Category Archives: Health

Some Food Discoveries

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Happy food, sad food.

We had a birthday in the family last week, so I took the opportunity to enjoy a piece of my Cake Simulator, this time as a spice cake with peach butter cream frosting (recipes to follow shortly). I veered off my happy carnivore trail for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I wanted to make sure it tastes good, because I haven’t had this version of the Simulation.

Secondly, I accidently bought another round of Nutrisense CGM monitoring, so I had a chance to make absolutely sure this cake doesn’t spike the glucose. I did it for you. I did it for science. I did it because I’m an idiot. Don’t forget to pause your subscription, guys. It auto-renews. Since I didn’t get to do any experimenting at all during the weeks I was intending to, due to an illness, I’m not terribly sorry I have another month to play around with my sugars, though I can’t say I feel good about the expense.

And thirdly, I wanted to see if the oxalate content of tiger-nut flour is enough to trigger my bladder problems. I hadn’t had any in a while, so I couldn’t remember if that was an effect I thought I’d observed or not.

Well, the results are in.

Taste: The thing you’re most concerned with, I’m sure, since that was what I was most concerned with, is how does it taste? I’m pleased to report that it was very, very tasty. A little bit of a bitterness in the mouth afterwards due to the stevia, but while eating it, it’s the best thing ever. Just don’t drink coffee with it, because it increases that aftertaste to a disgusting degree. I can’t understand how anybody “sweetens” coffee with stevia. Blech.

Glucose acceptability:

The farthest red dot to the left is the point at which I ate the cake. I’d been fasting until that point. You can see no spike from this, so I’m pretty confident in saying you can probably have at least one (1/16 of the cake) serving without losing your keto badge for the day. The little “spike” after it was exercise-induced. Your mileage may vary, of course. I’ve seen my glucose spike from “low-carb” foods that didn’t affect Get Along Husband in the slightest, so you want to do your own testing to be sure.

And thirdly, the oxalates. Because I have a lot of scar-tissue around my bladder after all the c-sections (I think this is why, anyway), foods high in oxalate cause me to have a hard time emptying my bladder, usually first thing in the morning. I can’t drink teas or eat spinach (like anybody would want to eat spinach anyway), and many other things cause these problems. And, sadly, tiger-nut flour must have enough oxalate to trigger this dysfunction for me. I was very uncomfortable when I woke up this morning, and took a few hours to finally be back to normal. If you have oxalate troubles, skip this food.

Better be laying in them beans and rice, ammiright? Besides the cake discovery, I’ve also found a very unexpected problem for my children. Over the last few years, I’ve heavily restricted grains and seeds from my children’s diets. We will very occasionally allow organic corn products. I believe grains are detrimental when taken with any regularity. But, because prepping has been on my mind, and rice is shelf-stable for a long time, I thought I’d try re-introducing some rice to my children’s diets, to see if they tolerate it. They enjoyed it, to be sure. Very tasty stuff.

But there was a detriment. Three times I gave them rice, each time a couple of weeks to a month apart. Three times, two of my smaller children got nosebleeds that same night. Nosebleeds? Rice?

So I guess we’ll be relying on some other starchy food for calories in the event we can’t get enough animal-based foods.

One final discovery that I’m sure you’ll be interested in:

Berries are keto food, right? And apple sauce is a no-no, right? Isn’t that what the gurus all say? Well, here you go:

There are a couple of things going on here that confounded this result that you ought to be aware of before you just write off blueberries forever and start eating apple sauce. First of all, obviously, apple sauce is not conducive to ketosis. But it is a 7 on the nutrisense scale, which is better than the blueberries’ 4. These were not particularly sweet blueberries, either. Some of them were still faintly green, and I didn’t enjoy them very much. I hadn’t fasted for very long before either of these tests, but I did throw some protein in with the apple sauce, and I’m sure that blunted the spike quite a bit. I’d have probably gotten closer to the blueberries’ score without the meat sticks. (I love Nick’s Sticks, btw. Not an affiliate link. Just wanted to share.)

The point is, blueberries might not be a great keto food after all. Of course, if you’re not primarily a fat-burner for the last several years, you’re likely going to have different results. Better or worse, I cannot say.

Again, test for yourself. You can get $25 off your first month by using my referral link. I’m not giving you any medical advice, ever. I’m just showing you what happens to a 5-year keto/carnivore when she does this stuff. I’ll have a bunch of exercise-related graphs to show you soon. I may even try a few more plant foods, but the longer I’m carnivore, the less I really care to even find out. I might not bother.

And now, I have a date with my butcher to pick up another whole beef. I can’t believe how much meat these children go through, and if there are going to be food shortages, rice is clearly not an option.

Can I feed this rice to the chickens? Will they explode?

Want to discuss? Meet me on MeWe, Gab, or SG.

 

 

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.

 

You’re Dying! Abort the Carnivore Diet! Abort! Abort! Abort!

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My life’s comedic timing is perfect.

So, I’m standing here in my kitchen. I’ve just put some suet in my beautiful new 8-quart slow cooker to render down into tallow. Since I’m here, and already coated in glorious grass-fed beef fat from stem to stern, I figure I might as well pack some gel capsules with raw beef suet as well. By the way, those are vegetarian capsules. It says so right there on the bag, as if that were a selling point. I’ll explain why and how I do this strange thing in another post. The point is, I am at this moment doing the most medically scandalous thing a body can do, short of joining Hunter in hitting one of his Daddy’s free crackpipes while consuming said raw beef suet.

Spotted in the wild

And the phone rings.

I: Hello?

She: Hello, this is Such-and-such with your doctor’s office. How are you doing today?

I: Hi there! You tell me: How am I doing today?

She: Well, we got your labs back, and your thyroid and HBA1C look great.

I, waiting for the other shoe to drop, because I already know about this shoe. It’s an old, worn out shoe: Good. And?

She: Your cholesterol doesn’t look so good. She (the doctor) says your good cholesterol is high, which is good, but your bad cholesterol is very high, which is bad. She wants you to back off on saturated fats, eat more vegetables and less meat, and get more exercise.

I, grinning and trying not to actually LOL: OK, can you give me the numbers?

See what I mean about my life’s comedic timing? Here I am, deliberately and with wanton disregard for the opinion of Man, packing pills with saturated fat, and my doctor calls me to tell me to KNOCK THAT OFF RIGHT NOW!

I won’t bore you with the rest of the call, Patient Reader, but after the kind receptionist gladly gave me my scary number, I did manage to wring the other, unimportant numbers out of her, as well. Are you ready for these numbers, my friends? Here they are:

  • Total cholesterol: 315
  • LDL (not bad, just misunderstood): 211
  • HDL (The OTHER good cholesterol): 97
  • Triglycerides: 55 (I’ve seen this as low as 37, and I feel a little cheated today. Probably elevated due to stress from rushing out early for the blood-draw. But this is still a very good trig/hdl ratio of about .56)
  • VLDL (The actually bad particle): A perfectly relaxing 7.

Now, none of this was a surprise to me, because I got my own bloodwork done in much greater detail, through Own Your Labs just a month ago. I’m way geekier about my health than my doctor is. I wanted more information than my insurance is willing to pay for, so I have a lot of other great numbers to show, off, too! I’m a textbook example of an (I do believe healthy) phenotype known as a Lean Mass Hyper-responder. I am both fit and slender, and of what is traditionally understood as a “risky” cholesterol profile. In fact, the only number that got flagged in my entire comprehensive panel was my LDL–a paltry 151 at the time, due, I think, to a cold I’d been fighting off. That’s quite low for me. Did you know those terrifying little particles are a vital part of your immune system?

While I find conventional medicine to be very useful for many things, evaluating and ameliorating heart disease risk is not one of them. Hormone replacement, trauma and acute care, and antibiotics are all things for which I am very grateful. But you don’t care about my opinion of western medicine right now, do you?

What you care about, I’m sure, is that I’m going to die of a heart attack and need to get on some statins, STAT. In fact, by the time I hit publish, the ambulance should be on its way. I just called them, to be on the safe side.

Don’t hold your breath, veggie lovers. I intend to outlive you all. 

I am not remotely interested in explaining the intricacies of lipids to a general audience. I don’t have time. Besides, you might be convinced to go carnivore, and I really don’t want you to start competing with me for meat at its current price. I’m not giving you a complete run-down, or even trying to convince you of my way of thinking about this. I will, however, give you a few clues to aid you in your quest for truth as you come to realize what many, many people are catching on to of late: The science–the actual science, and not the pharmaceutical industry’s “studies”–should at least awaken you to the possibility, that the saturated-fat-heart-disease paradigm is ass-backwards and hopelessly lost.

Saturated fat intake doesn’t appear to have much to do with LDL levels.

Saturated fat intake is not associated with all-cause mortality.

People with high LDL outlive people with low LDL.

Replacing saturated animal fats with vegetable oils is associated with higher risk of heart events, even though it does lower serum cholesterol levels. (There’s an apparent paradox between this one and the first study I listed, which I can explain, but won’t.)

That will be enough to get you started. You may also enjoy this very layperson-accessible lecture by Dr. Paul Mason about why doctors still believe such insane things about cholesterol.

My doctor wants to see me again in six months, after I’ve behaved myself with the meat and exercise for a while. (By the way, I exercise like a beast at least five days a week. I have the abs to prove it. It’s a testament to the inadequate intimacy of the doctor-patient relationship in times of telemedicine due to “covid” that she doesn’t know this. She hasn’t actually touched me in a couple of years.) If my One Number doesn’t look any better, she will try to prescribe me a statin, I’m sure. Now, I have some choices to make, and I’m not sure which direction I should go.

I could attempt to educate my doctor on the facts of the matter. I’ve wasted my time like this before, printing out reams of studies in which the doctor was (surprise!) not interested. I fired that doctor, naturally. But the gal I’m seeing right now is super-smart, and she might just be interested. Then again, she might be primarily interested in continuing to collect her paycheck, which cholesterol-hypothesis skeptics tend to have a harder time doing in this system. I could also bring to her the results of my CAC scan (the one I keep putting off) and at least convince her that my arteries at least don’t appear to be harmed yet. There are lots of things I could show to an open-minded person to get a conversation started.

Alternatively, I could ghost myself and not show up for the next lab-work, instead choosing to wait until I have another thyroid check, and evade that topic yet again. Honestly, this is my usual course of action.

Or, I could game my numbers, doing nobody much good at all, but at least getting it on the insurance record that my cholesterol numbers are “healthy”. Funnily enough, all I’d have to do is eat a bunch of carbs for a few days before my labs and I’d look like the healthiest patient you ever saw. There would be enough immediate downsides to this that I doubt I’d ever attempt it. But it would look better for insurance purposes, for sure.

What do you think I should do? We can talk about this on Gab, MeWe, or SG, my current social media hangouts.

 

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. (Update: I was wrong about this. These things do cause some mild problems in this respect.)

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.

How To Beat Anxiety and Depression

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Gut health is mental health.

Somebody recently mentioned on a social media site that he had experienced one of those long, dark nights of the soul during which, instead of sleeping, you toss and turn and recall every single stupid or awkward thing you’ve ever said out loud. I’ve had nights like that. Worse than that, I’ve had long, waking days of the same thing. You’re just going about your business and suddenly your mind starts accusing you: I’m the dumbest person ever. How can anybody stand to be around me? I can’t believe I said that!

Not only that, but the anxious mind then takes the opportunity to run a Top 10 (if you’re lucky, it’s only ten) list of your most socially awkward moments ever.

Now, maybe it’s just a function of getting older, but I honestly no longer have any trouble believing that I actually said that, whatever “that” was. You get used to living with your foot in your mouth. You get used to it, but it’s hard to truly learn to let go, isn’t it? I know it’s not just me. Everybody says or does cringe-making things regularly. Not everybody notices it, but most do. So, then, how do they let it go so easily? My gaffes get stuck in my head like a peanut butter and banana sandwich gets stuck to the roof of your mouth!

Surprisingly, for those who suffer from this kind of anxiety, I think it has a lot to do with our guts. No, I don’t mean the socially confident are simply braver than us. I mean that there is a difference in our literal guts, our intestines, that makes the food we eat affect our brains in a unique way. You see, since I started the carnivore diet, I’ve experienced this thing referred to by carnivores who have trod this path before me as the “carnivore calm”. I haven’t had a single 2 a.m. cringing episode since I stopped eating plants!

Almost all plants (and dairy, which I’ll have to address in a separate post) have literally nerve-wracking effects for me. On those days after going carnivore that I just couldn’t resist the asparagus or whatever, I would always notice half a day or so later, I’d get some anxiety again. Not the social kind (that’s really gluten and dairy), but free-floating anxiety. I sometimes get ear worms that seem obnoxiously loud and make me want to jam a crochet hook into my ear to dig them out. I can’t ever just have a nice song that I like in my head. I get to have all of my thoughts drowned out by a 15 second loop of whatever popular atrocity I last heard while flipping through the radio stations. It’s maddening.

Enough days in a row of fiber of any kind, and I become clinically depressed.

(This seems to me a really good place to point out that, in spite of all my anxieties and depression, Jesus has made most of my adult life a productive and meaningful time in spite of all of these hindrances. He’s the real miracle-maker in my life. He gave me the spiritual wherewithal to make it through a lifetime of depression and anxiety and still be a productive and useful person, able to raise a family and work for Him in my own reclusive ways. I give Him all praise and glory for that. And then after all those years of learning to lean on Him, he led me to the physical reason for all these problems that he salved so lovingly for so many years, so that I could move on to the next step in my walk with Him. Give Him praise, people! I never knew what He was doing, but I always knew He knew what He was doing. Eliminating plants and dairy didn’t save me from anything, but it has sure has made me feel better while being saved. OK, back to the OP:)

When I eat zero fiber, I get none of these symptoms. I just hum through my day, clear-headed and happy. I handle stress like a champ. I’m actually having fun!

Carnivore didn’t change who I am. I’m still weird. I’m still introverted. I’m still making mistakes. I still stick my foot in my mouth. I still do stupid things and wonder why I didn’t know any better. But I’m able to forgive myself quickly and move on. My brain no longer stores everything I got wrong today to hate-binge on later when I’m trying to sleep. I’m no longer hindered from enjoying the world by all the negative self-talk that used to try to hold me back.

I’m just so stinking well-adjusted now!

That’s weird, isn’t it? I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a few years of experimentation to share. My depression and anxiety largely went away when I moved to a ketogenic diet, so ketones probably have a little something to do with it. Ketosis does give you a very sharp mental state.

But I also gave up wheat at the same time, and I think that really was the magic bullet for me. Gluten has a deleterious effect on my gut, and thus my brain. I know for a fact, after different experiments adding foods back, that gluten is the trigger for other physical ailments of which I’m now totally free. I probably have undiagnosed celiac disease. I don’t really care to ask a doctor to confirm it.

I have a relative who craved gluten like a drug as a kid, and would only eat foods containing gluten (not hard to pull off in this food environment) and whose mind was very much hampered by the stuff. Gluten exacerbated every stereotypical autistic, and, frighteningly, sociopathic behavior in him. It was my witnessing of this pattern that made me wonder about myself. Gluten is the mind-killer!

Gluten, fine, but how can cauliflower make me feel so bad? To tell the truth, I question this aspect of my condition frequently myself, sometimes to the point where I stop believing it entirely and eat something that’s not meat. And then I invariably find out again. A little bite of something is often no problem, but if I just decide I’m going to start having regular keto food instead of full-blown carnivore, it’s only a matter of a day or two before I start having those same old feelings of anxiety and depression, stress, the little compulsions like over-tidiness, and songs stuck in my head. It has, through some intentional experiments, but mostly mishap, become undeniable to me that it’s the food. Fiber is doing something in my gut–whether feeding the wrong bacteria, making it leaky, or something else I can’t guess–that is throwing off the chemicals in my brain. This could very well be happening to you, too.

Now, I’m sure there are causes of mental illness that don’t originate in the gut. I’m not calling carnivore a magic bullet. But for me it has been almost magical, and it might be worth a shot for you, too. If having a song stuck in a loop in your head doesn’t bother you, and that’s the only symptom you’ve got, maybe you don’t want to experiment with taking plants out of your diet. I miss the plants, to tell the truth. I’d eat them all day long if I could. I simply can’t.

I am not the only person who experiences this. There are maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of carnivores who have discovered this exact pattern in themselves. I didn’t make this up. They didn’t make this up. If you want to hear more, I recommend starting with YouTube videos from Amber O’Hearn or Georgia Ede, then let the rabbit hole suck you in from there. There’s a lot of solid evidence that the Western diet is mentally torturing a number of us.

Now, I have to go lift some weights and then we have a gingerbread house decorating party to host (no eating the houses!), so I’m going to throw this out there mostly unedited. Please forgive any typos, run-on sentences, and irrelevant asides.

Want to discuss this? Meet me on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.

You’re Not Welcome

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They’ve socialized my pants. 

Get-Along-Husband took me shopping the other night, and I bought a couple of pretty sweaters. I didn’t try them on, because the size, petite small, has always been a good fit in those brands. I brought them home, put them on, and both of them looked like I was wearing a tent. A granny-tent.

Now, I know a smart person tries everything on before bringing it home.  But I’m not a smart person. What I am, is a person who has learned to rely on labeling as a useful time-saver. This is not totally unreasonable, right? But aside from the inconvenience of having to return these and then try and find things that actually fit, this isn’t really a big deal in the long run. This is a first world problem of the type that people rightly denigrate.

But there’s another real problem of the first world that’s closely related to this. I’ve concluded after so many experiences like this over the last few years, that the first world contains very few people who are properly proportioned anymore. My former petite-smalls are now apparently designed to hide quite a bit of unsightly belly fat. They look awful. Jeans that fit me in the waist have no butt, because people are either emaciated or dumpy. It’s terrifying how unhealthy we all are.

The thing that just broke me recently is this outrage, which I photographed at Old Navy:

By “revolution”, they mean the socialist one.

I can assure you that Old Navy is not eating those extra costs. If I only require two yards of cloth to cover my body, I am the one who is expected to cough up the funds required to help cover the body of someone else who requires five yards of cloth.

We’ve gone from fat-shaming to health-shaming. It’s not even just social disapproval, but outright punition. It’s to the point where you can’t even tell people who’ve asked what they can do to maintain a healthy body without becoming a pariah for acting like you’re better than somebody else.

I stick to a diet that keeps me healthy. I’m vigilant about my physical activity. I put myself to bed at a reasonable hour. I get as much sunlight as I can, and take my Vitamin D supplements. I do a whole lot of things that contribute to my good health. It’s not an accident of genetics or socioeconomic status that I’m not a tub of lard. My good health, and my consequently well-proportioned body have not come without a cost to me. I’ve worked for that, and I’ve paid for that.

I take responsibility for my own health, and you should have to do that, too. Many of the things I do to take care of myself cost more up front than just letting things go would. But the amount I’m saving myself and the collective (thanks, socialism!) in health care and lost productivity makes my health a true net gain, financially. But, up front, I pay for this.

Now I’m being asked to subsidize people who refuse to take those steps. Some of them even desire to remain fat. And you’re a very bad person if you think there’s anything wrong with that. Not only do I have to pay extra for my health care, and in taxes for medicaid or medicare and disability; not only do I have to keep my mouth shut about your obvious problem; NOW I HAVE TO LITERALLY PAY TO  COVER YOUR FAT ^$$.

No, I’m not sorry I put it that way, dear Church Lady. I felt like channeling Karl Denninger this morning, caps and italics and ugly words and all.

You should feel bad about your poor health. How else are you going to be motivated to do anything about it? Contrary to the narrative about “healthy at any size” and “beautiful at any size”, the fact is that if you are overweight, you are sick. Probably not beautiful, either, but this is not about your looks. This is not about who you are as a person. This is not about whether I like to look at you or not. This is not about making you feel bad for other people’s entertainment.

Fat “shaming” is a lie from Satan. Your size has everything to do with your health, both physical and mental, and I do think spiritual as well. And you’re dragging the rest of us down with you.

Many people wouldn’t even care how sick other people were if they didn’t have to pay for it. I admit, the fact that I pay out the nose for my own health and then even more for other people’s is incredibly galling. It’s not just health and clothing. I also have a large family to raise, and I’m personally footing both the cost of their education and other families’ education, too. My numerous kids are going to be on the hook, not only for their own parents’ old age, but for the socialized elderly care of people who couldn’t be bothered to raise their own children.

In this now-fully socialized society, even the “capitalists”, are doing things on the socialist model. As Old Navy amply demonstrates, the more good I do, the more I end up paying because other people don’t want to.

So, you ask, did Atlas shrug? Did you boycott the stupid store, as they richly deserve?

Sigh. To tell the truth, it’s hard to find those fleece-lined leggings anywhere else, and it’s cold on that morning run, so this time, Atlas shouldered the burden. This time, as in most other areas of my life, I ate the cost of somebody else’s poor choices. Whether for lack of information, or motivation, or self-respect, or whatever the excuse, I paid more than I should have had to for the amount of goods I received so that others could slack off. As a responsible person in a society of irresponsible people, I do this daily, in a hundred chaffing little ways.

Fat acceptance–nay, fat supremacy–is killing people. And it’s making me just shy of crazy.

OK, I’m done. You can go back to your cheesecake now. Discuss on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic. 

Pemmican

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How to make on-the-go carnivore nutrition:

(Pemmican) was invented by the native peoples of North America. It was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen.

The specific ingredients used were usually whatever was available; the meat was often bison, moose, elk, or deer. Fruits such as cranberries and saskatoon berries were sometimes added. Cherries, currants, chokeberries and blueberries were also used, but almost exclusively in ceremonial and wedding pemmican.

—Read more about pemmican on Infogalactic

Recipe first. Scroll on past for images and explanations.

Print Recipe

Pemmican

A nutrition bar with a 1:1 ratio of meat to fat
Prep Time1 hour
Cook Time8 hours
1 hour
Total Time10 hours
Keyword: Emergency, survival, travel
Servings: 8 bars
Author: GAHCindy

Equipment

  • Food dehydrator (or the sun, or a fire)
  • Food processor (or rocks)
  • Meat slicer (or sharp stone knife)
  • Kitchen scales (or two hands and two eyeballs for estimating)

Ingredients

  • 5 lb beef hearts Other lean meat may be used, but hearts are best.
  • 1 lb rendered beef tallow

Instructions

  • Slice beef hearts very thin using either a meat slicer (recommended) or a very sharp knife. Slightly frozen meat slices much more easily.
  • Lay slices out on food dehydrator sheets in a single layer.
  • Dehydrate for 6-8 hours at 167 degrees. Meat is done when it snaps nicely in two.
  • Using a food processor, grind the dried meat to a powder. Don't leave large pieces, as it makes the texture of the bar much less enjoyable. This takes a while, and it's loud, so cover your ears.
  • It's a good idea to get as close to a 50/50 blend of meat and fat as possible for the sake of shelf-life and flavor. Make note of the weight of both the bowl you will mix the meat in, and the saucepan in which you will melt down the beef tallow, so that you can zero out those amounts when you weigh your meat powder and tallow.
  • Add the tallow to the pan and melt it down.
  • Weigh the meat powder to determine how much fat to use. 5 lbs of meat will usually dry out to about 1 lb of powder. Then weigh out the same amount of fat and mix the two together.
  • At this point, you can flavor your pemmican if you like. Suggested additions: 1/4 cup honey, freezedried blueberries, berry powder.
  • Pour into a baking dish. I usually use a 9x13 for this amount, but you can do whatever thickness you like.
  • This will set right on the counter, or you can put it in the fridge for a few minutes to go faster. After it's set, cut it into the desired number of pieces.
  • Store individually wrapped in plastic wrap or baggies, or for longer shelf-life, in vacuum-sealed bags.

One of the toughest things about maintaining a carnivore diet while traveling is finding food that is just meat. No seed oils, no plants? No food! I often find myself fasting when I don’t really want to, just because there’s not much out there. Yes, you can buy some McDonald’s hamburger patties in a pinch, but I hate the drive-thru, and the rest of my family doesn’t need whatever else is on that God-forsaken menu. This Feather-Indian food is a perfect emergency and travel food, and I try to keep some on hand at all times.

It’s a little bit time consuming to make, and you need some special equipment if you don’t want to spend days making it the old-fashioned way. If you do want to make it the old fashioned way, please do take pictures and send them my way. That would be not much fun at all for me, but I’d love to see it done!

I wouldn’t do this without a good meat slicer

 

Sliced meat, ready for drying.

Lay your beef slices in a single layer and cook ’em!

Pemmican can be cooked into a stew or fried with vegetables for the picky, but I’ve never been motivated or hungry enough to try that. We eat it as a bar. It looks a bit like a brownie, but doesn’t resemble dessert in any other way.

This pemmican has freeze dried blueberries sprinkled on top. Not terribly sweet, and still carnivore enough for me.

 

A few tips and warning before you get started:

Trim: Trim all of the fat you can from around the heart. The red, lean meat is all you want for this part. You’ll add back an equal weight of tallow, and you want the fat:protein to be as close to 50/50 as possible.

Grind! I’ve gotten pretty precise in the way I make my pemmican. My first batch wasn’t very good, to be honest. It was unpleasant to chew, and inconsistently textured. I needed to be pickier about my grind size. You need powder, not just tiny chunks. Be patient and keep grinding the dried meat no matter how long it takes, until you have actual powder.

Sweeten: You can add honey or dried fruits to this and increase both calorie count and carbs. These additions also make it much more palatable. This is survival and on-the-go food, so I don’t worry too much about the carbs, but if you’re trying to lose weight or defeat a carb addiction, leave that stuff out and just salt it when you eat it.

Preserve: Interestingly, while honey is an additional preservative, salt will make your pemmican go bad faster. Wait, wut? It’s true! Salt will draw moisture into your pemmican and shorten its shelf-life considerably. If you feel it needs flavor, add it at the point of consumption, not in the making.

Meat: Any lean meat can be used, even ground beef. If you don’t feel like slicing meat, or only have access to ground meat, 93% or leaner ground beef can be used. I’ve done it, and it tastes pretty good, but not exactly the same. If your meat is not lean enough, you will not have a very tasty or shelf-stable result. Follow all the same instructions as for sliced meat, except use a rolling pin to roll your ground meat between two sheets of parchment, thusly:

Then cut it into roughly 3 inch strips and follow the rest of the instructions.

Fat: You want tallow from a ruminant animal like beef or bison, so you have a high saturated fat content and room-temperature solidity. Lard and higher PUFA fats will not do the same thing. They’d taste awful, too, I’m sure. I imagine lamb tallow would also work. Is lamb tallow a thing?

 

Have you ever tried pemmican? Made it? Let me know how you do it, or if you ever even want to, by joining me on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.

Hiyo, Silver!

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I’m not ashamed of doing things that aren’t “smart”–things like taking horse paste and inhaling nanoparticles of silver–when all the “smart” people are jumping off a cliff and calling that foolishness “herd immunity”. It’s herd something, anyway. 

This post is for entertainment purposes and is not to be construed as medical advice. Do not attempt this yourself. I’m just telling you what I did. Try whatever you like. But don’t blame or credit me with the results, please. You have been warned.

So, I think I had the Coof–the Rona, the WuFlu, the Illegal Cough–whatever you want to call it. What I did not have, was Covid-19, because that is an ugly, clunky name, and I do not get ugly, clunkily-named illnesses. I didn’t really feel up to leaving the house to get tested once I was sick, so I can’t say for sure what it was. Besides, you’re not supposed to go places when you’re sick. Somebody might catch something. I’ll probably get antibody testing pretty soon and see if I have them.

What I had at first was about 4 days of awful chest congestion, lots of dry coughing, but no drop in pulse-ox. I never lost my sense of smell, that I could tell, but I also wasn’t eating, so maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it. It felt low in the lungs, unlike asthma, though my albuterol inhaler did ease some of the distress. I was so tired I couldn’t move. I had a low fever and then muscle aches after the fever subsided. It might have just been the flu.

After the first few days, I gave in and took the horse paste, which I should have done the first day. I’ve always been reluctant to medicate. I could cut my hand off and spend several minutes bleeding out while considering whether I really wanted to intervene in nature’s handling of the matter. This works well for me 99% of the time. I have a strong immune system because I let it practice a lot. I’ll go out and lick doorknobs if it’s been too long since I’ve had an illness to spar with.

The day after taking Ivermectin I had most of my energy back, but breathing was still labored. To get an idea of how I should treat myself, I researched how it’s prescribed for other ailments, and how several (mostly successful) experiments specifically for the Cough had been run. I could have taken it daily with little danger of side effects, I figured, but again, I wanted to see if my body could do it on its own. Because of the way I spaced it out, taking notes on how I felt every day, I don’t think it was either placebo effect or coincidence that I improved so quickly after getting my hooves, but I guess it could have been.

Me and My Man

I hung out at that mostly-better level for a while, maybe 3 days. I felt like I was never going to improve further on my own, so I took another dose of the stuff and within a few hours was feeling pretty good. But my breathing was still labored. I wasn’t coughing anything up, even though it felt like I surely had stuff way down in there, and I was having to use my long-neglected asthma inhaler every six to eight hours. It worked to help me breathe, but it didn’t heal me.

I had been doing nebulized hydrogen peroxide (you can do a web search to find instructions if you’re interested), to no detriment as far as I could tell, but also to no avail. I’ve spent the last several weeks living basically normally. I’ve even been doing my workouts at about half my usual intensity, just hoping against hope that I’m not overdoing it. I can’t just sit here and wait until I’m perfectly well. I get bored.

So I was feeling good, almost 100%, but still using my inhaler almost daily. I did finally start coughing some stuff up a week ago, instead of just coughing, but it comes painfully.

Now, I am not going to the doctor unless I absolutely have to. I just don’t do that. It’s a fault of mine. I don’t want anybody to know I’m not invincible, for one thing. I take it as a personal failure when I get sick. Besides, I don’t want to take time out of my busy schedule for an appointment. I also don’t want to take antibiotics or steroids. I don’t want to do a covid test. I don’t want to pay for a consult.

“So what else can I try?”, I wondered. My immune system was clearly unable to finish this thing off on its own.

Last night I was thinking about the hydrogen peroxide treatment, and how that works. To oversimplify the explanation, basically it produces ROS in the tissues which then destroy any bacteria or viruses that they encounter. The H2O2/saline solution, applied several times, was not doing what it should, but I couldn’t think why. It really should work. Maybe it just isn’t powerful enough because I stubbornly let the bug settle in and get comfortable for too long instead of treating immediately.

So I started thinking, there is another substance that I know does the same thing. I’ve taken it internally plenty of times, though not by inhalation. What if I try direct application of colloidal silver? I went on a hunt for literature on nebulizing the stuff, because I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Well, what do you know? People do that! Granted, they’re all slightly crazy, but who isn’t these days? So after some research (on a barely explored topic, unfortunately), and a prayer that I’m not doing something completely stupid, I went ahead and diluted some colloidal silver with distilled water and spent ten minutes with my nebulizer this morning. Immediately, I coughed up a bunch of yellow gunk, and the quality of my breathing for the rest of the morning has been perfect, as if I’d never had even a cold. I am still occasionally coughing stuff up, but not painfully. The sputum tastes like silver, which you probably don’t care to know.

I’ll let you know tomorrow, after I do another treatment tonight, if I’ve made it through a full 36 hours without breathing difficulties. If I do, that will be the first time in about six weeks. Yes, that is how long I’ve let this thing go on. I know I’m an idiot for not doing more, sooner, but I really wanted to figure this out for myself.

Besides, I have a lot of faith in my immune system. This was a weird bug, whatever it was, and my body didn’t know what to do with it. If this peaceful, easy breathing lasts, especially through a good workout, I’ll call this a plausible treatment (for MYSELF) for respiratory infections.

I won’t call it a plausible treatment for you, Dear Reader. You should never take medical advice from a hillbilly mommy blogger, OK? You take your life into your own hands when you do that.

Want to discuss? Join me on either MeWe or Social Galactic.

Update: After a couple of days of not wheezing, my wheeze did come back, but it never got as bad as before. I also started to feel really, really good (except for the breathing), able to fully keep up with my family’s needs for the first time in weeks. The rest of the family also came down with the same symptoms, but recovered very quickly. We tested negative for Covid-19. I think it was probably just a run-of-the-mill flu. Anyhow, I finally tapped out and called the PA I go to, whereupon she told me to just tough it out like I’ve been doing, it’s just taking me a while to recover. I do think the silver helped a lot, but it wasn’t quite a magic bullet as I’d hoped. Perhaps there was some infection set up, and the treatment did help, or perhaps it was coincidental that I started to feel so much better so quickly. Either way, I’m keeping this in mind as a possible treatment for future illnesses. It certainly didn’t hurt.

Carnivore Diet and the Christian Worldview

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Has all that evolution talk got you in a tizzy? 

A discerning reader asked a question a while back, and it’s something that’s been on my to-blog list ever since. It’s a very important question, and one I’ve spent a bit of time thinking through.

Well I do wonder what you think about why the Lord created man in the garden of Eden and told Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:29 ~ “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. (and verse 30: And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.)” It wasn’t until after the flood that He told Noah and his family that they could eat meat. …I’m not against meat. I eat some beef, some turkey, and chicken, and salmon… I also eat vegetables and fruit. It just seems to me that in light of the verses quoted above, that we humans were created to eat vegetables originally. (And I don’t believe in evolution so I don’t think we’ve “evolved” to eat only one thing or the other. ;-)) Just tho’t I’d ask you what you think about those verses and what you think they mean in light of eating various foods.
In His grace, Mrs. O

Thank you so much, Mrs. O! I don’t know what I’d do without comments like this.

I pointed out that after we left the Garden of Eden, God gave us animals for use as clothing immediately, and it is implicit therein that humans began using them for meat soon after leaving the garden. Cain and Abel didn’t have their little scuffle because Abel was sacrificing something he barely needed. This was his best. That very likely means it was his food. God had clearly commanded animal sacrifice, and nothing else would suit Him.

It would seem very odd to me if they were raising and sacrificing animals and wearing them as clothing, but not eating the meat also. But maybe they did waste the meat and righteously consume only plants. I think you come away with a very different meaning–and an anti-Gospel one, at that–by reading the Cain and Abel story that way, but let’s roll with it. I can’t say for sure that they were eating meat, if I’m being very, very pedantic with only the explicit text, so let’s just say that the first generation of Man never had even a thought of eating meat, and the only killing of animals that they did was for sacrifice and possibly clothing.

All I can come up with is: So what?

That was then, this is now. Things changed after Eden, and then they changed again after the flood. There was, for one thing, a cleansing of the human race, wiping out the offspring of the Nephilim and the human race (about which, I won’t elaborate further, but oh, my, the things they don’t tell you in Bible school!). The earth itself also was laid waste, and the plants and animals that were preserved underwent that same culling. These genetic bottlenecks likely introduced even more corruption to our genome, and that of the plants and animals we ate, than was already there. This would (theoretically, but logically) have made us even less able to digest the plants than before.

Noah was told explicitly after the Flood to eat (clean) meat. The restriction on eating meat, if there was one, was lifted at that point regardless. Later on, in the New Covenant, the distinction between clean and unclean meats was also voided. We need to eat meat. I think all of this taken together establishes that a strictly carnivore diet is at least permissible to the Bible-believer. There may be some angle I’ve missed and that’s what the comment section is for, so let me have them, please.

But what about eating only meat? There’s something just flat-out worldly and unbelieving about that. Underneath the health objections, which don’t hold up very well in my experience and opinion, there’s just this visceral reaction to the idea that we evolved this way, and anything built on that foundation must be wrong, wrong, wrong. When I came across the carnivore way of thinking about food, I wanted to reject it out of hand, too. It’s all evolution all the time with these people!

We did not evolve this way. We devolved this way.

I listen to a lot of diet and lifestyle podcasts while I’m doing less mind-intensive things like weeding and running. I also read a lot of nutrition and metabolism-focused blogs. It is by-and-large a Godless conversation, sadly, and it can be very tiresome even to weirdos like me who are energized, rather than discouraged, by a good dose of cognitive dissonance.

I’m with you, Mrs. O. (At least, I think I am.) Since starting the carnivore way of eating, and for the first time in my grain-glutted life, my teeth are now in extremely good shape, but I’m grinding them down to pitiful nubs having to listen to evolution-this and ancestral-that all the time.

Most Christians aren’t going to even entertain the thought of the carnivore approach if the only supporting narrative–and friends, it is nothing but a narrative, a just-so story–is the modern creation myth of millions of years of evolution. For what it’s worth, the same evolutionary nonsense is also trotted out to justify vegetarian eating, i.e. our monkey brains were only able to grow so large because we learned to farm the extra calories required for such intelligence. They can and do stuff just anything into that evolutionary box.

I have something a lot less flexible, but thankfully perfect and infallible, to base my life choices on: the Word of God. Like Mrs. O., I believe that the Genesis account is literal: six days, two sexes, and only one No-No Tree. I’m one hundred percent in agreement that Adam and Eve were put in a garden and told to eat the plants, except for that one. I further believe that everything that God gave them to eat was good.

And then something happened that changed our very DNA, and that of the entire living world. I don’t know what Eden was like, whether there was any entropy, how long it was meant to last, whether eating was a mere pleasure rather than a physiological necessity. So many questions arise when you start wondering how the metaphysical and the physical met in that place.

But once we’re out of that Garden, meat makes plenty of sense.

I can’t say for sure what happened over the millennia on a physiological level, but my guess is that, because Earth became corrupt, and the entire creation began to groan, much of the nutrition that was available to us through plants became less and less accessible throughout the generations. Our genetic makeup didn’t permit perfect processing of the foods anymore, and the foods themselves developed hardier defenses.:

17And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

18Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

19In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Think of lectins as thorns, and you’ll see why grains might not be the best thing for us.

As for the bizarre-sounding fact that many carnivores have discovered they have to eat only meat, I observe that we are at the end of many millennia of devolution, and we are less and less able to process these foods as our DNA inexorably declines in quality. Except in times of plenty such as we’ve enjoyed for my entire life in this country, needing “the herb of the field” is a hard fact of life, and in many ways a detrimental one, or it wouldn’t be part of the Curse, as it clearly is in the quoted text.

As I said before, I might myself have to eat something besides meat in order to get enough calories to survive someday. I don’t look forward to that, because my health would suffer, but hard times do come. As a nation, we are long overdue for some collective judgment, which I expect will rain on the just and the unjust. Plate me up some lentils, in that case. My soul will survive that just fine. In the meantime, I’m storing up as much health and strength as I can by eating what works best for my body.

Praise Him for providing meat!

I love my brothers and sisters in Christ and would dearly love to see them in better health, so that the Lord’s work can be done with vigor, and his Word elucidated by clear, unclouded minds. Through use of the evolutionary narrative, Satan is convincing many of his enemies to become weak, both physically and mentally, by turning them off on a gut level (pun absolutely intended) to the notion that animal nutrition is superior to plant nutrition before they really get a chance to think about it.

Hopefully you can see by now that a carnivore diet, at the very least, does not fail to fit in with the Gospel narrative, aka the Truth. It certainly provides a better explanation for why we need to eat meat than “Monkeys with tiny brains dropped out of trees and started eating brains, so their brains got bigger.” (I know, evolution-worshippers, that this is a gross over-simplification of your beloved stories. But if you believe in evolution, I’d far rather talk to you about your soul than your food.)

Life requires death, on both a physical and a metaphysical level. Animal sacrifice is done away with, but animal eating is not…yet. The Good News here is that all things are being restored. Until that day, we receive with thanks the sustenance that God provides.

What think you? Anybody here looking at that pb&j sandwich a little bit less lovingly now?

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