Commitment thread

[Josh]

Thought that as a complement to the confession thread we could have one for making commitments. Getting it in writing might help to give second thoughts about cheating.

My one is: I will only eat raw meat + fish, fat, jerky and up to one cup of fruit a day from now until Christmas, only drink water and no alcohol. I feel I need to be strict as otherwise it can easily fall by the wayside.

Feel free to be less strict and give yourself the option to cheat once a week or whatever.

[goodsamaritan]

Hmmm... somehow I don't feel any desire to "cheat" to eat rice or eat cooked meat or eat pizza.

[PaleoPhil]

Good idea. Once I've finished off my remaining nuts and get a bigger freezer and probably a meat grinder I will try a more purely Lex-Rooker type all-raw meat/fat/organs diet with water and tea for at least a few weeks and come as close as I can in the mean time.

I suspect that I'll add back some greens and berries and stuff afterword, as I believe even Lex occasionally has, but it would be interesting to have a flesh-diet baseline to compare to.

[RawZi]

    I don't know right now.  I'd like to say I will be strict 100% forever, but at this very moment I'll just promise to be strict right now through tomorrow.  Maybe tomorrow I'll come back to the thread and write how much more.

[SkinnyDevil]

Cheating.

Odd concept.

I'm not certain what other thread you refer to, but when you say "cheating", I assume you mean eating "forbidden" foods?

I'll give this one some thought.

[Cosmo]

Hmmm... somehow I don't feel any desire to "cheat" to eat rice or eat cooked meat or eat pizza.

+1
That's exactly how I feel after eating only raw food for a year Though I've been craving chocolate for the last couple of days... Apart from chocolate, I've never had any cravings for cooked food like pizza and cakes.

[Josh]

Cheating.

Odd concept.

Obviously we don't have a supervisor, so there's noone to give us a red cross for eating non paleo. I'm finding though that while I'm still adapting, the non paleo foods really throw me out, so want to tighten right up.

Maybe once one has adapted one's body will tell you what's right. At the moment though it's telling me kebab, chips, cheesecake, coffee and beer are very very right!

[TylerDurden]

Good idea. Once I've finished off my remaining nuts and get a bigger freezer and probably a meat grinder I will try a more purely Lex-Rooker type all-raw meat/fat/organs diet with water and tea for at least a few weeks and come as close as I can in the mean time.

I suspect that I'll add back some greens and berries and stuff afterword, as I believe even Lex occasionally has, but it would be interesting to have a flesh-diet baseline to compare to.

Errr, Last I checked lex gave up on all plant-food, in the last few years. At least that's what he told me. He does eat cooked animal food(pemmican) and cooked meats but that's it, AFAIK.

It seems that zero-carbers can quickly get issues when even eating a small amount of carbs due to not having the right bacteria(or enzymes?) to handle it after successfully adapting to 0 carb for a long time.

[goodsamaritan]

At the moment though it's telling me kebab, chips, cheesecake, coffee and beer are very very right!

Oh my gosh, I had forgotten how I felt like that for quite some time. (I never liked beer, I did eat "chips" but they always made me feel bad afterwards... I didn't know why, I used to like barbecued pork a lot,  I never liked cheescake.)

I used to be a coffee drinker until the day came it hit me and blood / oxygen wasn't reaching my brain and I had to be hospitalized. I was in the hospital and I thought to myself I was going to die and I still didn't have any kids yet.  Then I had chronic fatigue syndrome, elevated heart rate at rest, and I was only able to cure it by stopping the consumption of all forms of caffeine.

Maybe since I had my horror stories with all things caffeine, my mind will be forever scarred by that experience.  I hope me sharing my experience with coffee and all things caffeine like coke will scare you out of your wits. 

[PaleoPhil]

Errr, Last I checked lex gave up on all plant-food, in the last few years. At least that's what he told me. He does eat cooked animal food(pemmican) and cooked meats but that's it, AFAIK.

Ah, OK, thanks.

It seems that zero-carbers can quickly get issues when even eating a small amount of carbs due to not having the right bacteria(or enzymes?) to handle it after successfully adapting to 0 carb for a long time.

I get issues with carbs and I haven't gone truly 0 carb yet, and it's incredible how rapidly and positively I respond to an all-meat/fat diet. I speculate that maybe I'm descended from people who were hunters of big game and therefore heavy meat eaters or maybe the damage to my system makes me unable to handle carbs. There is apparently a history of Central Asian peoples (such as with the Tatars of steak Tartar fame and the Mongols) being heavy eaters of  the raw meats of animals like horses, cattle, reindeer and wild stags and boars in more recent days, and probably bigger beasts like aurochs and mammoths in the ancient past.

I notice that others in my family are major carb addicts and both type 1 and 2 diabetes are common among my relatives (though my own blood sugar was never measured until after I went Paleo, AFAIK), so sensitivity to carbs seems to run especially strong in my family. I know that the Irish, Welsh, Basques and others have been specified as having particularly ancient genes that are nearly unchanged from Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Central Asia, who might have eaten mostly big game animals. Its speculation, but maybe that has something to do with it. I would guess that Middle Eastern and Mediterranean peoples might tend to handle carbs a bit better than a true bloodthirsty savage like me.     

My people were the sorts of barbarians that the Romans and other empires sought to either enslave or cleanse forever from the earth (though the Romans probably never quite made it to Ireland--legend has it that they thought Ireland was even more savage than Gaul and therefore not worth the bother of conquering). I am of the defeated peoples.   The ancient and doomed ones.  Interestingly, we of the ancient Irish are also apparently related to other doomed hunter-gatherer peoples like the Algonquian-speaking Indians, according to DNA analysis. Which is not surprising, because many of the North American Indians have long been suspected of originating in Central Asia.

[TylerDurden]

These ideas re ethnity and diet are so absurd. Take me for example, I'm mostly irish, the rest being welsh/breton/scottish and a sizeable(1/4) portion of slovenian and I have no issues with (raw) fruit have awful problems with raw dairy(despite irish people being continuously claimed to have been frequent dairy drinkers) etc.

Since everyone seems to be on the bandwagon re ethnicity, I might mention that I'm mostly of Upper Palaeolithic genotype extraction(cro-magnon  were upper palaeolithic types too) so if fruit is good(and necessary) for me and dairy is bad for me, the Cro-Magnon in the palaeolithic must also have eaten lots of fruit and no dairy for health reasons. It's just as valid(or absurd) as any of the other notions mentioned above or elsewhere).

[PaleoPhil]

These ideas re ethnity and diet are so absurd. Take me for example, I'm mostly irish, the rest being welsh/breton/scottish and a sizeable(1/4) portion of slovenian and I have no issues with (raw) fruit ....

I have to admit I was stretching on that one and was only half serious. On the other hand, my impression was that even with the fruit you eat you still eat far fewer carbs than the avg American. What % of your calorie intake would you estimate is carbs?

Another speculation is that the damage that modern foods did to us over the years affected us differently; and still another is that my close relatives have high rates of illnesses associated with carbs, such as type 1 and 2 diabetes, gum disease, etc., so my familial inheritance seems to be a factor. Feel free to suggest your own if you wish, though I'm less concerned with the why than I am with the fact that for whatever reason I seem to do better on much lower than avg carbs. It has taken me over 5 years since first going Paleo to discover that, so it was not something I chose, rather something I've had to come to terms with. My improvements have exceeded my wildest dreams and make up for the inconveniences and insults I have encountered along the way.

In my introduction in the Welcome section you'll find that I talked about evidence that supports your case--about how scientists at first thought the Irish were much more sensitive to modern foods like gluten foods, then discovered that other people (such as the Italians and other Europeans) were about equally sensitive, based on the data at the time I was looking at it back in 2004.

have awful problems with raw dairy(despite irish people being continuously claimed to have been frequent dairy drinkers) etc.

Me too, but I thought it was the Scandinavians who were thought to have the longest history of dairy consumption, and that even they didn't become heavy consumers before less than 10 thousand years ago (I don't remember the specific estimates)--although such dates do tend to get pushed back some as new evidence is found. Have you found newer info on this?

[TylerDurden]

There is a lot of conflicting claims. For example, some reports claim that northern europeans hardly touched dairy until something like 5,000 years ago as they were just hunter-gatherers mostly rather than pastoralists.

[PaleoPhil]

Interesting. Ancient diet is certainly an area in need of much greater research.