I’m a huge fan of the carnivore diet.
Note: except for extreme crisis situations, I’d generally recommend my favorite diet – AIP.
I say that I am a huge fan, because if you’ve read my book, you’ll know that the carnivore diet is essentially what saved my life – literally. I didn’t begin the carnivore diet intentionally, thinking I wanted to lose some weight or something; I was dragged into it by sheer and wretched necessity. Essentially, at a certain point, every single thing I ate began to give me immediate and dramatic issues – Even things that were clear for the AIP diet: peas, green leafies, carrots, etc. As my long covid drag me down, I began eliminating things out of my diet like a ship tossing things overboard at sea. Eventually, it came down to just meat: I could, sometimes, eat meat. And that was it. And so, I did. I was in a very bad place, and so even then things were quite touch and go. But I have absolutely no doubt, that if I had tried to soldier on through the Mediterranean diet, or green leafies and whole grains, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
All of which is to say, I had a very deep stake in the matter: if I got it wrong, I was in big trouble. I had to get it right, there was no room for error. These are some of the things that I learned the hard way, from that experience, that I hope will give readers a head start.
1. Eat enough salt: I found that if you think you’re eating enough salt, eat more. As long as you space it out, contrary to at certain professional pharmaganda associations will tell you, there is virtually no way you could overdose on sal, within reasonable limits (don’t drink seawater, and don’t eat too much salt if your kidneys are toast – other than that, it’s a big easy target). If you’re feeling any sort of “blah” from carnivore (tired, headache, etc) That’s a very strong indicator that you’re not eating enough salt. Eat more salt.
A bonus to this is to eat more salt as you drink water – even possibly mixing the salt into your water. My experience is that there is actually a noticeable difference for me if I mix the salt in my water – I have no idea why, but I only need to drink about a third of the water that I otherwise would. Again, I have no idea why that would be any different than eating the salt a few minutes later; this is just my experience.
2. Brush your teeth: mainly because your spouse will get mad at you if you don’t 🤣 I found that if I don’t floss on carnivore, little bits of meat get stuck in my gums, and bad things happen. on that note, if you haven’t already, I would toss your Colgate toothpaste, and just get a circular electric toothbrush from AliExpress for $20 and use water. Toothpaste is full of chemicals and neurotoxins, expensive, and annoying. I hear more and more people switching to just an electric toothbrush and water, and for me it’s by far my favorite.
But basically, when you’re starting carnivore, you’re going to get a lot of superfluous bacteria dying off. Remember that your mouth is literally the start of a very long tube that works its way all the way down through you – detox in your mouth by brushing off the dead bacteria will set the tone for the rest of your digestive tract.
3. Eat organ meats, eat the whole animal. Pretty self-explanatory, pretty nasty sometimes.
4. Drink vinegar (it doesn’t have to be apple cider vinegar, can be, but the asset is the important part) before eating if you’re having trouble with the meat – feeling bloated or whatever. Basically, if you have low stomach acid, eating a lot of meat is going to be difficult for you; it’s easy to compensate for however, by drinking some vinegar before eating.
5. Most importantly: If you’re doing carnivore, and you’re not seeing results that you want, it means one thing and one thing only: you need to be fasting. Unfortunately, there is literally no alternatives to fasting, no cheats, no nothing. I am firmly convinced that fasting is for everyone, there are no exceptions (once you understand how and why fasting is crucial, you see why this also applies to kids – The difference is that kids’ systems are basically always fasting, except during an immediately after eating, so they don’t need to intentionally fast). There is a tendency nowadays to blame things on genetics or metabolism – the problem with that is that neither of those things are ultimately determinative. In other words, if you have a slow metabolism, it’s because you’ve done something (probably inadvertently or out of necessity) that resulted in your body lowering its metabolic rate. Likewise, if you have certain genetics, certain things may be easier or harder for you, or require workarounds – but rarely do genetics mean that you cannot reach a reasonably balanced state of health (typically if you do have genetic scenarios that are catastrophic, you’d know about them fairly quickly in life).
This is not to say that genetics play no part here. Think of genetics as a +% or -% that are tacked onto your efforts: for some people, merely eating carnivore is enough to put them in a state similar to fasting – for others, to reach this state requires more intentional effort. If you’re not seeing the results that you want, there’s a good chance you fall into this letter category.
One of the tricks was fasting is to ease in and ease out: you won’t immediately hurt yourself with fasting (usually), But if you don’t give it a few days to ease in and out, it’s very likely that you’ll throw off your hormonal balance, especially if you’re female. Personally, I would literally chart what my ease in and ease out plan is for fasting – start with an intermittent fasting ratio and expanded as necessary. I know we’ve all been told that the human body can only last about 5 days without food before dying – I can personally attest that this is pure baloney. In fact, if reproductive hormones were a minimal factor, by far the safest and easiest and most effective way to lose weight would simply be to not eat for weeks or months (and yes, it’s been done many times, super fascinating!). The problem comes if you’re still having babies, or menopause, or whatever. If you don’t ease into and out of fasting, or if you fast too extreme, you can absolutely throw off your hormones, especially females who have much more hormones to balance (i.e. start with a 5-day water fast right out of the gate; versus, say, doing 3 weeks where you skip eating on Friday, then do a 2-day water fast, then a week or two later do a 5-day, etc).
