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Originally Posted by Holiztic  sounds like you're a flexitarian, if you need a label 
ps: carnivore means eating nothing but meat: meat all the time, nothing else! you meant omnivore, I think
oh, and I am not on that boat anymore, we're totally TF and eat meat at almost every meal. |
Sure, I'll take a label! It beats having to describe ad nauseum what my diet is. But what exactly IS a flexitarian?
I know carnivore is an all-meat-eater, and that's actually what I meant to say, granted it was a tongue-in-cheek reference. So I just meant I've hardly gone from vegetarian to subsisting solely on animal flesh. But maybe I overstated it! I do consider myself an omnivore, it doesn't require that much meat to qualify.
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Originally Posted by nicolelynn You sound TF AND flexitarian to me. The term TF has sadly become narrowed to mean the NT/WAPF diet. Traditional peoples ate any number of things: all whale blubber, all milk or exclusively sea vegetables and fish, etc. You don't have to eat butter, liver and eggs every day to be TF.
I am slowly finding myself on a flexitarian diet as well. Strange as it is since less carbs are recommended in general for candida/parasites, I am starting to feel alot better eating more alkaline (LOTS of greens...green drinks with breakfast, green smoothie for a snack, salad with my veggie soup for lunch, veggies for a snack, 2 veggies with dinner, etc). Fill that it with a couple servings of TF soaked grains, nuts, beans, fruit and maybe 1 serving of animal food per day (or every couple of days lately).
It took me by surprise as I had tried the GAPS/SCD and I guess all the meat and fat wasn't really working for me. I've had the WAPF recommended 70% fat diet for the past 3 years and ended up with leaky gut. I'm not saying that is what caused it, but it didn't protect me. I'm now back down to about 30-40% fat.
I still stay away from unfermented soy, bad vegetable oils, extruded grains...I soak my grains, legumes and nuts. And will always eat SOME form of animal food. So I retained all of that from TF.
Now I just eat what works for my body.
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It's funny, I'm much more familiar with Weston A. Price than WAPF. I learned fairly recently that they are NOT the same, that is, the Foundation was not set up by Price himself, and that there is some lady (whose name has slipped my mind) who is kind of leading her own charge based loosely on Price's work. I've read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (well, ok, I didn't read ALL of it, but much of it - and then had to give it back to the library!) and for one thing is cemented what I had been instinctively feeling about sugar and white flour for about eight years. I've noticed that few people on MDC, though probably more people on this particular board, feel the way I do about sugar - that it's not something to be enjoyed "in moderation" but something that is just poison for our bodies, period. So I'm obviously pretty extreme on that compared to most.
I think you've mentioned some details I'm either not doing (yet) or totally unfamiliar with. The only soy in my house is commercial soy sauce, probably bad for us. But I don't eat tofu or drink soy milk or anything like that. I would probably eat edamame if it was in front of me. I soak my legumes, but I thought everbody did. I don't soak other grains because I just buy (whole wheat) flour at the store, not wheat berries. I don't have a grinder. I assume those are the grains you mean? Is soaking rice recommended as well?
I think we're in agreement that it's a journey. I doubt I have settled on exactly the diet that I will embrace for the rest of my life - and probably will always find things to tweak about it
Maybe my diet isn't "perfect" yet but I can tell you with absolute certainty that I feel about 800% better than I did last year, when I started, and that my feeling better is significantly attributed to my improved diet (the rest being attributed to actually sleeping! Yay!).
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Originally Posted by Cristiaz I'm in your boat. I was a veggie for 14 years but after discovering I'm gluten intolerant, a lot of my former (and unhealthy) protein sources were over. I don't know how to label myself. I guess it would be whole foods with a strong interest in TF. I do some TF and I post in that thread cuz all those mamas are super smart when it comes to food. I don't eat much meat. Maybe twice a week which isn't enough at all. I eat grass fed steak and wild salmon. I think since I went so long without meat, I've had to transition to eating it slowly. I don't like a lot of it. I hate chicken and turkey and would never eat pork. I hate hamburgers but LOVE the steak and LOVE salmon. I want to get a roast from our local farm and make roast beef slices. I feel I'm in an omnivores dilemma. I CANNOT eat it if I don't know where it came from and how it was treated. So aside from wild salmon, I don't buy meat in any stores, grass fed or not. Only from my local source.
I do make everything homemade. I do soak my grains. I make saurkraut and am learning about fermenting other veggies. My DD and DH drink raw milk and eat raw cheese but I HATE dairy. I'm lactose intolerant do to eating gluten when I shouldn't have so I couldn't do raw right now anyway.
I crave protein all week aside from my one or two nights I eat it. I eat lots of local eggs to get buy. Hopefully I'll figure out my omnivores dilemma.
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Yes, it's strange what coming off of vegetarianism will do to your meat appetite. I cannot stand chicken. Will. Not. Eat. It. Which isn't a moral or other choice, just can't tolerate even the idea of the taste. I considered raising and butchering my own chickens (I spent a lot of time researching them, and particularly learning about butchering, and I've decided I have it in me to kill a chicken - I think
) but... yuk. DH (also former vegetarian, for more like 15+ years) only wants beef, particularly steak. He tolerates ham steak and pork chops ok. I'm ok with beef but really want pork. I bought some bacon at the farm yesterday and when I make it, it will be savored like I once savored ice cream. Yum!
I like raw milk and have just now worked a half gallon a week into the budget (not much, I know, but a start). I would absolutely buy nothing but raw, local cheese, but I can't squeeze it into the budget. So it's conventional grocery store cheese for me, for now.
I'm with you on the meat, I will ONLY buy it locally from farms that pasture, and places I can visit the animals myself (though now I would also take the word of farmers I know who recommend a place - I know not all farms are able to allow free visitor access). I will, however, eat meat at someone else's house even if it's CAFO. Ghandi did that - as a guest, he would eat whatever was offered him without complaint. But I'm a guest maybe 3 times a year, so it's not often.
I feel similarly about eggs - I will only buy local eggs now. The two farms I get them from treat their hens great. One farm is the veggie farm, and the farmers are actually vegetarian. They literally love their chickens. The chickens are pastured but enclosed in large, movable fences so they are protected from predators. They get moved around every week. The other farm is a meat farm, but the chickens are allowed to completely free range all over the farm. I love seeing them, they lead completely free, interesting lives, visiting the cows and pigs and visitors as they like.
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Originally Posted by snowbunny I think there's too much emphasis on meat in much of what you read about TF online. That's not to say I don't think meat and animal foods are important. Frankly, I think a largely plant-based diet is both health and traditional.
When you look at traditional diets, oftentimes it wasn't just meat, eggs and raw milk; rather, much of the volume of food was largely vegetable - especially leafy greens. Additionally the broad range of traditional diets is interesting too: some thrived on rye bread and cheese, others blood and milk, others still fish and dried berries. What they did have in common was that they ate unprocessed, nutrient-dense foods that were often prepared (cross-globally) a certain way.
What ultimately matters, really, is that you eat in a way that optimizes your wellness.
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That's an interesting point about the emphasis on meat. Perhaps it's kind of a backlash against a popular (though not totally pervasive) opinion that meat is bad for you. For example, someone might say "I eat a really healthy diet, hardly any meat" as if the "hardly any meat" was what qualified as a healthy diet. (Me, I would consider that statement to have no information either way on the health of the diet). The Atkins diet told us that we could eat all the fat we wanted and just limit carbs, and went as far as to say we could enjoy McDonald's as long as we skipped the bun. Which, in my opinion, kind of missed the mark a bit.
Yeah, I read that in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Very, very interesting book. Price was way ahead of his time. At this point we're completely out of our ancestral ecosystems. My DH is kind of lucky in the sense that he is half pure Irish (and the other half mutt like the rest of us) and has SOME idea of what his recent ancestors ate (a lot of beef and mutton, I think!). I, on the other hand, have a lot of unknown ancestry, mostly European but some Cherokee as well. What's a girl to do? I had decided to make do with my own ecosystem and eat as much local as possible, though my local is very far from my ancestors' local. I wonder if there's a magic that can be made with one's own local ecosystem, eating plants pollinated by similar bees, cows that breathed about the same air and grazed under about the same intensity of sun.
