Carnivore Pizza

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Mmmmm, bready!

I’m a simple woman. I’m happy to just grill up a steak or some burgers and call it a meal. No need to get fussy making messes in the kitchen.

Get Along Husband, however, likes his comfort foods, and so do the kids. One thing they all miss like crazy since we changed our eating habits is pizza with a bread crust. People make something called meatza all the time using ground meats and cheese, but it’s not very bready, and not worth the effort, in my opinion. This stuff passes for bread, though, and is so easy to do that I can make it happen even on a weeknight.

Print Recipe

Carnivore Pizza Crust

An easy, convincing substitute for pizza crust
Prep Time10 minutes
Cook Time20 minutes
Course: Main Course
Cuisine: Carnivore
Keyword: carnivore, keto, low carb
Servings: 4

Equipment

  • parchment paper or silicone mats
  • 1 plastic food prep glove

Ingredients

  • 6 oz pork rinds
  • 6 eggs
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp garlic powder optional
  • 1/2 tsp rosemary optional
  • 2 tbsp parmesan cheese, grated optional

Instructions

  • Heat oven to 325℉
  • Crush the pork rinds in a blender (or by hand, if that's how you roll).
  • Add baking powder and other (optional) ingredients.
  • Whisk the eggs together in a separate bowl, then mix thoroughly into the pork rinds.
  • Set aside for 3 minutes to soak.
  • Spread the pork rind mixture onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. A silicone mat will work, as well.
  • Bake for about 15 minutes, or until beginning to turn golden brown around the edges.
  • Remove crust from oven, then top with desired toppings.
  • Heat oven to 425℉
  • Place pizza back into oven for 5 minutes, or until cheese has melted and toppings are warm.

Notes

  • To increase the number of servings, use one ounce of pork rinds for every egg, and adjust for whatever size crowd you're trying to feed.
  • I find that a plastic-gloved (like these) hand pats the dough out more easily than trying to spread it with a spatula, but a spatula will do in a pinch.

You can top this any way you want. To keep it strictly carnivore and keto, I made a super-simple alfredo sauce by warming up a cup of heavy whipping cream and maybe 1/4 cup of parmesan cheese. You can add seasonings like basil, garlic, and onion to make it a little more zesty. The meat on top of this one is canned chicken, nothing fancy, and little balls of fresh mozzarella.

Of course, I’ve made this for the whole family with non-meat toppings and tomato pizza sauce. Everybody enjoys it!

Yes, that’s pineapple, and I’m not even ashamed of myself!

How bready is it? Pretty bready. I love it.

You could just make the bread and put a little extra cheese on top, dip it in garlic butter, and you have a delicious garlic bread. No toppings required. And if you want to put the batter about an inch deep into some greased muffin tins, the pork rind and egg mixture would make a fine “biscuit” for biscuits and sausage gravy (which I am totally doing for Sunday breakfast this weekend). This batter/dough is really versatile.

So if you’re thinking you can’t cut the carbs because you’d miss bread too much, try this. You don’t even have to be a cook.

Update:

I found this marvelous stuff at Wal-Mart (I know, I hate them, too).

You can use this instead of having to crush your own pork rinds. It’s 10.5 oz, so if you use the whole can, you’ll need 11 eggs and 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder. It comes out to two medium-sized pizzas. And it costs less to buy it this way than to buy whole bags and crush them yourself. Yay!

 

Why I Quit Coffee

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Again.

I’ve been back and forth on this topic for at least a year now, first eliminating coffee, then adding it back to my routine, deciding against it, then for, then against. With all of the mixed messages in the ever-manipulable and untrustworthy “science”, I couldn’t decide whether I believed coffee was truly bad or not. There are arguments for and against, and both sides sound eminently reasonable. In my last post about healing my thyroid, I said we’d talk about coffee another time, as it is less relevant to the thyroid than it is to other things. So here we are!

Friends on social media will be all too aware of my struggle to decide whether I do or don’t like coffee today, and probably will be relieved to hear that I won’t be vacillating on that anymore. If you see me drinking coffee from this point, you’ll know that I’ve ceased to care about my health and mood, and probably need a good talking-to. Considering what coffee does to my mood, though, you may want to send someone with a thick skin to do the talking.

Now, why? What have I got against this marvelous bean that everybody clings to as if it were life itself? 

Well, the first clue that it might not be the best thing for anybody is that everybody clings to it as if it were life itself. 

Addictions are–try and stay friendly with me here, coffee addicts–bad. Socially acceptable addictions may be the worst of all, because all of the addicts are encouraging each other right out in the open, without shame. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve mentioned this or that ill effect I thought coffee was having on me, only to be strongly discouraged from doing anything about my problem by other addicts. They go to great lengths to send me the dozens of articles we’ve all seen about how coffee increases longevity, or helps with this ailment or that. When I read the literature behind the articles, though, the evidence is mixed, at best. I may be able to write some posts looking at these studies in depth sometime. When the kids are grown. Maybe.

(Our society’s coffee addiction is second only to our carbohydrate addiction, by the way. Tell people to cut carbs, and they will immediately turn to the food pyramid, the vegan quacks, grandma’s homespun wisdom, anything at all to make you stop telling them they have to put down the pasta and apple pie. The biggest problem I have with coffee, like many people have with carbs, is that I can’t moderate it. If I have “just a cup today”, my need will become “just a pot a day” within a couple of weeks. I do not like being ruled by anything, even if it’s something that is perfectly acceptable for other people. Carb addicts should think the same way about carbs. But I digress.)

Whatever the “science” may say about the benefits of coffee, I have gone through several cycles of testing things out for myself, and so should you. If you’re noticing problems, forget what some egghead said and do what you need to do to feel well.

Here’s what I notice when I drink coffee:

The first few days, one cup at a time, are great! I can run faster and farther. I can lift heavier. I want to write, talk, sing, dance, play! For about an hour after my cup, I have a minor but distinct edge over my un-caffeinated self of the day before. Then I slump for an hour or two, but I’m ok for the rest of the day. For the first few days or weeks of reintroducing coffee, that slump is bearable, and I only have that one cup.

After that honeymoon period, though, I’m utterly dependent. I’m no longer beating my un-caffeinated self at anything. I’m not fully awake until I have the coffee. I need the coffee just to be normal now. It’s no longer my super-power, but my crutch. I don’t just sag a little after that first cup wears off, I fall on my face. I don’t want to run or lift without it, and when I do, my performance is lackluster. My personality feels flat. I get a little headache. Then I can’t recover from my workout adequately without another cup. Next thing I know, I’m having to make myself cut the now-steady caffeine drip by noon, because I’m harming my sleep. When I look up and find that it’s 2 p.m., and I’m still sipping, I know it’s going to be a difficult night.

As far as my kids are concerned, the hardest part of the coffee habit is that it makes me jittery and cranky. Nobody wants a jittery and cranky mommy.

After a few days to a week of withdrawal symptoms, all of this goes away and I’m steady again. I still want to do all the wonderful things, but without the manic pressure to do it.

Hormones, man. What a drag.

Cortisol is commonly thought of as the “stress” hormone, but in reality, it is the wake-up-and-pay-attention hormone. (We could get into some other hormonal weeds here, like adrenaline and noradrenaline, but let’s keep it simple. If I’m a little bit inaccurate, it’s because I’m putting everything into the cortisol bucket for time’s sake.) Cortisol starts to rise shortly before you get out of bed, and continues to do so until midmorning. The problem with coffee in this context is that, while your body needs that cortisol to get going for the day, it emphatically does not need more than it is able to produce for itself. Coffee raises and artificially keeps elevated a hormone that needs to start coming down toward noon.

I’ve heard some biohacking “experts” say that coffee should be put off until late morning for the reason that you already have enough cortisol to get you through the morning, but you can use it to get over the late morning slump. But, for one thing, almost nobody is waiting until that time of day to have their first cup. For another, if your levels are naturally coming down midmorning, isn’t that because your body needs to shift to other modes for now? So I don’t think it’s a particularly healthy practice to wait for your natural “slump”, which probably is meant to trigger such trivial energy-seeking behaviors as eating and resting, to receive your boost of fake energy.

Coffee suppresses appetite. “Wait!” you say. “I thought that was a good thing! We’re all fat because we eat too much. Appetite suppression is good!”

No, I don’t think so. I no longer even recommend fasting to my friends and family who are trying to lose weight. Fasting works, of course. Don’t take me to be saying that it doesn’t. But it’s not the easiest, or the most humane, or the safest way to get healthy, and weight loss should be a secondary goal to health gain.

I didn’t even realize it until recently, but I was drinking coffee because it “helped” me skip breakfast. I always work out fasted, first thing in the morning. I just feel gross with food in my stomach while I’m trying to crush things. But now I’m eating immediately after the workout, instead of trying to push it until lunch or beyond.

For a long time intermittent fasting was something I thought I had to do to lose weight, or to keep it off. Now that I’m years into a carnivore diet, though, I find that I need to eat three good meals a day, and I tend to gain weight when I skip breakfast. The amount of food I eat doesn’t change, just the timing. A friend of mine mentioned to me just this week that having a meal a short time after rising can lower cortisol and actually help your weight stability. Of course it can! I had ignored this obvious truth in favor of the utterly disproven conventional wisdom that restricting calories, especially early in the day, is a recipe for success.

Man, it’s good to have smart friends, ain’t it?

And on top of that bit of bad thinking about meal timing, I was adding to the stress on my system by drinking coffee.

I think our appetites are out of whack because of what we eat, not how much. I do eat more often when I don’t have coffee. Because I’m eating the correct things, and the amount that my body intuitively asks for, I’m not putting on weight eating all three meals a day. I’m just getting real energy from my food, instead of resource-depleting fake energy. If you have some weight to lose, coffee will make you eat less often, but in the long run, you’re going to find yourself overeating to regain the nutritional ground you lost while you were burning the hormone candle at both ends.

Did coffee have anything to do with my thyroid hormones, as I’d mentioned earlier? The interplay between all of the body’s hormones, whether sex hormones or steroid hormones, is a delicate one, and of course messing with one thing will mess with another! Anyone who does have thyroid function will almost certainly be stressing that gland due to the other disrupted hormones. But since I don’t have any thyroid function to speak of, I wouldn’t really be affecting my thyroid directly with coffee.

In my case, it is the fact that having coffee within an hour of taking thyroid medicine will decrease absorption of that medication that was probably tripping me up the most. I was having a hard time even waiting an hour to drink my first cup, and I don’t doubt that was skewing my uptake at least a little bit. This isn’t just about your medication, though, friends:

Coffee also interferes with the absorption of nutrients from your food. Coffee lowers the acidity of your stomach. Please don’t listen to the idiots who say that’s a good thing. Your stomach is supposed to be acidic, with an ideal ph of between 1 and 2. Coffee is acidic, with a pH of 5, but not as acidic as stomach acid, so it’s actually not acidifying your body, but quite the opposite. When you bring that pH up even a little, you are impairing your stomach’s ability to dissolve and digest nutrients. (This is also why I don’t recommend drinking a whole lot of water at meals, but doing most of your drinking in between. Little sips will do to aid swallowing.)

Coffee contains phytates that can interfere with absorption of minerals such as iron and zinc. 

Caffeine speeds up gut motility

Caffeine–not the only important compound in coffee, but the one you’re probably really addicted to–also speeds up your gut motility and causes your food to remain in the gut for a shorter time, further decreasing your absorption of food.

I’m going to go out on a limb with this next couple of possible harms. I haven’t really looked into these ideas yet, but I have hunches. Many of the plant compounds in coffee, including caffeine, are designed to act as pesticides to protect the seed from being eaten. There are any number of possible effects from this. You know that if you overdose on coffee, you will have symptoms: headaches, nausea, sleeplessness, jittery or nervous behavior. I think those compounds probably cause some leaky gut, a condition where the tight junctions in your small intestine become loosened and allow too-large proteins to enter the bloodstream, causing all sorts of symptoms of food intolerances and full-blown allergies.

Food poisoning may also be a slight concern. Not the most likely thing, maybe, but I have seen a pattern of illnesses that resembled food poisoning in at least one person I’m aware of who has been on and off coffee the same way I have. Eating is a challenge to the immune system. Every time you eat, your body directs a large portion of its resources to sorting out what is and isn’t acceptable to have in your bloodstream. If you are chronically lowering your stomach acid with coffee, you’re weakening your ability to fight the pathogens that are meant die in that acidic environment.

So, is coffee ever a good idea?

I can envision some scenarios where I might resort to coffee. Some kind of emergency requiring me to stay up all night, for instance. Living the quiet life I do, that’s a very unlikely thing, thankfully. Or maybe pre-race, a cup of coffee would be just the thing to push me over the top for just that one day. I do want to get out and race with other people sometime, instead of just racing myself every time. So that’s a situation where you might catch me backsliding a bit.

On any kind of regular basis, though? Nope. Coffee has got to go.

You’ll have to decide for yourself, of course, if your coffee habit is truly a good thing for you. I won’t make fun of you for enjoying your brew, and I hope the longevity studies turn out to be true. With this many coffee addicts running around, that certainly would be good news for all of us! But I do encourage everybody to at least try a few weeks without it, then go back to drinking it, and see if it’s really as harmless as you think it is.

I’ve closed comments on this blog. If you want to discuss this, or anything else, you can find me on MeWe, Gab, or SG.

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.

Carnbread Dressing

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This diet just gets weirder and weirder.

I showed you earlier how to make a cornbread simulation I like to call Carnbread. Now let’s turn that oddly bread-like loaf into a stuffing for your Thanksgiving turkey! Or maybe your Thursday night chicken dinner, since this is January.

Carnbread stuffing is made in a similar manner to cornbread stuffing.

Print Recipe

Carnbread Dressing

A meaty alternative to cornbread stuffing
Prep Time10 minutes
Cook Time30 minutes
Course: Side Dish
Cuisine: Carnivore
Keyword: carnivore, dairy free, keto
Servings: 10

Ingredients

  • 2 loaves carnbread
  • 2 tbsp dried sage
  • 2 tbsp dried minced onions a teaspoon of onion powder could also be used
  • 2 tbsp paprika
  • 2 tbsp dried parsley
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp rosemary
  • 1 tsp celery seed
  • 2 tsp thyme
  • 1/4 tsp white pepper
  • 1/4 tsp black pepper

Instructions

  • Prepare one recipe of Carnivore Cornbread.
  • Optional, but helpful for a better texture: Freeze the bread overnight or longer, wrapped in plastic wrap or zipper bags, then allow to thaw before continuing.
  • Heat oven to 300 °F
  • Cut Carnbread into 1-inch cubes, and toss in a large bowl with all other ingredients.
  • Spread the cubes in a single layer onto two (or more) baking sheets
  • Bake in the oven until they are crunchy and turn golden brown.
  • Stir occasionally, and taste-test to see if they're as done as you like.
  • Now you have croutons! Stop here if you just want to snack on some croutons, or eat them with egg drop soup or something.
  • To make the dressing, mix the now-crispy croutons with two cups of warm poultry stock.

Stuffing (or dressing, I guess, since I never put it inside the bird) is my favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal. It was, anyway, before I figured out what all that delicious food was doing to my body. Good news, carnivores: we don’t have to miss out on the stuffing experience! This stuff is so close to bread stuffing that I think I could have served it without explanation on Thanksgiving and nobody would have figured out that it’s not made of bread. They wouldn’t have thought it was normal bread, to be sure. The texture isn’t exactly right, so maybe they’d have guessed it was one of those Ezekiel breads or gluten-free breads.

As with any carnivore recipe, you can and should leave out any and all spices that you don’t eat. On special occasions, I go ahead and use the spices I normally skip. I served this dish right alongside my bread stuffing. Guess which one people preferred? This dressing is really good! I don’t know if I would actually put it inside a turkey and bake it. That would probably be soggy and eggy-tasting. Let me know if you decide to try it. I’m not that brave.

Carnivore Cornbread

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AKA Carnbread

Recipe first. We’ll talk later.

Print Recipe

Carnivore Cornbread

A fairly bready substitute for cornbread
Prep Time5 minutes
Cook Time40 minutes
Servings: 10

Equipment

  • 2 loaf pans
  • 1 blender

Ingredients

  • butter, bacon grease, or lard for greasing pans
  • 3 12.5 oz cans canned, cooked chicken, well-drained Sub your own pre-cooked chicken if you like.
  • 14 large eggs
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp cream of tartar
  • 1 tsp salt I use Redmond's Real salt. If you use regular table salt, you may want to halve the amount.
  • 4 tbsp unsalted butter
  • 1/2 tsp crushed dried rosemary (Optional, helps with the eggy flavor)
  • or 2 Tbsp Lakanto monkfruit or other keto-friendly sweetener (Optional, for a sweet version. Omit rosemary if choosing this option.)

Instructions

  • Heat oven to 350°F.
  • Grease the two loaf pans. If the pans are cast iron, put them into the pre-heating oven to warm up.
  • Blend the drained chicken and eggs in a blender until thoroughly mixed.
  • Divide the batter into the loaf pans.
  • Bake for about 50 minutes, or until the "bread" has completely set.
  • Turn out immediately onto a cooling rack to cool.

I don’t do a lot of food substitutes. If I can’t eat a thing, I don’t often try to make something similar to fill that niche in my diet. However, there are occasions–Thanksgiving, Christmas, days-ending-in-y-when-I’m-tired-of-the-same-old-same-old–when a little bready substance seems like it would hit the spot. This recipe evolved from several carnivore recipes I’ve found online that weren’t big enough–or tasty enough, frankly–to feed my large family. I used this recipe recently to make croutons which then became a carnivore “stuffing” to go with our Thanksgiving turkey. The recipe for that is coming soon. Everybody said that my version was just as good as the gluten-free bread version I made for the normal people, and it disappeared just as fast, so I guess they were telling the truth!

A word of warning for the unwary: a slice of real bread has nothing like the nutrient profile of a slice of this fake bread bread simulation. So when you’re eating carnbread (as I just decided to rename it), it is not going to serve the same function as cornbread. You’ll fill up very quickly on this loaf. I ate a few slices last night as my main course, simply buttered and dipped in a delicious meat stock. It was a very satisfying meal.

I’ve poured the batter into individual-size casserole dishes that made loaves just the right size for a hamburger bun, and that works beautifully for a cookout where you’d like to be able to eat a sandwich just like everybody else. Goes great with my homemade clean mayo. You might not be able to eat the whole sandwich, though. It is a lot of food.

You could also use a couple of well-greased muffin tins to make cornbread muffins. Just watch the cooking times as you change the shape and size.

I haven’t actually tried sweetening the bread for a dessert-like treat yet, but I have it in my head to do a maple and vanilla flavored one sometime. Since it doesn’t taste very chickeny, but is a little eggy, I think it will be pretty tasty. I’ll report back on that if I ever do it. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this recipe!

Let me know via Gab, MeWe, or SG if you try it. Or if you refuse to try it. Whatever, just come talk to me!

 

 

 

Friday Random Mess

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Let’s kick off the weekend with some links, shall we?

Have you joined the Global Walkout yet? Don’t let the big banks, big ag, big pharma, and big government run and ruin your life. All you have to do is walk out. Start at Step 1 if you’re new to the idea. Step 9 is for business people to encourage their customers to prefer cash payment:

Step 9

Eric Peters has coined a useful word to describe the Cult of the White Coat: allopathia

So, yes, this government is completely lawless now. What are you going to do about it, plebe?: Facebook and Twitter created special portals for the government to rapidly request takedowns of content. 

What you were not taught about Christopher Columbus and Islam. When I was in school, Columbus was still a celebrated figure, but I don’t think one word was said about Islam. If I had no interest in history as an adult, I would have been surprised by all of this. History class is a joke, and has been for a long, long time. Homeschool, people.

33 Things Christian Men Should Know About Women. I’ll probably have my sons read this. I’d quibble with this a bit:

25. It’s common for a woman to conform to a man’s interests and hobbies to receive his affection

A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the Lord your God. —Deuteronomy 22:5

I don’t know when it began that men started to desire women who shared the same masculine hobbies as them. “She loves watching sports, drinking beer, and shooting guns… I’m in love!” It must be a sign of the times when narcissism is so high that men look to women to be just like them instead of understanding that God created two sexes with a distinct division of gifts for maintaining a family home.

When men signal they like a woman with masculine hobbies, women will soon come to “love” masculine hobbies. There are millions of women in the United States who know more than me about pro football, craft beer, bodybuilding, shooting guns, comic book movies, and all the most appropriate times to use profanity in conversation. They may not admit it to you, but I believe they do these things to maximize their chances of receiving affection from men and to sustain that affection by being able to talk about the things that men like.

There’s nothing sinister or upside-down about a woman who’s into a man taking on his interests to a degree. I learned a lot about Linux in order to cozy up to my future husband. In fact, I became very proficient for a while and impressed him with a few unexpected skills. Can’t remember much now, but I can still converse intelligently with him about his jobby (job+hobby). I was already interested in more “masculine” stuff because I was a daddy’s girl. I never thought to compete with my husband, and I never thought to trick him into thinking I was going to be his best buddy at the shooting range, although I certainly am. I did think I needed to prove my worth as his life-long partner.

The reason it is common for women to conform to a man’s interests is that a woman needs to be familiar enough with her husband’s interests to be a good helpmeet and an understanding companion. It is natural and healthy to do that. A woman who can’t do that is probably not going to be a felicitous match. Best to find that out before the wedding, no? An unregenerate or un-selfaware woman will turn that into a competition, though, and make for a cold marriage once she catches him and either begins to compete, or becomes completely cold to his interests, and thus his needs.

Another fertilizer plant destroyed. It really is on purpose, people.

Nice one today, Stonetoss:

R-ticulate image number 0

Britain threating jailtime for praying in front of abortion clinics. Prayer is powerful. The enemy knows this. It’s time we realized it, as well, and started really doing it.

That’s all for this week. We’re about to go dip some beeswax candles. Will probably blog that! Happy weekend, friends!

 

Steak Crisps

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I wouldn’t want to name them ‘beef chips’.

The thing I miss the most about eating carbs is crispy textures. I love potato chips, crackers, crisp cookies. I don’t love what those things do to my body, though, so I’ve stayed away for years. You can buy crispy carnivore snacks, but I can’t afford that stuff.

What I’ve taken to doing is as simple as can be, and not at all expensive if you can find these on sale. My favorite local grocery store frequently sells the steak-um style beef sheets for 2 for $5.

This is not even a recipe, it’s so simple.

  1. Lay your sheets out in the food dehydrator on the wire racks. I put one of the plastic fruit-leather pans on the bottom rack to catch any drips of fat. Do remove the paper that separates the meat-sheets. I left them on once, and the food stuck to it. Very disappointing.
  2. Salt or season to taste. I usually use plain Redmond’s Real Salt. The smoked salt was delicious, but sprinkle very lightly. The bigger crystals will overwhelm the flavor.
  3. Dry at around 160°F for 12 hours.

Eat them right away or bag them up for later. I keep them in the fridge. It doesn’t take us long to eat them all, so I’m not sure how shelf-stable or travelable they are.

Doggies will want some. Don’t be stingy:

What I Eat in a Day

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A carnivore diet is the easiest thing in the world to plan, but some people still have trouble envisioning what their plates should look like without a side of taters and a dessert. Probably the hardest thing to get used to is thinking of meat (and eggs and dairy, if you add those) as a whole meal all by itself.

I hope you’ll see that my food is not completely boring, that I don’t have to be perfect to get great results, and above all, that it is OK to pile your plate right up to the heavens if that’s how much food you need today. It’s also OK to skip a meal you don’t feel you need it. I’m not suggesting that everyone should eat the same amount or things that I do. This is just meant to give ideas to those who maybe have none. If you’re more interested in keto than carnivore, just imagine a few asparagus on the side of my plates. Sometimes–very occasionally–I even put a few of those on my plate. It’s a way of eating, not a religion.

Anyway, here’s what I ate Saturday, September 3 (yes, this was a month ago. I’m a little behind on everything rn):

First meal: Ground beef “salad”. Cold, leftover plain ground beef, smoked salt, cubed butter, and cubed feta goat cheese. Not pictured are the two slices of bacon I ate before I thought to write this post. This was about 1/2 a pound of meat, I reckon, and an ounce each of butter and cheese. I don’t always eat breakfast, but it’s usually something left over from a previous meal if I do.

Lunch: steak and deviled eggs (there’s a little pickle in the eggs):

Snack, cute little caterpillar. I did not eat the leaf:

I’m kidding, of course. I do not eat bugs, but I suppose that would still be carnivore.

And finally, a small snack in the afternoon after a late workout, cottage cheese with a few cherries, which are not meat. I cannot resist cherries or pears when they are perfect and in-season. That only happens for about 2 weeks every summer, so this is a self-limiting indulgence. They taste just awful the rest of the year.:

I’m sure there are carnivores who would light their hair on fire and read me out of the tribe for that last meal. It’s got fructose! But I’m metabolically quite healthy, and not addicted to sweets in a way that will make me spiral out-of-control just because I had a bite. I’d worked out pretty hard in the afternoon and wanted to close my eating window by four o’clock, and this is the food that presented itself.

You may recall from earlier posts that I do have some problems with dairy. It does cause some inflammation and anxiety, so I limit it. But I also find that including dairy helps me build muscle in a way that meat and eggs don’t seem to do. Dairy is designed to make things grow, after all. It’s a trade-off I’m sometimes willing to make for a few weeks of body-building, but not permanently. At the first sign of an auto-immune flare-up, the dairy is out again. HS is not something I like to fool around with. I’d probably be better off in some ways if I never did that, but after a lot of experimentation, I think I’ve found an acceptable amount of dairy that works for my goals.

So that was a fairly normal day last month. The cherries are an outlier, but I wouldn’t want to lie ye. I’ll try to remember to do a few more of these so the curious can see what other days look like, and hopefully be inspired to make healthier choices for themselves. Any carnivores in the house? What are you having today?