Toby Martin writes:

>> All animals have a sort of internal guide as to what foods they need
>> which can be had in their environment. When you are eating an unnatural
>> diet you confuse this innate sense and/or deactivate it. Getting back to
>> a more natural diet seems to awaken this sense.
>>
>> I apologize if I'm not answering your question in a meaningful way.
>
>No, this is a great answer; kind of what I thought you'd say, but I
>didn't know for sure.
>
>I would still like to hear how other NeanderThinners choose their
>proportions of meat:vegetable matter.

Well, my opinion is that while the "eat what your body tells you" is very
good advice, and something I tend to do myself, at the same time when you
are first trying to get a handle on things, it may not help much to hear
that, as you are perhaps intimating. Sometimes guidelines are necessary, or
can at least be helpful, to ease you into learning the ropes of what your
body is capable of handling in the first place. Like someone said, if it
was up to them, they might eat nothing but fruit and nuts all the time, and
that's not the Neanderthin program. And I have heard about instinctos who
will eat themselves into a stupor waiting for the "instinctive stop" that
never comes, or at least doesn't until it's too late, so when you are first
getting the hang of it, instincts can be misread. My opinion is that while
they are helpful, instincts may not be totally reliable outside the ancient
environment of relative scarcity that kept a lid on their unfettered
expression.

What I find is that if I am eating meat at least once a day, then 4-6 oz.
at a time will satisfy me, and usually meat for one meal a day, although
occasionally two. However, I was a vegetarian for 17-18 years, and possibly
that was because I am someone who isn't high on the scale of needing to eat
*tons* of meat, although I sure feel a lot better with a *regular* amount
these days. My advice for beginners like ex-vegetarians in particular is
that 4 oz. at a meal to start with is enough. It can take your stomach a
few weeks to ramp up to the levels of digestive acid necessary for larger
amounts.

Also, I tend to be a "path-of-least-resistance" type of person; and since
meat costs more, is more of a hassle to fix (than raw foods like
nuts/fruits, etc.), and in the case of muscle meats more of a hassle to eat
(because it can be so goddamn stringy, and not always chewable down to a
swallowable bolus--I can sure see why the hunter-gatherers left it till
last!), I sometimes revert back to previous semi-vegetarian ways out of
pure laziness. After a spell like this, lasting up to a couple of weeks,
however, it may take 8 oz. of meat at a time to completely satisfy me
coming off the drought. Or if I am only eating meat every other day, or
every few days, instead of every day, the portions also may tend to go up
into the 8-oz range.

One thing I find, too, is that my digestive system can handle somewhat
larger quantities of fish than red meat. Too much red meat will log me down
a bit and zap my energy some, so I have to watch it just a bit. On the
other hand it helps keep me energized if I don't overdo what my digestive
system can handle. I found when first coming off a vegetarian diet a few
years ago that I had no trouble digesting fish from day one (starting with
4 oz.), but had to work my way into the red meat more slowly. I have also
started to eat red meat a lot more often these days, because although I
started off on fish and actually like fish more, the quality has gone
downhill at the grocery store considerably in the 3-4 years since I gave up
vegetarianism (and the decline is a bit alarming to me), and the poor taste
and quality recently have made me gun-shy. I don't experience this problem
at the local Mennonite butcher for red meat--so far, at least.

But these amounts are just what works for me. There are others here on the
list saying they eat 2-3 lbs. meat/day, which I don't think I could do,
even if I could afford it. And frankly, there are times I *would* like to
experiment with eating more than 8 oz. at a meal, or at least only one
meal/day, for extended periods of time, but I mean, jesus, 14 bucks for a
cut of sirloin from the local Mennonite butcher here lasts me only two
meals. That's awfully expensive to be eating every meal for someone on my
kind of salary (and I haven't found any kind of meat I like much other than
expensive fish, sirloins, and easily-prepared ground meats, which are also
not necessarily that cheap from the butcher).

One thing I would like to add here is that I know some ex-vegetarians
(speaking about a crowd I am more familiar with) who found they didn't need
that much meat to make them feel a *lot* better. Remember people vary quite
a lot, and our hunting/gathering ancestors as far as we know also varied
tremendously in the amount of meat they ate. Just because someone here says
they eat 2-3 lbs./meat a day every day, or if someone else says they need
meat only a few times a week, don't take either as gospel. But from what I
can see, the range would probably be somewhere between 4 and 12 oz. at a
meal for most people (Troy and Ray being at the high end of that, maybe as
much as a pound at a meal, doing the math on what Troy has stated of his
daily average, I might guess. Troy? Ray?).

On the other hand, if we were living strenuous hunting/gathering lifestyles
working out for half the day every day, 4-12 oz. might look pretty puny.
I've read documented evidence of the aborigines eating as much 5 lbs. of
meat at a single sitting when they are having feast times after the lean.
Here is a quote: "There are numerous reports of Aborigines eating 2-3 kg
[i.e, 4.4 to 6.6 lbs.] of meat at one long istting, taking maximum
advantage of an abundant food supply on those irregular occasions when it
was available. It can be argued that the feasts were critical to the
survival of Aborigines as hunter/gatherers, as they provided excess energy
which could be converted into fat and deposited as adipose tissue, thereby
providing an energy reserve to tide an individual over periodic food
shortages. [O'Dea, Kerin 1992, "Traditional diet and food preferences of
Australian Aboriginal hunter-gatherers." In Whiten & Widdowson, Foraging
Strategies and Natural Diet of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans." Oxford:
Clarendon Press.]

I am also of the opinion that much might change about our opinions on
appropriate amounts of food, and their macronutrient profiles, if we had as
high a sustained energy output as our ancestors likely did. I have to laugh
at the bird-food amounts many people eat and the recommendations by dietary
officials of in the mid-2,000 calorie/day range for men and the low to
mid-2000-calorie-range for women. It is obvious no one is exercising very
much if they can't eat any more than that and not gain weight. When I used
to run 6-10 miles a day when I was younger, it took close to 3,500 calories
to maintain, and I have known of runners eating more like 4,000 to 5,000
calories a day if they were marathoners. Loren Cordain has a recent paper
out on evolutionary aspects of exercise suggesting that the amount of
exercise our Paleolithic forbears did was the equivalent of running 10
miles/day with a 25-lb. load on their head or back. I would like to see
more food studies done of the nutritional requirements and food intake of
individuals today who are putting in that kind of exercise load--people
like dedicated bodybuilders and runners or cross-country skiiers--I think
it would tell us a lot more about the body's nutritional requirements that
we were actually evolved for than current RDAs and dietary recommendations.
Those kind of exercise loads might make 2-3 lbs. of meat/day look pretty
normal, who knows.

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS