Instinctive raw eating in practice

[Wattlebird]

cuttlefish today, sort of like squid, but still unique in its own way.

[cherimoya_kid]

people are incredible wasteful with fruit though, here there are tons of plump dark cherries that go to waste! in the desert southwest i have seen pomegranates littering the grounds.  many places berries line hiking trails and yes, people still buy them from the grocery store.

I remember seeing tens of thousands of pomegranate trees in San Diego County in CA.  There were so many that I devalued them.  I was a fool to do so, though. 

However, I will have to say that the white sapote, cherimoya, and avocado were also competing for room on my plate with those pomegranate.  It's hard to say no to ripe white sapote and cherimoya.

Seriously, tree-ripe white sapote....wow.

[Hanna]

I´m just eating soaked sesame seeds. Yummy! Sesame seeds which have been soaked in water for a day (or longer) are much tastier to me than dry sesame seeds.

Currently, I also love persimmons and seaweed "Dulce" or "dulse" (fresh, but aged in the fridge till they are soft).

Eating meat AND fish (instead of just eating seafood as animal food) I feel clearly stronger - physically stronger and more self-confident.

[Iguana]

Of course, Hanna, it’s ascertained that in the long run we need the complete range of raw animal foods: meat, fish, shellfish, eggs and probably insects too. Some people can go on for years or decades with a restricted range of raw food but it’s certainly not ideal when we have a past of damaging cooked diet.

[Wattlebird]

for what its worth, providing one has ready access to a variety of animal foods, I find the nose and tastebuds take care of the details.

[Hanna]

Well, my so-called instinct simply didn´t allow me to eat significant amounts of the meat of land animals (except sometimes in the form of salted air-dried bacon and, of course, liver, brain, bone marrow). So what should I have done, Iguana? Suddenly, I don't know why, this blockade has disappeared. Physically, I felt very well (perhaps better than ever before) before this happened.

[Iguana]

So what should I have done, Iguana? Suddenly, I don't know why, this blockade has disappeared. Physically, I felt very well (perhaps better than ever before) before this happened.

I don't think you had to do something: our body needs shift slowly or suddenly over the years and it's ok as long as we test the different animal foods once in a way. As Wattlebird said.

[Hanna]

I just ate lamb. It was delicious, it was very tender...
Currently, my favorite fruit is the prickly pear. It has always been one of my favorite fruits.
Other favorite foods of mine are currently chickweed and white cabbage (unprocessed), but, of course, I cannot eat much of them.

[Iguana]

Oh yes, prickly pears! Whatever their color, they are a delight. But store them away from your clothes!



Chickweed? I had a look at the photos but don't know it.

[Wattlebird]

Hi Hanna and Iguana,
Chickweed is a weed in Australia and in this area it is plentiful, even popping up in our yard. Refreshing taste.
We have three cats that have decided they like the lodgings here and so they loll around the yard in the sun, often on the grass and chickweed. Fortunately the nose is a good cat pee detector. 

[jessica]

yum i agree chickweed is delicious, it reminds me of the way corn silks and really immature fresh corn stalks taste. up until these last few weeks i have been eating it but its pretty much dead in the field now
wish i could get some lamb but maybe maybe we will have another fresh deer and hopefully some wild turkey soon!

[Hanna]

I just ate lamb. It was delicious, it was very tender...

... and makes me feel so strong!  Meat was clearly a missing piece in my diet.
The chickweed I find in the woods isn´t tasty any longer, however, there is delicious chickweed growing in the compost heap of my father.

I´m just eating sea spaghetti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himanthalia_elongata), one of my favorite foods for years. However, I like fresh dulse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmaria_palmata) even more.
 

[Iguana]

Its wonderful that we always discover new foods; even after more than 25 years into instincto, I still discover new ones.

... and makes me feel so strong!  Meat was clearly a missing piece in my diet.
 

I wonder how you could eat raw paleo for all these years without having meat. Isn’t it a trend in Germany to eat “instinkto” while being vegetarian or almost, as Tyler observed? This has never been the case of the old of the old ones in Switzerland and in France : we have meat on the dinner table almost every day and if there’s no meat, we have fish or shellfish. For example, I saw a 4 - 5 years old boy eating two-third or half of a raw lamb leg at once; there was nothing left except the bones and it was the usual dose for him according to his mother.

Tonight I chose aged beef, then a bit of celeriac, some small carrots, a tomato and 4 small Hass avocados. At lunch, I had a few physalis,  4 or 5 persimmons and two cherimoyas — not kids, fully grown ones.   And then, figs dried by myself. 

[Hanna]

I even practiced a 100% vegan instincto diet for one and a half year in the past.

I never have heard of a vegan or vegetarian instincto trend in Germany. However, (almost) all raw food dieters don´t eat a strict raw food diet anyway. I sometimes doubt that there is any strict raw food dieter out there.

[Iguana]

100% vegan instincto diet

  I never thought that such a weird thing could ever exist...! Thanks for the info.

[Hanna]

And in spite of this 100% raw vegan diet I didn´t have, for example, tooth problems any longer. I guess that most health problems of so called raw food dieters / instinctos result from not practicing their diet strictly or result from a very restricted choice of foods or a serious eating disorder.

This has never been the case of the old of the old ones in Switzerland and in France :

Iguana, as you know by yourself, GCB himself practiced a vegan/vegetarian (including goat milk) raw food diet in the beginning.

[Iguana]

Iguana, as you know by yourself, GCB himself practiced a vegan/vegetarian (including goat milk) raw food diet in the beginning.

Right! But it’s history and I would not even have imagined that someone could name “instincto” a vegan diet nowadays, especially since GCB published his book (in 1985 I think) in which there’s the best debunking of the vegetarian ideology I ever read!

[Hanna]

For lunch I ate more lamb; now I feel like Herkules! I´m really hooked now; I wanna eat more and more lamb...

Iguana, your ignorance (or was it the meat I ate? Just kidding...) sometimes makes me really aggressive. I'll cite gcb´s book linked by yourself in this thread: http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/instinctoanopsology/who-has-read-gc-burger%27s-first-book/

I’m not in favor of meat; the less one eats of it, the better one feels in every way_I mean as far as respecting life, farm productivity, the economy, etc. is concerned. But I think that it’s wrong to be dead-set against meat from the outset. In some cases, meat can prove extremely useful therapeutically.

http://www.reocities.com/HotSprings/7627/ggraw_eat3.html

That´s not a true debunking of vegetarianism, is it?

[Iguana]

Hanna, I feel you take this paragraph somewhat out of context. True, he recognize in it that "as far as respecting life, farm productivity, the economy, etc. is concerned" it would be better to eat little meat.But as I understand, it’s only regarding those concerns. He’s view is finely balanced, not of the kind “all out against vegetarianism” which would have been counterproductive. Don’t forget he was the first in modern times to introduce raw meat in a raw diet. Here is the paragraph in context.     

o I would advise a slice of raw undressed meat. That would be safer minus the blended egg yolk and relish.

_That bamboozles your instincts. I get the message. But how can you uphold that meat was one of man’s initial foods? Primates are declaredly vegetarians.

o Here we go again, back to vegetarian doctrine. Monkeys were long believed to scorn flesh since they feed on fruit and wild plants. They had never been caught in the act of meat-eating. Accordingly, they weren’t assumed to be meat-eaters: That would have required conjuring them up eating raw meat given that they didn’t come up with cooking. Whichever way you look at it, raw meat is taboo as I was privileged to find out when I included it in raw-instinct eating.

_Had you initially banned eating meat?

o Almost every diet-conscious person comes within the undertow of vegetarianism. I was no exception at first. True enough, eating meat and flesh generally warrants due caution. Nourishing a body with alien proteins is quite dangerous. I believe that vegetarianism reflects some truth. It is an experience man had a very long time ago_that is, when he started eating meat without keeping to the laws of instinct. Nourishing the body with a food that the body wants and will be able to metabolize properly is quite different from nourishing the body with the same food when the body doesn’t want it. In the second instance, all kinds of molecules could slip though the grinding mill of dietary enzymes and trigger off devastation, the extent of which no one can as yet accurately assess.
One thing is for sure: It’s not by viewing the issue ideologically or hot-headedly that we’ll understand anything.
Getting back to our monkeys, I think we have to stick to the facts. The English ethnologist, Jane van Lawick Goodall, who lived with chimpanzees for twenty years, witnessed, apparently, a whole troop of them dismember a young wild boar. The best hunters in the troop knew how to catch it without having learnt archery. Primates have the instinct to hunt and eat their prey; it can be assumed, therefore, that animal protein is part or their natural diet. And as our genetic code is still very close...

_Apparently, monkeys eat very little meat.

o Their eating little of it doesn’t preclude its being useful and possibly even vital for their health. Nor is it necessarily bad for ours.
As I was saying, vegetarians are right to take up the cudgels against the usual ways of eating meat. It’s eaten cooked, which is toxic. And people overeat it, unheedful of instincts.
In a great many cases, I have noted that cooked meat disrupts people’s nervous systems, by generally arousing excitability, which has a ripple effect on one’s aggressiveness, anxiety and sex drive, as well as one’s entire mental make-up. I can well understand that some wise pundits centered on their inner states may have condemned it as throttling the spirit. Presumably, they didn’t consider trying raw meat as well, or else they would have realized that cooking was the culprit.
Clearly, raw meat stirs up no arousal, unless an animal is already poisoned with cooked food_in which case, the molecules that have built up in its tissues will touch off excitability in the meat eater, and he will incriminate the meat rather than the toxins.

_Is it not the actual killing of an animal that was proscribed by different religions?

o True enough, there’s something shocking about killing anything. It jars with our concepts of spirituality.
Mind you, Hitler and his henchmen were card-carrying vegetarians. But they didn’t shrink from mass murder. Perhaps one day neurophysiological disorders will be meaningfully correlated with adulterated foods and the rise of major political trends.

_Eating meat means eating death. I thought you were in favor of eating only live foods...

o That’s one of the battle cries of vegetarianism. One is rightly told that one is eating “carrion.” What better way to get you off your T-bone once and for all, as if you had a cube of human flesh on the tines of your fork. In actual fact, meat only looks dead; it’s teeming with life. Think of all the live yeasts thriving on it.
A cooked vegetable, by contrast, is stone dead. All that’s left of it is a scrawny corpse splayed out on your plate; isn’t that a carcass?

_A friend of mine always termed every meat-eater a scavenger. Barely has the animal been killed when all kinds of toxins reportedly start work on it.

o Well, you can tell him that nobody is compelled to eat meat when it has reached the stage of carrion. Rotting meat does, obviously, turn toxic after a while; it contains proteins, but instincts prevent us from eating it. The smell is repulsive; the tongue feels as though seared by the meat. It’s a good job we’re protected against a natural toxin. Carrion has been around in nature for a long time. And that the smell should repel us proves that man is by no means a scavenger.
Man isn’t a carnivorous animal either. Instincts clearly don’t allow us to eat fresh meat; an animal that’s been recently slain gives off an extremely disgusting smell.

_Carnivorous animals are said, in fact, to live less long than herbivorous ones.

o When a tiger catches a zebu, he savors the guts filled with partly digested grass. In reality, tigers are great vegetarians! And cows that graze swallow a large number of insects with their ration of grass. They are more carnivorous than one might think. According to some farming traditions, it was, moreover, common practice to give calves, during their growth spurts, a good two dozen eggs yolks to ensure future sound health.
I’m not in favor of meat; the less one eats of it, the better one feels in every way_I mean as far as respecting life, farm productivity, the economy, etc. is concerned. But I think that it’s wrong to be dead-set against meat from the outset. In some cases, meat can prove extremely useful therapeutically. What one has to know is when and how much of it one can eat, and we have the answer to that one_that is, we can trust to our instincts, which, to my mind, are more reliable than any theoretical, ethical, or other consideration.

_And what if our instincts led us astray? It seems quite plausible that meat could pervert our taste buds.

o Of course, taste alone isn’t enough to prove that meat is beneficial to us. We have to try and see the long-term effects of meat on human health. Whether it is easily digestible or not, whether one sleeps well on it, its effects on physical and mental health, whether it helps one put on weight, whether it helps cure diseases, etc. With hindsight, I have the feeling that results, on the whole, have been quite encouraging_provided one respects instinctive “cues” and that one avoids eating meat too frequently with other foods.

[Hanna]

Gcb again, from the same link/book:

With our method, we’ve been afforded further insight_that is, instincts sometimes make meat appealing, especially meat left out in the open for a while, exactly as instincts do with any natural food.

Sometimes! Not daily. Not my opinion (I don´t have any opinion concerning meat, I'm just following the signs of my body and my taste buds...), but gcb's teachings.

[Iguana]

Yes, you're absolutely right, we usually don't eat meat daily. One day fish, one day eggs, one day shellfish, one day avocados, one day meat, for example... following the signs given by our body, as you rightly say, which may sometimes lead us to eat shellfish, meat or whatever everyday for several days, weeks or even months until a need or a deficiency is fulfilled.   So we agree, don't we? 

[Hanna]

The problem is, first of all, that you don't agree with yourself:

Yes, you're absolutely right, we usually don't eat meat daily. One day fish, one day eggs, one day shellfish, one day avocados, one day meat, for example...

we have meat on the dinner table almost every day and if there’s no meat, we have fish or shellfish.

[Iguana]

There is a misunderstanding: having meat on the table doesn't  mean that everyone around this table will necessarily choose meat, the meat being there as a choice along with other foodstuffs to choose from. That is if there are at least 2 persons eating together. When I'm alone, I don't put everything on the table: I just go to open my fridge where the meat is hung and I take its smell.

Another point about the book quoted, is that it wasn't intended as a guide to practice instinctive nutrition, but just to make his theory known to the largest audience as possible. At the time, most of the people interested in nutrition where vegetarians, and I always felt he didn't want to drive them away by being too harsh against vegetarianism. Thus the tone, "yes, I understand you, folks, it would better if we could live without meat". For those interested in doing the experiment, he advised at the end of the book not to do it alone more then a week or so without having followed his introduction seminar, which lasted two days. 

There was also a one week seminar in which we discussed in depth within a small group all the theoretical points in biochemistry, immunology and such. 

[eveheart]

It seems that instinctotherapy, by its very nature, is not something that one person can teach to another, beyond the basic precepts. That lamb which tasted like million dollars may at any time lose its savor. I have had that experience with oysters: they tasted like heaven, so I bought a few dozen more, but I lost the taste for them before I ate them all. The instinct which may tell a person to eat flesh sparingly tells me to eat it daily. At some time in the future, I may reverse what I just wrote, yet in both cases, I will have written the truth. That's true instinctotherapy.

[Iguana]

Yes, the Universe is dynamic, always in a transient state, and so we are!