Category Archives: Diet

Why Carnivore Didn’t Work for You, Part 2: Electrolytes

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Salt up, sweetie!

By far the most common complaints I hear from someone when they begin carnivore or keto are these:

  • cramping
  • dizziness
  • tiredness
  • flu-like muscle aches
  • heart pounding or flutters

These are all symptoms of electrolyte loss, which is thankfully very easy to fix!

When you switch to a low-carb or zero-carb way of eating, you no longer retain fluid the way you do when you’re a sweet-eater. The first thing you notice when you finally get into ketosis is that you pee. A LOT. In fact, that first heady weight-loss success of 10-15 pounds in two weeks is mostly just water! I’m sorry to break it to you, but the fat loss doesn’t come immediately. It’s water loss that has you all excited. And rightly so! You shouldn’t have been holding on to all that water. It’s making you puffy and not benefitting you at all, locked away like that.

Carbohydrates cause your body to lock water away in your cells, and with it, salts and minerals. As you begin to burn more fat than sugar, the retained water flushes out of your system, taking with it (mainly) your sodium, magnesium, and potassium. Your body has been used to doing one thing, and now it has to learn to do another. This comes with symptoms, unless you do something about it. Attention should be paid in the first several weeks of your new way of eating to getting enough salt (mainly), and very likely a magnesium and potassium supplement as well.

But salt is bad for you!

Well…no. Cutting back on salt is one of the worst ideas modern medicine has pushed. While there are apparently a small number of people for whom a very large amount of salt really does cause high blood pressure, most people need more salt, not less. Even those salt-sensitive people will probably be able to use normal amounts of salt when they cut out the sugar. It is that other white crystal we love to consume that is causing the outrageous epidemic of high blood pressure: sugar. Cut your sugar, and your “high” salt intake will be perfectly benign. Beneficial, even! James DiNicolantonio’s book, The Salt Fix, is a very good primer on the subject:

How much salt, though? Well, all I can say for sure is: be liberal about it. Salt your food to taste. Put a pinch of salt in your water when you drink. Drink clean electrolyte drinks like LMNT or Myoxcience’s Stix. If you have symptoms, have even more salt. If you have too much salt, you will simply feel thirsty and drink more water.

I like to buy electrolyte powders for hot days, or when I’m doing a lot of hard physical activity, but most of the time, they’re a treat, rather than a necessity. They can get a little bit expensive. You don’t have to spend that kind of money. Just put some salt, and maybe some no-salt into your water. Add a daily magnesium for a few weeks, as well, at least until the symptoms are long gone. After you’re “fat adapted”, you may never need to take further measures, and you’ll just instinctively eat the amount of salt you need. Some people find after a while that they need to eat no salt at all, while others, like me, are still salt-fiends. For now, though, assume you need more salt.

Can I have too much salt? There’s very little risk of overdose, unless you’re being ridiculous. You’re not going to be ridiculous are you? Remember the woman who drank too much water too fast and died? You can overdose on anything. But if you’re being sensible and not eating a tablespoon of salt at a time, ten times a day, you are not going to hurt yourself.

Just be a little bit, maybe a lot, more deliberately salty, and you’ll be fine. Don’t let “keto flu”, which is temporary, if unpleasant, stop you from getting healthy! Salt up!

Plain Food

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Healthy kids.

One of my teenagers recently told me of a conversation with his coworker. He was talking about our family’s food habits, and told her that I often serve plain, crumbled ground beef with no seasonings.

“That’s child abuse!”

Now, first of all, it’s not like I’m forbidding my children the use of all seasonings. Salt and butter they have in abundance, and they can usually have salsa, sour cream, worcestershire sauce, or several other condiments they like. But we do eat a fair amount of undressed, un-sauced food, and I do this very intentionally. It is not out of laziness, or meanness, or even because I’m a bad cook. I serve most of our food unadorned out of a sincere belief that this will teach my children to have a healthy relationship with food.

When I first started eating a ketogenic diet, I went into it with the mindset that this diet was just for me, because of my particular health problems. I was still stuck in my old way of thinking, brought on by frequent contact with Western medicine, that my problems were genetic, irreversible, and unique to me, so I didn’t feel that there was a need to drag my perfectly healthy (or so I thought) children along for the ride. I was just trying to keep my blood sugar under control, not change the world.

I continued to make the family’s usual “healthy” foods and just made a little something different for myself. But as I delved more into the topic, and especially as I began to go fully carnivore, the realization set in that sugar wasn’t even the main reason I shouldn’t be eating plants. I began to understand that the principles I was applying to my own health could and should be applied to the health of every human being. I had thought at first that keto/carnivore was going to be just a me thing, but I saw after several months that I didn’t just look better. Not only did I have better blood-glucose levels, but all kinds of health problems had become faint memories, rather than daily realities.

Joint pain, brain fog, anxiety, social phobia, trichotillomania, hidradenitis supprativa, asthma, eczema, seasonal allergies, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I’ve just plain forgotten were all GONE. (I still sneeze a little during ragweed season.)

Having realized that, I began to accept that my children were also having some of the same problems I was, and likely for the same reasons. Were they really doing fine, as I’d thought? One of my children had the trifecta of allergies, asthma, and eczema, as well as the disturbing beginnings of an OCD (brought on by a viral infection). Another had been showing symptoms of IBS for at least a year. We had already discovered long ago that still another child loses all symptoms and behaviors of autism as long as we don’t include grains and dairy in that child’s diet. What else might I be able to do for them with an appropriate diet?

Seeing all of this, I couldn’t any longer keep my children on even a “healthy” normal diet. While I didn’t take them all fully carnivore, I did begin to make all of their meals heavily meat-based. I allow them no more than two servings a day of either fruit or a starchy vegetable. They can have some leafy greens, though not kale or spinach. I eliminated grains, seed oils, and all refined carbohydrates completely, allowing for seeds and nuts or beans once a week, and only for the children who tolerate them well. For the two with the most obvious problems, we went 100% carnivore for a time. Both of those children are able to incorporate only small amounts of some “safer” plants, though still not daily.

It’s pretty restrictive, and we’re fine with that.

Now, I know (or hope, at least) that my son’s coworker was joking when she proclaimed our plain fare to be actual child abuse. But let me tell you what looks a lot more like child abuse to me:

  • 8 year-olds who weigh 150 pounds
  • teenagers with Type II diabetes
  • children who can’t go more than an hour without begging for a snack
  • children who can’t behave themselves because of food colorings, sugar highs, malabsorption of nutrients, and proteins that are incompatible with the human gut

That, and not thoughtful application of dietary principles, is child abuse. I am certainly not accusing parents themselves (most of them, anyway) of abuse, but our overall food culture is abusive. Because of dishonest science, hatred of self-discipline, and the greed of big food corporations, nobody knows how to eat, or even that food has an impact on all areas of health. That is an absolute shame, and we have to put an end to it. Now, once a person knows he should do something, and doesn’t do it, we might begin to put the blame on that person. It might become abuse, or at least neglect, if a bad situation is allowed to continue.

The foods that I used to serve my children were very tasty. I took a lot of pride in being a good cook. In fact, I inadvertently did to my children with my “healthy home cooking” the exact same thing that wicked big food corporations are still trying to do to all of us. By introducing the biggest and best flavors I could manage–every day, nearly every meal–I was spoiling their palates and their health, and (much worse) setting them up for food addictions later in life.

Hyper-palatability is that quality of sweetness, saltiness, and fat that processed (even home-processed) foods possess. When we eat these foods, that powerful combination of flavor and mouthfeel bypass all hunger and satiety signals that our hormones send when we are hungry or full, causing us to both overeat, and eat the wrong food. Food corporations spend millions, maybe billions, on research finding the best ways to keep customers eating long past the point of satiety, and to keep us coming back for more. Even though the body’s nutritional needs are not being met by these foods, our entire bodies wantonly crave them, and reject plain food in favor of that dopamine high. There’s a word for this. It’s called addiction. My constant attempts to please the palates of my family were creating raging addicts in my home. I had to face that fact and do a hard thing.

I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it is not. They actually acted like a bunch of little addicts when I stopped letting them have the candy and gold fish crackers! They were somewhat depressed, unhappy with everything I fed them for a while, and though they are typically well-behaved, there were a some bad attitudes for a while. Thankfully, it didn’t take them long to adapt. They are children, after all, and very impressionable. After a few months of eating real food, not too fancy, they learned to reject (for the most part) foods that do not nourish them. Kids do want to do what is good for them, but we have to enable them to do it by removing the stumbling blocks in their way.

Don’t we ever have fun with our food? Sure! Our family does still occasionally have food that can be considered hyper-palatable, like this keto or carnivore pizza or carnivore waffles. But I keep these things mostly to special occasions. There’s nothing wrong with having a treat every now and then, but to expect every meal to hit all of those pleasure buttons in our brains is gluttony. Dare I use such a harsh word to describe probably most of the people who are reading this blog? Yes, I do.

American, you’re most likely enjoying your food a little too much, and a little too often. That is gluttony.

Do your children a favor, moms and dads: Give them plain food 95% of the time. Salt it, of course! We actually need salt. But use sauces and seasonings less frequently, and get the processed foods out of your house entirely. It is a hard lesson to learn, but teach your children to be content with meat that just tastes like meat, fruit that just tastes like fruit, and veggies that just taste like veggies. I can promise that if you do this, you will be improving not only your children’s overall health, but their behavior and moods, and even their emotional connection with you and each other. Far too many children who appear healthy but have behavioral issues are struggling because they just don’t have the energy to fully engage.

Help them.

You might fear a mutiny if you do what I did, but you are the parent. They can’t drive themselves to the store and override your decisions. (Well, a couple of mine could have, actually.) If you do not give in to the addictions that you have created, it won’t be long before the crying is over, and your children accept that this is just how it is for your family. I know you love your children. I know how much I loved mine when I was feeding them the exact same way! Now put as much thought and effort into their nutrition as you do into every other aspect of their lives.

If you find that you need help with a transition to a healthier (not necessarily carnivore) diet for your family, get in touch with me on SG or MeWe and I’ll send you a link to my diet coaching page. Or just shoot me your questions and I’ll get to them directly if at all possible.

 

 

Did Keto or Carnivore Heal My Thyroid?

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Could it heal yours?

I mentioned a while back that I was experimenting with easing off of my thyroid medication. I had high hopes that my carnivore/keto ways of eating had finally made it possible for my thyroid to make its own hormones. I’m at the end of that experiment now, and ready to report my results. I’m going to have to back up a ways to explain my thinking and results, though, so that readers can understand why my results are probably not going to be typical. Someone else may have a better or worse chance of success, depending on their unique circumstances.

In my late teens, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. What I really had was a drug problem, intense sadness, and a Jesus-shaped hole in my heart. But I didn’t turn to Jesus until much later. The worldly way of dealing with my failures was to see a psychiatrist, so that’s what I did. The psychiatrist put me on lithium, never warning me that the drug could affect my thyroid function. I was on myriad other drugs, also, and nothing helped at all. I’m not going to go into the story of the next few years, because, to tell the truth, I have no memory of a great deal of it. It was bad, OK? Suffice it to say that Jesus found me, made me whole, and I’ve been clothed and (mostly) in my right mind for about twenty years now.

Praise God!

But my thyroid did not recover. When I cold-turkey quit all the psych meds, I also threw out the thyroid medicine. In my ignorance, I didn’t realize that it was different than the rest of the meds, and I actually needed that one. For about five years, I didn’t understand that I was running on a damaged thyroid. I had plenty of symptoms that I didn’t know were symptoms, but I had fired all the doctors, so there was nobody to tell me.

This is the part where we sit in silence, in awe and wonder at how God brought me through these still-difficult years and gave me two beautiful, healthy children when I should probably have been infertile.

Then, like many post-partum women, after my second child, I found that my thyroid just flat-out couldn’t do it any more. A doctor finally tested my hormone levels, and put me on levothyroxine. That was more than fifteen years ago, and I have been taking that medication every day since then.

Once I started doing a ketogenic, then carnivore diet, I felt better than I could remember feeling since I was a child. My thyroid antibodies, a marker of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, simply disappeared after I cut out plants. I started hearing stories of women with Hashimoto’s being able to regain some thyroid function. But I didn’t just have Hashimoto’s. I also had decreased function from the psychiatric attack on my thyroid. My chances of success were slim, but I had to try.

As I mentioned here, I did everything I could think of, including quitting coffee and taking thyroid boosting supplements, to optimize my thyroid function, and then I (without my doctor’s supervision, and don’t you EVER think of trying this at home) eased myself off my thyroid medicine over a period of some weeks. For about the amount of time it takes for the last of the thyroid medicine to leave your body, I felt normal.

Then for a few more weeks, I thought I felt normal. Maybe a little slow. And then I started slipping more noticeably. I started to gain some weight, even though I wasn’t eating any differently. I was forgetting things, not getting my housework done, feeling cranky and sluggish all the time. My hair dried out, nails became brittle. Exercise became hard, instead of a joy to me like it usually is.

I kept on trucking for a few more weeks, hoping that my brain and thyroid tissue would finally figure it out.

In the end, I finally had to admit that I was not going to make it. These were my numbers about 3 months from beginning to taper off:

Woah!

So, no, carnivore and keto did not heal my thyroid. I’m not able to make it without hormone replacement. Back on the same medication I went.

But here’s the interesting part. There were things that got better, even as my thyroid symptoms got worse. My period (avert your eyes, men) had always been ridiculously heavy and with giant clots, and that actually got better with no meds. I didn’t experience any cycle disruption at all. Perhaps I would have if I hadn’t tapped out of the experiment when I did. My sleep tracker started telling me that I was sleeping better, less restlessly.

The biggest change was that my acne disappeared. For a few years, I’d constantly had embarrassing, ugly, deep red cysts on my face. After stopping the meds, I didn’t even need makeup to go out anymore. I confess, I always felt especially delicate about the acne because I knew many people would blame my carnivore diet for it. I want to be an ambassador for this optimal way of eating, and I knew nobody would want to imitate me with my face looking like that. I had questioned whether it was the diet myself, but I’ve never seen a carnivore besides me have this problem, and I felt wonderful otherwise. I knew it had to be something else. I had never considered that it could be the formulation of the medication itself.

When I went back on Levoxyl, that acne came roaring back. The good news in this for me was that coffee was not the reason I had acne. It was obviously the medication, so I at least got to reacquaint myself with that old friend. Temporarily. We can talk more about coffee some other time.

Once I started thinking through what had happened during my sabbatical from medication, I realized that it was probably some inactive ingredient in the thyroid pill I was taking, and not anything wrong with my hormones, that was causing the acne. So, without fully disclosing to my doctor what a crazy thing I had done to figure this out, I asked her to put me on Tirosint, instead of Levoxyl. It’s pricey, but absolutely worth it to get a medication that doesn’t have any unnecessary ingredients.

I have not had any acne since I switched meds. My periods also got even lighter and my cycle is shorter: 28 days now instead of 34. This is marvelous!

Even though I didn’t succeed at resurrecting my thyroid with the carnivore diet, as many Hashimoto’s sufferers have done, I am very glad I tried. It is not a good idea to just accept long-term medication without trying to find other solutions. There was a better approach for me, and it is possible that I never would have realized it if I hadn’t gone this route.

Carnivore and keto might still work for your thyroid, Dear Reader. Several readers have asked for updates, I presume because they’d like to try this themselves. My friendly, not-at-all-medical advice is to get your diet nailed down for at least six months. Do either grain- and dairy-free keto or, ideally, carnivore. See if your antibodies improve. Then, under your doctor’s supervision–please do not do follow my example and go it alone–ease off the drugs and see what happens for you. I had a history of high lithium intake to contend with, so you very easily could have better luck than I did.

I would encourage anybody with Hashimotos to give it a very studied, deliberate, careful attempt. I’d love to hear from any of you about your own situation!

I’m not opening comments on the blog anymore. Spam and trolls are just too much trouble. You can find me for conversation on Gab, MeWe, and SG.

Of Kale and Coffee

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“What’s wrong with kale?” a reader wanted to know after my post about parental bribery, which was not really about kale. I trust this means that my point about parenting was well-taken, at least.

If I didn’t have a personal clean speech policy, I’d gladly don the t-shirt that Paul Salad-no–er, Saladino–likes to wear:

I know people hear that and think it’s some kind of anti-health joke, but I am in earnest when I say you shouldn’t eat it. It is mostly unusable fiber, useful only for making your poops big. It is also loaded with compounds that both inhibit absorption of any nutrients that might be found in it and could potentially harm you in other ways. Cooking it can take care of some of these chemicals, but not all. It’s a leafy green that has iron, you say? Sorry, mom, it’s not iron that a human body can use very well. You’re much better off eating an ounce of liver, or just plain old ground beef, than several cups of kale.

The goitrogens found in kale and all of its relatives are the main reason I find that mother’s feeding of her children to be appalling. That wasn’t just kale, but raw kale. The kids’ thyroids will survive a few doses of that, but over a lifetime? This is an incredibly bad idea.

Is kale good for anything? Well, we took a weekend trip to Asheville a few years ago and saw that they had kale planted in the flower beds. I approve of this use of kale. And look, if you cook it real good to get the goitrogens out and eat it far, far away from any foods you want to actually absorb, you can eat some kale and not be harmed by it. If you really like it (you freak), your pleasure is a good worth pursuing. It’s not a bad poison in the right dose, delivered the right way. You might even get some trace minerals with your snack, if you salt it with an unrefined salt. But kale is not really helping anything, once you factor in the numerous downsides.

And now I turn my baleful gaze on coffee. I can hear you already screaming “Why do you have to ruin everything, Cindy? Why?!” Coffee is good for you. Everybody says so. Just like kale. In fact, Ken Berry says it’s good for you (or did, back when he posted this), so you can comfort yourself with this happy video:

I believe I heard that the good doctor has quit coffee himself now, and become somewhat less certain of himself in this regard.

I’ll let Paul Saladino explain the problem with coffee, which also happens to be the problem with chocolate.

If you don’t have time to watch, that’s fine. It’s all pretty sciencey and involved. Suffice it to say that there are good reasons to turn down that morning cup of wakefulness.

For myself, coffee and chocolate both were causing hormonal acne. I’m not sure if it was the high cortisol, the disturbed sleep, some chemical from the growing or processing of those beans, or something else I can’t even think of, but my face had at least one, sometimes two or three new oil volcanoes every month, right about that time, IYKWIM. I looked awful. One thing I’m certain of is that caffeine all by itself is not causing these problems. I’m still having the equivalent of one to two cups a day with Run gum (that link gets you 20% off for the next two shoppers that use it), which I will be stopping as soon as I feel like it, which is not right now. I also like a yerba mate or yaupon tea from time to time, as they’re a low-oxalate alternative to pekoe tea.

I quit chocolate first, and things got some better. I did see improvement, but not enough to think I’d really solved the problem. It wasn’t until I finally broke the coffee (not to say the caffeine) habit that I experienced healing to an extent that made me a believer. Since I quit, my body temperature has risen, as well, so it was affecting my thyroid, as well.

These beans are not good for me.

Should you quit your coffee? I don’t know. If you’re sleeping beautifully (you’ll have to let me tell you about my Oura ring sometime!), no skin problems, stable mood, no gut or hormonal problems, then go ahead and enjoy your bitter brew. But know that it’s probably going to bite you someday if you can’t moderate the habit.

You should definitely quit kale though. Definitely.

Using a CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitor)

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A geeky thing you can do for your health

I’ve been wearing a continuous glucose monitor from nutrisense.io for the last couple of weeks. I’m getting ready to switch it out for a fresh one today, and thought I’d share a link with you guys. For no good reason that I can discern, glucose monitors require a doctor’s prescription most of the time, but Nutrisense provides the service without bothering your own doctor or insurance. I believe there’s a doctor involved in there somewhere, but you pay out of pocket, and it’s considered to be for educational purposes only. Certainly you could share the information you gather with your own doctor, but I honestly have so little faith in the average doctor’s understanding of nutrition and metabolism that I don’t know why you’d want to. You’re often better off taking these matters into your own hands.

There’s really no world-changing reason for me to be using a CGM at this point. I just wanted a window to my metabolism that’s a little larger than the sporadic finger-prick glucose test can give.

A couple of years ago, when I had been doing carnivore for about a year, I got three months’ worth of monitoring from Nutrisense for both myself and Get Along Husband, mostly because I wanted to see if his chronic headaches could be correlated with blood sugar excursions, but also for my own entertainment. To some extent, the headaches were correlated with high glucose, and the CGM convinced him that a high-carb diet was never going to be beneficial to his tender noggin. His general health has benefitted from that information, as well.

There’s nothing like seeing your body struggling to deal with sugar in real time to make you knock that stuff right out!

Now, I have my hba1c and other lab tests, as well as my keto-mojo and the fact that I feel good all the time, to give me all the information I really need to decide whether my carnivore diet is working for me. So I didn’t exactly need a CGM this time around. But I wanted to see a few things after a couple more years of getting 99% of my nutrition from animal products:

  1. How high was my exercise raising my glucose? A couple of years ago, I would frequently see my sugars go up into the 160s after a hard workout or a run. How am I doing with that now? Does my body still need that much sugar, or am I running on fat more than I used to?
  2. Am I metabolically inflexible? What does a meal with carbs do to my body? While my overall numbers look great in a one-time lab test, there is that nagging question of what is happening on those rare occasions that I include berries or fruit or alcohol. Would I be able to go back to eating beans and rice fairly quickly (after all, the Great Reset is being foisted upon us as we speak) without too much metabolic trouble? Am I so physiologically used to running on fat that my body is distressed when I reintroduce sugar?
  3. It is often said by ketosis skeptics that metabolic flexibility goes out the window if you stay in ketosis too much, and that completely eliminating sugar is just as bad as having too much sugar. I doubt that inflexibility goes both ways. I think you can lose your ability to run on fat far more easily than you can lose your ability to run on sugar, but I wanted to see that happening, if it is. If I need to carb-cycle, I want to know that.

While these are things I thought I already knew the answer to because I’ve studied the dickens out of the subject, I really wanted to just see it. So far, I’ve had no real surprises, but I have a couple of weeks left to go in which I’ll probably put myself through some tests that I normally wouldn’t want to do. Hopefully I’ll be able to find the time to share the results with you.

This post is getting too long for a Monday morning, so I’ll be back with some graphs in another post to tell you what I’ve learned, and what I think I’m seeing. In the meantime, whether you eat a standard American diet, or paleo, or carnivore, or just live on air and sunshine like a plant, you might also be interested to see what’s happening to your blood glucose 24/7. If so, I have a referral link that will get you $25 dollars off your first order with Nutrisense. If you sign up, I would also get $25 off my next month, but I’m not going to be doing another month, so I don’t really benefit from this deal.

The cool thing about Nutrisense is that they have dieticians and coaches on hand to help you understand what you’re seeing. You don’t have to be a geek to get a lot of good information from this service.

Let me know if you decide to do it! Want to discuss this, or anything else? Find me any time on SG, Gab, or MeWe.

 

What to do About Recurring Boils, AKA Hidradenitis Supprativa

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Medical “science” strikes out again. (Please note that I am talking about my own personal experience, and not handing out advice. Follow me or don’t, but don’t blame or credit me for your outcome. This is about my journey, and your causes may be completely different! But what I’ve done is absolutely worth a try if you’re suffering. In case you’re not interested in my story, I’ll put the spoiler up here: stop eating grains, especially wheat, and seed oils, and maybe nightshades and dairy.)

Have you ever heard of hidradenitis suppurativa? It’s a fancy word for boils. You get them under your arms, on your buttocks, under your breasts. If you do a web search, you’ll be told that HS results from infected hair follicles, hormones, skin rubbing together, uncleanliness, or genetics. Smoking and being overweight makes it worse. It’s supposedly rare, and supposedly incurable. The advanced stages of HS often have surgeons flaying the skin off their patients to try and improve the situation. Antibiotics don’t help, because there’s no infection. People–even doctors who should know better– often erroneously attribute it to poor hygiene. It’s debilitating. It’s embarrassing, painful, and ugly, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

When I was in my early twenties, I started getting HS boils, and it was a constant bother until just a few years ago. I lived about seventeen years with these things, and it was non-stop, no remission, no matter what I tried. I was not overweight at the time that I developed the condition, and the boils persisted even when I quit smoking, so these two things, for me, seem to have little to do with it. Nothing seemed to cause it, and nothing seemed to help. I’d never had a bacterially-infected boil, nor did antibiotics ever do anything but upset my stomach. I’d had surgery suggested to me, but no way was I doing that. That sounded worse than the disease itself.

It never occurred to me that it was specific foods causing it, and no doctor ever suggested it to me.

It is purely accidental that I haven’t had a single boil in the last four years. If I hadn’t gotten gestational diabetes and then decided to live the rest of my life on a very low carb diet, I’d still be having trouble sitting down. The scars will always be with me, but I don’t even mind wearing sleeveless shirts anymore.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I had a particularly bad boil, and ended up in the ER with it. The doctor who was taking care of me asked, “Do you by any chance have Crohn’s disease? We see this in these patients pretty frequently.” He seemed to think that it was because of the diarrhea that accompanies that disease being an irritant to the skin. It didn’t apply to my situation, but I never forgot what he said. It was a clue. I knew even then that it wasn’t because of skin irritation or infection, but something internal, maybe autoimmune (or autoinflammatory, whatever). I now think that people with Crohn’s are at least partly food-inflamed in much the same way I was. If I knew anybody with Crohn’s, I’d evangelize them about the carnivore diet.

A while back, one of the leading internet carnivore/keto lifestyle doctors posted a video about HS, and how to deal with it, and his solution was (of course) a ketogenic diet and weight loss. When you’ve got a hammer–and a fine hammer it is!–everything’s a nail. Dr. Berry gives a confident, firm, and wrong answer.

I embedded the video because I do like his advice on diet, and you should follow it for plenty of reasons. But it’s not insulin-resistance. At least, it wasn’t for me. Your mileage may, of course, vary.

Certainly, my HS did get better at the same time I went keto. Kelly Hogan tells the same story. But I think Dr. Berry is wrong about the reason for that. It’s not insulin resistance that causes HS. Getting your blood sugar under control will likely not clear up the whole mess, though it will help a little.

I’ve had HS long before I got fat, and I didn’t get better when I lost weight while still eating triggering foods. Now that I’m off the grains and seed oils, no amount of mere sugar can trigger it. I know, because I’ve experimented with it to see. I can eat honey and fruit all day long, and I’m fine. Now, insulin resistance will contribute to inflammation body-wide, just as the good doctor says, so people with HS or any other illness do need to get themselves healthy. This means you absolutely need to lose weight. Fat exacerbates the problem, the same way it exacerbates every other health problem. It does make it worse. I’m not saying to stay fat.

Do not stay fat!

But I don’t think insulin resistance causes HS. For me, HS is a severe, almost instantaneous reaction to certain foods, not insulin resistance. My approach to a ketogenic diet just happened to eliminate the foods that were causing my HS.

One great thing about adhering to a carnivore diet is that you can do controlled experiments on yourself to see what symptoms any given food might cause. I have carefully added back several different foods for the sake of seeing what I can get away with, and to my surprise, I found that, for me, grains (wheat, corn, rice, etc.) and seed oils are the only triggers for this condition. Even a tiny crumb of something made with wheat will set off bleeding, swelling, and itching in my scars. I once went to a BBQ place and there was a stray crumb from the breading of fried okra on my plate. I didn’t even swallow it! I spit it out as soon as I tasted it. Or maybe I swallowed some without realizing it. Anyway, I didn’t think anything else of it until a few hours later when the itching started. Seed oils on my meat at a restaurant will do the same as grains. It’s not even worth eating out anymore, I have to be so careful. I suspect nightshades and dairy could be a problem for some people, but they don’t seem to cause this particular symptom in me.

Whatever it is that caused my HS in the beginning (I think it was ultimately due to a medical procedure I had when I was 18), I don’t have boils now, as long as I stay away from grains and seed oils.

You can call it remission, if you like. I’m not healed. I’ll still get painful boils if I start eating those foods again. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s as good as a cure. With all due respect to the doctor, while a keto/carnivore approach that excludes grains and seed oils may help, I don’t think it’s for the reasons he gives. In fact, you might be metabolically healthy like I was for several of my first years with this disease, and be just fine with your carbs. If so, you could start by eliminating the most likely triggering foods: grains, seed oils, and possibly nightshades, and dairy.

If you have HS, I’d love to hear about your experience, and whether you’ve found foods to be your trigger, either by email or on social media. You can find me on Gab, MeWe, and SG.

You Need to Hear Some Preaching

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But I’m a girl, so it won’t be Bible-preaching.

I’ve got a number of friends and family who, because of the example I set, know that they ought to cut the bad foods out of their diet. Unlike many people on a Standard American Diet, they even have some idea what those bad foods are.

The problem is, I’m the only voice they hear this stuff from, and I lack gravitas. It doesn’t matter that I have taken my body from pudgy and sickly to slender and strong. It doesn’t matter that I can run circles around people half my age. It doesn’t matter that I look hotter than I did when I was 21. (I was never very pretty, but I’m now a solid 9 out of 10, if you’re just comparing today’s me to other mes I’ve been.) It doesn’t matter that I am not aging at anything like the accelerated rate of my age cohort. None of my success can be seen as anything but a fluke, because I’m just a congenital weirdo who does things like having “too many” babies and then homeschooling them. It is certainly not just anybody who can be healthy at the ripe old age of…however old I am now. It takes a special genetic predisposition, aka luck, right?

I’m not a doctor or a certified nutritionist. I don’t even have a YouTube channel. I’ve considered it, since watching videos is apparently what everybody really wants to do. Alas, I have a face fit only for radio, and voice fit only for print, so I won’t be venturing into that world.

What I do have is this little blog and my equally tiny real-life social network. And while I’m over here with no credentials whatsoever, trying to save everybody a lot of self-inflicted grief, every magazine, newspaper, tv show, doctor, nurse, athlete, friend, and neighbor is telling my loved ones to eat ever more seed oils, grains, and sugar. And now they’re trying to turn us on to this bizarre fake meat that is supposed to be better for you than plain old, God-given meat.

Lord, help me fight this giant industry that’s trying to kill my people!

Add to these influences the fact that all those processed foods are nigh-on orgasmic to eat. When the tv is off, and you’re finally listening to your rational self and trying to reject that hyperpalatable food, your traitorous brain will start singing the same tune. Your dopamine-loving brain will tell you anything at all to justify the next hit of sweet-fat-salty bliss. Next thing you know, you’re face down in a bowl of macaroni salad, and your insulin is higher than Hunter Biden after the Chinese dropped the latest payment in his off-shore account.

All the people (but me) say this is perfectly reasonable eating behavior!

You can probably see by now that I’m getting a little frustrated trying to convince the people I love most to just stop.

Stop giving yourself cancer.

Stop giving yourself heart disease.

Stop giving yourself diabetes.

Take responsibility for what you put into your body.

You, my beloved friends and family, are giving yourself these diseases. Every time you open your mouth to put in whatever insane food happens to be in front of you, with no sense of responsibility for the effects that it will have on your body (and your mind, but I’ll get to that later), you are sinning against your own body.

Do I take it too far calling it a sin? But I told you I was going to be preaching, didn’t I?

Is there not a point where intentional self-harm begins to carry moral implications? You be the judge of your own behavior.

There was a time when you truly couldn’t be blamed for your physical condition. There was a time, before I started telling you these things, that you really thought that the food pyramid was science from on high, rather than a marketing ploy to boost grain sales. There was a time when it was still possible to believe that your illnesses were all just genetic, just normal aging, just bad luck. There was a time when you could have no idea that you had caused your own problems in large part by your own choices.

But you can’t be ignorant any longer, because I’m standing out here on my street corner with my (bun-less) sandwich-board sign telling you that you don’t have to go through the Hell of metabolic illness. Salvation is here! (Understand, please, that I am absolutely not equating having a healthy diet with saving your soul. I’m going to keep torturing this metaphor until it confesses…something, anyway.)

Actions come from belief, and belief comes from hearing, and how will you hear if I don’t preach to you?

To my dismay, I’ve discovered that what most people are willing to believe has more to do with how often they hear a thing than whether what they’re hearing makes any sense at all. (Consider this your invitation to throw out your lying tv, also.) If you hear over and over that whole grain bread is a health food and that meat will kill you, you will eat whole grain bread and cut down on meat, even though you can see with your own two eyes that you haven’t gotten healthy by following this advice. Your fat, sickly doctor will look you unabashedly in the eye and tell you to lose weight, and you’ll do the same things to lose weight that your fat, sickly doctor is doing. And guess what? You’ll be fat and sickly, too. 

People in authority, people in white coats, people in front of tv cameras, and simply the people from whom you desire social approval just keep repeating the low-fat, anti-meat mantra. They win your mind because they keep repeating the lie. I’ve been remiss in that. I cut back on saying it because I don’t want to bother people, but repetition is the key.

You know that the “healthy” way of eating will kill you; you’re watching it happen in real time. But you still need to hear from the other side daily, kind of like reading your Bible to fight the devil’s incessant tricks. So, for the sake of my loved ones (and you strangers on the internet) I’ll repeat this until it either sinks in or I die trying:

Repent!

Stop making excuses. Do the emotionally and socially painful work of changing your diet. You have a choice to become sicker or healthier, every single time you eat. I will be tickled pink to give specifics to anybody who asks, and feel free to browse my scanty archives.

If you are interested in hearing more, here are some preachers you may find quite a bit more credible than apparently I have been.

I don’t always agree with everything that all of them say. Some of them are nerdier or meatier or more plant-tolerant than others. They’ll all get to you to a much healthier place than your current advisors can.

Ken Berry, MD

Dr. Cywes, the Carb Addiction Doc

Dr. Berg

Ivor Cummins

Shawn Baker, Meat Rx

 

 

 

Do You Need Supplements on a Carnivore Diet?

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Polyphenols! Antioxidants! Vita-mints!

(As usual, nothing in this blog post is to be taken as professional medical advice or instruction. Even the parts where I call your doctor an idiot should not prevent you from consulting your doctor about any changes you make to your diet or exercise. I’m a hillbilly mommy blogger. Take me just as seriously as that warrants, and we’ll get along just fine.)

I am often asked what kind of supplements I have to take because meat is basically the only thing I eat. The first time I was asked this, I was kind of surprised. I never really thought about it because it seems obvious: I’m made of meat, therefore meat should have everything in it that I need to eat. Of course, this is a silly gut feeling and not a deeply researched conclusion. So I have done a little research over the last year or so, just to be sure I’m not missing out on something that only broccoli can give.

While my instincts led me to the correct place, the reasoning I laid on top of the intuition to explain it wasn’t very good, was it? You could just as easily think that because the animals I eat are also made of meat, and they eat plants, then I should eat plants, too. But many of the animals I eat turn out to be not very much like me, having things like crops and extra stomachs to add umph to their digestive workings. As it turns out, those animals are doing a great deal with their digestive systems that I can’t. I then eat them, so that I can get the nutrients from plants in a form that I can use.

As one guy whose name I can’t recall said “My eyes are in the front of my head, and I only have one stomach.” My stomach acid is that of a predator, not a ruminant animal. I don’t have the enlarged cecum of an herbivore that would allow me to digest large amounts of fiber like a gorilla does. I am clearly designed to hunt and eat meat. Since going carnivore, I can tell you on a personal level that my results bear out my gut instinct, however silly it may have seemed to begin with. I’ve never been so consistently healthy and happy in my life.

But what about those vitamins, huh? Especially Vitamin C, which is apparently the only thing standing between me and certain death. Everybody swears by mega-dosing with C, including some very smart people, but I’ve concluded that nobody actually needs to do this, provided they’re willing to make the changes necessary to keep their bodies healthy without supplementation. Even if you’re trying to avoid getting a cold or think it will help with cancer, I don’t see a lot of value in just shoveling in more supplements to cover for a detrimental diet.

There are couple of little secrets the food nannies haven’t let us in on for some reason. Among the best-kept is that there is C in fresh meat. Yes, there is. So there’s that, but the other secret is even more interesting. You see, vitamin C and insulin compete for the same receptors in your cells. When you’re chronically consuming carbohydrates, and thus chronically raising your insulin, your cells are less able to use whatever vitamin C you consume, making higher and higher doses necessary to get any of the needful nutrient into your tissues. As you become more hyperinsulinemic, you become more vitamin C deficient.

Some people do need a vitamin C supplement. Those people are not carnivores. All the stories about limes saving sailors from scurvy have very little to do with the limes, and much more to do with their insanely deficient diet. They ate dried meats, beer, and refined carbohydrates all day long. Of course they got scurvy.

Instead of spending extra money and time to take more and more of something that you’re actually getting plenty of, if you’d only stop wasting it, why not just lower the carbohydrate load to a point where your glucose, and thus your insulin, no longer impede your body’s use of it? You could even lower your carbs to zero for maximum effect.

Besides C, though, there’s a plethora of vitamins and minerals that we’re told we need to worry about. People who want you to assume that meat is bad for you conveniently leave out the fact that meats have every single nutrient you need in them. Do you know which people need a whole lot of supplements to survive? Vegans and vegetarians. There are a number of nutrients that you simply can’t get from plants. B12, DHA, iron, Vitamins D, A, and K, and many minerals like selenium are missing in a vegan diet, and remain inadequate in a less strict vegetarian diet with eggs. Even those plants that are touted as having a lot of nutrients often have them in the wrong form for humans to absorb and use. Some plant foods block the absorption of vital nutrients, as black beans are known to do for zinc. Plants are not your friend if you’re trying to get vitamins and minerals to stay healthy. I know this is hard to hear. I used to like black beans, too, especially with tortillas and salsa.

What about all the other super-food things? Don’t I need the polyphenols in chocolate or the antioxidants in blueberries to keep me from getting cancer or something? The simple answer for me is no. You should do your own research, of course, but I have read a lot of the literature on these things. Go ahead and eat those superfoods if you think they’ll help you. I doubt there’s much harm in many of them in the amounts you’ll be consuming them–the low-sugar foods like berries, anyway. But there is, as far as I can tell, no advantage in consuming these things, provided you get a totally unbalanced diet of meat, meat, and more meat.

I’ve concluded that those polyphenols are probably better termed “toxins”, as the power that they have seems to be in inducing a hormetic response, rather than providing something that you actually need in order to be healthy. They’re almost, to my thinking, a tiny dose of chemotherapy on a fork. That might be an ok thing to throw in there if you’re filling up on insulin-raising, immune-system destroying, cancer-feeding “foods” all day long, but I prefer to keep myself healthy by not doing things that require medicinal correctives to begin with. Your mileage may vary.

Hold on, though. I do think there is a place for supplementation! I take a couple of supplements at the moment. Depending on where you live and what diet you’ve been eating all your life, you might need some supplements, too, at least in the short term. I take the supplements I take, not because the carnivore diet is lacking, but because my environment is lacking. I simply can’t get enough sunshine or iodine where I live right now. Chances are you can’t, either. Meat helps, even with this, though, and I need far fewer supplements than I used to.

There are only two supplements I need right now: iodine and Vitamin D. Other people might need boosts of other nutrients, depending on their own location and physical needs.

I take Lugol’s 2% solution for iodine because the plants around here don’t have enough iodine in them for it to get into my meat. Everybody who lives inland and subsists mainly on meat from land animals should probably take an iodine supplement, regardless of diet. (Magnesium is also a good addition for some people for similar reasons. I don’t seem to need it, but Get Along Husband certainly does.) Most carnivores don’t even do this much, though, and they seem to be fine. With my thyroid history, I think it’s probably helpful, and I don’t see how it can hurt. The CW is that iodine is dangerous to the thyroid and we have to be very careful, but the CW is so ass-backward most of the time that I admit I just discount it out of hand now. And if that’s so, what’s with all the iodized salt in everything?

Vitamin D is just a good idea for everybody in the winter months. I use a brand that couples the D3 with K2, as D can wreak havoc with calcium absorption if there isn’t sufficient K. Some people trust that there’s enough K2 in their grass-fed meat and dairy, but I don’t feel too sure of that. The cows aren’t getting any more sun than I am right now, right? I take it once or twice a week in the winter months. This, however, is a far smaller dose than I needed back when I was consuming plants, because my diet contains more D than it used to, and I absorb all my nutrients to a far greater degree than I did when I had all that fiber clogging up the works. I used to struggle to keep my levels up, but now they stay right where they ought to without much effort at all. Just 5000-10000 IUs per week is sufficient now that I’m more replete. I suspect that I won’t need a supplement at all next winter, as long as I keep getting my sunshine, liver, and egg yolks all summer long. I get my D levels tested every fall to see what my needs will be going into the cold and flu season.

Rather than adding more and more “good” foods and supplements as medicine to offset the damage we’re causing to our bodies with harmful foods, the most effective way to be healthy is to keep from doing dietary harm in the first place. First, do no harm. Now, where have I heard that before?

Get your sunshine and eat your meat. It’s as simple as that.

(You’ll notice I’ve included no links. You have the same internet I have, so dig around and you’ll either find that I’m right or wrong. I’m a mommy blogger, but I’m not your mommy. I don’t have a lot of time to find links, but it’s a very searchable topic. Have fun finding out for yourself!)

 

A Carnivore-ish Meal Plan

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A few people have asked for a sample meal plan for what the kids eat. If you like printables, here’s a good one for meal planning. To be honest, I’ve been kinda winging it lately. It doesn’t go as well when I do that, though, so I made a proper plan this time, just for you. Here’s our likely week this week. Looks like I’ll run out of food before I run out of week:

 

Gosh, that’s a lot of scrambled eggs, isn’t it? It’s the fastest way to feed a crowd, and nobody seems to mind, so it’s what I do.

You’ll probably notice that that’s not “paleo”, as it contains beans, legumes, and seeds. I’m not totally anti-seed, like many paleo people. (I don’t even believe in cavemen; I’m a creationist, as a Christian ought to be.) I do try to keep seeds down to a couple of times a week, and only those kinds that I think all the tummies handle well. As a rule, there are no grains in our diet, but if we’re out somewhere and someone hands them a corn chip or a rice cake, that’s ok by me.

For the strict carnivores:

My own plan amounts to “procure, cook, then eat meat and/or eggs”, so there’s not much planning to do. I’m currently taking a high-fat approach to eating, so breakfast is a medium-rare steak of some kind and one whole egg plus 4 yolks cooked sunny side up. My second meal is usually 4-6 quarter-pound burger patties, with the rendered fat poured back on. If I’m still hungry at supper-time, I will have a bite of whatever meat the kids have, or an egg cooked in butter, or more hamburger patties. This is a maintenance amount of calories for me on a normal day with a workout and walking. I have a little bit less on a low-activity day.

It sounds a little bit monotonous, doesn’t it? But I’ve found that when I’m actually hungry, I’m never sorry that I have to eat just meat. If I don’t want to want to eat it because it sounds boring, that’s a clue that I’m not truly hungry, but bored or just seeking food out of habit.

Jesse eats the same breakfast as the kids, minus the fruit or veg. His lunch is either sandwich meats (mostly roast beef) or hamburger patties, plus boiled eggs and homemade coconut oil mayonnaise or herbed butter. (Mayo recipe follows shortly, if I ever get the pictures taken.) His dinner will be steak and fish, or hamburger patties, or whatever meat the rest of the family is having.

Honestly, there was a time I’d have laughed at anyone who thought there was something wrong with grains, seed oils, or any other food our culture sees as normal. Just give them all the things! Food can’t hurt anybody! Eat the rainbow!

You can see that there is a fair amount of repetition in the children’s diets, too. Some of them reject the vegetables entirely, so it’s even less varied for them. I’m good with that.

Until fairly recently, historically speaking, the insane variety in food choice we take for granted was something even kings couldn’t take for granted the way we do. The human race did just fine–nay, thrived–on just meat and local, seasonal produce, so that’s how I try to feed my kids. I admit, we eat more like the kings than the peasantry, and I’m tickled that we’ve been able to do so thus far. I thank God for that, and I pray that our food system can adapt to handle everyone’s need for more meat. Most people really aren’t eating enough protein to thrive.

Variety tends to be more seasonal than daily, but we do change things up from time to time. There will be more salads and berries in the spring, cucumbers and melons in the summer, and squash and grapes in the fall. Hopefully, I’ll be a somewhat better gardener this year than last, so some of that will even come from our own land!

How Does a Carnivore Mom Feed Her Children?

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Friends and family who know how restrictive my own diet is often wonder if I’m doing the same sort of thing for–or to–my family. Well, yes and no. Some members of my family are 100% carnivore, some could be defined as paleo, and ketosis is something we all experience on a daily basis, as healthy humans should. I don’t aim for ketosis anymore, as I did when I was trying to lose weight, it’s just a metabolic fact around here.

I know of a number of carnivore parents for whom that way of eating extends to the whole family, and I do firmly believe that children–and anyone else in the world–can thrive on nothing but meat. Not only does their health not suffer, I think it’s probably superior, if you can pull it off. If your family is very young and you just don’t eat plants much, that will be normal for your kids.

But my older kids were raised on quite a bit more variety, so to take all the extras out of their diets would cause quite a ruckus. And as much I like the simplicity and safety of the carnivore approach for myself, there’s no good reason that all plants should be eliminated unless you have some damage to your body that requires drastic measures. I believe we’re blessed with the ability to make full use of what the world has to offer, and many of the plants are good for food and medicine. The trouble starts when we over-process our foods, find ways to eat things that shouldn’t be eaten, and start messing around with our microbiomes, hormones, and immune systems through antibiotics, vaccinations, and plastics. Many of the things that our society thinks of as “progress” are truly toxic.

If someone is healthy (and that is increasingly rare in this world) he should simply avoid the things that cause damage and eat whatever real food he likes.

I have a few guiding principles for feeding my children:

  • Whole foods only, except for special occasions when we will veer off into some home-made, but still processed foods like keto birthday cake, or maybe even a gluten-free sugary birthday cake. They’ll recover. It’s ok!
  • No seed oils, ever, under any circumstances.
  • Fats and carbs. Healthy people are made to get their energy from both fat and carbohydrates, so I allow my children both substrates. It’s not necessary to eat carbs the way it is fats, and we do prioritize fats. But there’s a sweet potato or an apple, for example, at least once or twice a day. There’s no good reason to restrict whole food carbohydrates in healthy people.
  • Nose to tail. I don’t force any of the kids to eat organ meats, but they’re available several times a week. I encourage them to at least take a bite and see what they think. I do think organs and offal are superfoods, but they seem to only taste good when a person has a real need for the nutrients, so I leave that to the individual palate.
  • Most vegetables and fruits should be cooked or fermented. There are a number of good reasons for this that I won’t bore anybody with for now.
  • No wheat, and other grains are eaten only when unavoidable (corn and rice are, at present, on my “ok if we have to” list). Because of auto-immune problems with several of us, we have to adhere strictly to gluten-free eating.
  • Carbs are on the low side when compared to most children’s diets. We have one or two whole-food starches per day.
  • I don’t make my children eat their vegetables or finish everything on their plates. A person’s hunger is what should drive him to eat, not guilt over “waste” or insulting the cook, or whatever. If you don’t need the food, it’s a waste to eat it! This is one thing that I’ve flubbed in the past. I insisted that none of my children will be picky eaters, and they’ll eat some of everything that’s offered. Now I think that’s ridiculous. One of my “picky eaters” turned out to have IBS, and needs a 95% carnivore diet to control it. I was harming him by making him eat foods that he knew didn’t agree with him. A child absolutely should be in control of how much and which foods they eat, provided that the foods on offer are real food. My job is to make sure that my kids have a healthy range of foods to chose from, and let them learn to listen to their bodies. Compared to the standard American diet, I offer a much smaller array of choices, but they are learning to make good choices, and not learning emotionally or socially-driven eating behaviors.
  • Meat and eggs are the main thing, and sometimes the only thing. Many of the meals are 100% carnivore.
  • No snacking. Who has time for grazing, anyway? If you’re feeding children appropriately at the meal, they can go a very long time without needing to fill up again.
  • Foods that cause noticeable symptoms are avoided, even if the symptoms are supposedly harmless. For instance, most beans bloat my littlest one’s belly up to a ridiculous size, so we limit beans and legumes to lentils and chickpeas, which don’t do that for some reason. Some of us can have dairy, and some can’t. One child gets excruciating stomach pain from white potatoes, so he skips those if they’re offered.
  • No stressing about perfect eating. It’s the pattern, what was eaten over the course of the day or week or month, that matters, and not the single food item. If we went to a birthday party and ate ice cream, then we just thank the Lord that we had a chance to hang out with our friends. If poor choices become habitual, poor outcomes are sure to follow, so we make sure that these kinds of things are far from our daily routine, but an occasional deviation is not a big deal.

When I type it out like this, it seems like a lot of rules, and probably looks at first blush to be a very difficult way to eat. And, to be honest, when we’re traveling or visiting others, it does present some challenges. At home, though, I spend less time in the kitchen than I used to, not more. I don’t often do more than add salt and pepper to some meat and veg, and then throw it all in the oven or crock pot, so its not at all time-consuming the way it used to be. It’s really a very simple and satisfying way to eat.

But it is thought-consuming. It takes a good bit of research to decide who in the nutrition world is making the most sense right now. So many opinions are out there, and I have to figure out what works best for our situation. I am emphasizing physical health in a way that my parents certainly didn’t. They didn’t have the information I have, and our food environment wasn’t yet as toxic as it is today. Health extends far beyond food, of course, but we can talk about the other stuff some other time.

Everybody has reasons for eating what they do. I’d like to know what you guys are doing and why, if you don’t mind leaving comments.

Do any of our food “rules” seem overly restrictive to you? Too permissive?