Carnivore Diet

[GradyCat 3,692]

Is anybody here familiar with the Carnivore Diet?

It's basically a more restrictive form of Keto where you ONLY eat meat, cheese, fat, and butter. The more meat the better. The fattier the meat the better.

It sounds counterintuitive to eat this type of diet, but there are several doctors out there who recommend it to help reverse diabetes and fight inflammation.

While it's impossible to have zero carbs, the goal is to have as few as possible, less than 10 per day, and consume no bread, fruit, vegetables or anything other than "meat."

Now, I must say that I had/have my doubts about the healthiness of this diet.

That being said, my husband has been on it for 4 months and lost 35 pounds and his A1C and morning fasting glucose levels are now within normal range. He is going to continue on the diet, or as he calls it, "way of life."

I did it with him for 3 months and I lost 20 pounds, but toward the end I was having a lot of diarrhea and my body couldn't handle/process all of the Protein and fat without some carbs, so I switched to a new diet in mid-December.

Dr. Ken berry is the person my husband follows on YouTube who explains the science behind it and how to do it. He also said that 1/3 of people can't do it because of their particular body's need for carbs for proper digestion.

Anyway, I was curious if anybody here was familiar with the Carnivore Diet or had tried it or was doing it?

[RickM 1,747]

A few points (or counterpoints) on these diets.

Any of these restrictive diets can lead to some weight loss for a while, because it takes some time for us to adjust to the restrictions and adapt to overeating the permitted foods. For example, our popular low carb diets of today - the average American/Western diet has 3-400 g of carbohydrates in it, so if you restrict that to some random small number - 40, 20, 20, 10 - it really doesn't matter - that's 1000 calories or more. Even if you eat "as much bacon as you want..." you likely aren't used to eating that much of it so you will be eating fewer calories than before. Until you adapt to that and let you bacon consumption rise to or beyond your previous carbohydrate consumption. Give it a few months. A few years ago I did a low fat diet for a while as we were poking at a specific medical condition where that can be beneficial. Even though I could have as much whole grains and root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, etc.) as I wanted, I wasn't used to eating that much of those things so I lost weight, though that wasn't the intent.

If you go back to when the low fat diet fad was at its peak, there were lots of doctors recommending it, and lots of science behind it. What they were missing, as with today's diets, is the "uh oh" of what's missing and how that affects us long term. There are essential nutrients associated with fats that were being missed, just as there is essential nutrition associated with carbohydrates.

Back in the day before effective diabetes meds and insulin, that is the way diabetics ate, as that was the only way for them to keep any control over their blood sugar. It wasn't particularly healthy, but it was the only thing that kept them alive with that condition. The science that is touted in promoting these diets tends to be fairly narrow, siting just one or a couple of factors that benefit from the diet, while ignoring the rest of the body's systems. If one has a condition that requires such limitations, then one follows it, but also these days has the help of other specialists, such as RDs, who can help in compensating for what's missing in the diet by adopting other foods or supplements to balance things out.

Today's average diet is very high in processed foods which tend to be high in sugar, particularly added sugars and sugar analogs, and we can certainly benefit from cutting those out, but it is easy to go into overkill mode and cut out carbohydrates that provide us with essential nutrition without them going overboard on the free sugars that are doing us harm. Similarly, when low fat was the fad of the day, most people then were overdoing fats - lots of butter, deep fried everything, country gravy on everything, etc. but soft drinks came in 6 oz bottles not big gulp quarts. So they could benefit from lower fat diet - but not no fat as they were deficient in some essential nutrients.

[ms.sss 14,739]

Some anecdotal input:

I’ve never attempted the carnivore diet myself (I love me some salad way too much, lol), BUT, my cousin (39 yrs old, male, 5,9”) has been on the carnivore diet now for almost 4 years now.

He was NOT overweight by any stretch of the imagination…I think he told me he was 160 lbs when he started. Today he is 130 lbs.

He tells me he feels good, has lots of energy, and while he does not poop often, it is not uncomfortable. He drinks a sh*t tonne of Water.

As with anything, what works for one may not work for another….your best way to figure it out is to try yourself (with a suggestion to do so under eye of some medical professional)…though it sounds like you already found evidence that you are of that latter group that doesn’t play well with this diet? Are you looking to try it again?