Day 9 and going strong?
Got a little exercise today and definitely felt a little faint in comparison to my usual self. My heart was still pounding unusually hard and fast for the amount of exertion I was putting out there.
I was really busy doing a bunch of other writing today. As we speak I think I’ve already topped the 20-page mark, so I’ll save my juice for the commemorative Day 10, which is, for those who aren’t mathematicians, tomorrow.
Today’s menu was pretty exciting. I cooked for convenience today, not variety, and it wasn’t all that enjoyable to be honest. Still, the nice thing about the diet so far is that food is something you stick in your mouth, chew, and swallow. It’s like a whole new level of neutrality surrounding food. I don’t think much else of food in general and can just get along with my day. It’s nice. So, here goes:
Breakfast: Chicken roasted in leftover bacon grease topped with extra butter
Lunch: Ditto
Dinner: Ditto
Snacks: Ditto
I did have 2 ounces of that Fontina I’ve been hitting right before breakfast, but that’s it. Chicken with chicken and more chicken. I did eat the gizzard and will eat the rest of the organs tomorrow even though there was some nasty green lovin? on the liver that will probably kill me.
I can definitely say that, so far, raw meat, in the form of red meat and raw fish, is much more enticing on this diet than cooked meat and seafood.
Bowels are flowing flawlessly for all those interested in that. Had me a nice one within 20 minutes of waking up. Although, I will not be satisfied until it jumps out of the toilet and sings a song of Christmas cheer. When I find a diet that produces that result, I will have found ‘the one. I hear that singing feces requires having a lot of fiber in your diet though, but I remain skeptical about that.
Hi Matt.
I just want to answer you on the Metabolic Typing deal. I completely agree with you that people are physiologically not so different that the diets of two different people could by something as different as an all fruit to an all red meat diet.
What I rather meant with Metabolic Typing (or biochemical individuality) is that there are small variations in the metabolism of people, which are evident. Some people just don’t do well on huge amounts of red meat, and prefer lighter, whiter meats such as chicken and can tolerate more vegetables and fruits. Others, on the other hand, do well only on red meats and fatty fish.
This does have to do with metabolic typing.
An example, as the more north you go, the lighter the skin and hair of the people is. This is adaption. If you on the other hand go closer to Ecuador you will find more people with dark skin. Of course today people have moved around a lot, so it doesn’t hold as true as it used to. But these changes on the outside (skin color, hair color) developed as an adaption over several generations, to a specific environment and climate. Exactly so there must be some internal adaptions we all have, according to where our ancestors lived and the food that was available.
You can imagine that in the tropics much more fruit was (and probably still is) consumed than in Alaska. Because of the climate and the soil, these differences have always been present, so for the people living in a specific area, the children slowly have become adapted to the food available.
Today people are mostly inter racial mixes, and nobody has ancestors from a single country, but everyone’s own metabolism is in some way still influenced by the adaptions our ancestors genes went through.
But most people do probably need meat, though, and I wouldn’t go as far to say that people with carb metabolism can thrive on a raw vegan diet for long time. They just do fine with more vegetable and fruit in their diet, something which wouldn’t work for a protein type long term.
The book Metabolic Typing Diet also takes it a little far in that it recommends different levels of vitamins/minerals, depending on which metabolic type you are.
A few questions about your ZC trial:
do you eat your eggs raw? Egg yolk raw? And what about your meats, are you cooking some of them while keeping others raw? raw butter yo uuse? More details of your zero carb journey!!
Thank you for doing this experiment by the way!
Why do you think you were unable to eat all raw meat before without craving junk food, but now it’s more appealing to eat raw than cooked? Could it be because you are losing more nutrients by not eating carbs? Something people ignore about the Eskimos and explorers is that they lived in a cold and harsh climate. They didn’t live in the tropics eating all meat. But Charles acts like you’ll get scurvy and die if you eat any carbs, even unrefined ones. Uh, yea, right, whatever.
I don’t have scurvy. My teeth are clean and free of decay, despite only brushing them with water. (Unlike Charles who is using tooth paste and mouth wash, which he claims are unnecessary, but continues to use. I didn’t brush my teeth much as a kid, except with water, and didn’t get any cavities until I changed my diet to eating more refined sugar, soft drinks, PUFA oils, flour, and other crap.
Where do you stand on the scurvy issue? What’s the cause of scurvy? I assume you wouldn’t agree with Charles that eating unrefined carbohydrates would cause such degeneration. And whether the carbs are perishable is not particularly relevant, IMO. Unheated honey is not perishable at all and I doubt it would cause scurvy or obesity or any other modern diseases to develop, unless eaten exclusively to the exclusion of protein and fat.
Based on Stefansson’s suggestions, vitamin C may only be required for carbohydrate metabolism. Eating exclusively boiled fish, according to Stefannson, was just as quick and reliable of a cure for scurvy as eating citrus.
The main reason I couldn’t tolerate an all-raw diet before was that I was eating raw honey as a carbohydrate. My hypoglycemic reaction was predictably severe. Three days was about as long as I could make it before having a flippin’ nervous breakdown.
I do believe in the therapeutic nature of raw animal products and other raw foods however, which gets back to the previous comment posted. I am not eating raw eggs on this diet so far, just raw red meat.
In the past, I had a terrible time digesting eggs. After eating raw eggs almost daily for several weeks I have never had any digestive problems with eggs to speak of. I find that very interesting. I do not eat raw eggs now because I can’t seem to get them down without gagging unless blended with cream and honey to the point where it tastes like ice cream.
I will say that the whole time I was eating raw eggs they hurt my stomach. Ironic as they cured me of stomach problems with cooked eggs.
How did they get enough fat from fish? I would think even fatty fish are too lean and would cause rabbit starvation unless you ate other fats with them.
If I eat zero-carb diet and add unheated honey, I do not notice any difference in how I feel. I don’t think unheated honey functions like other sugars, if the body is working right. Nor does AV. I have to add other carbs to avoid ketosis, as the raw honey doesn’t do that.
I also found the raw eggs caused stomach cramps, probably from anti-nutrients and toxins in the white. I don’t really care about eggs, raw or cooked. To me they’re very bland and disgusting.
What, specifically would you suggest to get the body “working right” so that I no longer have negative physical and mental reactions to simple sugars like raw milk and raw honey?
I think I know your answer already, “consume nothing but raw milk and raw honey!”
Perhaps that will be a future 30-day experiment :)
I do short high-intensity exercise, like Tabata intervals, and Art DeVany type of stuff. Also active sitting. If you don’t have much money, a balance ball is cheap and effective. If you have $500-600 free I’d get a Swopper chair and use that for work and computer. It lets you bounce up and down, lean forward and backward, and rock from side to side. Very fun and the ideal chair for fidgeters.
I only do low-intensity exercise (like walking) and high-intensity exercise, like running up stairs and walking down until exhaustion, rope climbing, high jumping, rebounding, or KB swings. Make it very random, intense, unpredictable.
Diet is not a cure-all for diseases. If a person is sedentary, their options are more limited. You said in another thread that if a person can’t digest meats and animal fats, they should try eating ONLY fatty meat. I think we have to consider the overall dietary context. Eating the right combinations of food can heal the body, while the wrong combinations might damage health or cause disease.
The really exciting helath breakthroughs are being made by people on the fringes, who realize that the best way to treat a problem is to “attack it directly.” Like getting diabetics to eat lots of juices, raw milk, unheated honey, etc. It’s hard getting the balance right, but there are many anecdotal cases of people that have reversed serious disease by ignoring the popular nutrition dogma.
If you read old low-carb diet books like Pennington and Anchell, they had it down to a science more than the modern people like Atkins and Eades. They told people, it’s fine to eat a reasonable serving of potatoes, rice, grapes, banana, pears or watermelons, but if you ate other foods, like apples or canteloupes, you wouldn’t lose weight and might gain weight.
Such nuances are totally lost by Atkins, Eades, Bernstein, let alone Charles and Gary. Eades recently reamed out a reader for daring to eat an apple and half of a banana. He was very mad about the apple, but if he’d read Alfred Pennington, and Melvin Anchell (Steak Lover’s Diet), he might have suggested that the banana be eaten whole and the apple avoided.
Also Pennington and Anchell told people to avoid all artificial sweeteners, but that point is largely lost on guys like Atkins, Eades, and Bernstein, who claim they should be eaten freely. They’re no longer interested in “what works” (real world results), just the dogma that low carb is better than high carb. An apple is better than a banana, because it has less carbs. And if you look at the diet gurus and their followers, most of them aren’t particularly lean.
“Eades recently reamed out a reader for daring to eat an apple and half of a banana. He was very mad about the apple, but if he’d read Alfred Pennington, and Melvin Anchell (Steak Lover’s Diet), he might have suggested that the banana be eaten whole and the apple avoided.”
That should be he wasn’t very mad about the apple. He was mad about the banana. Half a banana, at that. If he had read Pennington and Anchell, he might say it is better to eat a whole banana than to eat half an apple. And to give up those artificial sweeteners completely, since Pennington and Anchell both realized in the past they prevented weight loss and even caused weight gain. I’d get rid of coffee, tea, and other stimulants (like cocoa powder or dark chocolate) too. It is proven that they raise insulin level (even decaf coffee). They have no value as foods. Why eat them?