I feel ok today except that my digestive tract is a little off. I felt like I had to poop and the first time I went very little came out and then shortly after I had to go again and felt like the rest came out then. That is something that only happens when I eat cooked food, probably the bread from the chicken pot pie and the creamy sauce in there stopped things up a little. Also I was a little more thirsty and dry mouthed from the salt.

One other thing I've noticed re being on a raw palaeo diet is that on the very rare occasions I eat (unadulterated) bread or similar pastry, that I have to gulp large amounts of water to force it down. Pre-rawpalaeo diet, I had no such problems with highly-dried cooked food.

It doesn't seem like the beginning was important to read except to convince you that the method and research is correct and that the modern optometry practice is wrong about lenses being the only part of your eye responsible for focus.

I only got to the part with the first few "exercises" and then kind of lost interest. You're right about the text-bookyness of it, and it's a dry one at that. I consider myself a good reader but sometimes I can't keep up with something if it strikes me a certain boring way, and then with exercises I have trouble with consistency.

That's good you're back in the gym.
I myself have kind of been a bum and haven't gone in a good while.

I started reading the Relearning to See book over thanksgiving break, but haven't picked it up in a few days. I can tell consistency will be a problem with me as well. It seems like it could work though, given enough effort.

Response to Lex's post in "Slanker's Order" thread:

Thanks for the thoughtful response Lex, similar thoughts have crossed my mind. One issue I have is that since I lack much desire towards my raw muscle/suet mix or organs it's hard for me to eat it at work. The best time for me to eat my raw food is at night, which is the opposite of the "eat your healthy food first then eat something else at night" principle.

Today, for example, I didn't eat lunch at all, nor breakfast. I almost never have breakfast, but usually I bring about 1lb muscle with an eyeballed addition of suet to work and put as much as a tablespoon of honey into it to make it more palatable. Sometimes I eat as much as I can without the honey, sometimes I finish it all before the honey, usually not.

So today I left my lunch at the plant and was out doing my sample collections (I collect samples of drinking water for the water company and then test them back at the plant for bacteria) and ended up being out way past lunch time because of uncontrollable circumstances. What happened was I needed to open a lock to get at a well and my key didn't work in the lock so I had to wait for someone, which happened on top of an already busy day. In fact most of the time I don't get to lunch until 1:00 pm, very often later. So on this day I didn't have any time at all to eat my lunch and am just now eating it at 11:00 pm. I almost went the whole day without eating, when I got home from work I took a nap and before hand had about a handful of raw macadamia nuts and dates. I very rarely eat raw vegan foods like this but just had no desire to eat meat and wanted to eat just something before laying down.

So the thing is, if I truly enjoyed the meat mix I eat I would probably bring it along with me to eat in the car in case I got stuck somewhere, or I would somehow find time to eat it. I'm blown away by how easy it is to consume calories in the form of cooked foods like sandwiches or a meat and grain dish like beef and rice with vegetables. You can easily eat the amount of calories my meat mix is, which takes me maybe 1/2 hour or more because it's chewy and I'm not enjoying it very much, in 10 minutes or less. That is to say that if I ate a "normal" diet I would never get caught without anything to eat because I could stop at a convenience store for 2 minutes to grab a sandwich, which I could eat in 5 minutes and even while driving. Sitting down with my glass container of muscle and suet is basically the opposite end of the ease of eating spectrum.

So for that reason it would be easier for me to eat more convenient foods during the day while I'm working and doing chores rather than at night. I imagine making my own sushi and bringing it to work, or a cooked dish like meat and vegetables. One time I made a paleo stew and brought that to work, however I had another hard day and no time for lunch so that ended up being my dinner as well. Again stew is much less convenient (need a bowl and relative concentration to not make a mess as compared to a sandwich or bowl of a dryer dish) than most other cooked foods to eat, hence not having the time to eat it.

This whole thing points to the issue that I seem to be only able to concentrate on one or a couple of difficult things in my life at a time. Like when I was learning guitar, that's all I cared about. I was in high school and did school work, but at that point in school homework and everything is second nature and you either can do it or can't. I spent most of my free time practicing guitar, and I got good fast. Now I'm at a point in my life where I'm trying to do so many things, principle of which is convert myself to this raw paleo diet. I am already mostly raw paleo, but the concentration it takes to stay on the diet I believe is making other things more difficult. I go to the gym less because I just don't feel like it, sometimes because I didn't eat lunch or am generally discouraged.

The whole idea of my current diet was that I could gain muscle eating about 2 lbs muscle mixed with suet (I don't measure the suet but it's maybe 1/3 by volume of the muscle I add) split into 2 meals per day. Other than that I eat occasional raw seafood for extra nutrients I might be missing, and very rarely raw plants like an avocado or some kind of salad. The thing is, I don't know if I can gain weight on this diet because I can't keep consistent on it long enough to tell one way or the other. The combination of the food not being entirely appealing and also being a little more time consuming to eat means that I have yet to be able to keep up the 2 meals every day for more than a week without either missing one or going off my diet due to a craving or inconvenience. So for all intents and purposes I am following in a sense that 80/20 rule, maybe closer to 90/10, but instead of intentionally eating something off my diet every day I stick to it for a few days and then eat <20% of a days food off of my diet. It's not quite a yoyo situation because I don't go off my diet on craziness like cookies and ice cream, but it's enough to keep me from making the gains I want and feeling once in a while the effects of going off the diet in the way I do.

I may indeed start experimenting with different things. It just seems so appealing to imagine that if I stick to it I can one day get the monkey off my back of cooked food, as well as truly enjoy all raw animal foods. I have experienced some very good health results from this diet, in particular basically never getting sick, and I don't want to give that up out of a weakness. Really the thing that has got me down is the weight gaining attempt. I did gain quite a bit of weight from my vegan days, but I'm stuck at about 155 lbs and my preferred weight from before when I was on SAD was around 165 to 170 lbs tops. Not much to gain but I felt very healthy and on my frame I looked athletic and strong at that weight. If all I cared about was maintaining my current weight the diet wouldn't be so hard because I could skip meals if I didn't feel like eating while I try to train my tastes, but I have the idea in my head that I shouldn't be skipping meals because I want to gain weight. I feel almost like I'm at the point where I can either give up on gaining the weight and achieving what I want in the gym and with martial arts training, or I can give up or modify my diet. This is probably a false dichotomy because if I had the ability to make myself eat the food I should probably be able to meet my training goals with it, but I can't convince my body to want to eat something if it doesn't. It's strange when I try to eat the food and it's not gross but rather neutral tasting, and I tend to chew it a lot because my body isn't telling me to swallow and take another bite like it would be if I really liked it, you know? So it takes so much longer than it has to in order to eat it.

Either way I should sit back and thank my blessings for at least doing what I'm doing, it can be stressful and difficult but I don't have the fear of these health problems I see so many having. My girlfriends roommate had skin cancer at like age 18!