My First 30 Days of Carnivore

Last weekend, I completed the Carnivore Challenge: 30 days of only consuming meat, salt and water*. If you had told me a number of years ago that I, the former vegetarian who’d retch on stringy bits of chicken, would pull off such a feat, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am, arguably better than ever. And not only that, but I want to share my experience in the hope that other people will feel less intimidated to experiment on their own journeys to health, because it was far easier than I ever imagined it would be to adopt an all-meat diet. And the rewards for doing so (which we’ll get to later), could be rather large.

Why Carnivore?

I want to first outline the general motivations behind people who try the carnivore diet (carnivore). I also want to tell you about my own personal reasons and what led me to one day have a whole chicken in my salad crisper.

All-meat diets are fast emerging as the new frontier for (nuritional) medicine. There may not have been a recorded population in human history that has sustained itself on an all-meat diet before, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done and may even be beneficial in certain circumstances. Foods from plants are losing their top spot as the best way to get in vital nutrients and minerals. In fact, these foods are by definition ‘low quality’, as they are calorically-deficient and partly undigestible (they contain fibre). As well as only being partly digestible, the body struggles harder to utilise the nutrients contained therein as they are less bioavailable. Bio-availability meaning the ease in which the body is able to access or absorb and use vitamins and minerals from foods for biological functions. At the other end of the spectrum, food from animals, once maligned, are beginning to take centre stage as high quality foods: meaning they are calorically- and nutrient-dense. You can get every single macro- and micronutrient you need from an all-meat diet whereas the same cannot be said for a vegan one. 

These facts give way to the theory behind carnivore: that eating only meat may be a supercharged way of healing bodies from physical illnesses, as well as physical and mental trauma. This theory is currently being clinically practised and researched. Drs. Belinda Lennerz and David Ludwig of Harvard University are studying self-reported carnivores in order to shed new light on nutrition as a medical intervention. The study will be the largest of its kind to date. In Hungry, The International Center for Medical Nutritional Intervention (Paleomedicina) have detailed a case study where they’ve administered their paleolithic ketogenic diet (PKD) protocol to a patient with a glioblastoma multiforme. He has been progression- and symptom-free for 36 months. 

Given all this, I thought to myself: surely a diet as powerful as this one could do one or two things to benefit me. You can’t argue with a diet that has literally halted the progression of a brain tumour. I’ve been on the classical ketogenic diet (keto) for over a year now, but I believed that carnivore could help me improve or elevate physical and mental issues that keto had already done a lot to improve.

Symptoms I was looking to improve: 

Days 1 – 3 Plain Sailing

The current lockdown we are facing due to a global pandemic has had the bizarre and unforeseen silver-lining of letting me begin my carnivore diet in earnest. I had embarked on this diet primarily to help me break my addictive tendencies towards food. 

Keto acts as a good set of training wheels for people new to low-carbohydrate diets as it takes out the most adverse foods like grains, beans and legumes. On the one hand, we scare people off by telling them they have to avoid carb-laden pizza, but then on the other, we reel them back in with erythritol-sweetened mudcakes. Keto, with its lashings of cream, roast ‘swede’ potatoes and fathead garlic bread, make it a safe refuge for a food addict like me. There came a point, however, where my every waking minute was dominated by thoughts of food. I needed to break my addiction to it.  

A few days into carnivore, I was struck by a sobering thought: recovery is very, very boring. However, this boredom towards delectable cuts of meat did not last. On carnivore, you aren’t eating hyperpalatable foods that have been engineered by food scientists to excite us to an artificial extreme – by lighting up the dopamine neural pathways in our brains. When we are eating these foods day in and day out, our threshold for what is delicious is artificially high. But when these foods are removed, the threshold comes down and a new, healthier level for what we deem palatable is established. It sounds counterintuitive, but by removing the sugary foods that excite you the most from your diet, you’ll likely be more satisfied by your diet overall, given time. Carnivore is helpful in this instance because by default it eliminates these foods. However, I did not have that revelation by Day 3. Does eating only meat get boring? To that I say, I can’t imagine my body getting tired of something it evolutionarily evolved to need, my mind on the other hand, is more fickle. 

On Day 3, something special happened. The ‘magic’ of carnivore that people describe happened to me. In the evening just before bed, I felt a sense and calm and inner peace that I hadn’t experienced in years. It was like my brain was being given a warm hug. Furthermore, during the day, I work in bid and proposal management so I am constantly proofreading and editing documents. Normally after a hard day’s work, I often feel like I don’t have the energy to read for personal pleasure. But on Day 3, I had more reserves left in the tank than normal and was able to read for hours before bed. The memory of the third day was what got me through the next stage, which can only be described as hell. 

Days 4 – 10 To Hell and Back 

During the next week and a bit of carnivore, my body and bowels turned against me. I can confirm that the prevalent reports from fellow carnivores of loose bowel movements during the transition phrase are true. I didn’t necessarily need to use the bathroom more frequently, but when I did – I won’t elaborate. 

One of the theories that tries to explain why our toilets receive such an onslaught, poses that the issue is caused by a rapid change in our gut microbiome. A 2014 study by L.A. David and C.F. Maurice titled ‘Diet Rapidly and Reproducibly Alters the Human Gut Microbiome’ had a group of people on the standard American-type diet either change to a plant-based or animal-based diet, and then measured their levels of gut microbes. Whilst there was no change in the diversity of microbes in both groups, the total numbers of certain strains changed drastically all in the space of one day. The hypothesis posed by some carnivores – not the study – is that when you eat plant food and fibre, there will be complementary microbes housed in the gut that will process the digestible and undigestible matter. Therefore, not consuming any fibre has a knock-on effect on these microbes. If we stop consuming the matter they process, they become redundant, and our body – being adaptable and responsive – subsequently flushes these hanger-ons from our system. 

Around this time my appetite also took a nosedive. On some days I only managed to eat one, relatively small meal. Even when I was physically hungry, mentally I didn’t want to eat the food I had served myself. I was behaving like a picky toddler because I had allowed myself to act like one. I had coddled myself and given into every craving for an artificially-sweetened, low-carb baked good. I had focused more on my tastebuds than on my health. I was having to detox from my keto junk food and the change was hard. But I had been through a similar transition before when I’d rid my diet of bread, pasta and potatoes. I knew when to be hard on myself and when to be gentle in order to stay on course, because I knew there was another side to this, and I was determined to get there. 

The transition was hard because that is the nature of transition. I was asking a lot from my body. I can only imagine that it’s even harder for people who have never been in ketosis before as their body is switching over it’s metabolic pathways from burning sugar to burning fat for the first time. I went from consuming plants and fibre, the way I had done all my life, to stopping abruptly. My body had to overhaul the way it had worked previously, and that’s hard. But by the end of the second week, we were back in business. 

Between days 8 – 10, my hunger started to return. I had put trust in my body that it would adapt and come out the other side stronger, and it did. By day 10, I looked forward to every meal. I was excited to eat. I was enjoying the deliciousness and richness of the high-quality food I was eating. 

Days 10 – 28 Fine Tuning

During the second half of my experiment, I stumbled across a baseline. My baseline meals were (and still are) baked salmon, roasted chicken with added goose fat and pan-seared chicken liver. I felt good on these foods. 

In the later stages, carnivore became a proper elimination diet. When you are only eating animal protein, animal fat and salt it becomes easy to pinpoint certain food sensitivities. I was gutted to discover that eggs and me weren’t for better or for worse. Before carnivore, I would have described myself as an egg person; every morning I would have two, sunny-side up eggs fried in goose fat for breakfast. Sadly, no longer mi amor. During the first couple of days, I was eating a lot of eggs and a topical rash appeared on my chest. From time to time, I have suffered from this rash – it always appears in the exact same location – but I had always thought it was related to eating too much dairy and sugar. Yet here I was, zero-dairy and zero-carb, but I was as rashy as ever. For the first time, I was confronted with the reality that diets are a lot harder to get right than I had previously imagined. 

I subsequently extracted only one thing out of my diet: eggs. The rash began to heal. I waited for the rash to completely heal and for me to get back to my healthy baseline. Then, the only thing I added back in was eggs. And lo and behold, the rash came back within half a day. To me, it was pretty conclusive that the eggs were sadly the culprit.

If that wasn’t enough to rock my insulated, lockdown world, more revelations were coming thick and fast. I noticed that beef was triggering some anxiety. Within the online carnivore community, ruminants are stressed due to the higher nutritional content of their meat. I wanted to follow not just a carnivore diet, but the optimum one. So I tried, I really tried to get in beef ribeyes and minced beef. But as I ate these foods, I noticed I was having heart palpitations. More to the point, within a couple of hours to half a day after eating beef, I was suffering from a mental fragility that I’d never related back to food before now. I didn’t think my mood was impacted to such an extreme by the food I ate. I was anxious, paranoid and imagining slights that didn’t exist all within hours of eating beef. 

I knew what I had to do. I had to test beef like I had tested the eggs. I got myself back to my baseline for five days or so, then I would reintroduce beef. Every time I did, it would make my heart race, within a few hours I would be panicky and then later zapped of energy. A similar thing was also happening with lamb in terms of the heart palpitations. Pork was also just passing straight through my system. I was physically happy on my fish and poultry, but I felt bad mentally as these food items are often looked on in the community as lower quality when compared to meat from ruminants. That was, until I had an appointment with Dr Georgia Ede. 

Days 29 – 30 The Doctor Will See You

Dr Georgia Ede is a Harvard-trained, board-certified psychiatrist who uses nutritional interventions in her work to help people with mental health conditions. My first ever appointment with her coincided with me nearing the end of my challenge. I related my difficulties back to her: the heart palpitations, the anxiety and how I wasn’t getting on with pork or eggs. I felt in equal parts neurotic and self-indulgent. But I needn’t have, as finally I had come across someone as fixated as me on the minutiae of what we put in our mouths and the resulting problems. I wanted to throw my hands up in the air and ask ‘What gives!’ I had thought one of the benefits of an all-meat diet was its simplicity: just eat meat and drink water. But I was finding it difficult to master. Dr Ede said that she’d worked with hundreds of people on all-meat diets, and she’d spotted an emerging pattern. If carnivores are a subgroup of society, then there is a further sub-group within this group that seems to struggle to tolerate beef and pork. She said that what truly lay behind the intolerance to beef and pork could either be an intolerance to a protein found in both, or where beef was concerned, it could be an intolerance to histamines. 

Coincidentally, the list of symptoms I had been struggling with – namely the heart palpitations –  matched perfectly with the symptoms of histamine intolerance. Great, I thought. Another problem to add to the pile. All foods contain histamine, so when it comes to histamine intolerance, the name of the game is to hone in on low-histamine foods. The foods highest in histamines are ones that have been aged, cured, canned or smoked. It’s near-impossible to find fresh beef steaks; the ones I had been buying from my local supermarket, had been aged for 21 days. But whether it’s the protein or histamines in beef that I don’t get on with, I am dropping beef from my repriotiere of meals for now. And similarly, lamb in on probation unless I can source it fresh.

The main takeaway from the appointment was that despite my journey so far, I was only just beginning to figure my diet and health out. I was told that most people only begin to see changes at the 3 month mark, and even then, it’s the start of the change. The 30-day challenge is a good method to get people’s toes wet. But for the next 2 months, I’m taking the plunge. 

My findings

With reference to the table at the start, here were my key findings: 

* Seeing as there are many iterations of the carnivore diet or the paleolithic ketogenic diet currently being practised, I thought I would map out the protocol I followed. I was originally incorporating the benign herbs thyme and oregano, as well as cracked black pepper. However, I quickly dispensed with those items wanting to narrow the variables in my experiment to as few as possible. I excluded tea, coffee, all spices and dairy from the outset for the same reason. I also began my 30 days by eating pork and eggs, only to subsequently drop them later to the relief of my stomach and digestive system. I have also now dropped beef and lamb. For the majority of the time, I was consuming the muscle meat and offal from cows, lambs, chickens, ducks, fish and seafood. I was also adding in additional fats like goose fat, duck fat and beef drippings. I didn’t track my macronutrients or calorie count, other than making sure I was hitting a fat to protein ratio of 1:1 in grams. 

Originally, I tried to follow the protocol that Paleomedicina ‘prescribes’, but found a 2:1 fat to protein ratio in grams was too hard to maintain for a novice such as myself. It wasn’t sustainable: I was drinking rendered beef drippings by the mugful in a desperate attempt to get enough fat in. At Paleomedicina, their recommendation to patients is 35 grams of additional fat with every 100 grams of meat. Their diet also requires the consumption of 400 grams of liver each week and a further 250 grams of other offal, whether that be from the brain, bone marrow or heart. I only averaged around 30 – 50 grams of chicken liver a day. I ate only when I was hungry which resulted in me generally needing to eat twice a day – in the morning, and again in the early evening.

** Dr Georgia Ede is a Harvard-trained, board-certified psychiatrist who uses nutritional interventions in her work to help people with mental health conditions.