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For those unfamiliar with the famous ?Fail Blog,? you should check it out. It is an encyclopedia of the comical side of human blunder. Up there with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Stuff White People Like (JennytheNipper, please click on the Stuff White People Like hyperlink) as one of my favorite humorous places on the internet.  This is one of my favorites entitled “Activist Fail.” 



In today’s installment, we’ll summarize my milk diet adventure ? in which I drank nothing but raw milk for weeks on end?

I called this one ?milk diet fail,? not because the milk diet was a complete and ?udder? failure ? which it certainly wasn’t, but because I didn’t quite make it 30 days like I had hoped to.

Yes, that’s right, I’ve been eating solid food for 4 days now, and loving every last delicious, hot, salty, spicy, crunchy, chewable morsel of it. In fact, I can’t remember enjoying making and eating food as much as I have the last 4 days since ?bagging? the milk diet.

On the 26th day of the milk diet I started having some gastrointestinal issues. I woke up and fasted for most of the day on the 27th, bent over in pain and pooping every 30 minutes. By the end of the day, the last thing in the world I was wanting to do was drink more m?f?in milk. Boo to the Moo.

Couple this with the fact that I was in basically a hyperallergenic state and snotty as hell, and I was ready to mooove on. I was even snoring for the first time in a decade or so, and keeping Aurora up at night. I had to sleep on the couch by the end of the milk diet ? or, more accurately, lying awake on the couch at night.

Still, the milk diet did deliver in many of the categories in which I was seeking deliverance. I began taking an interest in the diet after reading certain things about it. Of course I was interested in its alleged ability to cure disease. I mean, one of the co-founders of the Mayo Clinic, J.E. Crewe certainly felt confident in it:

?’the treatment of various diseases over a period of eighteen years with a practically exclusive milk diet has convinced me personally that the most important single factor in the cause of disease and in the resistance to disease is food. I have seen so many instances of the rapid and marked response to this form of treatment that nothing could make me believe this is not so??

-J.E. Crewe, co-founder of the Mayo Clinic (Excerpt taken from William Campbell Douglass? The Milk Book; 1984).

But more specifically, I was interested in the fact that it raised body temperature, raised blood pressure in those with hypotension (while lowering it in those with hypertension), and raised the resting pulse ? all signs of raising the metabolism, which is obviously a key focus of mine. I have always had very low blood pressure ? not a bad thing, and definitely better than having high blood pressure, but I am still unsure of whether or not it’s really better to have blood pressure at 105/66 vs. 120/80.

Milk diet authors certainly noticed people healing from chronic disease while blood pressure went from low to normal. And very low blood pressure almost always accompanies a low body temperature in underweight people. So, in some respects, low blood pressure is a sign of being in a low metabolic state (ironically, so is very high blood pressure).

I’ve also had a low resting pulse throughout my entire adulthood. I remember as far back as high school when I was having my wisdom teeth removed, and the doctor woke me from my drug-induced stupor to ask me what my normal resting pulse was. In slow motion, I told him ?about 40 or 45. That’s pretty damn low. During surgery it had dipped to the low to mid-30’s. That’s beats per minute.

Some, like Ray Peat, believe that the resting pulse is a better indicator of metabolic health than the body temperature. Is this true? Maybe. I’m open to it, but the body temperature thus far has been a much more reliable indicator. I certainly don’t think you’ll find an obese person with a low resting pulse like that of an Olympic athlete, but you’ll certainly see a low basal body temperature ? which I still feel is more telling.

Still, resting pulse does fall the deeper into calorie deficit that you travel (barring the adrenaline rush you get in the beginning). So it is a sign of a low metabolism ? or at least the body making efforts to conserve energy when at rest (which would make sense in light of Olympians and endurance athletes, whose bodies shut down into near hibernation when they go into a restful state).

Anyway, here are my final stats during my 26-27 day raw milk fast.

-Blood pressure up about 10-14 points systolic and an equal amount on the diastolic side.

-Resting pulse came up over 60 (from the high-40’s to low-50’s) and remained there or higher throughout the milk diet and persists now ? sometimes as high as 70 bpm.

-Body temperature, which had quickly and suddenly fallen to 96.9 degrees F due to my dietary deviance leading up to Aurora’s jaw surgery (ice cream, French toast, chocolate cake, all-you-can-eat pancakes, fruit juice, you get the picture) rose to above 97.5 degrees F. I’ve had some readings at nearly 98 degrees first thing in the morning, and mid-day temperatures have consistently run above 98 degrees F for the first time since I began keeping track of body temperature in 2008.

It’s also worth mentioning here that, despite eating ungodly amounts of calories ? eating basically all day long and gaining 5 pounds of sheer body fat during the month of April, my body temperature dropped and appetite increased ? once again confirming to me that the greatest factor in maintaining good health and a strong metabolism is food quality, not quantity (although you can certainly combine both for an added bonus).

My weight change was -1 pound. That’s it. This was strange as I lost 5 pounds in the first 7 days and then slowly replaced this lost weight up until the end. I really had to force feed myself to do it though. I didn’t have the slightest urge to eat the entire time, and found myself daydreaming constantly about not eating and exercising like crazy towards the end. Eating every 30 minutes sucks. But hey, it clearly impacted my physiology the way I anticipated.

Anyway, that’s that. The milk diet could really be a powerful healing tool. Sure, it’s not easy. And I had my fair share of struggles throughout it ? mainly being snotty, sneezing a lot, wheezing, having the occasional gastrointestinal complaint (pain, constipation, foul-smelling stools with the consistency of clay), and feeling like I was perpetually fighting off a head cold/sinus infection.

It’s certainly worth noting that the milk diet is about as close as you can get to a sure thing for curing tooth decay. My teeth, after nearly 4 weeks of 6 quarts of raw milk daily are the best they’ve been in years. They are incredibly strong and pain-free. I feel like you could hit ?em with a sledgehammer and they?d remain intact.

Interesting experiment. Learned some stuff for sure. Time to Moove on though!