Great post. I went 'ketovore' for five months this fall. It completely reset my eating hormones (hungry, stop now, etc.). I do believe that eating pure carnivore is possible and healthy if done right, but my body was seriously craving carbs. So I've brought in some basics: rice, bananas, occasional sourdough. I make sure to eat tons of protein and fat so I don't overeat carbs and it's been working. Less plant and fruit fiber. I definitely lose weight if I keep carbs to one serving a day. Balancing act, but resetting glucose loads and eliminating all sugars was a huge component.

You are doing well to listen to your body. It will let you know. Overtime, it changes as you age, and it’s different for everyone. I used to teach nutrition classes, half students coming because of an illness and half coming to support continued health. The best thing you can do is follow what works best for your needs. It’s the listening and adjusting. Good for you 👍🏻

Great update, dude, congrats on your progress so far. Glad you’re just doing what works best for you but sticking with a good bit of elimination still.

Best of success on your journey.

I ate a vegan diet for seven years. Last year I switched back to eating meat again. I’d say I roughly eat carnivore for 75% of my caloric intake. I feel marginally better in physical terms and better wrt mental health. I attribute that to losing the social stigma of eating a vegan diet. My strength has gone up significantly.

All that said, I think you can live a healthy life at either end of the diet spectrum. There is probably something to minimizing carbs, especially enriched and processed ones. I notice a feel physically and mentally slow when I have a lot of store-bought breads.

What I’ve picked up on throughout my journey is that I feel best when I adhere to eating whole foods. I don’t necessarily mean organic, I’m referring to staying away from processed foods. I get my meat from our local butcher when I can, but let’s be honest - that gets expensive af. It’s a shame that quality food is so expensive.

Keep experimenting and sharing your findings. 🫡

I am keto / carnivore because of my heart. Had a bit of a blockage that was taken care of during a heart valve replacement (long story).

After the surgery I did a lot of research in regards to what to eat to reduce heart disease. I found plenty of anecdotal evidence on YouTube and other places.

The one thing that stuck me was that sugar damages arteries. This is something you don’t hear.

When on the keto / carnivore diet your bloodwork will normalize however, LDL cholesterol will go up. I found a study that correlated that with LOWER all cause mortality.

If you are worried about the saturated fat and cholesterol thing… don’t! It’s been a sham from the beginning to sell statin drugs.

If you have any questions, I am more than happy to help. Keep up your journey.

13 pounds in 8 days is impressive. Congratulations!

Link to LDL study:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30198808/

If you cannot open and read it

, I have it in PDF i can send you.

Some recs. Buy some lmnt and have that first thing in the morning upon waking. If you like salads try them with some apple cider vinegar and olive oil. And some Parmesan cheese

Btw saturated fats don’t cause heart disease. It’s inflammation from glucose spikes too often or seed oils

I also think heart disease and gout are potential problems in the carnivore diet. But also cancer and malnutrition - there are a lot of nutrients proven to protect against cancers that are found in vegetables and fruits (e.g. berries), and also many are produced by gut bacteria when they are feed indigestable fibers (which are counted as carbohydrates)

This is what I think I know (I could be wrong of course, apparently I need to add disclaimers to everything I say now-a-days even though it should be obvious):

This data comes from dozens of sources I could not easily cite at this point. Much of the expert opinions come from thousands of studies, careful evaluation of which ones are good (only about 15%) and which ones matter most (maybe only 2%). Anybody can "find a study" that says anything they want to hear, so be extremely careful about making conclusions from just 1 or 2 studies. Many studies show LDL lowering reduces mortality, here is one just for kicks, but do not just accept single studies like this or any other: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9812424/

Heart disease

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Heart disease seems to be caused by:

1. Unmodifiable factors: Age, maleness, family history and other genetic components

2. The concentration of ApoB lipoprotein in your bloodstream, integrated over time (high concentrations for short time periods don't add much to this integral)

3. Modulated by hypertension (higher blood pressure increases the rate)

4. Modulated by inflammation (reducing inflammation in the endothelial lining reduces the rate)

5. Made worse by other things that may damage your endothelial lining (smoking, elevated glucose for a long time, etc).

Most people don't get their ApoB measured, but LDL is a close proxy for it. The carnivore diet raises LDL. In some people (hyperresponders) it raises LDL massively.

Also it has been around forever - Egyptian Pharoahs had heart disease. The 'ice man' had heart disease. It's not caused by modern diets or "bread" it has been with us forever and not weeded out by evolution because it is a late-stage disease of aging.

Modern medicine has good solutions for preventing this disease which target LDL cholesterol. In particular:

1. If you are a hyper-producer of cholesterol, statin drugs very sigificantly lowers your LDL.

2. If you are a hyper-absorber of cholesterol, ezetimibe very sigificantly lowers your LDL.

3. Baby aspirin significantly lowers your inflammation (but may make gout worse)

4. Multiple drugs significantly lower your blood pressure (ACE inhibitors, ARBs, calcium channel blockers, beta blockers, diuretics).

Diet can also have a significant effect:

1. Lots of PUFAs (I know it's unpopular, but Canola oil is magically powerful against atherosclerosis), you can use nuts and seeds for these if you don't want seed oils.

2. Low saturated fat (which causes cholesterol), which lowers the level of ApoB

3. Low simple carbs (which raise triglycerides which also have an impact)

Weight loss has a significant positive effect, no matter how you do it. If you lose weight on carnivore, the weight loss part of what you did was protective against atherosclerosis.

Exercise is also proven to have a sigificant effect, independent of any weight loss it may also provide.

Your body has a lot of ways to deal with atheromas in a "safe" way: they tend to develop hard fibrous caps which protects you (they won't break and spill out and form a clot when they have a firm cap). Also, your blood vessels will form new tiny capillaries to carry blood around any narrowings. And your blood vessels will expand to make more room when there is a narrowing. So the lifetime buildup isn't really much of a worry as your body adapts to it. Exercise helps to maximize this adaptation. The real worry is when a fresh atheroma with a soft cap bursts. If you keep your inflammation and blood pressure down and your diet good, you can avoid these fresh atheromas and live a long life, even if you can't "reverse" heart disease (some doctors claim they can revese it, but most professionals have reason to doubt that. I also doubt it is reversable).

Gout

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This is a simple disease. You have too much uric acid, which has gotten to a high enough level that it crystallizes out into monosodium urate crystals. Your immune system can attack these crystals once they get into the wrong places (tiny areas in your joints, often your big toe). They aren't attacked right-off-the-bat and by the time you have a gout attack you usually have quite a lot of crystal build-up.

The cause is either (1) Too much uric acid production, either (a) too many purines in your diet, or (b) too much break down of your body's tissues, or (2) your kidneys aren't filtering out the uric acid fast enough. Some people turn over cellular material rapidly (1b) or don't have good kidney function (2), but eating a high purine diet can cause it all on it's own.

Purines are essentially from DNA. The amount of purines you eat are proporational to the number of cells you eat. Baby spinich has high purines compared to adult spinach because the cells are smaller. Same with baby fish vs adult fish. Organ meat has more smaller cells. Yeast is tons of tiny cells. Eggs are one giant cell with essentially no purines. Milk isn't cellular and has no purines.

Gout isn't dangerous and is reversible (modulo any joint damage it caused that persists), but it is painful and best avoided.

Join #proofofwalk to shed more pounds 🤙

Funny thing, risk of heart disease is one thing I no longer worry about now that I am meat based. Cancer is another big one. Also all the things they sell drugs for in TV commercials.

Gout is something other people worry about on my behalf, but anything I personally see as an issue.

Living this worry-free is very liberating. Now all I really worry about how my body will be able to repair all the years of abuse and toxins. So far it is doing fine at this.

I also worry about the future availability of meat. But that is a very different topic.

13 lbs in 8 days is bonkers. Are you going to get your body comp measured?

Wow, there's a lot going on for you. Thanks for sharing and reaching out to the community.

Heart disease and clogged arteries are not related to red meat, saturated fat, and cholesterol, but are the result of diets high in sugar, refined carbohydrates, and seed oils, i.e. canola, vegetable, sunflower, grapeseed, cottonseed oil, etc... This is well-documented in Nina Teicholz's 2014 best-seller, THE BIG FAT SURPRISE, as well as the works of Ben Bickman, Tim Noakes, and Anthony Chaffee, among many others. Find their vlogs and books on YouTube.

A shoddy scientist Ancel Keys was paid by the sugar industry in the 1940s to throw red meat and saturated fat under the bus to take the heat off the true culprit, the sugar industry. Teicholz documents this in her book as well.

Another excellent book on fat, cholesterol, and the dangers of statin drugs is THE GREAT CHOLESTEROL MYTH by Jonny Bowden, PH.D and Stephen Sinatra, M.D. all backed by solid science.

Gout is related to high alcohol and sugar consumption, again, red meat gets the bum rap.

You will be extra thirsty in the absence of carbs due to the depletion of glycogen stores which uses water. Keep well-hydrated and add electrolytes to your water to keep your energy up and your leg cramps at bay.

Don't worry about an exercise routine right now as this will have little impact on your weight loss and may overwhelm you at a vulnerable time.

Eating carbs when we're not hungry is indicative of carb/food addiction which is very common in today's landscape. The food industry designs foods for repeat business so they are manufactured to alter brain chemistry for the dire purpose of addiction. Food, and The Food Industry are not related but the industry has created the narrative on nutrition. Basically if it has a barcode and is shown on TV or billboard ads its not food nor fit for human consumption.

Having one meal a day might be an advanced strategy if you're having energy dips. You might be dealing with insulin resistance (pre-diabetes) and sugar imbalance. This takes time to heal and shouldn't be rushed to promote weight-loss. If you're not yet fat-adapted, i.e. using ketones as your main energy source instead of glucose (sugar) you will have energy highs and lows and could potentially cause weight gain. Ketone bodies are the by-products of your fat stores being broken down and used as energy. Your body will only switch to using ketones when you eat zero to under 20-50 grams of carbs per day although this varies person to person. You'll get to know your carb tolerance in time and lower to zero is best.

I'm afraid you'll have to toughen up around your wife's cooking and your kids' carby cereals to stay on track but it will be worth it for the self-esteem you'll gain along with the transformational results. Meat heals carb addiction by resetting your brain back to its natural and superior fuel source: ketone bodies!

I can tell you from my own experience that eating 100% ruminant meat (beef) is the quintessential elimination diet and is the most healing diet we can adopt because it's our ancestral diet and every one of our cells has a memory for high meat consumption. We evolved on fatty animals.

Changing one's diet is the most difficult thing anyone will ever do but is also the most rewarding.

As a Holistic Nutritionist and Carnivore I can offer you some free coaching if you'd like. DM me and we can go from there...🐂🤎