On with the intro...

[Bacchal]

Greetings!
So, I became aware of the "caveman diet" in the latter half of my ten-year stint as a vegetarian. When I finally acknowledged, following those ten years of stubbornness, that vegetarianism wasn't doing me a whole hell of a lot of good, my curiosity was piqued by the idea of eating like our pre-agriculturist ancestors. I found my way to Mark Sisson's "Primal Blueprint" and Nora Gedgaudas' "Primal Body, Primal Mind." After reading all those wonderful healing stories, I was certain I had found the silver bullet for perfect health, after having tried to acquire it since I was 18, when I stopped eating meat. There were definitely small successes in health after adding meat back into my diet, but my slight, underweight frame didn't transform as much I had expected or hoped, nor did my hair-trigger mood-swings.
Since first coming to this in early 2010, I have been following some half-baked amalgamation of Sisson's spin on paleo and the WAPF, with a little of Kurt Harris' influence. Having struggled through intense cravings for foods that I know were probably doing me not much good, along with not getting much in the way of those miraculous results I've seen from numerous other accounts, I've become rather disillusioned. I eat the best that I can, tweaking things from time to time, knowing not to expect much in the way of progress. Though I dislike the word, I'm definitely a "foodie" and at one point, I think I just settled on the notion of eating all the foods I liked but stressing the highest quality and wisest preparations a la WAPF, yet I still can't let go of the idea of finding perfect health rather than settling for "good enough." Plus, I know some of these foods my likely damaged gut can't handle regardless of how thoughtfully prepared they are. I just finished "The Perfect Health Diet" by Paul and Shou-Ching Shih Jaminet, and while I gained a lot of new insights and knowledge, it doesn't stray too much from what I have tried in the past, other than the fact that they stress the importance of certain single-nutrient supplements for insurance and because of widespread deficiencies of said nutrients. I'm wary of such a strong, indefinite reliance on supplements, however, which I'm sure most here would agree with. The one thing I haven't tried, though, in all my questing, is raw animal foods. I have experience with raw eggs, milk, and rare steak and fish, but these were in addition to a mostly cooked diet. Raw was never my main focus, other than an extremely short, half-assed attempt at raw veganism in my early vegetarian days (I honestly don't know how people can do that long-term without feeling famished). Anyway, I'm opening myself up to the idea of eating all or mostly raw. I've dipped my toes in so to speak, but haven't taken the full plunge just yet. I have a grass-fed lamb roast currently thawing out as I type. I intend to cut off the fattiest portion of it and experiment. Hopefully, it will be a long-awaited revelation and resolution.

[CitrusHigh]

Welcome! You have gotten what you were after, this so called perfect diet (which is individual to each set of genetics) the only thing you were missing before was the raw component, seems like such a small distinction but its the difference between life and death, nurturing and poisoning, health and dis-ease, balance and toxicity. If you stick with this and adjust the specifics of the diet to what your body tells you, you'll be living on your biologically appropriate diet, aka your body's ideal diet. This will balance your biochemistry and you will be mentally balanced in a way you have probably never experienced before if you have or had mood swing issues.

We are here to help, so lean on us when you cant find what you're looking for in past posts or sticky areas. Best of luck, just a little more effort and you'll be home free! Congrats!

[Bacchal]

Thank you much! I'm sure I will have questions along the way, and I can tell there are a lot of knowledgeable folks here (you being one, as I've gathered from browsing your posts). It's humbling, as I have always been the go-to guy amongst friends and family for nutritional advice, but the more you know the more you realize how much you have yet to learn. I am happy to have found this forum.

An on-going balance in biochemistry would be a great delight, for sure! It's definitely balanced out a bit over the years since coming back to meat, but there is room for improvement. I've experienced peak mental health, or at least close to it, when doing neurofeedback. Unfortunately, I didn't have the money to continue, and at this point I've probably undone much of the re-wiring, but now I know that superlative mind is a real possibility, and that's exciting and a great relief.

On an unrelated note: I'm curious about "Thoth." Is there a consensus on the pronunciation of his name? I have heard it pronounced exactly as English speakers would expect it to be, which just sounds silly (and incidentally makes for a good joke: I saw a t-shirt with his image with the caption "I got thoth on my thirt"). I've also seen the pronunciations "toth" as well as "tote," both with a long "o."

[CitrusHigh]

To be honest, I'm not sure how its pronounced, I've always pronounced it however i feel like saying at any given time. So funny you would ask me just now, because I wouldn't have been able to answer you as confidently just 2 days ago , haha for sync.

Anyway, Im going to change my user name to reflect the update eventually but apparently the closest we know of for ancient, authentic pronunciation is...

" Thoth, a Greek name derived from the Egyptian * i aut? (djih-how-tee)"

The word stems from the Greek while this entity was supposedly Egyptian, and thus, that is where the most relevant spelling and pronunciation. Fascinating stuff though, highly recommend the works attributed to him. Whether or not he actually existed, the wisdom in those writings is profound. :-)

The balancing and harmonizing of your body's biochem is something that will happen when you are putting the proper [for your genes, its a meat of some sort(s)] fuel molecules in to your body on the regular. The cooked counterparts you've been eating til now can be considered slightly nourishing toxins. Your body doesn't welcome that food for health, it groans at the prospect of processing all those maillard compounds, all that burned, rubbery fat, all those oxidized nutrients, and no Biophotons, the light in our DNA molecules. What you should notice is more energy, less drag from eating/digestion (and hopefully the opposite), better focus/mental clarity, better reaction times, more coherent and more  articulate thoughts and words. The problem is that inherent in a cooked diet, even one as great as A WAPF style diet, is that there are profound nutritional voids where all of the life once was in the food. So everything you eat, your body has to do extra duty for, with rawness usually comes easy breezy digestion, because your guts are designed to melt raw meat in to mostly nutrition and there is very little waste left over. I seriously don't think people are able to comprehend this state until they experience it, almost like it reactivates your predator instinct and acuity. What I mean for example is, just before I left for my recent cali road trip I had to chase around a bunch of my ducks to butcher for the road. The thing about them is that they scatter every which way and flap their wings which becomes very distracting when youre trying to catch one individual bird in the group. All of a sudden things 'kicked on' inside of me and I was able to near effortlessly focus on the bird I chose, it was such an intense focus, a predator's focus like you see when a wolf or lion has isolated on animal from the herd, just a relentless chase with nothing but success as the focus. Hard to explain, but you'll know it when you experience it in action, its unreal.  Not that we need to be predators anymore if we don't want to, but it is reconnection with some of our oldest and most fundamental instincts and capabilities. To participate in a high risk hunt as a tribe must have been an amazing experience.