My Experience With the Carnivore Diet
It’s January and surprisingly my social media feeds aren’t littered with people trying to keep New Years Resolutions. I don’t know if it’s because me and my friend groups are getting older and life just gets in the way or what but I feel like I’m not seeing quite the volume of “New Year New Me” posts and updates. It could be that more people are just quietly working behind the scenes and not posting for the world to see and if that’s the case I applaud every single one of you.
A very common resolution is to lose weight and many people fall off the wagon and give up before ever really gaining any steam. They’ll try some fad diet, lose a few pounds then have one weekend of over endluging and be right back where they started. The thing most people fail to do is make lifestyle changes and instead are looking for that quick fix that’s going to change their life by tomorrow. Well I’ve got news for you, it doesn’t work that way. If you want to make concrete changes in your lifestyle, you have to make actual lifestyle changes.
For a lot of people their journey to change their lives is over before they ever really venture into their quest. They’ll choose unsustainable diets and training routines and when it gets hard they quit. Or even worse when they fall off for a day they throw a pity party and spiral out of control then blame the diet for them not losing weight. In reality they need to take a look in the mirror because they chose something that was totally unsustainable, at least for them.
Diets and exercise routines need to be a good fit for the person venturing into them. For example I haaaaaaate vegetables and fruits, I legit just don’t eat them because I’ve got some pretty serious texture aversions and may or may not throw up when eating them. With this information it would be safe to bet that I shouldn’t go on a vegan diet. I know that’s a bit extreme but it’s not that far off from the diets people select from themselves. For instance if you’re someone who really struggles to cut out carbs you’re going to really struggle on a ketogenic diet where the mechanism for weight loss is keeping your carbohydrate intake to less than 20 grams per day. On the other hand if you’re someone who thrives with structure then you’re going to really struggle on a flexible diet like If It Fits Your Macros. The diets we choose need to be in line with what our personalities are, and to venture away from that is not going to lead to success for you.
All that being said I found a diet that really worked for me when I was first getting sober back in 2020. I felt like I had no control of anything in my life at the time with Covid still lingering and me not being able to drink (by choice) or even open my gym, so I thought I’d take control of my diet. I was heavier and more out of shape than I had been in over a decade so I figured I’d give this carnivore diet all the influencers were talking about a go.
I had success, but I can see why some people don’t. Today we’re going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to the carnivore diet.
Background on the Carnivore Diet
Where Did the Carnivore Diet Come From?
You may or may not have heard of this diet but for a solid three years it was the talk of the town. Even Joe Rogan got on the action after talking to Chris and Mark Bell on his podcast. The Bell brothers had been working on a documentary about it and were on Rogan’s podcast to talk about that, as well as Chris’ new venture into Kratom use for pain management. Rogan probably had the biggest hand in catapulting this way of eating into the mainstream, there were even some people calling it the Rogan Carnivore diet. But there were a lot more people who really brought this to the masses: Jordan Peterson, Chris Bell, Mark Bell, Paul Saladino, and Shawn Baker were probably the biggest proponents of the diet at that time and had major influence. These people saw the potential in this way of eating when it came to body composition, and believe it or not health.
While the above people had a big hand in mainstreaming this diet recently it’s roots can actually be traced back to the mid 1800’s. It was in 1856 that a German man by the name of Bernard Moncriff wrote The Philosophy of the Stomach: Or, An Exclusively Animal Diet. That seems like a very odd name for a book, but everything that I’ve found on it points to that being the actual title. Bernard spent an entire year eating only beef and milk and wrote about his experience in this book. After reading his book there was an Italian physician named Arnaldo Cantani in 1870 who began to put his diabetic patients on animal based diets in an effort to help them with their blood sugar problems. Then about 10 years later in 1880 a man by the name of James H. Salisbury advocated a meat based diet of 2-4lbs of lean beef and 3-5 pints of hot water daily for 4-12 weeks. This diet became known as the meat and hot water diet, or more commonly the Salisbury Diet.
This was a relatively obscure diet/way of eating until Shawn Baker really started to gain traction on social media in 2018. This was before Rogan jumping on board and the traction he gained was mostly due to the adhearance to this diet by Jordan Peterson. Peterson’s main focus in his lectures is self help and personal acountability with young men so he had a pretty broad audience of people who jumped on the chance to potentially change their lives. Whatever your thoughts on Peterson are, you can’t deny that he’s had a major influence on young men who feel slighted by the system, and his adhearance to and vocal support of this diet had major implications on its popularity.
What is the Carnivore Diet?
The carnivore diet is first and foremost an elimination diet. An elimination diet is a way of eating that seeks to eliminate as many food options as possible while still maintaining nutrient density. This diet takes away anything that doesn’t come from an animal so it eliminates grains, processed starches, sugars, seed oils, sodas, sweets, etc. Their montra is “nose to tail” so anything that used to have a face is fair game when it comes to the carnivore diet. The goal is to start with just red meat and water for about 30 days in an effort to “reset” your body. The claim is that this diet will eliminate the foods that are causing inflammation in your body. This makes sense beause we know virtually everyone on the planet can tolerate beef with the exception of people who have been bitten by the Lone Star tick and now have an allergy to Galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose which is a carbohydrate found in some meats, mainly pork and beef. So your starting point is fatty cuts of red meat and water. You’re not necessarily counting calories at this point, just making sure you only eat beef and only drink water until you’re full.
After about 30-60 days your body should be mostly inflammation free and you can start introducing foods to see what you can and cannot tolerate. In the beginning this will include things like butter, cheese, heavy cream and anything that happens to come from an animal. As you reintroduce one food at a time you give yourself enough time to see how your body responds. For some people adding in dairy can leave them inflammed and feeling like they got hit by a bus. For others certain meats that aren’t beef tend to reintroduce pain that had subsided when they started the diet. Some foods will leave you feeling tired and run down, while some can induce joint and muscle pain, and other foods may have no effect at all. The foods that don’t cause inflammtion are kept in the diet and the ones that cause issues are completely eliminated for good.
This is essentially the diet. You can’t really stray from this and consider it a carnivore diet although some people will begin what’s called a ketovore diet which we’ll talk about later on in this article. There’s no real calorie counting, no real break down of macronutrients, no real plan other than to limit the foods you eat to the foods that don’t induce inflammation in your body.
Why Does the Carnivore Diet Work for Weight Loss?
Although it wasn’t created for weight loss specifically, the carnivore diet is a good option for some people when it comes to weight loss. I’ll probably catch some flack for this but the biggest reason it works is the simple fact that you’re eliminating the majority of foods from your diet. Less options = less input. You’re excluding everything that doesn’t come from an animal leaving you with almost 100% of your calories coming from fat and protein. You’re going to consume fewer calories when there’s fewer food options and when you walk around fulling full all day long.
Another reason it works coincides with the reason above: you’re going to consume fewer calories because you’ve eliminated everything that isn’t protein or fat from your diet. You’re eating high fat, high protein foods and these foods cause higher levels of satiety. Satiety is the feeling of fullness, and proteins and fats increase this feeling a lot moreso than carbohydrates do. Think about it, if you had 2 three inch ribeyes in front of you you’d probably eat the first one and pass on the second one. You wouldn’t think to eat more because you’ll feel incredibly full, and more than likely wouldn’t be tempted to touch the other one. BUT if you had 1 three inch ribeye and 1 lb of fries in front of you I’d bet you’d eat that ribeye and probably eat a good portion of those fries as well. Why is this?
One of the biggest reasons for this is ghrelin. Ghrelin is a gut hormone that is also known as the “hunger hormone”. Ingesting more fats and proteins supresses ghrelin, while carbohydrates actually stimulate it. You remember Lays’ motto “bet ya can’t eat just one”? Well, there’s some science to back that claim and ghrelin is one of the biggest reasons.
Another reason why this diet can be successful for weight loss is the thermic effect of food. Not all calories are created equal and with protein it’s even moreso the case. When you eat 1 gram of protein you’re consuming 4 kilocalories (kcal, or calories) which is the same as when you eat 1 gram of carbohydrate. The difference between the two macronutrients (other than the insluin response) is that this one gram of protein will yield 2.8-3.2 kcal of energy, while one gram of carbs will yield 3.7-3.8 kcal. While both macronutrients contain the same amount of energy, the protein takes more energy to break down in your body yielding less usable energy after digestion. If you extrapolate that out for a meal, or a day or even a week you’ll see that eating higher protein foods can be a huge game changer for weight loss.
The carnivore diet will put you into ketosis, but I wouldn’t say this is one of the reasons this diet helps with weight loss. Most of the studies don’t actually support a ketogenic diet has any more of a positive effect on weight loss when compared to diets where just calories are controlled. Some people swear by ketogenic diets, but the data doesn’t support any higher efficacy than traditional calorie cutting diets. The majority of the evidence suggests that carnivore diets work for weight loss mostly because it helps control your hunger which will help control your input. Add in the thermic effect of protein and you’ll find yourself eating less and storing more. Big win!
Carnivore for Depression and Anxiety?
Jordan Peterson has famously made carnivore diets popular amongst those battling depression and anxiety. There aren’t really any studies to support this claim, but there are thousands of people who say the diet has had positive effects on their mental health. Early on when Peterson starting talking about this diet on Joe Rogan’s podcast he made the claim that it helped with his depression, and actually helped cure his gum disease. This claim of being a positive for mental health was further bolstered when his daughter Mikhaila Peterson claimed that the carnivore diet helped cure her bipolar disorder in addition to sending her rheumatoid arthritis into remission. She was actually the one who got Jordan on board with the diet initially.
There are a lot of claims about this diet being essentially a cure-all and while I can say it did some amazing things for me personally, if something sounds too good to be true it more than likely is. I don’t think this diet can cure depression but what I will say is that it can help take the handcuffs off so that you can deal with it a lot more efficiently. I’ll touch on that further in this article.
My Personal Experience
In the Beginning
The reasons I started the carnivore diet are the following:
I wanted to lose weight after spending all of 2020 in a drunken stupor
I was battling depression and anxiety and heard the diet could help
I wanted to control some part of my life, I wanted something to be a choice while I was getting sober
I do pretty well with meat, and I hate vegetables and fruits
I’ve had success with ketogenic diets in the past so I thought I could stick to this one
When I first started this diet I was overcoming my addiction to alcohol so I can’t really say that I struggled to stay on task. I was battling something much harder at the same time so following dietary guidelines that said I could only eat meat seemed relatively easy. Some people say that you’ll have sugar withdrawals and I may have had them but they were drawfed by the alcohol withdrawals I was going through at the time.
My biggest goal in the beginning was just to take control back in my life, so having a regimented eating strategy was something that really helped to be honest. I started off just eating ground beef, eggs and steaks. These are all foods I enjoyed and ate already so it wasn’t a crazy transition or anything. I followed this diet to a T for about 3 months with the exception of eating a slice of cookie cake every month on the 14th when i celebrated each month of sobriety.
Weight Loss
I started off around 230lbs. While this wasn’t heavier than I had ever been (i had been almost 250lbs back when I was dabbling in powerlifting), I was more out of shape than I had ever been. Covid quarantine hadn’t been kind to me as I spent most of that time coping with alcohol, and terrible foods. I had still been in the gym lifting, but every other aspect of my life was as unhealthy as imaginable.
Now take some of these results with a grain of salt because I also gave up alcohol at the exact same time. I was drinking upwards of 25 beers a day, which would translate to about 2500 kcal and that was taken out of my diet at this time as well. 2400 kcal to be exact because I drank the “great taste less filling” Miller Lite that had 96 kcal per beer. Cutting that many calories out of my diet would have had a drastic effect on my weight to begin with, but the diet helped further that along.
In the first month I dropped about 35lbs. I was now right around 195lbs and the lightest I had been in about two years. That’s crazy weight loss for someone who wasn’t sedentary before starting this diet but I had also incorporated walking in addition to going to the gym still.
In the next month the weight loss continued and by mid December I was down to about 175lbs. This was a total of 55lbs over the course of 90 days. That’s pretty extreme but also consider that I was walking about 50 miles a week, training in the gym 6 days per week, and had completely cut out alcohol. SHortly after this time I relapsed and you could say that I completely fell off the wagon as far as my eating went. I got back up to about 185lbs by the end of January before reeling myself back in and dedicating myself back to a sober and recovered life.
By August 2021 I had gotten my weight down to about 158lbs at my lightest. This was a total of 72lbs in a year. While my body looked great, my mind felt even better and we’re going to talk about that next.
Mental Clarity
When I say I had the most mental clarity I had ever had in my life it’s not an exaggeration. Now again, understand that I had also quit drinking during this time, but this wasn’t just sober clarity this was another level of clarity. I didn’t get that brain fog you tend to get in the middle of the day. I never felt tired, like ever. I was energized and I could focus. Whereas I’m someone who can get off task fairly easily, I could be laser focused on what I was working on.
This diet also seemed to take the handcuffs off as far as my anxiety control went. It doesn’t relieve your anxiety because only you can talk yourself through that, but it without a doubt allowed me to work through it. My anxiety was what caused my depression so in a round about way it made it much easier to get to a place where my depression subsided.
This diet WILL NOT get rid of your anxiety or depression. It can’t. But what it can do is allow you enough mental clarity to work through whatever is causing these problems. It takes the handcuffs off and gives you the ability to think clear headed.
I had heard from proponents of this diet that it could cure depression, but that was not my experience at all. Prior to my relapse I had been on this diet for about three months and while I can say I felt infinitely better, I was still incredibly anxious and depressed. If you want to get yourself out of whatever hole you’re in emotionally YOU have to be the one to do so. Getting outside, exercising, working through your anxiety is what will get you past it. A diet can’t do it! It still takes effort on your end to get past whatever is holding you back. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that anything outside of your own effort will do this.
I felt amazing throughout the day! Now when I went to train that was a different story and we’re going to talk about that next.
Training
Unless you’re a gym newbie or getting back into it after a long layoff this diet will destroy your performance in the gym or on the field. I get into arguments all the time with keto and carnivore zealots who think you can perform at a high level on these diets. YOU CAN’T! You cannot function at a high level in the gym or on the field without carbohydrates. I’ve had it happen to me, I’ve had it happen to the athletes I work with and there is a plethora of data to support this.
It got to the point where I was failing at 80% of my squat max and 75% of my bench max. Not failing at a rep PR, but failing at hitting a single rep at intensities where I should be able to hit 8-10 reps minimum. There’s a few reasons for this.
Mass moves mass and I lost a lot of mass.
Carbohydrates are protein sparing so a percentage of the weight I lost was muscle. Less muscle = lower performance.
Carbohydrates are necessary for energy.
While I felt amazing doing every day tasks or low intensity work like walking or even low volume jumping, any time I needed to push myself that next gear just wasn’t there. Your body will switch to burning ketones when you put yourself into a ketogenic state, but ketones are horrible fuel for training intensity.
My pumps were nonexistant. One of the byproducts of a low carb/ketogenic diet is lack of glycogen in the muscles and liver. Glycogen is the way our bodies store sugars for energy. The same way we store fat in our of adipose tissue and amino acids in the form of protein structures in our muscles, we store sugar in the form of glycogen. Most people store somewhere between 1-1.5lbs of glycogen in our muscles and liver, but people with more muscle mass will store even more. For every gram of glycogen you have, your body holds onto about 3 grams of water so that 1-3lbs of glycogen can easily have you shed 4-12lbs of body weight and its almost all coming out of your muscle. This can make you look really flat in the gym.
It wasn’t until I began adding carbohydrates around my training times that I finally started to get back into training that felt productive. I would add rice before and after my training and it pushed me almost back to where I started. My weight was 160lbs but I was lifting just shy of what I was able to when I was at 230lbs. It was amazing but it also meant that I was no longer carnivore and that was ok. Even Paul Saladino and Shawn Baker eventually started adding fruit and honey back into their diets when their performance really started to suffer.
Gut Microbiome Changes
One of the biggest things that changes about your body when you start a carnivore diet is your gut microbiome. You may have heard this word, or gut microbiota or gut flora, but they’re all the same thing. Your gut microbiome is a collection of microorganisms including bacteria, fungi, archaea and even viruses that live inside your gut. These microorganisms play a huge role in your overall health as they assist with digestion and your overall immune system.
If you’re not eating fiber, sugars, or starches and only consuming meat your gut microbiome is going to be perturbed and actually won’t be able to handle all of the change initially. Over time your gut microbiome will change and adapt but in the short term this can lead to some less than ideal side effects. Worst part of this diet was the first week or two where you couldn’t not only trust a fart, but you couldn’t trust that you didn’t have to go to poop. I call it poop but in reality it’s chunky water. Sorry for the graphic picture you’ve painted in your head but it’s really important to warn people before starting this diet so they’re not caught off guard.
After a few weeks this will subside because your gut microbiome has changed, and believe it or not it has changed for the better. Now we don’t have a lot of data on the why but we do know a few things:
Our mental and emotional health is tied to our gut microbiota
Our immune system health is tied to our gut microbiota
Your emotional and physical health is a direct reflection of what’s going on in your stomach. This is one of the reasons your mental clarity improves on this diet and why so many people believe it cured their depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder. While I honestly don’t believe it “cures” it, I do believe beyond any shadow of a doubt that it will allow YOU to work to change your mental and emotional health. Take that for what it’s worth but I’ve seen it and I’ve lived it.
Ketogenesis
This is going to be a short section. While I believe a ketogenic diet can be incredibly beneficial for many sedentary people, I don’t think it’s best to live in a state that our body uses as a last resort to not die when food is scarce. There really isn’t any long term data one way or the other, but something just tells me that while it can be good in small doses, it shouldn’t be a long term plan for sustained weight maintenance. It is literally your body’s response to food scarcity, it’s a survival mechanism and last ditch effort to keep you alive so you can find foods that can be broken down into sugars. Your body will even break proteins down via glucogeonenisis to turn into sugar. It would rather break down your muscle than run on ketones. Like I stated above as well, there’s zero data to support a ketogenic diet being any more beneficial for the average person when compared to a normal 40/30/30 calorically restricted diet. Ketogenic diets can be a good thing in the short term, but it’s not healthily sustainable.
My Overall Thoughts
The carnivore diet, with some tweaks towards the end, worked for me. It worked for me because it worked with my personality and wasn’t a major life change. I enjoyed meat, I really enjoyed eggs and I love dairy. I don’t need to indulge in sugar to function and I’ve never been a fan of sodas. It was sustainable for myself until it really started to effect my performance and I decided to deviate.
The carnivore diet wasn’t a great elimination diet for myself because the only thing I really realized was making me inflammed was something that I already had a feeling was: seed oils. It did also help me realize that sugar drives up my anxiety quite a bit as well though. But for some people it can be a great way to figure out what’s causing you pain, what’s changing your mental acuity, what’s making you more anxious than you need to be, and what’s making you hold onto more weight than you want to.
It was a great calorie restrictor for myself. Taking out alcohol, sugar, and starches really limited my calorie options so I consumed far less calories. Eating high levels of protein and fat really increased my satiety as well. I got to the point where I was only hungry once a day and some times didn’t even really want to eat I just knew I should.
There’s a few things you should know before you start a carnivore diet:
Just because you’re on a carnivore (or ketogenic) diet doesn’t mean that calories don’t matter. Count them because the more information you have the better. If you’re not losing weight you are consuming too many calories.
If the scale isn’t moving for you it isn’t you “holding onto inflammation”, you’re just eating more calories than you’re burning.
People swear dairy is causing them to hold onto weight and they’ll drop a ton of weight when they cease eating it. I’ll agree but only because they’ve eliminated possibly the highest calorie density food that’s considered carnivore, of course you’re going to lose weight.
Don’t assume this diet will cure your emotional health because it won’t. You still have to do the work on yourself to get out of that hole. It can make it easier but it’s not a cure all.
If you don’t love meat, you’ll fail on this diet.
Don’t cook your meat in seed oils, use butter.
That’s my take. I liked it, I think it benefited me. I think it is a great short term solution for some people, but I don’t for a second think it’s something that is sustainable for the general public and it ABSOLUTELY isn’t sustainable for someone who needs to perform on the field or in the gym.
