How did I personally start The Carnivore Diet?

I’ll start by saying that The Carnivore Diet isn’t a religion or ideology unlike the flawed Veganism movement, It’s simply a path to better health. This isn’t an article attempting to dogmatize the diet but rather just my personal experience alongside the facts to get the best outcome for you mentally and physically while on it.

I started my health journey off as a vegan which lasted about a week. This made me feel better but I started to notice general cramping and some of my issues were still prevalent. I then found keto on google which explained to me how to enter ketosis and do the diet, which was by eating less than 20 carbohydrates a day. I didn’t have any meats just eggs at the time so I just ate an egg and didn’t eat anything the rest of that day. I woke up and noticed that something was improving here so I then went to the store and got some stuff like bacon, cheese, eggs, sausages and chicken and just made those my daily meals. My asthma, dandruff, ashy skin, lower back pain, and general joint pain all then went away following this diet.

My health improvements compared to the standard American diet vastly improved however something was still off in certain areas. I would do it for like a week or two or a month and then cheat. I was constantly drawn to food, always screenshotting food and recipes scrolling through Instagram.

I never really bought into eating plants as they always just made me feel groggy so my goal was just to get as close to zero carbs a day as I could on keto. I essentially considered myself a carnivore eating the items I listed above. It wasn’t until I realized that things like spices and lactose which are in processed meats were affecting me. This makes sense as all carbohydrates are broken down into sugar. I believe in a natural approach to most aspects of my life personally and my diet above would be the equivalent of me eating fresh meat all day and then deciding to throw a few grains of white sugar in my mouth thinking “It can’t hurt that bad! It’s only a little bit”, it’s just asking for problems. When I finally started buying nutrient dense/fat-filled ruminant meat like ground beef and steak with no additives everything was perfect. When I used to look at carbohydrates on keto it would always provoke a reaction, that simply stopped happening once I decided to eat meat (fat, protein) and eliminate carbohydrates fully. I haven’t cheated since.

This will be a quick article going over how to do The Carnivore Diet most efficiently and break the mental connection with carbohydrates.

How do I do The Carnivore Diet correctly?

This is a fail-proof way to succeed at doing The Carnivore Diet. Usually, individuals allow themselves to get tripped up with processed meats at stores that have sugar/spices/additives in them or cheese/butter/ghee which has traces of lactose in it.

Carbohydrates ARE addictive and the more you eat the more the rope will continue to pull you back in. Carbohydrates are also a detriment to your gym performance as they will deter proper fat adaptation. Follow the steps below and something that I can only describe as magical will happen, you’ll completely mentally disconnect from carbohydrates elevating your quality of life even more.

• Buy fresh meat with no additives, preservatives, or artificial ingredients. Stores usually have their meats processed on shared equipment opening you up to allergens from things like wheat or they’ll spray it with some sort of preservative like ascorbic acid which comes from a plant. The packaging should look something like the picture below. You should be able to find something like this in stores and be sure to make sure it’s not wrapped in paper. If you can’t find it in stores you can order it from a farm online.

• You need to eat plenty of fat, fat is the key to satiation. It’s a major component of why this way of eating is so successful for many as you are just not hungry for extended periods being in your natural state of ketosis which promotes mental clarity. You should ideally eat meats that have a higher fat to protein ratio. 70/30-80/20 ground beef is perfect. I eat one pound of ground beef along with two Sam’s Choice Angus beef burgers daily. Ribeye steaks also contain plenty of fat with protein.
• You need to stay prepared, I buy 30 packs of ground beef and 4 boxes of Sam’s choice beef burgers every month. Buy the meats you like and cook them how you like consistently. Don’t allow yourself to get into a position where you are out of food and trying to experiment with something that you just don’t need to subject yourself to like fast food or processed meats. Sugar and seed oils do not belong on meat and nothing beats the day in and day out satiation of nutrient/energy dense meat.
• Cook in a stainless steel pan with stainless steel utensils and eat in a stainless steel bowl. Nonstick pans WILL leech chemicals into your food no matter what it says. If you cook in a stainless steel pan then your worst worry is inorganic elements which are not inherently harmful as opposed to other chemical-filled pans.

What about the studies saying meat is so bad?

The first thing you need to understand about epidemiology studies is that the participants are filling out questionnaires on what they ate in the past.

Let me ask you a question, can you tell me what you ate 3 days ago? In these surveys, they’re usually being asked to report on what they’ve been eating within a past timeframe of days, months, and years which is bound to be flawed as individuals lie to others and even themselves.

There are no studies where people are locked in labs, observed constantly and every variable is controlled/adjusted for over a set number of decades. This means that at best we have a body of associations that by definition can not determine causation. Epidemiology studies are associative and can never assert cause and effect because science is a discipline. It is inappropriate for any nutritionist to make any claims regarding risk in nutritional science.

The average person also consumes 225-325+ carbohydrates on a 2000-calorie diet. Carnivores are consuming minimal to optimally zero carbohydrates. Fat, protein, and carbohydrates are all metabolized differently in the body so how could these studies possibly even begin to equate with a person on The Carnivore Diet or even somebody doing low carb, keto? They can’t.

In truth, a study where identical twins are locked in a lab and observed constantly over a set number of decades will likely never happen for its impracticality, expenses, and ethics. We would have to then turn to what we know about the physiology of the human body.

1. The body will never require one gram of dietary carbohydrates ever. Gluconeogenesis is a process that produces all the required glucose in your body from noncarbohydrate sources such as amino acids, glycerol and lactate which are also all found in meat.
2. Babies are born into the state of Ketosis which is our natural metabolic state. It’s associated with mental clarity due to it supplying your brain with ketones along with the glucose produced from gluconeogenesis. You will not have elevated ketone levels eating a diet high in carbohydrates. Carbohydrates contribute to inflammation and why people typically deal with brain fog aka the complete lack of mental clarity.
3. The nitrogen isotope 15 testing in the bones of humans confirms that we’ve been obligate carnivores for the last 4.5 million years. Nitrogen testing is a reliable way of reconstructing a diet as we obtain it solely through our diet. The nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14 isotope ratios in the collagen samples of Neanderthals are similar to what’s seen in carnivores today like lions and wolves. This coincides with other evidence like spears being found near human bodies, butchered animals, etc. They likely ate a lot of mammoth meat primarily and if they are anything like elephants it would not be difficult to neutralize them with a few spear attacks.
4. Humans have never had such access to high-carb sources of food as we do now in our present society. We have genetically modified fruits to make them super sweet, softer and without seeds. Fruits weren’t even available most of the time of the year, our ancestors who ate berries would only be able to get them in the summer which is about three months out of the entire year.
5. This point comes from a more common sense angle but this idea that we fulfilled our energy requirements from sugary fruits from trees and sedentary plants has always been quite ludicrous. Animals encourage competition and physical activity in hunting among humans for a worthwhile reward. A single cow can last a human an entire year. Plants lack satiating animal fat, are low in calories, have poor bioavailability and are full of plant toxins. If plants are so vital to human nutrition then can you please explain to me what high carb sources were available to humans during the 2.5 million year period of the ice ages when very few plants were available? The further we get away from how we’ve evolutionary evolved, the worst our health will continue to get.

So all in all we’ve taken humans out of their natural state of Ketosis and made a body of observations on a population eating an insane amount of carbohydrates with regards to our previous history as a species before the agrarian revolution.

Individuals have then tried to make claims about this contraindicated pro-inflammatory diet by looking at self-reported intakes of things/variables like cholesterol, saturated fat, heme iron, and TMAO within a mixed macronutrient diet which have all been debunked.

Never mix carbohydrates and fat!

Essentially your cells have two fuel sources which are carbohydrates and fat. Mixing the two of these is asking for metabolic dysfunction. So you may say I’ll just do high carb low fat then. Vegans usually see initial benefits when doing this until they run into the ultimate nutritional deficiencies that will occur as plants lack Creatine, B12, Cholesterol, Carnosine, and DHA among other fundamental things your body needs. 84% of vegetarians/vegans will abandon their diet within 5 years. The only reason vegans are able to do a diet like this is due to manmade supplements however this is certainly not optimal.

In nature, we have never seen a food with high amounts of both carbs and fat together. Eating both carbohydrates and fat activates the Randle cycle restricting the efficient use of both glucose and fatty acids. People typically eat a mixture of these two macronutrients multiple times a day and it’s just asking for issues relating to insulin resistance, metabolic dysfunction and obesity down the line.

I implore you all to watch the good gentleman Bart Kay for a further breakdown on this topic. Bart Kay is a Professor of Clinical Physiology, Cardiovascular Pathophysiology, and many other things including nutrition. He is a great resource for information on the carnivore diet. Most nutritionists will try to mislead you further diluting the issue of diet in the context of associative studies however this individual only deals with the facts and has subsequently debunked every plant-based nutritionist. The video I provided above details what The Randle Cycle is in 5 minutes however I suggest you check out his other content as well for more detailed breakdowns of nutrition studies, graphs and analysis/commentary.

Just try it!

I always say just try it for 4 days as 72-96 hours is the timeframe for carbohydrates to drain out of your body. Initially, you will be moody and quite irritable, this is normal as you are completely shifting your body’s fuel source and making a dramatic change back to the species’ appropriate way of eating. The third or fourth day is when you will start to feel better and notice these effects more dramatically. You will continue to progressively adapt from this point on as well. Once you start to do this and feel the way you do it’ll completely change your relationship with food. You’ll go from constantly snacking and eating multiple meals a day to eating 1 to 2 times a day. The mental clarity you will also experience will just be glorious and nothing will honestly convince you to betray this ketogenic state ever short of desperation or despair (even in this scenario I’d rather fast).

So what are you waiting for? Eliminate the macronutrient called carbohydrates and eat fat/protein exclusively to mentally disconnect from carbs and live a better life. The path forward for a better society where we all are truly in tune with the world and not suffering from the emptiness that carbohydrates bring us is right in front of us. Too many people are losing their lives and sanity being a victim of the mass production of these manmade sugary foods.

Eat meat, be satiated and free yourself from disease and hunger!