Kathleen Sanderson

While medieval people might have kept a little bit of oil handy to wipe on their seal, I wonder if they might also have just rubbed it on an oily part of their body (hair or forehead?)?

Just in case it might help someone, I've heard a number people on keto/carnivore diets say that it fixed their sleep apnea so they no longer need a CPAP machine.

The tips on making your property fire-resistant are good; some could be made into a permanent part of the property, and others might be done in case of need (like removing curtains from the windows). I've lived in a couple of environments where wildfires were common, and where we were threatened by them several times. It's important to keep in mind that even if you've taken all of the precautions, if fire is heading in your direction, buckle the house up and GET OUT OF THERE! Do it well ahead of time, just like leaving coastal property ahead of time if it looks like a hurricane may hit your area. Don't wait until the flames are at your property line - a wildfire in a dry environment, especially if you have high winds, can move extremely fast, and you could be trapped. People have died because they delayed too long and either couldn't get out (blocked roads), or couldn't even leave their house. Even if your house survives the fire, if it's surrounded by flames, you may not survive inside of it, because of the hot air, smoke, and because the fire can burn up all the oxygen in the middle of itself.

If you have wildfires in the area, keep VERY close track of them. Here, we have websites that track wildfires (especially in the western states most prone to fires), and are updated twice or three times every day during active fires. If you don't have access to that for your area, one of the satellite weather apps may be helpful.

Any time you have a wildfire within several miles of your home, keep your vehicle loaded and ready to go at five seconds notice, because you may not get much more warning than that. And figure out - well ahead of time - as many different alternate escape routes as you can possibly find. (Don't plan on using a 4WD route, though, unless your vehicle has 4WD, or you may get yourself into even worse trouble.) Have some place that you can go to already arranged in advance. Keep your children or anyone else who will be riding with you close, so you can grab them quickly. Keep your pets (or any animals you may need to evacuate with you) up close where you can get them quickly, too, and have a means to haul them. I can think of at least three times that my vehicle sat, loaded for evacuation, for three or four days before we knew for sure we weren't going to get burned out (this is extremely stressful - can give you PTSD). I actually bought an old horse trailer that wasn't even registered, just so I'd have a way to get my goats out if we had to leave because of a fire. (I sold that place to my next-door neighbor eight years ago - we've stayed in touch, and twice since we left, wildfires have burned right up to the property line. I am so glad we weren't still there.)

To repeat, do everything you can to safeguard your property. But you still need to be prepared to evacuate if a fire is coming at you.

Editing to add: it doesn't matter what direction the wind is blowing when you find out about the fire. The wind can blow steady in one direction for several days, and then all of a sudden, with no warning, switch around and blow in a different direction. I have seen it happen. In one case, that was to our benefit, because wind had been pushing a large fire towards us for several days, then suddenly stopped and started blowing the fire back into the burned area, which saved an entire town (in Alaska) and allowed the firefighters to finally get control of it. But it could be blowing the fire off to one side of you, then suddenly switch and start blowing it right at you. Hurricanes are prone to this kind of behavior, too. Pay attention, and be more cautious than you think you need to be!

Jeff Marchand wrote:Kathleen,

How is your blood sugars, liver enzymes and cholesterol levels?  If they are nt were your doctor wants them to be the results can be no joke.  I count myself very very lucky to be here. I choose to take prescription meds over dying or worse given that stroke is in my family history.  

Have you tried Intermittent Fasting?  I never liked the carnivore diet because of all the cholestrol.  But I am no expert.  I.F. worked for me.   But weight will come back if/when you stop just like any other diet.

My blood labs have been really good - and improving - every year that we've been carnivore! And I almost always do use I.F. - with, on average, an 18 hour fast, and two meals per day. (I can't get nearly enough calories on one meal a day).

One thing that is possibly an issue is that - at the same time that I'm trying to *lose* weight - I'm also trying to get my daughter to *gain* weight. She's barely at 100 lbs., and it's a struggle to keep her there. She is profoundly retarded (also autistic, has celiac disease, lupus, spina bifida occulta, neurogenic bladder, and - I strongly suspect - serious gut issues such as IBS or Crohns, which is probably why it's so hard to get her to eat sometimes, but she's doing a LOT better on carnivore), and doesn't communicate well, but most plant foods seem to cause her severe gut pain. So I do buy some things I probably shouldn't eat, mostly dairy (fermented), trying to put weight on her.

Jeff Marchand wrote:My blood type is B+.  I had gout for years.  Allopurinol is a cheap generic drug that lowers your uric acid and has very few side effects.  A rash is the most common. Take it every day and you wont get a gout attack again.

What I found out later to my great chagrin is that as has been mentioned previously is that gout is associated with metabolic syndrome. My blood sugars and cholestrol were elevated.  I  had uncontrolled diabetes and heart disease.  Had a heart attack and needed a triple by-pass.  So I urge you to take your gout as seriously as a heart attack , as the saying goes.  I know I just "should'ed" you but it comes from the heart . Pun intended

Ive shed quite a bit of weight  and my blood sugars are in the low normal range now, admittedly with  some assistance from the pharmaceutical industry.  I know many on here will disagree with that approach but at least I am alive to be disagreed with.

I do disagree with the pharmaceutical approach to metabolic disease - but, in spite of that, I am considering asking my doctor about trying something at my next annual checkup. I lost about 45 lbs. when I first started doing the carnivore diet, but stalled out and haven't made any more progress in the last three years, in spite of being pretty careful what I eat. I do have a bad back and don't get enough exercise, but still - I could stand to lose another ninety pounds or so.  I'm tired of it being so hard to lose weight (supposedly, I should be able to lose weight on about 1900 calories per day - I'm usually well below that, and still can't lose. I do realize that hormones have more to do with it than actual calorie count, but I seldom eat anything that should be causing an increase in insulin, either). Sometimes you really do need a little extra help.

I'm on keto/carnivore diet for medical reasons (pain relief, mostly, for me), and found that as long as I stick to it, I don't have any gout. Or arthritis, either. So I'm not sure that we can say that meat causes gout. If I go off the carnivore diet and eat carbs, especially from grains, I get gout and arthritis pain again. Probably all anyone can do is keep a detailed, accurate food diary, including what time they eat. Also record every ache and pain, and what time it showed up. After a couple of months, make graphs. Problems from foods can take a couple of days or so to show up (some show up immediately - if I eat carbs, the muscle pain in my thighs comes back almost instantly); a couple of graphs overlaid on one another will help spot relationships between what you ate and what happened a few hours or a few days later. It is a lot of work - if you have someone living with you who can help with the note-keeping, that may make it easier. In my case, there seem to be a few things that we can add back in, like sauerkraut, pickles, green beans (well-cooked), and blueberries. Also, taking eggs out helped my daughter a lot (she's autistic).

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:I have noticed that bugs prefer some colors of clothing over other colors. While I can't hope to keep white clothing looking clean, it's renowned for keeping biting bugs away.

I've also noticed that some bugs are attracted to  certain colors more than to others. Example - I've seen black cows absolutely covered in flies, while red and white cows in the same field were hardly bothered at all. And one time there was a red car sitting in the driveway along with two or three other colors, and there were flies all over the red car, none on the others. I don't think colors do much good with things like mosquitoes, but if flies are the problem, you could try white clothes and see if that helps.

Had a friend who was working on the North Slope years ago - he said the other guys liked working next to him, because he attracted all of the mosquitoes! That had to have been body chemistry, because they were all eating the same food.

I wish we had Grocery Outlet or something similar near us. I used to get probably half my groceries at the Grocery Outlet in Klamath Falls, but I think it's essentially a West Coast chain. They have Aldi in this region, but none nearer to us than an hour and a half each way. Walmart is about the best we can do for groceries. Still, their prices are good for our budget!

As far as cooking for a mostly-meat diet, Daughter and I mostly just eat ground beef (patties or crumbled), chicken leg quarters, boneless pork loin roast, once in a while a ham, chicken liver, and some canned fish, canned chicken, and canned corned beef. I roast the chicken leg quarters in the electric cooker (Ninja brand instantpot) and they not only come out really well (375 F for one hour and ten minutes), but are great cold the next day. I either fry hamburger patties in the electric cooker, or in the countertop grill. Crumbled ground beef may have a can of green beans added to it and call it soup, or add some sour cream and call it stroganoff. Pork roast goes in the electric cooker to roast at 375 for twenty minutes per pound. And the canned fish gets turned into fish 'soup,' though I usually simmer it down until it is more casserole (not at all runny). Chicken livers get fried in leftover grease from the ground beef, or (once in a while) bacon grease. Oh, and our big treat once every couple of months is a bag of frozen shrimp - some goes into fish soup, and some gets wrapped in bacon and cooked on the countertop grill for a few minutes. The grilled bacon-wrapped shrimp is, surprisingly, still good cold the next day, and so is the pork roast. Leftover burgers can be warmed up - they aren't great cold. But if you could cook some chicken and a pork roast ahead, that would give your husband some leftovers in the frig that he could eat.

I suspect that my daughter has Crohn's or something close to it. A lot of foods send her to the floor, curled up screaming, but the reaction is delayed enough that it's tricky sometimes figuring out what caused it. Her dad was diagnosed with Crohn's probably ten years ago, but he'd had gut issues for as long as I'd known him (we were seventeen and eighteen when we met, fifty-two years ago; he died of cancer recently). We are still testing to see what we can safely add back without causing her pain. I have to do a lot of guessing, because, while she's not non-verbal, her communication skills are toddler-level. The vegetables and one fruit that seem pretty safe for her so far are sauerkraut, canned green beans, and very-well-cooked broccoli, and once in a while we have some blueberries and sour cream. I tried using up some dry lentils and split peas last year, and set her back about six weeks. So that stuff is completely out.

This is something I've been struggling with. I have ALWAYS kept a deep pantry. I was raised in Alaska, and lived there as an adult with children two hundred miles from Fairbanks, so we went grocery shopping in either Fairbanks or Anchorage only two or three times a year, and we put up local meat and salmon as much as we could get. Then we spent several years in Eastern Oregon's high desert where we were 45 miles from town - sometimes an hour or more driving time, depending on road conditions. I used to keep a lot of the usual dry staples - whole grains, dry legumes, salt and sugar, vinegar, molasses, canned foods, etc. We never got down to less than three months worth of food on hand, and I tried to keep a year's worth. Plus we had chickens and dairy goats, sometimes raised a couple of pigs or lambs, often kept meat rabbits, and, when we were in Alaska, we ate quite a lot of game and salmon.

Fast forward to now. My handicapped daughter and I are both on a keto/carnivore diet (we mostly eat meat, a small amount of fermented dairy, and a small amount of mostly-low-carb vegetables) because we have no choice. We both have serious medical issues from most of what we used to eat. I would literally be non-functional if we went back to eating that way (daughter is pretty much non-functional anyway, but at least she's not laying on the floor screaming 24/7). I'm getting up there in years and have a very bad back, so other than a few goat in our small pasture, essentially have no livestock and am not able to hunt.

I have two chest freezers (one is currently not being used), as well as the bottom-freezer on my frig. I have been shopping for one month at a time. And it really, really bothers me to only have one month's worth of food on hand. Reading this thread has got me thinking about changing that, and how to make it work. I think, if I plug the other freezer back in (yes, it will run my power bill up a bit), I can put meat in both freezers, use down to the bottom in one, then refill it and start using from the other one until it's empty, and so on. (Stuff we plan to use right away goes in the frig freezer if it will fit.)

And, I can attempt to stock up on canned meats, although that's a little more problematic for several reasons. One is that in this humid climate (Kentucky) cans rust quickly. Another is that I think the nutrient value of canned meat is slightly lower than fresh or frozen (especially the vitamin C content - yes, most meat does contain some C). And third is that when we have canned meats on hand, those tend to get eaten quickly, especially if my back is acting up, because it's easier to open a can than to cook. So I need to think about how to do this.

Anyway, as Nicole said in the original post, everyone is going to have different food needs (I was reading the list that she posted and cringing, LOL!), and different storage problems to solve. And while you are at it, don't forget cleaning supplies and toiletries. And food for your animals.

I used to have a book on Alaskan sourdough recipes. Don't have it now (gave it to one of my daughters) because youngest and I both have celiac disease, and I can't eat carbs. But the cookbook had everything in it, from regular bread to all kinds of quickbreads, to cakes and other desserts. Worth hunting for in second-hand bookstores.

I think my book was an early edition of this: https://www.amazon.com/Alaska-Sourdough-Revised-Stuff-Alaskan-ebook/dp/B091CVN3VX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3NBSFMV4EYIBD&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.CpuG-FY_Co1PDf0dxEYyvsHkDhbAmJKNB97fFPzPGNNEu-HjUS4DKxMUnDCwkOf5HVNYOfLjGUG4qrAtmGrvKrNPFzWm7bNw6rX7PW6vLGSumYqg6CviYAybV8Ofj8fMsKfqtiJPYi6fFaN3UAIMKbUygK8zViUdmee_rAs1SVXZZY7IcGMZhieoxvpv0WvlSE3fBZb4Bpzal-IBVxavlOsLAb-RqwFhDlhV52sirfs.tGAcmWvv_uml_gXgAvdQ6uLLKmP2qYBnJvx5gLwTO3g&dib_tag=se&keywords=Alaska+sourdough+recipe+book&qid=1782586848&s=books&sprefix=alaska+sourdough+recipe+book%2Cstripbooks%2C227&sr=1-1