regardless of whether I actually cook anything. 

I came here to learn about others' experiences with various diets so that I can do troubleshooting.  I have tried a couple of things and had problems with them and wanted to find out what other people have done.  I have a lot of respect for individual people's anecdotes ('I tried doing X, and it resulted in ABC'). 

I am not necessarily aiming for an all raw diet, and since I can't prepare any of my own food at the moment, it doesn't even matter much what kind of diet I would like to do, I'll just have to wait until I can really do it.  I've loved reading about Weston Price for many years now - it gives me so much hope to know that you can prevent deformities if you eat nutritiously and avoid particular drugs and chemicals.  I myself have the narrow face and maloccluded teeth (before braces) that Weston Price wrote about, and I want to prevent that in my future children. 

I'm fascinated with primitive tribes and primitive diets.  I like to be an original observer, trying something and observing how my body feels afterwards.  This is how primitive people found out which foods were edible, for the very first time, when no one was there to tell them.

I've also used the Feingold diet for hyperactivity.  I was a hyperactive child, and my parents put me on the diet, and it instantly calmed me down on the very first day.  I tried it as an adult but for various reasons was never able to get completely on the diet, so I never really tested it as much as I would have liked to.  My life has been chaotic for the past few years.

Oh, I should warn everyone that I am still drinking large amounts of coffee (for the time being, but hopefully very soon I will be able to quit it again), and this makes me EXTREMELY VERBOSE, which means that my posts are often gigantically long and detailed and hard to read.  This improves when I quit coffee.

So, well, hello everyone.

[TylerDurden]

Hmm, You seem able to eat but not prepare food at all, according to your  explanation. I presume that means you can't even use a meat-knife to cut raw meat? Well then, you could always buy  raw, 100% grassfed  GROUND meat  in vacuum-packed form. Just one tear of the package means you get your meat with almost nil "preparation".

For info on a rawpalaeodiet, read the 1st posts of the threads in this section:-

http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/important-info-for-newbies/

Hmm, coffee:- Back in my pre-rawpalaeo days, I used to drink coffee as it was the only thing that made me temporarily feel alright. It was a drug which lasted c.30 minutes each time. I haven't had a drop since going rawpalaeo, of course, as I no longer needed it.

The WAPF diet does have many flaws. It accepts that many forms of cooking are harmful, but not all(boiling and steaming is fine according to the WAPF, for example). Yet  even boiling creates amounts of heat-created toxins which speed up aging among other health problems. The WAPF diet also often includes lots of slow-cooking and complicated recipes. One of the many wonderful advantages of a raw, palaeolithic diet  is that you usually don't need to prepare your raw food much. Normally, I just cut up a piece of raw wild game into bite-sized chunks with a knife and that's it(or just use my jaws to tear at the flesh when not in the  company of others!)

The WAPF also recommends fermented foods for people to take in extra bacteria yet recommends cooking which destroys bacteria in food - somewhat illogical. Also, it is, imo, somewhat dangerous to rely on hunter-gatherer experiences - such tribes had to do a lot of  harmful  things just in order to survive. Often they didn't have enough food so had to rely on very unhealthy, low-quality substitutes such as cassava instead. Plus, Weston-Price had too much of a rosy image of HGs in that he believed in the  absurd Noble Savage theory.

[LePatron7]

Welcome!

[longhairlover]

I do love the simplicity of eating raw.  I have always been averse to doing very long and complicated recipes, and I tended to disobey them or try to do it my own way, which didn't work very well. 

The reason why I can't do much with food right now is because I am living in a place where I don't have a refrigerator to keep the food in.  I am actually camping, at the moment (long-term).  So I don't keep food for long periods of time.

I agree with you about cassava - it always made me nervous to read about people using a poisonous plant and doing all these complicated processes to make it safe to eat.  It reminds me of industrial manufacturing.  If you take a piece of poisonous food and send it through this big factory with a hundred conveyor belts and vats and chemicals and cookers and all these other things, then eventually it might be safe to eat.  I don't like doing things that way.

Thanks for the welcomes.

[Ioanna]

welcome! what part of PA?... i went to school there.

[longhairlover]

I'm in State College, near Penn State University.  I didn't go to the university, my brother did, and I originally was staying at his apartment.  That was how I got here. 

[Adora]

Hi I live in Syr, not too far. Welcome. Give a call if your ever in the area.