For your brain recovery from past abuse I would recommend Hericium Erinaceum, also called Lions Mane, which is a medicinal mushroom. It´s a non hallucinogen fungi and the only fungi that is able to regrow brain nerves. It also has no real known side effects (as opposed to others such as reishi, chaga, shiitake..) and has many other properties, including reduced inflammation (can be a cause for pain), restful sleep, repair of the intestinal cell linings, killing pathogens, depression. alzheimers..you name it. I took the powder extract for a few weeks and noticed the calmness and increased mental clarity. I don´t think there are many things that work as well for the brain as this fungi. If you look at some pictures of it, you will notice that it resembles somewhat a brain, like a vast city of neverending neurons. I don´t think nature created this look by mistake.
You can get it either in powder form, as a powder extract or as a tincture. If you take the powder and the powder extract there will be chitin in it (especially in normal powder), which are the cell walls of the fungi, similar to fibre, not being absorbable by the body and that can cause problems with digestion. Therefore getting the liquid tincture and putting some few drops under your tongue will give you the maximum absorption and most probably least digestive (if any) problems. There are several extraction methods, single double or triple. Depending on the mushroom for some its better to stay with single, and for some others several extractions are recommended. As far as I know double or more is good for this type.
Furthermore there are usually 3 types. Wild harvested, cultivated or a mix of both. Then there are conventional (most of them from china and organic grown, which can also be from china). Fungi are incredible organisms, they control and communicate much of our environment and most importantly they ADAPT to the current environment (pollution, bacteria/viruses, I believe energy too and so forth). So if you take a cultured mushroom which could never adapt to its natural environment in nature, it will likely not be able to product certain compounds to protect itself from the malicious elements that surround it in nature. Therefore it would be less effective in some ways, although you can control cultivated mushrooms to increase certain compounds within the fungi. But I believe that natural adaption would always be preferable - hence wild harvested.
In regards to your dairy consumption you might need to be a bit cautious, if you overdo it on estrogen present in dairy, it might not give you the desirable male features you might be looking for. I think eggs, although a hormonal food, is known to produce more testosterone and would be a better option. I would also second cartilage, but also collagen, pork is extremely rich in this gelatinous mass, which should help with your joint regeneration.
I remember one guy on the carnivore fb forum which used to be vegan/frutarian, and he developed female face features and hips. He went into carnivore and his body composition and face changed. I can´t remember what he ate exaclty (if he left out dairy), I could check if need be.
