Roy:
>The other change I made in my raw experiment this time was the addition
>of RAF (egg whites and sashimi). This seems to have made a difference as
>well. On my previous vegan raw diets, after a few days I get a light,
>disconnected feeling, which is pleasant and unpleasant at the same time.
>It seems that the RAF has a kind of "grounding" effect.

Kirt:
I share your impression. This grounding is very apparent compared to a
vegan diet in my experience. And, perhaps surprisingly, there is another
side to the RAF issue for many instinctos: "advanced" RAF like aged fatty
fish, aged meat, bone marrow, and even shellfish, when attractive, provide
a pycho-physical rush that can only be compared to a mild buzz. In my
experience, this buzz takes effect within five minutes after consumption,
and may last as long as an hour or two or more. It is not a disconnected
feeling, and not like a sugar high, but something very pleasant and
"centered". You _know_ when experiencing it that your cells are basking in
the long-absent nutriment of primo RAF. One feels a bit like superman, but
with both feet on the ground, so to speak. Bee larvae has led to this
sensation whenever I have eaten it. Further, my experiments with raw butter
show a similar effect.

>i.e. routine
>aches and tensions are still draining out, yet I remain comfortably
>connected with my body, if that makes any sense. The only downside :-(
>is that yoga is less pleasurable, since there is a lower delta between
>the post-work-pre-yoga stressed-out me, and the post-yoga relaxed me.

This is very interesting, but I'm not sure I understand because I don't
know what a "delta" is. Are you saying that yoga isn't giving you the
satisfaction it did before because you are feeling better overall, that
your "baseline" is higher so the boost from yoga isn't as pronounced?

>A couple of things still bother me:
>Eating just the raw egg whites and risking the B deficiency, or
>including the yolks. (My cholesterol was extremely high even when I was
>a vegan. I don't want to take any risks till I have more facts than just
>a passing reference in Severen's book that whole raw eggs will not
>hurt.)

I know it seems maybe less reasonable than research, but you can try
trusting your taste as a short-term experiment. If the yolk is attractive,
it must have some utility. It would almost be an anomoly if you found that
your high cholesteral levels did not normalise after a time all-raw,
especially if you are including raw sources of fat. Egg yolks contain high
levels of cholesteral, but also _very_ high levels of the molecular agents
that keep cholesteral in "solution". Perhaps in a person "suffering" from
high cholesteral levels, the body needs this missing nutrient to normalize
its cholesteral metabolism. Researchers will need to report the details
someday, but the cholesteral reducing effects of fish fats is already quite
extensively documented. Certain shellfish, wild shrimp, lobsters, etc. all
have high cholesteral levels but don't appear to promote the cholesteral
problems associated with the SAD.

In fact, I would be more worried about "artificially" eating the white
while eshewing the yolk. Over time there may be some sort of imbalance
resulting from such a habit. Of course, I _don't_ know. Aajonus
Vonderplanitz claims that both yolk and white should be eaten together. I
don't know anyone who promotes eating only the white, but I'm sure someone,
somewhere has! ;)

Instincto lore has it that they should be tested separately. Word is that
yolk is vastly more popular than the white. I imagine mammals encountering
an egg might be a] quite sloppy relative to us with a spoon, etc., and b]
simply going after the yolk but unable to separate it as well as we can.
Still I have heard of people liking the white once in a while.

Eggs have been a frustration for me. I ate heaps of them cooked as a kid
(esp. as a special recipe in combination with Corn Flakes which my mother
concocted because i wouldn't eat eggs otherwise--and could not stand runny
yolks at all). I have eaten a couple doxen eggs (total) over the years but
never with great relish. They are just OK, not fantastic (rich and salty
and sweet) as the people who are "on top of" them report. This may mean
that I'm am still overloaded with cooked egg molecules and not really
opened up yet to raw eggs. This has been called being "blocked" for eggs.
In a sense it appears that I "shut down" for eggs very early on as a child,
since I wouldn't even eat them cooked--unless in that "corn flake omelette"
dish, which became a Staple for me: I made it well into my college days a
few times a week!)

Interestingly, at Burger's Montrame Chateau I tested a "rotten" egg that
was all different dull colors and decomposing but with an intact shell.
(Bruno was enjoying giving me a "backdoor" tour of foods and I ate one of
their grasshoppers, a couple dried bees, and these rotton eggs.) The
texture was weird and there was a thin watery substance that was very
strongly-flavored. The kicker was that it smelled _exactly_ like this
cooked egg/cornflake recipe I mentioned above. (It had a million
contrasting flavors; perhaps a variety of bacterial life?) Bruno said this
probably meant that it would be useful in detoxing the old eggs that it
smelled like. Unfortunately all this "testing" happened on just after a
satisfying Montrame fruit lunch so i wasn't really hungry for anything
anyway...

Still, it is hard to get really good eggs in the USA. Lots of them are
marketed as "free-range" but are always given prepared feeds as well. Then
again, when people really have the taste for them, it doesn't seem to
matter if they are of the highest quality, but it would be best if they
were. (One way--but certainly not instincto--to eat raw eggs is to use the
yolk as a salad dressing. Its pretty good really. I did so for a while
hoping to unblock for eggs, but to no avail.:(

I go into detail on this because being blocked for a particular food can be
a very frustrating thing. I have a friend in Holland who could never get a
taste for meat or seafood and drifted back into cooked foods as a result.
Sometimes one can be blocked for a food they never had cooked, but probably
more often it is one they are overloaded with from lots of cooked
consumption. Potatoes, for example.

But Roy, I must tell you that we could care less about fresh meat or fresh
fish fillets. Sashimi is preeeetty boring; at its best pleasant and at its
worst bland with a bad "mouthfeel". Fresh meat is often tough, acrid. Other
people do have a taste for fresh flesh and fish fillets, and some
instinctos never get into aged RAF. But not us! Though, of course, we
initially cut our teeth (so to speak) on fresh RAFs.

I know you mentioned that you are not interested in meat at this point, but
I have been meaning to type up a bit about "approaching RAF" for a while
and this will be my excuse...

One way to get into flesh easier is to cut the meat into jerky sized strips
and put them on a wire mesh in front af a table fan at least overnight. (In
fact a distinction should be made between aged and dried. "Aged" can hung
(see below) or dryING, but dried means without most of its original
moisture.) Depending on how thick you slice the meat (and the humidity
level) it will be totally dried in a day or several days. We find it most
tasty after a day or two, but not very attractive when it is completely
dried (the taste change is weaker in dried RAF as well).

The same thing can be done with any fresh fish fillet (and fillets can be
cut into strips of most any shape you want). The outside dries crusty and
the inside "ripens" into a melt-in-your mouth lovely flavor (if, of course,
you have a taste for it). Another advantage of this method is that if you
don't have a taste for it the meat strips or the fillet simply continues to
dry and is storable in the fridge when it is pretty much dried out. Usually
while its drying you will easily be able to smell when you have an
attraction to it.

Note that the fat is usually prized in both fish and meat. Of course, some
fat tastes better than others (belly or "brisket" fat is the best cut of
meat for my money--tenderloin the worst!). Or the "head fat in wild salmon
is even better than the belly fat in wild salmon, but they are both great
when you have a taste for them. In any case don;t necassarily trim the fats
off from old habits and "fear of fat" conditioning. Or how about this: if
you do trim away the fat, mail it to us--we'll eat it! Of course, it
matters that the meat be of high quality. Supermarket meat is NOT.

(POLARICA at (800) 426-3872 distributes game meats, much of which is the
highest-quality meat commercially available in the USA. They are located in
San Francisco, but will mail order $150 minimums. They will also mail you a
catalog free for the asking. One could also ask them if there are any
retailers of their game products near you...)

At Montrame they hang larger chunks of meat in the fridge to age. The
fridge slows down the "ripening" process. They also have to worry (or did
before they were closed) about health codes or something. For their own
consuption though, they would _not_ refridgerate meat, but let it age at
room temperature. I know of one guy (living in NYC at the time) who bought
an old fridge that didn't work and used it for hanging his fish (gutted,
but otherwise whole and unfilleted). We have had various drying/hanging
systems in the different places we have lived and usually travel with a
swath of wire mesh (which folds easily into smaller sizes for packing)
especially if were are going to an area which has good seafood or the
possibility of wild game.

There was an earlier thread about the Food Patry which works well for aging
RAF, as well as drying fruit and sprouting even. Perfect Health Products
((800) 444-4584) mail orders it and Real Goods ((800) 762-7325) may as well.

I have even hung RAF from thread and fishing line in hotel rooms from coat
hangers where we got some good RAF but had no other way to age it.
Instincto-quality meat and fish, need not be refridgerated and can be dried
or hung at room temperature in all but the highest humidity/temperature
conditions. Moisture is the trouble. Large chunks of RAF will eventual go
bad, but not nearly as soon as you might think. If RAF quickly becomes
rancid, it may have been frozen (commonly happens with fish) or it may have
been raised on bad feeds (especially commercial meat and farmed fish). When
aging, high-quality RAF just gets tastier and tastier, you know you have
quality stuff! The point being that we like or meat/fish aged.

On the other hand, organ meats seem best if fresh (with the exception of
heart which is pretty much like very strongly-flavored flesh and can be
dried/aged), but we have had so few organs available to us that I don't
really know. I have eaten kidneys, adrenals, and brains (best flavor) from
properly fed animals and didn't fall over dead, in fact, quite the
opposite: they are empowering foods. (I remain blocked for liver :()
Shellfish are great fresh, but I've often eaten them when they are dead,
opened a bit and drying out. Much stronger, which means better tasting if
you have a taste for it and worse if you don't. Again, if all the evils of
bacteria stuff was true I would have died long ago. Nevertheless I would
NOT recommend "advanced" RAF to anyone eating less than 100% raw.I am just
being cautious here. While it would may be a worthwhile addition, all the
heresay I have ever heard about the safety of quality RAF has been from
instinctos. However, it should be noted that both Vonderplanitz and Schmid
report many benefits of RAF even when not on an all-raw regime...

Come to think of it: I am NOT recommending ANYTHING!! I am just sharing
what has worked for me.

>I also think that the RAF is preventing that perpetually hungry feeling
>that I used to have in past vegan raw experiments.

It is eye opening, isn't it? So many vegans seem to end up admonishing
themselves (and others) for their inability to avoid cooked foods, or even
animal foods (raw or cooked) for any length of time. The situation is
exasperated by vegan zealots who make it socially unacceptable to eat (or
even admit to experimenting with) cooked AF, much less RAF. All the while
those who have found RAF to be beneficial (your positive experience so far
is almost stereotypical in its predictability) watch on the sidelines and
perhaps suggest RAF as a possible solution to the problems many vegans
have, and then whamo: they are called on the carpet for their lack of
compassion, spiritual evolution, etc etc. For the most part the long term
vegans (raw or not, but especially raw) seem to become more and more
unbalanced, which is both cause and effect for further vegan ideation, and
a pitiful downward spiral is seen. (We were privey a while back to a post
from one of the NFL fellows who now considers himself "Dr. Raw Courage" or
somesuch. What will the next level of this fellow's descent be I wonder?).
The ideations become flakier and flakier and the zealotry more and more
needed in order to maintain a regime that for most humans is simply not
good nutrition. As longterm raw-vegans slip into (or continue to engage in)
secretive bingeing on "no-no" foods, the external resolve to keep up
appearences becomes even more tantamount in their public rap. Tom Billings
has posted many fine examples recently of _former_ fruitarians who report
that is what they were doing. On the other hand, a minority seem to do OK
on a raw-vegan diet, especially with supplementation, but it just ain't the
same as RAF I imagine...

Unfortunately, the inclusion of RAF in an all-raw regime is no assurance of
mental balance--as Guy-Claude Burger has shown for decades. Fringe people
are attracted to (and apparently invent) fringe diets, and the best food is
no assurance that emotional problems with be dealt with as they come to the
fore. One women in Farnce put it this way to me: "Instincto doesn't solve
your problems--it only helps bring them up into the open to be solved--or
not." Her words impressed me then as they matched my own experience. And I
am reminded of her words often as I watch the goings on in the raw foods
arena.

>My strength levels have increased. ( I gauge them by the amount of time
>I can stay in a handstand. I had left off for about 4 weeks after being
>into raw, then went into a handstand and found I was able to stay up
>significantly longsr.) My stamina has increased. (I measure this by the
>number of sunsalutes I can do.)
>My thinking and concentration have improved significantly as well.
>Furthermore, after about 10 hours of almost-continual staring at my
>monitor screen, my eyes don't appear to bother me as much.

Your experience, again, is almost stereotypical.

>One thing that bothers me is that I'm starting to look too thin. I'm
>normally 6'2" and 190-200lb. I was about 180lb when I started the
>experiment. Now I'm down to about 175 after six weeks of raw, and I
>don't want to get any thinner. I don't think I'm losing any significant
>muscle mass, but for my own vain reasons, I think I need to gain more
>muscle to compensate for the fat I'm losing. (I'm losing it everywhere
>else except around my stomach :-().

Many people have a time of weight loss after which weight returns to normal
levels. Of course, this has long been the line used in NH as well, though
the weight often never returns (so one shops around for a new ideation, CR
perhaps?). But there are no universals. I gained ten pound immediately on
instincto (from 165 on Fit for Life) to 175. When I eat "freely" of avos
and have lots of RAF available I gain another ten pounds to 185. I consider
185 to be overweight for my build and it pisses me off to a degree, because
then I am back at the old dietary of restriction in some way. The point
being that there is a variety of individual experience and you won't really
know what yours is until you experience it!

Further, you might find that without cassia you have an easier time gaining
back some muscular weight. Our body may be more interested in detoxing than
we are, so to speak. But who knows?

>I have raw egg-whites, barley green powder and fruit for lunch (try to
>stay in the zone.) Actually, I have two lunches at 10/11AM and 3/4PM.
>At 8PM have sashimi or egg-whites, followed by a creative salad of
>sprouts, veggies, avocado, seaweed. Finally fruit. (I have been adding
>brewer's yeast and miso - I wonder if this violates raw.)

I'm not terribly familiar with either BY or miso, but they might be
superfluous considering the high quality of the rest of your intake...I
wouldn't be surprised if you would be tasting them in your mouth in the
morning if it weren't for the cassia, but I'm just guessing.

>I'm really excited about getting over the hurdle of detox bad breath.
>Six weeks on raw is even better than I thought it would be!
>This may sound silly, but I think the de-toxification has a similar
>cathartic effect on the mind and emotions: I feel I'm calmer and
>happier. Maybe it is because my body is less tense. WOW! all this stuff
>in 6 weeks! I thought it would take months of detox pains first.

Cassia works wonders. I am very interested to hear of your progress on the
zone/instincto hybrid diet that you have so intelligently undertaken. I
suspect you may have more success in the long-term than many instinctos who
so easily overeat fruit, and overeat most everything it seems. The "eat as
much as you want if it's tasting good" tack of instincto may well turn out
to be the big mistake of the "early instincto days" which we seem to still
be in the throes of. Christian (who posted about the snail-eating kid and
later his inability to tolerate any cooked food) appears to have a simliar
diet going. You may both have much to teach instinctos about an even more
healthful regime...

>My flexibility doesn't appear to have improved though, and my Yoga is
>about the same (a bit less pleasurable as I described earlier). My
>martial arts training has improved as well, due to my stamina
>improvements. I also get less frustrated from lack of progress. I'm also
>a lot more alert in the evenings and mornings, hence it helps my
>attempts at meditation.

Thanks again for sharing your experience, I suspect that in addition to
_my_ great interest, there are many lurkers who are very interested in your
progress and your continued posts on the matter...well, keep posting
updates once in a while, eh?

Cheers,
Kirt