What is the carnivore diet? One of my readers asked me that question, because he had never heard about it before.
Neither had I up until April 4th, 2021. That day, I stumbled across an article about a woman who’d lost a lot of weight by following that diet.
I read it, loved it, did some research about it, and then asked my husband what he thought.
In short, if you’re on a carnivore diet, you only eat and drink animal produces. No vegetables or fruit. That means that purists don’t drink coffee or tea, either. (We do.)
It’s not a new or fad diet… It was (to my knowledge) first launched in the early 1960’s under the name The Drinking Man’s Diet. Its author, Robert Cameron, was mocked by contemporary nutritionists, but Cameron lived to be much older than them.
Prior to April 4th, we had tried keto diet and intermittent fasting, which worked well. Except that it was hard to stay keto (stay away from pizza, bread, rice, etc.) and except that my husband prefers to eat late. So we had breakfast around 11 am and dinner around 8 pm, sometimes later.
After a while, a very short while, my weight plateaued, and I started to gain weight again.
My husband thought we should change our eating habits. Instead of just two meals a day, he would serve a vegetables before dinner, serve less meat, and serve a salat and some cream cheese after dinner.
It worked for him.
It had an effect on me as well.
I was starving most of the time.
When I walked Nefnef to the park (10 minutes away), I struggled to walk back because my lower back would hurt so much.
In the morning, I could hardly get out of bed because of joint pains. Oh, and obviously, I had to get up during the night, too, to go to the bathroom.
The scale, on the other hand, didn’t move from the corner of shame where I had placed it. I refused to use it because I had noticed how bloated I was and how big my stomach was. When I struggle to get in or out of the shower… it’s bad.
When we started on the carnivore diet, I stood on the scale for the first time in many months, and I was shocked. But I also had hope. For strange reasons, I knew this would work.
We started by throwing out most of our food. We cancelled our subscription to the weekly delivery of organic vegetables, and we bought meat, eggs, fish, and cheese.
We expected our expenses to go up, because meat is expensive in Israel, but strangely, they didn’t.
Perhaps because we no longer bought a couple of kg of toasted nuts every week, no expensive vegetables, no expensive chocolate (yes, our local supermarket is good at upselling), only very little wine, etc.
We have since then found organic, grass-fed meat that we have delivered every two weeks. And our grocery expenses are no higher than before.
We eat steak, fatty meat. And we eat liver, heart, mostly from chicken, because it’s hard to find other kinds here.
We also eat fish and fish roe.
We eat eggs.
And we eat cheese and use fat cream in our meals.
We tried bone broth but decided to wait with that until winter.
We drink mineral water with electrolytes.
If you want to know more about the carnivore diet from experts, then I would recommend reading The Carnivore Diet by Dr. Shawn Baker. It has very hands-on advice. The Carnivore Code by Paul Saladino is also a good read, but it’s more information, rather than advice.
