eveheart's Journal

[cherimoya_kid]

Have you tried vitamin D supplements, Eveheart?  they are usually good for autoimmune problems. Also getting plenty of sunlight is good, too.

[eveheart]

Have you tried vitamin D supplements, Eveheart?  they are usually good for autoimmune problems. Also getting plenty of sunlight is good, too.

I had the doctor check my Vitamin D level. It's not at all deficient. Perhaps it's the sunny California sun. I tried various treatments (food supplements, TCM, Ayurveda, etc.), but I couldn't make a dent in the range of problems I have, most of them without formal diagnosis. My primary doctor is the internet. Not always wise, but my health-plan doctors do not please me at all.

RPD alone has eliminated joint pain, psoriasis, gingivitis, chronic indigestion, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. Other paleo-related improvements are rebuilding of the arches in my feet (I switched from arch supports to "barefoot" or "minimalist" shoes). My next step is to take care of other problems, now that I'm not poisoning myself with toxins from food.

[cherimoya_kid]

I had the doctor check my Vitamin D level. It's not at all deficient. Perhaps it's the sunny California sun. I tried various treatments (food supplements, TCM, Ayurveda, etc.), but I couldn't make a dent in the range of problems I have, most of them without formal diagnosis. My primary doctor is the internet. Not always wise, but my health-plan doctors do not please me at all.

RPD alone has eliminated joint pain, psoriasis, gingivitis, chronic indigestion, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. Other paleo-related improvements are rebuilding of the arches in my feet (I switched from arch supports to "barefoot" or "minimalist" shoes). My next step is to take care of other problems, now that I'm not poisoning myself with toxins from food.

What exactly was your vitamin D level?  It should be 30 at minimum, and really more like 45.

[Inger]

I like your approach Eveheart!
I too use wisely picked (!) cooked animal foods rather than fruit. In winter at least. I never eat cooked "dishes" though.. but like you did, salmon with beans - gives me no major issues. Fruit makes me bloat and it takes time to get used to them. And I am so picky with fruit I would eat only wild fruits/berries or such. Not what you get at social gatherings.

Autoimmune stuff is complicated.. I bet you have ditched eggs, nuts and dairy? Because they are a no go if autoimmune issues... The diet gets quite strict but I guess you have no issues with it as you are looking for healing 100%.

Have you added seaweeds and seafoods in larger amounts Eveheart? They are antiinflammatory to a great degree! Cold is too, so if you do some cold adaption it would help the inflammation a lot! Same with earthing.
I guess you know about the light management/limiting fake lights too to get a great sleep, and not eating late helps a lot too. Good sleep is the most important thing for healing.

You are so right about having internet to your doctor..lol I do the same. I use doctors now only for testing/bloodwork and emergency and such.

[eveheart]

Have you added seaweeds and seafoods in larger amounts Eveheart? They are antiinflammatory to a great degree! Cold is too, so if you do some cold adaption it would help the inflammation a lot! Same with earthing.
I guess you know about the light management/limiting fake lights too to get a great sleep, and not eating late helps a lot too. Good sleep is the most important thing for healing.

In a day, I eat about 150 g of beef and 150 g of fish or seafood, plus tons of fat and a few mouthfuls of fermented veggies and seaweed. I live in a great oyster area, and I can get really good ones. I never eat nuts anymore because they are very irritating, no matter how well I chew them.

It has taken me a lot of soul-searching to get over the emotion of loss (deprivation), but it got easier when I focused on how delicious my food is, and easier still when I keep in mind how good I feel compared to before RPD.

[eveheart]

Elsewhere in this forum, I have contributed to discussions of very-low carb diets, living in ketosis, etc. My personal experience has been informed by several authors. Here is what Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek say in The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living: An Expert Guide to Making the Life-Saving Benefits of Carbohydrate Restriction Sustainable and Enjoyable

We like to promote moderation and a balanced lifestyle for many good reasons. ... But when we carry that over to diet, ‘balance’ is too often arbitrarily translated into eating relatively equal proportions of macronutrients from a variety of foods. Whereas this may work for many people, we have tried to make the case in this book that a subset of people (particularly those with insulin resistance) manifest themselves as having varying degrees of carbohydrate intolerance. [Emphasis mine.] Within this subgroup, some may remain healthy and functional by consuming 100 grams per day of carbohydrate, whereas others need to restrict this macronutrient down to 30 or 40 grams per day.... We don’t bat a therapeutic eyelash when we restrict gluten if a person has Celiac disease, or restrict lactose (milk sugar) in a person with lactose intolerance. Also consider the perspective of our pre-agricultural ancestors who consumed relatively little carbohydrate for hundreds of thousands of years before modern agriculture practices became dominant. And even into relatively modern times, the highly evolved hunting cultures of the Inuit and North American Bison People or the herding culture of the Masai offer testimony to the ability of humans to thrive in the virtual absence of concentrated dietary carbohydrates.

Carbohydrate as an Essential Nutrient Class A root concept of dietary need is ‘essentiality’. If no single component within a macronutrient class is essential to human well-being or function, then it is hard to argue in favor of a need for that macronutrient. And if we take that macronutrient away from the diets of individuals or whole cultures and they continue to thrive for a year or for millennia, case closed. -(pp. 47-48)

.

That's me, an obviously carbohydrate intolerant person. When they told me to eat more carbohydrates and less fat, I followed, doubling my body weight over the years. So now, when I learn that carbohydrates are the culprit, it is not that hard to adhere to an ultra low carb diet.

A friend of mine at work, talking about accountability and ownership, uses the phrase, "Pay me now or pay me later." It takes only a few days (like, a week or two) to convert to ketosis (pay me now). The up-side is feeling energetic, thinking clearly, sleeping well, waking up easily. My autoimmune conditions, like arthritis, vanish quickly. The flip side is grogginess sluggishness, achiness, water retention, obesity (pay me later).

We will always repeat pleasure and avoid pain. Sometimes what we think is pleasure turns out to be pain. It pays to think deeply and make the distinction.

I was moaning to a friend the other day about my deep regret over not being healthy, even when I knew about things like low-carb (Atkins) my whole adult life. She reminded me that everything past was as it needed to be. True that.

[eveheart]

Finally, I ordered from North Star Bison. I know, it took me a while to do this, but I had it to the last straw with my ex-butcher. Yes, my darling butcher and I had to break up. He changed grassfed supplier from Humboldt Grassfed Beef (in California) to another company, promising the same great meat at lower prices. What was that last straw? The new company doesn't sell offal!

Next, I tried another small market that put a few things on their order for me - pastured lamb liver, beef tongue, stuff like that. That order didn't come in for three weeks in a row, so I moved on to market #3 and ordered the same items. Again, nothing arrived, and the meat manager said he could have gotten the lamb liver, but he figured that I wanted everything all at once. Seriously? when a shopper can't get one item on their shopping list, does that mean they don't eat all week?

So that's what it took for me to order from North Star Bison. I got 4 eye of round roasts, 1 hump roast, 1 tongue, a bunch of marrow bone$ (desperate!), 2 lamb livers, and 1 each of thymus, pancreas, adrenals, and thyroid. The FedEx delivery worked out just fine. With my practice of hanging and aging meat, I foresee this as a 1-month supply of food. I can buy seafood locally.

I really like the way my refrigerator looks with all my bison in it!

[jessica]

eveheart why do you say "marrow bones(desperate)"  marrow is so tasty and super calorific, there aren't a lot of nutritional studies on it but from what I gather how the marrow actually works, there is no doubt in my mind its one of the more nutritious parts of the animal.

sorry you got the run around from your butcher! i work at a natural foods co-op right now and even with that IN they wont source me pastured pork belly(omg its amazing!)  I am noticing a lot of farms harvest spring beef and hoping to contact a few so that I may get some pancreas and other odd bits when they send em to the butcher......good haul eve!

[ys]

North Star is very expensive in my opinion.
I used them a few times but not anymore.  I get carcase quarters from Amish and butcher it myself. $3/lb delivered.

Be careful with adrenals.  Every time I tried them they give me very painful stomach for 2-3 hours.  Yuri reported the same thing.  I think all of those small glands are not worth the price.  They are so tiny.  Maybe except pancreas.

[eveheart]

eveheart why do you say "marrow bones(desperate)"  marrow is so tasty and super calorific, there aren't a lot of nutritional studies on it but from what I gather how the marrow actually works, there is no doubt in my mind its one of the more nutritious parts of the animal.

I eat marrow every day, but I've been unable to get it lately - these small, independent  butchers get 1/2 animal a week and a lot of people "fight" over the femur and humerus. North Star Bison charges $7.99/pound, and IMO this was the only overpriced item in my cart. I think it must be a supply-and-demand thing.

North Star is very expensive in my opinion.
I used them a few times but not anymore.  I get carcase quarters from Amish and butcher it myself. $3/lb delivered.

Be careful with adrenals.  Every time I tried them they give me very painful stomach for 2-3 hours.  Yuri reported the same thing.  I think all of those small glands are not worth the price.  They are so tiny.  Maybe except pancreas.

Price is a "location" thing. So is butchering. If I were to get a quarter from the Amish and ship it to California, it would exceed $3/lb delivered. Then, I'd have to hang it from the curtain rod and butcher it in my one-room studio, or maybe on my tiny porch. LOL

Seriously, they raise bison here in California, but the animals are slaughtered, cut, shrink-wrapped, and frozen in facilities that do not offer retail purchases.

I don't chow down on glands. Their size is a hint that a small snip will do.

[Adora]

I ate adrenals with kidney and suet together in a meal, and I was ok, but I didn't feel better, and it was one of my least favorite meals, maybe with greens, and I ate 1 adrenal at a time. 

[eveheart]

I just completed a week-long driving vacation around California. I packed a cooler with the necessities:
-old shoe made with beef muscle and lamb liver http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/display-your-culinary-creations/old-shoe-(beef)/msg99061/#msg99061
-fermented vegetables
-fermented vegetable juice
-marrow bones
-coconut oil
-coconut chunks
-seaweed
-avocados

My planning philosophy was that, if I had enough fat with me, I would be just fine. That was a good strategy. The cooler might not have been necessary, but I was traveling in a very hot desert area, and I didn't know how the food would react to the high heat.

For one meal, I took my children out to a restaurant and ate cooked sea foods. A few other meals were sashimi from restaurants along the way. I attended a conference that included sandwiches for lunch, but I had my own raw lunch packed and "donated" my sandwiches and cookies to a friend.

I have another trip planned at the end of the summer, this time by plane, to a wedding, and with a friend. I'm not sure how I'll plan that one, but I anticipate that I'll be eating more cooked food then.

[bookittyrun]

eveheart...  fascinating.  i wish i read this journal earlier.  it seems many of us on the forum start off rpd with the same / similar concerns, and eventually we find what works best for us... not what "plan" sells the most product, or books (phooey on those mainstream food gimmicks).  your journey with rpd shows you're an amazing person, i will keep tabs on your progress from time to time...

...just don't allow your affinity for butchers, convince you to pursue any guy wielding a knife!     

if you don't mind, i'd like to pass the link to your journal, off to a friend...  i think they might benefit from some of what's contained here...

[eveheart]

I've frequently wondered when I'd have something to post in my long-neglected journal. Today I finally got my first whole, slaughtered-to-order lamb.

Last year, I decided to buy a whole lamb from Nature's Bounty http://www.nbmeats.com/ near Vacaville, California, two hours from my home. However, at the time I was getting really great beef from a local butcher, and I visited Nature's Bounty once but never made the drive for a lamb.

In February, a local slaughterhouse was shut down, and finding good beef was impossible. Yesterday, I called Nature's Bounty and ordered my lamb. Today, my son picked up the slaughtered, chilled, and quartered lamb on his way here, and we spent about an hour cutting it up into pieces to hang in the fridge. I kept nibbling as we cut, and I can honestly say that this was the best meat I've ever eaten. We cut off the shanks and neck and gave them to my daughter's family for their crockpot. My hanging pieces are the shoulders, legs, four sections of ribs, and loins. I also have the liver, kidneys, brain, lungs, cheeks, fat, marrow, etc.

I think I'll get a lamb every month (in season) from Nature's Bounty. I have visited other sheep ranchers listed on EatWild.com, and NB is the most accommodating in terms of cutting (or not cutting) to order. Most ranches sell their meats cut into the popular steaks and roasts, individually plastic-wrapped, and frozen, with an emphasis on trimming away all the fat.

Special thanks to Sabertooth for his journal and videos. My son (the hunter) never opened a skull to get the brain out neatly, and I was able to tell him how to do it.

[eveheart]

A good find in the San Francisco Bay area: EGGS!!!

These pastured eggs come from a ranch near Chico, California. This egg rancher delivers wholesale to elite Bay area markets on the weekend and will add retail stops at $9/dozen (minimum 2 dozen). Although not as good as eggs that I might raise myself, I think they are way better than any I have seen at local farmers' markets and equal to what I can find if I drive for a few hours to buy them myself.

He also sells chicken, turkey eggs, and cooked Chinese-style foods. He can get pasture-raised lamb and beef from his neighboring ranchers.

He can be emailed at kfchickenfarmer (at) aol (dot) com, or on facebook https://www.facebook.com/kfchickenfarmer.wan.

[eveheart]

Insects! They've been on my raw bucket list for years now. In my own non-scientific mind, crab = spider and shrimp = grubs (larvae), so I've balked about trying insects because of my mental block about raw shrimp and crab. However, I've recently decided to overcome this blockage with insects.

My underlying reason to learn to eat insects is that I think insects would be a perfect survival food for any future SHTF. Survivalist city folks mostly think about food storage, so they seal up 55-gallon drums filled with dehydrated foods. The flaw in their thinking is that there will be a second STHF, when they run out of their stockpiled rations. Insects are a logical option in many scenarios, if one only learns the insect-scavenging and insect-rearing options that would work in one's climate.

I started thinking that scavenging would make sense - there are supposedly insects all over the place - so I went out one morning to scoop up a fingertip-ful of aphids from the rose bushes. Murphy's Law: the one time I go to eat them, the aphids were absent. Then, I looked around and found some tiny larvae munching on a rotting orange, but they were the tiniest pinhead size, so I looked some more - under rocks, in the top layer of dirt. Nothing! I even remember thinking, "It's June, and I haven't seen a single June bug this month!" I couldn't find a single insect in my entire 25' x 25' urban backyard! I came back in the house, found a small fly on the wall, grabbed and caught him, and SQUISH! I finally ate my first live insect!

What followed was some obsessive research about collecting and raising insects, and I decided to incorporated a small black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) farm as a combination composting/insect-rearing project in my backyard. The project yielded its first tiny crop today. I put a few prepupal larvae in a bowl, added some water to rinse off their tiny bodies, and ate them with a crunch. My judgment is that, one-at-a-time, they are flavorless. My mouth felt no perceivable wiggling in the moment before I bit down. There is a little chewing involved with the exoskeleton, but that part could be swallowed without chewing - I was merely exploring the texture as I chewed it. As an insanely good source of protein, these would definitely make a great food for every day or for a quick-crop survival protein. I plan to eat as many larvae and I collect from my composting farm. I believe that the taste is so unobjectionable that my whole family would be willing to eat bugs when the shtf.

About rinsing before eating, I wonder whether if I would receive any probiotic value if I eat a bit of the compost's bacteria that clings to the bsfl's body.

My next insect will be the ant. Drop a crumb of ant-food in the center of a bowl of a spoon, leave the spoon on the patio, eat the ants that gather on the spoon. After that: termites collected in my homemade termite collection apparatus. Maybe, after a while with bugs, raw shrimp and raw crab will deserve another try.

My insect selection is good for my climate, all three of these insects are native in my region. Witchetty grubs sound more gourmet, but I don't have any Witchetty bushes handy.

And, here's how I overcame the "wiggly" fear factor with live bugs: Imagine that the SHTF. I think, "There's no more food in the markets. Agribusiness is gone. No trucks are on the roads. Bandits have stolen anything worth eating. I'm hungry." Another victory for Mind over Matter!

[TylerDurden]

I'm rather  impressed. Way back at the start of going rawpalaeo, I thought of eating raw insects. So I foolishly bought some insect grubs(mealworms?) from a local pet-food-store. They didn't seem to taste of anything, really,  but my urge to puke was too great for me.Even if I find just a few fly-eggs laid on my meats, I suddenly find that the meat no longer tastes as good to me. I am well aware that this is purely psychological and a bit foolish since I have no issues with eating "high-meat". Well, perhaps an enforced  week of starvation might encourage me to try again...

[eveheart]

House-fly larvae are different, in that they exude a ton of ammonia-y urine, a gag-inducer for me, too. Some of our members relish that flavor, but it's way down at the bottom of my raw bucket list.

The beauty of BSFL is the mature fly itself - short life-span, doesn't eat or bite... just mates and dies - so you don't have any nuisance flies around the operation. Plus, the larvae crawl out of the compost as they are about to pupate, on a little ramp that you set up, so they are "self-harvesting."

The compost part is an urban homestead project I'm doing with my granddaughters. It's cool for kids - they can see the insects' cycle from egg, to larvae, to pupae, to adult. They can see the composting cycle really well, better than worm composting. The residue from the bsfl is quickly ready to be tossed in the worm pile for further decomposition.

This would be a cool business, too. You get paid as a commercial composting service, and the fly larvae product has high value as a livestock feed and fish meal ingredient. Unlike tropical crickets and grasshoppers, these flies thrive in more temperate climates. BSFL can also be fed with animal poop and the insects fed back to the livestock.

[Projectile Vomit]

Rainbow Mealworms and Crickets is a great place to buy live insects from, based on what I've read. I haven't ordered from them yet, but probably will. The idea of raising hornworms as a food source is appealing, as they eat live vegetation and I can taylor their diet to how nutrient dense I'd like them to be.

[eveheart]

Wow! I just read about hornworms on that website. I'd love to grab a leaf full of their eggs from a tomato plant and see if I could incubate and raise them on non-nightshade vegetable matter.

[van]

A good find in the San Francisco Bay area: EGGS!!!

These pastured eggs come from a ranch near Chico, California. This egg rancher delivers wholesale to elite Bay area markets on the weekend and will add retail stops at $9/dozen (minimum 2 dozen). Although not as good as eggs that I might raise myself, I think they are way better than any I have seen at local farmers' markets and equal to what I can find if I drive for a few hours to buy them myself.

He also sells chicken, turkey eggs, and cooked Chinese-style foods. He can get pasture-raised lamb and beef from his neighboring ranchers.

He can be emailed at kfchickenfarmer (at) aol (dot) com, or on facebook https://www.facebook.com/kfchickenfarmer.wan.

 
 Eveheart, I'm believing eggs to be the least paleo of all animal products.. and it's because ( especially from Chico ) that Ca. doesn't have enough rain to support greens and bugs year round.  Even with green food and bugs, chickens unless on an incredible pasture will still eat 90 percent of their food being corn and soy.  Ducks can go as low as fifty percent, and geese can get all their food from grass.  So basically eggs are like eating cattle that have only been in feed lots.  I've had my own chickens and ducks years previous and had elaborate irrigated pastures and sprouted all their grains to about six inches tall in flats,, a lot of work, but the eggs were like gold to me. 
  I think it's easy to forget just what chickens are eating, and to be mislead by the words organic and pasture raised.  My guess if you saw the chicken yard that the Chico eggs come from, and you saw the dry dirt, chicken poop and feathers, and watched what the chickens were actually consuming you might feel differently.  But then maybe I'm just being too neurotic. 

[eveheart]

I'm with you on eggs, Van. Even when I buy the "best" eggs in California, I always have mental question marks about some of the things I see at the property. For example, Tara Firma farms had the most correct look, with hens pecking at the edges of a forested area; the mental question mark was that the number of hens I saw couldn't have produced all the eggs I saw for sale in their store. Maybe they had lots of hens at lots of forest edges, or maybe their main egg operation is cooperatively farmed in many locations that are not as ideal as the ones they show.

The Chico egg rancher was a little interesting. I found his ad on craigslist posted under a Santa Cruz mountain location. His eggs were above average, in my opinion - truly fresh, yolks to die for, and fertile. For the next order, I asked the rancher where he was in the SC mountains, and he said he came down from Chico. His story: he was a Sacramento restaurateur who wanted to get out of the city and knew there was a need for superb eggs in the restaurant industry, so he bought some land and went into business. I still thought his eggs were excellent, but I was uncomfortable that there was no ranch to visit. Another question mark: an egg rancher who has to fill market orders is going to be more concerned with yield than with feed quality. Also, placing an order was a little hit-or-miss, so I stopped ordering from him. (The other part of his operation was producing commercial quantities of some Asian slow-cooked bbq meats that are sold in restaurants and delicatessens.)

The best eggs I've had in California came from an organic vegetable grower in the Salinas Valley. He had his hens pecking on his vast no-pesticide vegetable rows - plenty of grubs and worms there. You brought your own egg cartons. First come, first serve for his modest supply of eggs. No eggs in winter, as nature intended.

I think that egg mislabeling is a US phenomenon, driven by our appetite for cheap, year-round eggs. We do that with all other food production, so why should hens have it better? Abundant food at low prices is our number one demand, which kind of makes sense when you consider that we have a 300,000,000 mouths to feed. I'd hate to have roving hoards of my starving neighbors loot my lamb when Costco runs out of food to sell.

The bottom line: I don't buy eggs often, and when I do, I accept their imperfections in the name of Urban Paleo, where everything is a compromise.

[Projectile Vomit]

Great points regarding egg quality. Good eggs are tough to find. As with beef and other meats, the problem is the commercialization of egg production. A chicken can get 100 percent of its food from most landscapes if there are few enough chickens foraging on a large enough area (and predators are kept at bay). The problem emerges when a producer wants to make money selling eggs. Then you need more chickens to produce more eggs, and larger numbers of chickens can quickly overtax land and their foraged diet needs to be supplemented with commercial feeds. Ducks are better at foraging in temperate climates as they're from here (chickens are originally tropical birds), and geese are better still. If I took up the raising of fowl, I'd probably go for ducks over chickens. There is a producer of duck eggs here in northern Vermont who feeds very little grain (less than 25 percent of his ducks' total daily calories) during the summer months. The eggs are amazing. He's only able to bring about 4 dozen to the farmers market each weekend though, and they're generally sold out within 30 minutes of the market opening. I managed to get 1.5 dozen eggs this morning, but next time I might be too late.

[eveheart]

MAGGOTS!

(Oops, I mean: HOUSEFLY LARVAE!)

Because I live in an vast city (3rd largest city in California) that relies on trucking to supply it's food, I've been wondering about survival food. What would I eat if the trucks stopped rolling? What could I store that would exempt me from having all my sealed barrels of emergency rations stolen by strong-armed bandits?

First, I thought about sheep, goats, and chickens, but those animals are not food-for-tomorrow, and I really don't think I can raise happy livestock on my 400 square foot backyard (the size of a 2-car garage). Even black soldier fly larvae (bsfl) take three weeks to reach their tummy-filling size.

I set up a bsfl "farm" anyway. With the native bsf population, I got some bsfl growing in the bin, but I realized that this is too slow a process for emergency food. However, as luck would have it, houseflies found my bin and provided me with fistfuls of larvae in a day or three. For days, I eyed those wigglies with disgust, but as I contemplated the ease of attracting flies (and their rapid reproduction), my mouth started watering.

I know I'm not the first on this forum to eat fly larvae. Some members report eating chunks of maggot-infested meat with great relish. That enjoyment level may be in my future, but for now, I'm settling for eating them frozen. The freezing kills them, and that makes all the difference to dissipate my yuck factor.

The first two frozen larvae made me feel queasy. I reasoned that this queasiness was all in my head - such a tiny amount of anything wouldn't make me feel sick to my stomach - so I ate some more. From their frozen state, I dusted off some of the clinging compost dirt. The bite was a creamy POP! that I found enjoyable. The taste is negligible.

I'll keep my bsfl bin going, fwiw, and I'm adding red wigglers in a regular compost bin. (My city sells discount compost bins and offers free classes on composting with red wigglers.) But my main experiment is going to be with fly maggots. I'm going to quantify my experiments to find out how much "production" I need to feed a family. I will "fly-proof" my composting with screens so I don't get such a strong maggot smell all over the yard and grow my maggots in jars. I think a tray of about a dozen 1-quart mason jars with a little bait in each jar will do it. My goal: sustain a family on a "ranch" the size of a garage. Maggots and flaxseed sprouts should do the trick. I'll post pics one of these days.