60 Days on Carnivore

I came to the carnivore diet because I was pretty desperate. I have an undiagnosed digestive issue that doesn't look like anything we've heard of and is bounded by time-of-day more than type-of-food. I was getting increasingly frayed as I began triggering this issue every couple of weeks–way up in frequency from the previous once-every-three-months it had been for a while.

The carnivore diet has been touted by many people as having cured their severe digestive or auto-immune disorders. After listening to Jordan Peterson and his daughter discuss its effects on their mood and autoimmune issues, Sergey and I always kept it in our back pocket as something to try at some point.

While on carnivore, you are only allowed to consume a thing if it was produced by an animal. Fish, meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy are on the menu. Some sauces, tea, coffee, and spices/herbs are considered acceptable if you don't react to them and they help you enjoy staying on the diet.

I started in October of this year. Our aim was both weight loss and trying to solve for my digestive issue. I went cold turkey and kept almost pure carnivore (coffee & tea exceptions, and one situation where I ate a gift of persimmons out of politeness) the whole time. I cooked endless rounds of lamb, hambagu (Japanese hamburger), and made way too many attempts to re-create bread with only carnivore ingredients. I spent 30 days as part of a carnivore forum, but left when the advice got and stayed pushy.

Here is what I've gleaned from my time on the diet.

Regarding the carnivore claim that carnivore will fix what ails you. For me, this is false. I was told that I need to give it time, but I was promised pretty wow results within even the first thirty days, and I gave it sixty. My gut issue did not resolve. My sleep got markedly worse. Fixes I did notice: I was sweeping up way less hair, which means that before carnivore I was losing a lot of hair and didn't realize how abnormal that was. Also, after the initial facial eruption in the first couple of weeks, my skin calmed way down and breakouts became very rare. I did not lose weight, but I accept that was likely because 1) I stopped going to the gym due to energy plummeting and 2) I ate a lot of dairy. More on that later.

Regarding the carnivore claim that you stop being hungry on carnivore. True. Because there's no carbs or sugar on this diet, your blood sugar calms way the heck down and you stop feeling randomly hungry throughout the day. You also begin to re-learn trusting your hunger signals when they do show up. For me, this took two or three weeks, because hunger wasn't always hunger pangs for a while. It was craving a certain meat, or brain fog until I got some extra salt in me, or a sudden energy void. But after a while, hunger began to signal to me more cleanly when I actually needed to eat.

One thing I learned purely from the elimination diet nature of carnivore was that liquid fat after 4pm is 100% one of the things triggering my issue. Once the food noise is cleared away and your diet has been simplified down to basics, it's a lot easier to spot patterns. So if you feel like you're hitting a wall ten thousand times and are unable to pin down what food is doing it to you, consider some form of elimination diet. It really does reveal a lot.

Regarding the carnivore claim that on cheat days, you will feel and understand the ill effects of all other foods on your body and it will help you stay faithful to carnivore thereafter. For me, false. Here's the thing, sixty days on carnivore reset my alcohol tolerance to lightweight. It also meant that if I ate some processed carbs as my main dish, like a nice bowl of beef udon soup with all those fat noodles, I'd spike into low-level anxiety for hours. However, if I first ate a decent chunk of protein and then had processed carbs, or mountains of sugar like I did on Christmas, then I'm actually quite fine. The worst thing is that I'll have to deal with sugar cravings when I drop back down to minimal sugar intake, but I can deal with that. Basically, if I'm a bit smarter about the order I eat things, food is not harming me the way I've heard it would if I left the carnivore diet.

Now, what this tells me is that I don't have any of the issues that ail the larger Carnivore community. I believe the stories, the insane flare-ups of bizarre symptoms, and the horrible regret they have if they go off for even a little bite. However, given that it isn't my experience, what it tells me is that carnivore is not the answer to my problem. In fact, I may function better with a low level intake of carbohydrates and some daily fruit.

However, given the fact that my hair is growing back thicker, I'll definitely be leaning harder into protein from now on.

In short, if you are desperate for answers, the carnivore diet is as good a place to start as any. Just don't let yourself be shoved around by the well-meaning folk who are sure that because it gave them their life back, it'll do the same for you.