Your Kids Eat Carnivore, Too?

Why, thank you for asking!

Yes, they are eating in a way that is known as hypercarnivore. But they are not hyper carnivores. They’re very chill.

First, let’s define that new word. The Carnivore Diet, the way I’ve come to use the term, is not exactly what we’re talking about here. Most of my children lack the gut damage and medical conditions that forced me to remove all plants (some of which I miss very much) from my diet, so we have a more relaxed approach to their food. But they’re still living the Meat Life™, and doing very well on it!

From the Infogalactic entry for hypercarnivore:

“A hypercarnivore is an animal which has a diet that is more than 70% meat, with the balance consisting of non-animal foods such as fungi, fruits or other plant material. Some examples include felids, dolphins, eagles, snakes, marlin, most sharks, and the GAH children.”

I may have made up part of that definition.

My kids are more carnivore than even that, though. I guess about 90% of their food is meat, fish, dairy, and eggs right now. One of them is almost 100% carnivore due to IBS. A few of them don’t tolerate dairy. They all know their own unique quirks, and as long as they eat their meat, I’m flexible on the other stuff.

I posted a meal plan a few years ago when someone asked if I fed my kids a carnivore diet. I had not yet fully applied my new way of thinking about food, and the family were still eating a high-carb (by my current lights, anyway) diet most days, though I did consider it to be carnivorish. Even then, I think it met the strict criteria for hypercarnivore. It didn’t meet my current standards, but we were moving in the right direction.

These days, my children eat all of the meats, and a limited selection of fruits and vegetables. I allow fruit once a day, and a sweet potato every now and then, but other than that, high-carb foods are out. As much activity as these children get, the amount of sugar in what I do allow them is still very low. Seeds and nuts are allowed, but limited. Grains and beans are not in our pantry, but at church functions, or friends’ houses, we will make a few exceptions for the sake of being social. Gluten is verboten, no matter where we are. Likewise, seed oils.

Parents, you don’t have to feed your kids junk food and “kid food”. They don’t need to eat what everybody else eats to be happy. In fact, what nearly everybody else’s kids are eating is making them unhappy. I was just making lunch for my family after a busy school day, and it was 2:30 p.m. before I got it on the table. We do that almost every school day, because I have seven children to homeschool, and we don’t want to interrupt our school day with food. We’re concentrating–something that a whole lot of people are unable to do simply because of their food choices.

How many Standard American Dieters, even if they try to keep it clean, organic, and “healthy” can say that their children go until 2:30 or even 3:30 in the afternoon without begging for food and getting hangry? Because my children are on a low-carb diet, they have very steady blood glucose, and very steady moods. They have breakfast at 7:30, and they are finished eating until whenever the food can be ready. They are extremely flexible, and I never hear a word about how late the food is.

When I think back to how hungry my children–especially the smaller ones–used to be between meals, and how cranky they would get, I am appalled that I let it go on that way for so many years! I just didn’t realize it could be any other way. I’d have to give them a snack mid-morning just to hold them until lunchtime, usually at noon. Then they’d want another snack while dinner was cooking. Nowadays, nobody is ever hungry around here at noon!

I thought 3 big meals and 2 snacks a day was normal! While it is common, it is not normal. It is a highly disordered food culture that has children eating every two and half to three hours, right up to suppertime, and sometimes even another snack right before bed. We still have three meals, most days, but only two of them are big meals, and the third will be a quick, small one of cold cuts, leftovers, and berries. Sometimes dinner (it’s called supper, if you’re one of ourn) is our biggest meal, but I usually try to do the biggest feed in the middle of the day, so we’re not eating a lot near bedtime. This meal timing helps our sleep, in addition to giving us extra time in our day to work.

Do you want to have hypercarnivore kids, too? I really think you should! Healthy kids are happy kids. Many, many of our family’s behavioral and supposedly untreatable health and brain problems just vanished into thin air with a better way of eating. I don’t want to talk too much about my kids’ personal challenges, but even difficulties as intractable as autism and IBS can be mitigated greatly with a high fat, low-carb diet. If you’ve ever been unable to get your child to smile and make eye contact with you, you know what it would mean to have those things all of a sudden. This is precisely what happened with one of ours! Please try it and see for yourself, parents! It’s worth the time and effort.

I would dearly love to see more children healed in body, mind, and soul.

If you’re trying to move your children to a more appropriate diet than the standard fare, it is wise to change diets slowly to avoid upheavals, both digestive and emotional. Take half a year or a year, not a month, to wean off all the bad stuff. Start with the worst foods (usually grains and added sugars) today, and eliminate the lesser offenders later, one at a time, after your child is used to thinking differently about food. It worked beautifully for my family!

Don’t fret about the time lost. Just work your way out of the mainstream food habits a little bit at a time.

Let me know if you have questions. I love to answer them, free of charge. I also offer half-hour coaching sessions via Zoom where we can talk about ideas for making your lifestyle healthier. Email me if you’re interested! My address is cindy at getalonghome dot com. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I Eat in a Day

Some of my recent carnivore meals

“Just eat meat” sounds like such a simple concept, but people often ask what I eat in a day. Here are a few of my recent meals. Most days, I have two or three meals. Some days, just one big one. Meat Life™ is satisfying!

First, the simplest stuff. Ground beef, cold butter cubes, and cold beef tongue:

I usually have a can of cod liver and a can of sardines for my 4:00 p.m. meal, if I’m eating more than one meal that day. My eating window closes around 4 p.m. on those days. Me 7 years ago would have gagged at the thought, but it’s a very satisfying way to end the day:

A gigantic ribeye with some butter my youngest son shook up for me from cream:

These bigger meals are almost always OMADs (one meal a day). Burgers, fried eggs, and a LOT of bacon:

My birthday meal this year, filet mignon with bacon.

This next was a fun one. Leftover carnivore waffles as bread for a ham sandwich. Mustard, homemade avocado oil mayo, and pickles made this a little fancy for me. On a normal day, it would have just been waffles, butter, and meat, which makes a fine sandwich:

Chicken nuggets, make with pork rind panko, shrimp, and melted butter for a light lunch:

An all meat diet sounds a little draggy, but I assure you, there are ways to fun it up and still stay within the parameters of what works for you! What works for me won’t always work for others, and many may need to be less or (rarely) more strict than I am. Shoot me an email (cindy at getalonghome dot com) if you’re interested in finding a way to make keto or carnivore fit into your lifestyle and serve your unique needs!

A great, BIG thank you: My next run is now fully funded! I’m super excited to be training for the Black Bear Half Marathon! If you feel sad because you didn’t get a chance to contribute, there’s still time to do that! Just click the big yellow ‘donate’ button below. I can always use more funds for more training, gas, or food! And taxes, of course. You know they’re going to tax me on this.

Thank you so, so much, my friends!

 

Things Carnivores Say

That I have never experienced.

Carnivores are always making fantastic claims about what the diet has done for them. And you know what? I believe every single one of them! How could I not? I make some fantastic claims for myself! I’ve healed my allergies (except to ragweed, which reigns champion every fall), asthma (even ragweed doesn’t bring that back), and eczema, lost 60 pounds, cured anxiety, depression, OCD, and a host of other problems! You can read the rest of the blog to hear about all of it. But there are some marvelous benefits that almost all carnivores say they have experienced that I, to date, have not.

I’ve been carnivore for seven years come November, so I’ve been eating this way plenty long enough to say for sure whether these effects are something everybody should expect. I say no. Some of this Meat Magic may pass you by, no matter what other benefits you receive. You may experience the following effects, and I hope you do. Practically everybody else seems to, but I have not.

Thing #1: Carnivores don’t fart anymore.

I hate to lead off with potentially embarrassing information about myself. I know it’s not ladylike, but I still toot. It does not smell bad at all. I never have gas, bloating, tummy pain, or anything like that. But air still puffs out from time to time, especially when I eat butter. In fact, it smells faintly of butter. Sorry if that’s tmi, but it’s true. Butter makes me fart.

Woman covering her mouth, saying oops, with a little green cloud behind her, indoors

Thing #2: Carnivores don’t get sore after a hard workout anymore.

While I am very glad for anybody who is able to say this, delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), is not something I’ve left behind. I don’t know what this means for my health. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. But when I lift super-heavy, I still feel it the next day! I actually like that feeling, because it means I broke past my comfort barrier and really did something. Most people don’t like to be in pain, so I’m happy for those who can still walk upstairs and sit down without groaning the day after leg day.

But I just haven’t seen this for some reason. Still sore, and still happy to be that way!

Thing #3: Carnivores never miss certain foods.

You’d think desserts would be the hardest thing to pass up, having gone off the sugar, but the biggest struggle for me is to not put collard greens in my face. “Well, why not just have some delicious, good-for-you leafy greens then, you freak? You even cook it with bacon!” Because, my friend, something about fiber-rich foods makes my OCD come back with a vengeance! I like having eyebrows, and collard greens make me pull my hair. I know that sounds nuts, but it’s true, and I’ve cheated with leafy greens enough to know for sure that I can’t have that stuff. I do pick out the greens-flavored bacon and enjoy that, though. I can get away with that.

I’m sure other people struggle with certain foods, as well. I’m not above lingering over the dessert table to smell the delicious food, myself. I’ve just gotten used to the idea that these foods are a pleasant memory. I can miss them, but they are dead to me.

Thing #4: Carnivores don’t get sunburn any more. 

This, sadly, is another myth for me. I kept waiting for the day that I would be able to spend unlimited amounts of time in the sun without getting a burn, and it never came. Now, I always just burnt a little in the early summer, peeled, and then had a nice tan the rest of the summer. I never had a big problem with burning anyway. But I do still get a painful glow if I don’t remember to get out of the sun during the most intense hours of the day.

One thing I have noticed is that I don’t burn as much if I don’t sit still. Running at noon in direct summer sun? No problem. Sitting for the same length of time? Burn, baby, burn! So maybe the rest of those carnivores who are not burning anymore are just suddenly moving a lot more than they used to, dodging those slowpoke sun-rays!

Thing #5: The bugs don’t bite me any more.

I’ve heard so many people say the bugs don’t bite them anymore. As with all of these things, I believe them! They’re mosquito-repellent all of a sudden. What a blessing! Amazing things happen when you change your body chemistry so completely. But I’m sitting here scratching this very minute, and so are my meat-heavy children. I dunno. You can form your own theories about why that might be.

How about you, carnivores, and non-carnivores alike? Do you have any dietary expectations that haven’t quite been fulfilled by the way you’re eating right now? Comments are open, and I’d sure love to get something besides spam in here! Let me know!

Also, while I’ve got you here, I’m asking for donations to fund my next run. Help me get to the Black Bear Half Marathon:

 

Help! I’ve Failed the Carnivore Diet!

You ate pie? This cannot be tolerated! Mail in your Carnivore Club decoder ring immediately!

A person new to the carnivore way of eating was lamenting having fallen off the wagon after a number of days “strict carnivore”. My reply was this (edited a little):

Don’t count the days. You’re counting failures. Nobody can live like that. Instead, think of this as a path you’re on. You stepped in a little doo-doo today, or twisted your foot a little in a hole. But you’re still on the path. Stay. On. The. Path. I actually had a little bit of a slip on my path yesterday. I’ve been carnivore for 5+ years. I do not subtract the days that I ate something off-plan. I am still in the carnivore club, even if I ate something that is not meat, because Carnivore is the way I need to eat.

Friends, I stepped in a little doggie doo myself just yesterday! My kids and some friends were having strawberry and banana popsicles (homemade, just strawberries, bananas, and beef gelatin), and I was hot and thought that sounded like a neat idea, and I ate one! Right there in front of God and everybody!

While I wasn’t immediately sorry, and it tasted fine and cold, fruit of any kind will exacerbate some allergy symptoms for me, so this morning I was painfully reminded why I don’t usually indulge in such treats. When you get used to not having allergies, and suddenly you do again, you take notice!

Oh, dearie me. Now what will do? I can’t say I’m eating a carnivore diet now! My indulgence was a small one. Not even cake! I did not berate myself for it, and I wouldn’t even if it had been cake. I just got up this morning and ate my usual two hamburger patties and went on with my carnivore life. I scraped the dookie off my shoes and kept walking the path. That’s what you need to do now. Even if you’ve been absolutely wading in poo for days, or even weeks, every meal is a chance to do better for yourself.

You will never be able to build a new habit, or maintain an old one, if you are unable to face an imperfect day without beating yourself up. We all have stresses. We all have lapses. Heck, sometimes we just need to have a little fun! When we start going off the path more frequently, some thought might need to be applied as to why you keep doing that. But, thank God, changes can be made! You’re changing your neurology. Every cell in your body is being realigned to interact with food in a completely different way. That doesn’t just flip on and off like a switch. It’s going to take a lot of time.

If I eat a thing that’s not meat, I do not worry about it. I don’t consider myself to be less of a carnivore just because I occasionally like the little seaweed nori snacks. I include those in my carnivore diet sometimes because they do not appear to have any ill effect on me. Pickles, too. I could do it every day if I wanted to, and still consider this a carnivore diet. I don’t. It’s probably more like once a month. But who cares? Different people have different needs, and I do not need to avoid nori snacks. You might.

I do need to avoid strawberries and bananas. That fact is reinforced in my mind today every time I have to stop myself from rubbing my now-itchy eyes. I’m not going to forget this soon! You’re not going to forget your regret from the last mishap very soon, either. Just get up and go on with your healthy way of eating now. The trend is still in a positive direction! There is no reason to be angry with yourself. If anything, be resentful of the food. Learn to hate it for what it does to you.

Tell me, if you were on the standard American diet and you just happened to accidentally eat something that was good for you one day, would you feel like you were suddenly a health food fanatic? No, you would not. You would just think, “That was an unusual meal for me.” Do the same for your carnivore diet, friend. You had an unusual meal. You had a little misadventure, but you know that side-path you got onto won’t get you where you want to go. Just step back onto the right path!

And next time, look a little further ahead so you’ll be ready to dodge the doo-doo instead of stepping fully in it.

If you need help thinking about how to live a healthier life, I’d love to spend some time coaching you. It’s not just carnivore that I’m about. I can help you tweak your entire lifestyle to get to a better place. Just email me (cindy at get along home dot com) and we’ll get you scheduled. I’m not terribly busy this summer!

Smells are Free

Did you ever read Ooka the Wise: Tales of Old Japan?

There was a story in that book about an impoverished young man who rented a room above a restaurant. He couldn’t afford the delightful fish that was served below, but he’d gotten into the habit of eating his plain bowl of rice while sitting near his open window, so that he could smell the flavorful food cooking, and thus add to his enjoyment of the rice. I won’t spoil the story by telling you the rest of it, but this is one of my favorite books, and I’ve replaced it each time our current copy has been read to death. If you can find it for a reasonable price, you should pick it up.

Anyhow, that story stuck with me especially poignantly, since for most of my life I couldn’t smell anything much due to inflammation in my sinuses. Since starting a carnivore diet, lo these 6 years ago, I can smell my food! I can also smell your food, and there was a time when the smell of cake or pizza would drive me crazy. How ironic, I thought, that I’m finally able to smell all that stuff, now that I can’t eat it. Dear Alanis, here’s an actual irony for you!

I’ve noticed something new in my life fairly recently. The smells of these forbidden foods, all by themselves, are very pleasant. Any time I have veered off my healthy path of eating to indulge beyond the point of smelling it, I have not enjoyed the taste as much as I thought I would. Carbs don’t taste nearly as good to me as I remember them to taste. In fact, the memory is pleasant enough that I don’t have to ruin it by trying to recreate it. I have, however, continued to enjoy the smells. After all, the sense of smell is the sense that most deeply stirs our memories. Think about how your mother’s perfume or shampoo used to smell. What the church hymnals smelled like. The root cellar where Grandma kept her potatoes. You will not only remember the smells, you will have some emotions that go along with it. Provided that Mother and Grandmother were the kind a person would want to remember, these are wonderful memories, invoked just by smelling something. Sometimes just by imagining smelling something!

These days, you’ll often find me standing over the dessert table at church functions, just leaning over it a little bit and blissfully inhaling the scent of chocolate or glazed donuts. I’m sure I look to others as if I’m desiring to eat the things in front of me. I’m sure the (often markedly unhealthy) people coming up behind me think that I’m just so deprived, and feel sorry for me. “Why in the world doesn’t she just eat the cake if she enjoys it that much?” they must wonder.

But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if I eat that stuff, there will be repercussions. I have no trouble not putting that stuff into my mouth! Boils, guys. I get boils. But smells can’t give me boils!

It’s OK for me to do that.

Now, if you are in the early days of fighting a carbohydrate addiction, I absolutely do not recommend doing this, any more than an alcoholic should feel free to sit at a bar drinking seltzer water while his old friends get tipsy. You’re going to screw yourself up. Just don’t walk over to the dessert table. Stick your face in some flowers or something to get that smell out of your face! This is not something I could have done four years ago, either! Now that I am well and truly not tempted to eat what doesn’t benefit my body, I have a little freedom to experience the pleasure of sweet-smelling food. Smells are free, and I come away having experienced as much risk-free enjoyment as possible out of the offerings, and with no ill-effects afterwards.

I’ve been reading into dopamine a little bit lately, and what I’ve found out is that the pay-off, the thing you think you want to do, is not what dopamine is responding to. Dopamine is actually what gives you the urge. So if I get a dopamine spike upon thinking about a chocolate chip cookie, it doesn’t matter much if I actually eat the cookie. It is equally helpful to either ignore it, thus reducing that dopaminic urge for cookies next time, or indulge it with some alternative that is risk-free. I have found that I can simply reach into my memory of what that cookie would have tasted like, and get the same relief, as if I had performed the truly harmful act of eating a cookie. Likewise, I can smell the dessert table, feel pleasure, and that is as far as I need to go. If you like scented candles, you know what I’m saying.

That doesn’t mean that you should do this.

If you’re fighting food addiction,–and I guess I was food addicted for the first couple of years of this way of eating–I would highly recommend you find something besides food to satisfy that want. Do something fun, dredge up a memory of a wonderful time you’ve had, hug your kids or your dog, sing a song, take a short walk, play the piano.

Do anything at all besides thinking about the food!

I have been too weak to be able to benefit from the delightful smells that emanate from highly processed carbohydrates. As I’ve related before, I have sat and just cried while everybody else ate pizza. But if you stay on this path long enough, those smells will cease to be associated in your mind with then putting something in your mouth. It will happen eventually. And when it does, you will have a new pleasure in your life.

Smells are free!

I don’t know if there’s another carnivore on the planet that does this, so I’ll leave the comments open on this one, in case somebody wants to say “Hey, I thought I was the only one!”

Craving Sweets in the Heat?

It’s hot outside. Not coincidentally, lately I’m seeing an uptick in questions from new carnivores about sweet cravings, especially in the afternoon. Please do not answer the siren call of the ice cream truck. You don’t need berries, honey, fruit, or cheesecake. You just need water!

Because an insulin spike will, in fact, cause your cells to pack away some water with the sugar that it lets in, your body will ask for sugar when you’re not giving it enough water and salt. It asks for sugar, but that doesn’t mean you have to give it sugar. It simply doesn’t know how to ask for salt through cravings. You, though, are a human, and smart, so you can figure this out for yourself! Salt and water will ease your sweet craving just as quickly, and much more beneficially.

A lot of people like to take a fancy electrolyte powder in their water, and I’m totally fine with that. In fact, I have a packet or two of them just about every day. Myoxcience has my favorite electrolyte powder, as they don’t use stevia in theirs. They even have an unflavored one for those of us who have to avoid all sweet tastes. A lot of people like LMNT, but for some reason (probably the stevia) that brand makes me wheeze.

Try these things if you like, but honestly, for most people, some good old pickle juice will do the trick. Pickles don’t cost near as much. Just make sure you find a pickle brand that doesn’t have polysorbates and food dyes in them. Mt. Olive has an organic one that fits the bill. I’m sure there are others.

Don’t let old habits and sudden cravings knock you off-plan just because it’s hot outside. Drink your water and salt!

 

Carnivore Popcorn

Somebody asked me a while back what they could do for popcorn. My friend, I have found it!

You’re going to have to do a little footwork to procure the materials if you don’t buy your beef in bulk the way I do. If you do, tell your butcher you want the trim fat. And the suet and the marrow bones, and the organs! Don’t waste food! But this is about the trimmings. If you don’t buy your animals in bulk, you can probably go to any butcher and ask for fat trimmings. I promise, they will not think you’re crazy. Just march right up to that counter and ask!

When I got my first big ugly bag of fat with a bunch of red meat still stuck to it, I momentarily thought “What in the world am I going to do with this? Why did I ask for this?” I like suet for rendering, as it gets you a nice clean tallow, but this? This has a lot of meat still on it!

Um, hey…Carnivore person? It’s A BUNCH OF FAT WITH A LITTLE BIT OF MEAT ON IT! Isn’t that what you prefer to eat?

So I diced it up into about 1/4 inch pieces

And I fried it and ate it with my pitifully lean steak. (If you are one of those blessed people who have an air fryer, this would be a good use for it!)

You don’t need to eat this stuff as a side. It would make a marvelous small meal (aka, a snack).

You will never miss popcorn again, I promise. Just try it.

Why Carnivore Didn’t Work For You, Part 6: You Didn’t Know Your Reason

Why are you doing this, anyway?

I will occasionally come across somebody online who says that they tried carnivore, even though they didn’t have any particular reason to do so. By that person’s estimate, she had already been in perfect health and everything she was doing was working just fine. But she wanted to see if the carnivore way of eating would improve anything. And she usually finds that, in fact, she had been a lot less healthy than she thought she was. Her libido roars back to life, or the joint pain that she thought was due to “getting older” goes away, or the ringing in her ears stopped. All sorts of unanticipated pleasant things happen to people who eliminate plants from their diets. It’s almost magical!

But there are, for the first few weeks of shifting to a carnivorous diet, often some unpleasant things to be gotten through. Most of these difficulties can be mitigated by reading the rest of this series: Why Carnivore Didn’t Work For You, and taking that advice. If you hadn’t read these posts of mine, though, or gotten advice from someone else who has been there, you might have jumped into the carnivore diet feet first, with no idea why, except that the Meat Life™ sounds like a pretty cool bandwagon, and you didn’t want to miss out.

So you got a few days or weeks in, and stuff started to happen.

You felt lethargic and depressed. You started to feel like you were hypoglycemic. You got explosive diarrhea, or stopped going to the bathroom altogether. It got so bad you just gave up and had the spaghetti one day, et voila, you felt better. Back to your old self. Man, you missed that bread! I mean, the tinnitus came back, and you’re looking a little puffy again, but at least you feel happy!

My friend, carnivore works, even for you. It really does. But because you didn’t have a very strong reason to stick through and troubleshoot whatever was going wrong, you didn’t get to a place where you could experience that. I truly believe that there is nobody whose health or mood is so good that carnivore couldn’t make it better. But without something driving you to eat better, all of the potential pitfalls of the adaptation phase–sugar cravings, social needs, bowel upheavals, or doubts about the medical safety of it–you will quit.

If you’re making a change so drastic as this with no good idea why, it’s going to be, for all but the most stubborn of people, an unsustainable change. If you want to give the carnivore diet a go, know why you’re doing it first. Maybe it is something as simple as “better overall health”. But if you don’t name the result you’re looking for, you’ll likely lose sight of your progress when faced with difficulties. Go ahead and let your reason be “just” tinnitus. But hold on to your reason, friend. You’re going to need it when you’re at the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet and your family is chowing down on muffins and waffles, while you’re stuck with the bacon and eggs.

It won’t be enough that you’re just trying out a new way of eating. You will need sweet reason to get you through. After a while, you’ll start to notice other little reasons that you can add to the list. Your psoriasis went away. You’re no longer anxious. You made it through a menstrual cycle without anybody having to call the cops on you. Write all that stuff down. Add every small victory to your list of reasons to stick with it.

And stick with it, friend. Carnivore works.

 

You Have to Stop Doing Carnivore

You’ll waste away!

Every time I see somebody I haven’t seen in a while, they tell me how great I look. Well, that’s nice of them, isn’t it? It also happens to be true. I look about as good as I am capable of looking. Not gonna be winning any beauty contests, sadly, but I’m doing OK! And then, at least half the time, that same someone will say with concern–or, I’m not above suspecting, envy–something to the effect that one can take this thing too far, and I should really reincorporate something sweet into my meals at some point.

There was a time when it would have been a fair observation that I was becoming too skinny. Back when I was doing keto and there were a bunch of vegetables taking up space I should have been using for protein and fat, I was getting to be a little bit on the stringy side. I got down to just 100 lbs, and I hated the way I looked. I still hadn’t lost all the visible fat in my belly, but everything just hung off of me. I was wasting muscle, not just fat. I knew I couldn’t go back to the way of eating that had made me sick to begin with, but I certainly couldn’t continue with keto. All of my research convinced me that removing even more kinds of foods from my diet, rather than adding anything else back, was the best way to make myself truly healthy, and not just not fat.

When I went carnivore, I put back on fifteen pounds or so, and most of that was muscle and bone. I wish I’d had a before and after dexa scan to prove it, but common sense and a good look in the mirror are really enough. I’m definitely bigger than I was, and I’m definitely not fat.

Now, most of the time, when somebody tells me I’m going to get sick from all this meat, I just show my skeptic a nice, firm bicep, or tell them how fast I can run or how much weight I can lift these days. I am well-built at this point, with a healthy layer of muscle everywhere it ought to be. I even get comments about my good build from strangers in public. Nobody thinks I’m skinny. Feels good, man!

I do still have a little bit of mommy-belly, an inch or so of dangly skin that’s pretty easily hidden under my clothes. I’ve carried eight babies and had 5 c-sections. It’s not perfect, and I don’t know if it ever will be. But that’s ok, because a perfect little tummy is not what I’m going for. It would be nice, but it’s not my goal. That’s what I really want you to understand: I’m not doing this diet so I can look small. I want to be appropriately sized, strong and fast enough to do anything I need to do, and sharp and quick enough to stay alive in an increasingly tricky world. (Have you seen the traffic around here lately?)

I can’t do this if I’m eating the way 98% of the people around me are eating. Sorry. It just won’t work. It’s not working for you, either, friend.

Beauty is a sign of health, and health is what I’m chasing. I won’t say I don’t care how I look, because I’m as vain as any woman. I like to look just as good as I can. Happily, when I chase health, I’m bound to catch a little beauty, as well! I can’t lose eating this way!

Carnivore is not a weight loss diet. If you are fat, you will lose weight on carnivore. Your body will no longer be receiving the signal from your food to store extra fat. But if you are too skinny, you can fix that with carnivore, too! Doesn’t that just blow your mind? How is that even possible? But it’s true. You can stimulate muscle and put on healthy fat with this diet. I did it myself, and I haven’t dropped below 115 pounds in a few years. In fact, I’m still slowly gaining a little muscle. It ain’t easy to gain at 40-something, but if you lift consistently, and eat enough MEAT, it is doable.

I never have to eat more than I want to, but I do get to eat until I’m full. And then I can stop eating until I’m hungry again. Now, my concerned friend, does that sound like an eating disorder to you?

People actually heal their eating disorders and get back to a healthy weight by eating only meat. The carnivore way of eating will recompose your body to its best advantage. It does not simply force weight loss until you die. It is not anorexia. It is not a weird cultish fear of food. It is not something people do just to shock the current culture and stick a finger in the globalist all-seeing eye. (Although I do see that last as an upside.)

Carnivore is simply optimal.

For everybody, though? Well, like I’ve said before, I don’t think everybody has to go carnivore. Most people who think they’re doing ok would see improvements in problems they never even thought were food-related, if they’d just give it 30 days. I do think absolutely everybody can thrive on it. There is nobody who absolutely has to have plants. They are non-essential. Plants, especially grains, are survival food, hibernation food, slave food. As long as I have a choice, I want to thrive, not just survive.

There are sometimes some bumps in the road for some as they become accustomed to the Meat Life™, but all of the difficulties I’ve coached people through are caused not by eating meat, but by the severe damage they’ve already done to their bodies with standard American fare. See my “Why Carnivore Didn’t Work For You” series, for a few ways things can go wrong. If you need any help getting through the transition to a diet (not necessarily carnivore) that will work best for you, get in touch with me by email (cindy at getalonghome dot com) or on social media. I’d love to help!

Dear friends and family, I cannot possibly take this lifestyle too far, because it is not weight loss that I’m pursuing. It is health that I am after, and I’m getting better all the time. Join me!

Want to chat? Catch me on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.

 

 

Why Carnivore Didn’t Work for You, Part 5: You Went Too Fast

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

So you heard about this awesome, extreme way of eating. You saw the news that people were reversing diabetes, healing auto-immune diseases, lowering blood pressure, losing weight, getting ripped, and feeling incredible. You decided to jump into the lifestyle, went straight to the pantry, and threw out everything that never had a face. You went from eating all the things, to eating only beef, salt, and water on the first day.

And good for you! You knew what you needed to do, and you decided to just rip that band-aid right off and get on with it. That works beautifully sometimes! Probably about half of the people I’ve talked to personally about carnivore make this transition smoothly, with no trouble at all. Other times, unfortunately, a person will meet with so many trials in that first few weeks that they will give up. One of the things we carnivores often forget to mention is that we usually have a slower introduction to the Meat Life than this. Probably 95% of the successful Carnivorists started their search for health with keto, paleo, or something else a little off the beaten path, and only eventually pared it down to the bare necessities.

I was on a ketogenic diet for about 6 months before I decided to try it without plants. Because I transitioned slowly to this way of eating, I avoided all of the potential pitfalls of rushing right in.

I changed my relationship with food slowly.

I did not intentionally transition slowly to carnivore, as I had never even considered carnivore until about a day before I started it. As with many carnivores, it just sorta happened. I fell out of love with carbs. For me, there was no traumatic divorce from my Standard American Diet. Food is an emotional thing for most people. You have a relationship with it, even if you’re not a carb addict. It’s there for you when you feel bad or bored. It’s part of the social atmosphere, especially at holidays. You can’t just quit eating, so every meal is fraught with the stress of choice-making. So rather than changing everything about your food all at once, you need to change the way you relate to food first.

My only goal at first was to lose weight, so I started with a “dirty” ketogenic diet. The thinking behind it made sense–cut carbs, eat more fat–so that’s what I did. I did the keto desserts, the butter in my coffee, the intermittent fasting to get my ketones up. I baked all kinds of keto treats and made fat bombs. I even ate Atkins and Quest bars. Those things do not provide adequate nutrition. They’re junk food! But I think they’re also just fine while starting out. While I was weaning off of the real granola bars and candies, they provided a crutch so that all of the rest of my eating could be good, low-carb, whole foods. They are still worlds better than the carbohydrate-full kind! I began to feel better and lose weight immediately.

After a few months of getting used to running on fat instead of sugar, I cut out all sweet treats and bread substitutes, keeping the vegetables and berries and low-carb dairy. I did that because I knew that the sweet treats were still giving me more total carbs than I was able to handle. My weight loss had stalled.

I then moved to a “clean” ketogenic diet, and I lost more weight. Most of the problems that I had had with my skin, my mental health, my asthma all went away with a clean, unprocessed ketogenic diet. But I still had milder problems at times. One day, I was talking with a friend about veganism, and I said without thinking much about it “I’d rather give up all plants than all meat.” And the idea was born. I had not yet realized that you don’t have to have plants to be healthy, but I had made the connection between plants and many of my symptoms. It was a couple of days later that I happened upon some carnivore on YouTube (probably Shawn Baker or Paul Saladino), and only after looking into it more deeply, to see if this actually makes sense, did I decide to eliminate plants entirely.

Changing my relationship with food wasn’t enough. I also had to change my gut flora. The gut micro-biome is one of most-studied and least-understood aspects of human health, so a lot of what I’m about to say is conjecture. The more we study it the less we seem to know, and I am absolutely not going to claim any expertise. Even the experts have no real idea what they’re doing, according to the experts themselves! But what I do know, and have seen many times, is that changing your food too quickly can lead to some awful symptoms.

Anybody who has brought a new puppy home knows that you have to mix some of their old type of food with the new food over several days to allow their microbiome to adapt.  I had to do the same with my dog when I switched him to an appropriate diet (aka: meat) for dogs. The kibble you get in the stores is not the right food for an animal. We went too fast with our daughter’s new dog, due to only having a handful of his old food to work with, and he had a horrible diarrhea requiring veterinarian care. The very same thing happens when humans change their diets too quickly.

You might not be in love with carbs anymore, but I guarantee you some of your critters still are! In addition to the gastrointestinal distress of the bacteria die-off and replacement, I often see people anywhere from two to six weeks into a no-sugar diet–whether carnivore, keto, or just lower carb–begin to have depression, brain fog, and lack of willpower to resist carbs, even though they were doing fine for the first few weeks. I have a theory, completely untested by Science™, that when certain microbes and parasites are being fed, namely those that thrive on carbohydrates, they send soporific signals to your brain, letting you know that all is right with their world. And when they’re not being fed? Look out. They get mad, and mean, and start to beg for sugar. Like a rampaging toddler who wants his toy NOW, they will make you unhappy until they get what they want.

AI rendering of “angry toddler who wants his toy”

That’s just my theory, for what it’s worth. What is not just a theory, because I’ve seen it happen time and time again, is that if you power through these difficult times, get back on the diet no matter how many times you fall off, you will get past this!

Moving more slowly in weaning off of the plant matter will help you succeed. Don’t add back sugar when you feel like you’re not going to be able to stick to this way of eating. Just add back some green vegetables or some low-carb berries. These kinds of foods will help calm that urge to really hurt yourself on the sweet stuff, and you will be able to move on into carnivore bliss in a few days.