I needed to disable self sign-ups because I’ve been getting too many spam-type accounts. Thanks.
My crazy diet experiments (3+ years)
Another quick update:
- Been very low vitamin A for 2 weeks now
- Skin is a little less dry, but overall not much happening yet (as expected)
- Had cramps and diarrhea from kidney beans and I will not eat them again
- I was fine with white beans though
- Suprisingly no return of acne despite lots of white rice
But I really dont see a point in eating beans to be honest:
I bought them canned, but I have heard this is not optimal because of the resistant starch in canned products. According to some people resistant starch can slow down vitamin A detox, so I dont see why I should take this risk. Soaking and preparing beans myself just isnt worth it to me, I got no time for that.
Also if the point of beans is to get b-vitamins to balance the white rice, then you could do that much easier with just eating more meat. Beef has more Vitamin B1 than beans, and its B Vitamins are probably also easier to digest and absorb than the ones from beans.
I also read that Grant didnt eat any beans for his first year of low vitamin A and it clearly worked for him.
I also will from now on make fresh rice 3 times a day to avoid any resistant starch from rice.
Sorry for my delay, I obviously don't check this site on a regular basis. Thanks for the update. I'm not surprised, as I mentioned that I suspect that most if not all meat contains VA to some extent/in some form that our bodies are somehow able to use.
As far as your comment that it is not a great idea for people with a "broken system" to fast... well, in my opinion, these are probably the people who need to fast the most. 🙂 But I believe that you need to prep properly and refeed properly - choosing the wrong diet before/after could definitely get you into big trouble.
With regards to your question about how I feel about VA... I don't think about it at all. Honestly, the best thing I did was to step back and stop overanalyzing everything and trust my body and my intuition. The drug Accutane is indeed awful - it is a synthetic form of retinoid acid created in a lab. This is WILDLY different than a naturally occurring vitamin in a whole food. You simply cannot compare the two.
Sorry for my delay, Max, I don't check this site very often. I appreciate your response and obviously wish all the best for you in whatever path you choose. Just wanted to share what my experience had been, since our paths seemed similar but in reverse. 🙂
I can only judge a fruit-based raw vegan diet based on my own personal experience with it. Sure, you can find fruitarians who look totally malnourished and sick... but I don't know them personally, don't know their history, don't know their agenda and have no idea if they really even eat the way they claim they do. Plus, you can find unhealthy looking people on virtually every diet out there, and healthy looking people who live on fast food. I take those stories/videos with a grain of salt, to be quite honest. "Believe half of what you hear, and three quarters of what you see" (my dad's favorite quote).
I understand what you are saying about Loren pushing multiple fasts. I had the same initial reaction. However, the longer I do this, the more I believe he's right. Humans are so incredibly sick and toxic. As I'm sure you've heard Loren say a hundred times: "nothing heals the body except the body" (or some variation of that). Simply switching to the "right" diet (whatever that may be) is likely not enough to undo all the years of the wrong diet (plus all the other garbage thrown at us) - it makes sense to me that extreme measures must be undertaken. Personally, I believe that Accutane users definitely need to fast multiple times to get to optimal health. The drug is just so evil.
I do believe that quality fruit is a HUGE issue, and this is where you can run into real trouble. I went 100% all in on this lifestyle and am fortunate to live in a place where I can get amazing, ripe fruit most of the time. I have had zero issues with my teeth - I've had 3 dentists appointments thus far on this lifestyle, no problems whatsoever. As far as your comment about losing muscle and fat - again, I can only comment from personal experience. I have always been thin, but when I was on the low VA diet, I lost a significant amount of weight (for my body) very quickly. I began the diet around 115/120 lbs (I am 5'7") and within a month or so, I was down to 105. And I was eating SO MUCH. Bowls and bowls of rice, plus beef, plus beans. Upwards of 3,000-4,000 calories a day. In my opinion, something was seriously off here. Not to mention the fact that I was ravenously hungry ALL THE TIME. Now I eat about 1,500 calories a day, which comes mostly from fruit, and I'm never hungry and I am somewhere between 110-115. I am toned and fit, no cellulite, etc. and was able to rebuild quite nicely after my fast (though it did take a bit longer than I had hoped, about 5 months). I am obviously a female so I'm not sure if it is more difficult for males to gain muscle on this diet.
As far as you being able to eat raw meat post fasting without any signals from your body... I don't believe fasting (especially one fast) is a magic bullet. One thing I've definitely learned over the past few years is that there is no quick fix. I wasn't magically cured after my fast, and my body definitely wasn't sending me any kind of signals that I understood or could intelligently interpret. Almost two years post fast, I will say that that the feedback/communication between my body and mind has greatly improved - but I'm still a work in progress. 🙂 I also have said in a prior post that I do believe raw meat is far superior to cooked meat (on paper anyway - no way I could ever eat a piece of raw meat without gagging).
Your mango headache on your third day of refeeding...I'm not surprised! Ohhhh the symptoms I had during refeeding! They were WORSE than during my fast, likely because I was so toxic post Accutane and 4-5 months of beef, rice and beans. Also, I was down to 85 pounds at the end of my fast and my body likely had zero energy to really purge whatever had been broken down and stirred up during my fast. I believe that when I finally started to get some fuel (calories) in my body, it just accelerated/continued the cleansing process. Again, no magic bullets.
The other thing I remind myself - we are all different. Different backgrounds, different genetics, different diets, different levels of stress, the list goes on and on. No one's healing journey will be the same. We're all trying to to piece together pieces of different puzzles. I get it - we just want it to make sense and we want validation that this will work for us. And of course, stories of healing are so encouraging and get us to think outside of the conventional box. Hell, the reason I continued to post on this site is to convince Arena (@are) to give this a try, as our stories were so similar and she seems to be struggling so much on this path. I'm still hoping, Arena! 😉
@max-3 I don't worry about resistant starch, (personally I have some trouble with the logic of it) and I think the point of beans is fiber. If you encounter sludgy butt problems then you might want to think about some form of fiber. If beans aren't your thing another form might do. Right now for fiber I'm doing oats and peanut butter and black beans occasionally, as well as fruit and vegs.
@michele Im happy that it works for you and also wish you the best on your journey. And I completely agree with you on fruit quality. I chose to refeed on only frozen, very ripe mango. They tasted great but it could very well be that there was something wrong with them and my downfall wasnt because of their sky-high beta-carotene-content. They werent organic, but sadly in Germany this was the best I could find, the fruit quality is really bad here.
When I ate dark organic grapes only for 40 days my sebderm got better, when I ate pretty much only mango + beef for 40 days I got worse again. I know you will think the beef is the reason, but lets just compare mango with grapes. Mangoes have 120 times more beta carotene than grapes. This is the biggest difference, which makes me believe that this vitamin A theory could be legit. Also after the 40 days of grapes I started to eat other fruits and salads again. And I got worse again pretty much instantly. Why? Maybe because of the beta carotene in salads, tomatoes and so on. At least my experiences show this vitamin A/beta carotene is toxic-theory could be very well true.
Also interesting that the local fruits in Germany like apples, cherries and so on are all MUCH lower in beta-carotene than the tropical fruits (for example honey melons and mangoes have like 120 to 200 times more beta carotene than apples). Maybe I would have done a lot better without the imported tropical fruits. Idk. But where do I get ripe organic local fruit in Germany? It is all unripe and doesnt taste good. And I wont live on conventional grapes, apples and cherries, since these are all fruits with lots of pesticides.
@lil-chick Yes I dont think it makes sense either, but why test my luck if I can avoid it? Thank you for your tips about fiber. What fruits and vegs do you eat right now?
@max-3 I've done 40 days on black grapes too. 🙂 That was surprisingly when I started to put weight back ON. Go figure!
Hmm... a few thoughts on grapes vs. mangoes. Obviously, it's impossible to compare your experiment of grapes vs. mangoes, as you ate the mangoes with beef. Really hard for my to ignore the beef. 🙂 In addition, you had just finished a 20 day water fast. As I mentioned, my refeeding was more difficult than my fast in terms of symptoms. You are also overlooking the fact that the mangoes were frozen. Early on in my fruit-based days, I did lots of smoothies with frozen fruit and never felt particularly great afterward. Per Loren's advice, I cut them out and things were drastically better (I really wanted him to be wrong about something! haha). Having refed the "proper" way (or at least according to Loren), I couldn't have imagined eating frozen mangoes. It would have been a very different experience. It's easy to point your finger at the beta-carotene, but your experiment simply has way too many variables.
Salads took me some time. I did mostly fruit for quite a while and then slowly started to introduce salads again. My thought is that malabsorption needs to be corrected before salads can be well tolerated. But I do see that people have trouble with fruits like tomatoes. Most of the time, grocery store tomatoes are pretty acidic -- I will only eat tomatoes grown in my garden which are super sweet. I think that's the key.
Definitely interesting that the local fruits in Germany are relatively low in VA. Who knows - perhaps those living in that climate require less VA and more of the other vitamins/minerals due to sun exposure, humidity, temperature, etc. I choose to believe nature is much smarter than we are and gives us exactly what we need without us needing to overthink it. That is one major issue I have with the low VA diet - it's not at all intuitive. How did humans survive all these years without the ability to google the VA content in different foods? Plus, look at all the mental gymnastics on this forum (even your most recent post on resistant starch) - it's enough to make your head spin!
Quote from michele on July 2, 2021, 6:03 am...
Definitely interesting that the local fruits in Germany are relatively low in VA. Who knows - perhaps those living in that climate require less VA and more of the other vitamins/minerals due to sun exposure, humidity, temperature, etc. I choose to believe nature is much smarter than we are and gives us exactly what we need without us needing to overthink it. That is one major issue I have with the low VA diet - it's not at all intuitive. How did humans survive all these years without the ability to google the VA content in different foods? Plus, look at all the mental gymnastics on this forum (even your most recent post on resistant starch) - it's enough to make your head spin!
My German grandmother was brought up on a naturally low VA diet. Her parents came to the US around the turn of the last century. My grandmother and 2 of her sisters lived to be around 100 years of age. I know what they ate because I asked many questions of her before she died. And I did her shopping for many years. I've posted about her diet extensively here.
It could be that people with tropical genes have more ability to eat things like high-VA fruits. It could be that people like Scandinavians or Eskimo have more ability to eat things like high VA fish. But perhaps my genes are targeted for agricultural, cold mid-Europe including dairy which I do very well on, unlike many.
My grandmother had very wide bones, she didn't have osteoperosis at all. Even at the end of her life she had double the wrists that I had (even though we were of similar height). She never got diabetes. Her mind was very sharp.
My german great grandparents raised their 11 kids on foods mainly bought in bulk. Bulk flour, bulk potatoes, bulk oats, bulk legumes. Huge bags.
They also dried prunes and apples from their own trees.
No, I don't worry about foods that are dried and re-constituted. It's part of human agricultural life.
The time for eating fresh from the garden is extremely short, everything else is storage food.
The father was proud that he put meat on the table nightly.
Quote from Max on July 1, 2021, 7:36 pmAnother quick update:
- Been very low vitamin A for 2 weeks now
- Skin is a little less dry, but overall not much happening yet (as expected)
- Had cramps and diarrhea from kidney beans and I will not eat them again
- I was fine with white beans though
- Suprisingly no return of acne despite lots of white rice
But I really dont see a point in eating beans to be honest:
I bought them canned, but I have heard this is not optimal because of the resistant starch in canned products. According to some people resistant starch can slow down vitamin A detox, so I dont see why I should take this risk. Soaking and preparing beans myself just isnt worth it to me, I got no time for that.
Also if the point of beans is to get b-vitamins to balance the white rice, then you could do that much easier with just eating more meat. Beef has more Vitamin B1 than beans, and its B Vitamins are probably also easier to digest and absorb than the ones from beans.
I also read that Grant didnt eat any beans for his first year of low vitamin A and it clearly worked for him.
I also will from now on make fresh rice 3 times a day to avoid any resistant starch from rice.
kidney beans are full of vitamin A derivatives . No to red kidney beans !