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If I were to give you the kind of explanation I’d give my dog, it would go something like, “Just eat a damn steak; repeat when hungry.” In fact, I could sum up this whole book with that last sentence,
If you approach this diet with the focus of weighing a certain amount or fitting into a certain size of jeans, then you will likely struggle.
For weight loss, there are likely better methods than a carnivore diet, particularly when a person implements it in the way I think it should be done. So if your only goal is to lose weight and you have no concern for improving aspects of your health and nutrition, you might be better served by choosing another plan.
There is no one way to follow the plan, but there are common paths. Remember that failure precedes success, so don’t beat yourself up about any miscues.
Want to add a bit of cheese on top of your burger patty? Please do.
When you need air, you breathe. It’s as simple as that, and eating to satisfy hunger can be the same. When you’re eating a species-appropriate diet, you will find that once you become healthy, your appetite will become very well regulated.
While adapting to the diet, eat until you’re full, and repeat as often as needed to keep yourself out of the cupcakes.
Stack the deck in your favor and keep yourself constantly sated with meat.
If you have mostly aesthetic goals, a carnivore diet can be a tool to get where you want to be, but much, much more goes into that process than just getting healthy. Instead of focusing on the outward physical aspect, focus on the simpler goal of restoring normal health, which is something few people enjoy these days.
Generally, if a food comes from an animal, you can eat it: beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, deer, bison, fish, shellfish, pork, caribou, whale, shark, elephant, snake, crocodile, whatever.
If you struggle with health issues, I strongly recommend that you consider forgoing dairy for at least a trial period.
I’m not convinced you always need to choose high-fat products versus other products; it depends on the ingredients. If the food includes a lot of gums, stabilizers, or sweeteners, I generally avoid it.
you should use animal fats, period. Use butter, ghee, lard, tallow, suet, duck fat, and so on. Plant oils are generally garbage for us;
Seventy percent of your body is made of water. It’s all you need to drink, and as you get unhooked from sugar and artificial sweeteners, you’ll come to enjoy it.
My suggestion is that you not try to quit coffee or caffeine during the initial phases of the diet. Once you’ve adapted to your new eating habits, give it a go if it’s something you want to take on.
remember that weight loss is not the short-term goal of the carnivore diet; instead, get healthy and stop with the constant anxiety created by day-to-day fluctuations in weight. Just relax and enjoy the freedom of eating.
the carnivore diet isn’t a quick-weight-loss scheme. Trying to fix a malnutrition problem by starving yourself is a recipe for disaster. If your goal is to lose 20 pounds, and instead you gain 5, but you now enjoy life, don’t have back pain, and are no longer a slave to processed food, you’re far better off with the 5 extra pounds for now.
“Eat meat like it’s your job.”
Let’s talk about health for a minute. How do we even define it? Is it something that your doctor determines by taking some blood and checking an X-ray? Or is health more accurately defined as the absence of disease?
One of the most common issues of the transition period to a carnivore diet is fatigue, lethargy, or poor energy.
One of the more common digestive issues as this happens is not constipation but diarrhea.
Going on a carnivore diet will dramatically reduce the volume of waste you produce, and it will likely lead to less frequent bowel movements.
some people find that the diet makes reflux worse or that nausea or other types of dyspepsia occur.
Some people report that they develop a rash as they transition to the carnivore diet, but the incidence seems fairly rare.
Skin conditions usually resolve with time
Headaches are most likely related to fluid and electrolyte shifts that occur as your body adjusts to the new eating regimen.
If you experience cramps, the first thing I suggest you do is to look at your overall food intake to ensure it’s adequate. Beyond that, you can add various electrolytes in the form of salt (such as Redmond Real Salt) or electrolyte supplement.
People often state that they have very restorative sleep, but the overall quantity of sleep they get decreases.
A drawback to these gradual techniques is that for some time, you still have access to addictive or otherwise problematic food, which may make it harder for you to let go of those things.
If weight loss is your goal, or you’re trying to get lean beyond a normal level of body fat (which is 10 to 15 percent for men and 18 to 24 percent for women), then intermittent fasting may be helpful.
if you’re no longer consuming potentially harmful foods, then the benefits of extended fasting are likely diminished except in unusual cases.
There is a growing body of evidence that indicates that eating during daylight hours may be preferable to eating at night.
The reality is that you should eat when you’re hungry, and your work schedule often dictates when you can have your meals.
Glucose tends to remain stable for people on the carnivore diet because the glucose the body is using is not being ingested; it’s being produced mostly from protein, a small amount of fat, and a few other sources, such as lactate, via a process generally described as gluconeogenesis.
Liver function studies tend to be normal for people on the carnivore diet, and the assumption that increased protein is damaging to the liver is based upon a fallacy.
Similarly, when people follow a carnivore diet, reproductive hormones tend to normalize and function optimally.
Both men and women note improvements in libido and clinical testosterone function when they follow a carnivore diet, particularly after they’ve moved beyond the adaptation phase.
If food is unpalatable to you, you will get precisely zero nutrition from it because you won’t eat it. Aside from that, I know several people who’ve gone for long periods of eating raw meats, and they’ve noticed no benefits over cooked meats.
Are we being “forced” to adopt a plant-based diet? Almost daily, we see an ever-growing media campaign that demonizes meat and seems intent on guilting us into not eating it. Unfortunately, as I pointed out earlier, when we eliminate animal food, we don’t replace it with kale and broccoli; instead, we eat more processed garbage. That’s just how it goes, and the processed food companies, which have incredibly deep pockets, are well aware of this.
When it comes to wealthy developed countries, the EAT-Lancet Commission acknowledges that the population will not willingly accept this style of diet, so the plan is to start imposing draconian taxes and other restrictive legislation or trade agreements to more or less force citizens’ compliance.
For example, the people who live in Blue Zones are often homogeneous groups genetically. They live in favorable climates with low levels of pollution. They have low smoking rates, access to good health services, and a culture that prizes the elderly. One of the often-cited Blue Zone groups is the population of Loma Linda, California, which is largely comprised of members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a group that generally lives a long time and includes many vegetarians. Some details that advocates typically gloss over include that this population has extremely low rates of smoking and
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Okinawans typically ate about 50 percent more pork than their Japanese neighbors and consumed far less rice and grain. A study of the Okinawan centenarians noted that none of the individuals were vegetarian.
Researchers have conducted several formal epidemiological studies over the last few years, and those studies indicate there’s no advantage to a plant-based diet when it comes to mortality.
There are plenty of folks who eat a plant-based diet but are obese and sick, and often they’re eating the same garbage that the fat, sick meat eaters are eating. Processed carbohydrates, refined vegetable oils, and sugar make you sick regardless of whether you include meat in your diet.
A fairly recent study from the Humane Research Council showed that 84 percent of people who adopted a plant-based diet ultimately gave it up, typically within a few months and often for health reasons.
In the United States, approximately 70 percent of our caloric consumption derives from plant-based sources, most of which are grains, vegetable oils, and sugar-based foods. Further removal of animal nutrition doesn’t lead more people to eat kale; instead, they seek out other forms of concentrated calories, such as vegetable oils, sugars, and refined grains. Our health has only worsened as our consumption of animal products has declined since the 1970s.
The processed food manufacturers know that people consume more processed food when they don’t eat animal products, so those companies are on board with the plant-based movement.
I’ve yet to be made aware of any wild animal that is required to eat a “balanced diet” to be healthy.
If we compare direct emissions among all industries, then the worldwide production from animal agriculture is a mere 5 percent of the total. That number isn’t insignificant, but it’s certainly not the primary driver of climate change, as the vegans and the fake meat/processed food companies would have you believe.
To put this in perspective, Professor Mitloehner has determined that if every single person in the United States went vegan, and every animal that we eat magically vanished, the global effect on greenhouse gas emissions would decrease by approximately 0.3 percent.
