So, I'm not a long time lurker, but this is one of the few forums I've wandered across and actually felt the desire to sign up for.
A brief intro:
I'm 24, from the west coast of the US, and will be back in Sacramento, CA in a couple of days. I lived there for 4 years and will be returning to school there at CSUS. It is not my favorite place, but it does offer my favorite prices for school, ie I can afford to eat, and then sleep through class.
I have a fairly long history of random health issues, although I never would've considered myself unhealthy until I developed some chronically swollen tonsils. Those tonsils started me on the long path to eating my first raw steak a few months back. When I was younger I had sensitivities to what seemed like every food: wheat, corn, milk, peanut butter, tuna, etc. Now, looking at that list I think the problem with diet was woefully obvious, but at the time, since a human could not conceivably be unable to digest all food (no, raw meat, raw dairy and whatnot is not food in that context
), there must've been something wrong with my brain that led to a lack of appetite. I lived on oatmeal and sparse dinners.
Fast forward to after graduating high school, and I work at a lumber mill. I can eat damn near anything without putting on fat, and worked strenuously for 40h/wk without a problem. I regularly got less than 6 hours of sleep a night. At the end of that summer I slept more than 12 hours a night for months. I assumed I was simply recuperating from lack of sleep. After wasting some time pining over a lost first love and not going to college, I returned to the home town and that same lumber mill. Only, this time they had started treating the planed wood with an herbicide. Everytime a board slapped down, that shit would mist into the air. Towards the end of the summer I contracted what appeared to be strep throat. I was, or so I thought, healthily skeptical of doctors, but when it came to strep, I 'knew' that I would need antibiotics. Sure enough, the doc agreed thats what I had, and gave me a prescription. Two days later, my tonsils were back down to only twice their normal size, and the Doc calls me and says, "You don't have strep, stop taking the antibiotics. It must be viral." So, I did. The swelling in my throat ceased going down, and a few months later swelled to the point it affected my breathing. My failures with modern medicine are lengthy and were painful. Each time I went to the Doc out of desperation I was convinced they wouldn't do anything to help, but I didn't know what else to do. And, no, they didn't help.
Then, somewhere along the line, I started rinsing out my sinuses. That led to incredible relief from allergy symptoms. Not complete, but life was livable again. Then, since not everything else in my life was masked by constant tonsil related malaise, I noted that milk (ah, cereal, breakfast of champions) made my throat swell up worse. I cut it out for a few months, and then one day when I had nothing else to eat, or so I thought, I added it back in. My gut nearly took my life for that, and my tonsils took advantage of my distracted state (portions of my innards seemed to be trying to escape one way or the other) by swelling once more.
Finally, my brain connected the dots. What I ate actually affected my health. I know, huge leap of faith right there. After that, anytime something messed with me, I cut it out. As I ran out of things to eat, I looked up replacements online. It seems the first step away from SAD is the easiest to find, and most acceptable to try. Each step farther out was harder, both the acclimate to and to find reliable literature for. Here at the polar end, the RAF diet took me almost two years to find. A year back, I was forwarded something from Mercola (yeah, i think he's a two-bit hack, but the people he makes money off of do give him some good ideas) and it mentioned the protein changes when eggs are cooked. I drank my first egg the next day. Cooked eggs, especially scrambled, had always been an issue. Raw eggs at night, helped me recover from a workout. At first I was quite afraid of salmonella. As most of you will be not at all surprised to hear, I never got any sort of food poisoning from raw eggs. Speaking of food poisoning, the only time I have shat blood was after eating cooked food. It lasted for a week.
Anyway, when I finally read something in late summer about cooked meat being bad, it immediately occurred to me that it might be the same situation that I had experienced with eggs (and milk actually). A month later, I was convinced enough to try going vegetarian, if not vegan. Less than a week later, after having read some more about the Primal Diet, and after a bout with fatigue, depression, and a near constant headeache, I ate my first bloody steak.
Since then, I have noticed problems with both eggs and dairy. That is to say, I think that symptoms in relation to them finally became noticeable. After thinking, "great, now what the hell do I eat," I once more turned to the Internet, and was lead to this site after coming across some of Geoff's posts on another forum.
Well, that was an essay or two more than I was planning on, but hopefully someone will get something out of it.
I still haven't tried high meat, and I don't (yet) have a reliable source of suet, but those, I think, will be my next steps. Thank god someone tried this before me, cause there is no way I would've thought raw meat looked edible
. Speaking of, I still haven't been able to eat raw fowl. Any suggestions besides lemon marinade? That made no difference to me...
