Tag: carnivore journey

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Amazon Prime Day 2 – LAST CHANCE!

Prime Day: Carnivore Edition #2

A lot of yesterday’s deals are still going on, but some are selling out!! Check yesterday’s post to get those links: CLICK HERE

I’m looking for the best deals on all that Amazon has to offer for kitchen, cooking, health, fitness, and wellness products! From appliances to knives, gadgets to supplements, and anything else I can find that may fit into your mission for better health!

Don’t have a Prime membership? I got you! Here’s an Amazon Prime 30-day FREE trial. Cancel anytime! (Note: the links listed here are affiliate links that help me earn a small commission but do not cost any additional amount to you.)

Appliances

Ninja IG651 Foodi Smart XL Pro 7-in-1 Indoor Grill/Griddle Combo: 41% off! This has been on my wish list for a long time! The protein doneness settings take the guesswork out and you can get the perfect meat every time!

Cuisinart 36″ 4-Burner Gas Griddle: 30% off!

Instant Pot 800W Accu Slim Sous Vide Precision Cooker: 30% off! If you’ve ever wanted to try sous vide steak, here’s your chance to get a trusted brand at a great price!

Waterdrop Reverse Osmosis System with Smart Faucet: 30% off! Integrated into your kitchen plumbing, this system ensures your public water or well water is pure and free of toxins.

Corsi Smart Air Fryer XL: 31% Off! Compatible with Alexa and Google Assistant!

Kitchen Tools, Gadgets, & Accessories

Egg Holder Storage Box: 40% off PLUS an extra 20% off when you clip the coupon, making this under $8! If you love having hard-boiled eggs on hand but hate the smell when you open the fridge, maybe this would help!

SodaStream: 37% off! Make your own zero-sugar sparkling water!

Cuisinart 15-Piece Knife Block: 41% off! The one I shared yesterday sold out so grab this one before it’s gone!

Kitchen Appliance Sliding Mats: 20% off! These would come in handy as often as I have to slide my coffee pot and pressure cooker/air fryer in and out of its storage place!

Meat Masher: 20% off! Nifty little gadget! I use a potato masher since I no longer eat potatoes, it’s been repurposed for meat! But this is a cool item!

Magnetic Air Fryer Cheat Sheet: 44% off! Another handy item, though I’d only use it for the meats, but a very handy thing to have!

Dash 8″ Round Griddle: 20% off! I have the waffle maker version I use for chaffles, but this would work too! Same chaffle recipe but could be used as tortillas, pancakes, etc.

Vacuum Insulated Food Container – 2 pack: 20% off! Great for keeping your steak or bone broth ward, and your butter cold!

Vacuum Sealer for Food Storage: 33% off! Save money – buy in bulk, vacuum seal, and freeze!

Supplements

Vital Proteins Beef Collagen: 39% off! Collagen is a flavorless powder that can be added to drinks or recipes, used as a thickener, and is so good for you! Collagen is needed for healthy skin, hair, nails, and joints. Also helps to heal digestive issues!

Vital Proteins Grass-fed Desiccated Beef Liver Pills: 47% off! Hate the taste of liver but feel like your nutrition needs a boost? This pill form makes it easy!

#1 Best Selling Vitamin D3: 52% off! With the little sun exposure we get, working inside and using screens, most people are deficient in vitamin D – especially those of us farther north! Vitamin D is essential for bone, muscle, cardiovascular, and immune health, as well as mood regulation.

Health & Fitness

Red Light Therapy Panel: 41% off + an additional $8 off coupon! Red light therapy is a great tool for anti-aging, hair growth, relieving pain, aiding in internal healing, and mood enhancement!

Grounding Mat: 21% off! Grounding is another tool to help reduce anxiety, pain and inflammation; while increasing healing and improving sleep and mood stability! I use mine DAILY.

#1 Best Selling Neoprene Weight Set: 47% off! Just starting out with strength training? Hate going to the gym? Prefer higher reps with smaller weights? These are for you!

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Obese and Malnourished/Stuffed but Starving: the Real Epidemic

There’s a lot of conflicting chatter about the obesity epidemic and body-positivity. The diet and fitness industries are booming and have been for quite some time. So with so much health-conscious advice and programs available to us, how is it that the obesity rate just seems to keep climbing? Shouldn’t people be healthier than ever? Shouldn’t diabetes and heart disease be a thing of the past if all this advice really works?

Diets are Designed to Fail

Let me share my personal experience with you. Being 5′ 4″ and having been 240+ pounds, 112 pounds, and everywhere in between; having been anorexic and bulimic and having run the gamut of diet trends, restricting, binging, and being completely addicted to food in general as a means of coping with many issues in my life, having meticulously counted calories, fat grams, and carbs, done low fat, low carb, keto, and carnivore…I can speak pretty confidently about this subject.

Both times that I lost a significant amount of weight, I did so by restricting my food intake. It definitely works for weight loss. But it is not, has never been, and will never be, a sustainable way of life. Eat less, move more, right? No. Please stop doing that to your body. Do not punish your body for doing what it was designed to do. There’s so much talk of self-love and body-positivity, but the meaning of those phrases is being twisted. Self-love should not be conditional and body positivity should not take precedence over actual health. It’s one thing to love who you are as a person at any size, but the reality of the actual health of a person of any size – overly fat or overly thin – is something different. The first photo shows me at approximately 240 lbs – malnourished from eating tons of sugar and processed foods. The second photo shows me at approximately 140 lbs – malnourished from eating tons of keto products and calorie restricting. Yes, I felt better about my body and the way I looked in the second photo, but I didn’t feel great. I felt better, for sure. But not great. 

When you see an overweight person, it’s easy to assume they are not lacking nutrition. But in most cases, they are. For example, let’s think about Thanksgiving when you eat all the things, not only the turkey but the potatoes, the rolls, the stuffing, the sweet potatoes. You are absolutely stuffed, yet you manage to squeeze in a piece of pie or two, and whatever other desserts catch your eye. A few hours later you’re back at it, picking at the turkey, having another helping of your favorites. And you may actually feel hungry, even though you know your stomach is at capacity. How?

Stuffed but Starving

One Thanksgiving a few years ago, I made sure I stayed keto/carnivore. I had turkey, deviled eggs, and made PSMF rolls. PSMF rolls are a protein-sparing modified fasting recipe made from eggs. I ate until I was stuffed – yet I still felt like I needed more. For the entire month of November, I had been eating beef only. I was satisfied, happy, nourished, and thriving every day. But on Thanksgiving, everything I ate was from poultry. Again, my stomach was completely full after eating so much – including nearly an entire pan of those rolls. After that, I ‘treated myself’ with my favorite keto ice cream. I could NOT stop eating! I literally made myself feel sick because my body was crying out for the nutrition it had been getting all month and I threw it a curveball that day. I love turkey, chicken, and eggs – don’t get me wrong. I eat one of those things almost daily. But I can’t get by just eating those things. I had starved my body of whole nutrition for too long all those years of eating what we were all taught was healthy. 

2010: 230+ lbs, malnourished, always hungry

Nutrients > Calories

Chances are that an obese person is not that size because of the whole one-ingredient foods. They are likely eating very processed foods. It’s not really about the calorie content of a food, but the nutrition. It makes sense to me that if you are consuming both carbs and fat, that your body will use the most readily available fuel first – the carbs, saving the slow-burning fat in case of actual starvation. If you have been restricting calories in an effort to lose weight, your body doesn’t trust you. Your metabolic system has no brain or logic. It reacts based on your actions. Or lack of action. 

Whether I was eating low-fat, low-calorie, low-carb, or whatever I wanted, I still ate a lot of processed, manufactured food. I always felt deprived, tired, achy, lethargic. When I began my health mission on Carnivore, I started out still using zero-carb sweeteners and diet sodas. While I was feeling much better than I ever had on any other way of eating, there were still times my energy would plummet. Those ‘natural’ and artificial sweeteners were still causing an insulin response. And I still had some minor carb cravings. When I cut those things out, I have consistent energy and zero cravings.

Proper Human Diet

Eating meat and animal products has allowed my body to trust me again. No more glucose spikes and dips. I have nice, level energy and mental clarity that I thought I would never experience. I am now 51 years old and I feel better than I did at age 20.

XOXO

~ The Candid Carnivore

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Food Addiction is a Bitch

Addiction is painful, no matter what the drug happens to be.

Food to Mask the Pain

What is comfort food? Does it truly bring comfort? Or does it bring more pain?

If we are talking about the traditional comfort foods, most of us think of cookies, ice cream, cake, macaroni & cheese, maybe pizza and other foods high in carbohydrates. There is a very scientific reason that we feel comfort when eating those types of food. People much smarter than I can explain all of that in detail and do so with absolute authority. But I can tell you that I have learned from those very smart people, and from my own experience, that these foods contain high amounts of carbs. Carbs turn to sugar in our bodies. Sugar creates a chemical response in our bodies and in our brains that trigger a dopamine response. It’s something very similar to getting high and that feeling, in turn, creates an addiction. Sweet taste is several times more addictive than cocaine. Read that again – sweet taste. is several times more addictive. than COCAINE! What? We give these foods to our children! We are literally raising addicts just by feeding them foods from our local grocery stores. (click here to read one study using artificial sweetener and cocaine, as an example – there are several articles on the matter, just search for yourself! Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward (nih.gov)) 

There is sugar, in some form, in most processed foods. I dare you to grab any food item in your kitchen with an ingredient label – guaranteed there is at least one form of sugar in that item. Maybe more. Sugar has over 50 different names, and food manufacturers will try to fool you as often as possible. 

You hear a lot of people say they are an ’emotional eater’, meaning when they are sad, stressed, angry, happy, or any strong emotion, they turn to food. Rather than allowing themselves to feel that emotion, they distract themselves or use the food to cope or celebrate. Doesn’t that sound very similar to how a person with an addiction would respond? In my statement above, replace the phrase, “…they turn to food.” with “…they turn to alcohol.” Or a specific drug. Even when someone says they reward themselves with chocolate or some other food, isn’t that the same as saying they reward themselves with a drink or drug use? 

The Culture of Food as a Drug

This behavior is something many of us are taught in childhood. A good-intentioned adult wants to fix what is bothering the child, or distract them from crying, by giving them a treat. This creates a dependency very early in life! Rather than being taught how to cope with or regulate emotions, children are often taught to just cover it up or use some substance, which may start out as sugar or carbs, to create a flood of dopamine in the brain that gives us that feeling of comfort. Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of what predisposes a person for drug or alcohol abuse? It makes sense to me. Eating becomes something that is tied to emotions, whether we are eating to celebrate or to mourn. The chemistry of the food creates such an intense reaction in the body that it mimics emotion or masks it. Processed food, carbs, and sweet tastes (yes, even your diet soda and keto sweeteners) give us that dopamine hit that is so strong that real joy and happiness can’t compete. Is this a cause of depression? 

The problem is that – and I am not saying it is as simple as this – while lifestyle changes can be made to avoid drugs and alcohol, you can’t avoid food. You can avoid certain foods and ingredients, but it is SO difficult when family gatherings, social functions, and even office meetings often revolve around the very types of food you are trying to avoid. You hear things like, ‘oh come on live a little’, ‘one cupcake won’t kill you’, ‘you deserve a treat’….Would those food-pushers say to an alcoholic, ‘one shot won’t kill you’, or ‘it’s a celebration, how are you not going to drink?’ But most people don’t understand, because we need food to live, that sugar and processed foods are addictive. 

Nutrition is the Key

I, and I think many others can attest to this, have found that eating only animal foods reduces or eliminates the addiction to sugar and carbs. Why is this important? Sugar and carbs are not what our bodies were designed to thrive on. The over-consumption of these foods creates constant insulin response, which affects our mood and emotional regulation. Without the constant dips and spikes in blood glucose, and therefore insulin, my mood is fairly constant. I don’t crave that dopamine release that food used to give me. 

So do comfort foods really bring comfort, or do they replace true emotions with dopamine, thereby eliminating the processing of emotions and perpetuating the trauma, never allowing the healing or the development of coping skills? In my opinion, processed foods, carbs, and sugar do damage to our bodies and our minds. I know in my healing mission, my body feels so much better. But the healing I have experienced within my mind and my emotions is the most valuable result so far. 

Feel free to comment or ask questions about my experiences and let me know if there is any way I can help you on your own healing mission!

xoxo

~ The Candid CarnivoreShareLabels: carnivorecomfort foodcommunitydietdisordered eatingdopamineemotional healthfood addictfood addictionmental healthsugar addiction

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Carnivore Recipes – Adding Variety to Your Life with Tacos!

So you think a carnivore diet would be boring? Too restrictive? You’d miss cooking? I’m happy to tell you – you’re wrong! Personally, I absolutely love the simplicity of carnivore. After years of cooking for a family of six, trying to plan and budget, making sure we have a ‘balanced plate’ with a main dish plus sides…exhausting! 

Save Time and Money with Carnivore

Now my children are all grown and the ones who are still here at home buy and cook their own food. They are most definitely not carnivores. But that’s not to say that cooking wouldn’t be much simpler if they did still depend on me for meals. Coming home after work and tossing a couple of steaks in the air fryer while I feed my dogs, change my clothes, and go through the mail is WAY easier than throwing together a bunch of non-nutritive crap. But, on those occasions – usually weekends – when I have a bit more time and I feel like spending some time on meals, I can always find something incredible to make and devour. 

Where to Find Recipes

Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram are loaded with inspiring recipes. Even if you don’t want to or aren’t able to follow the recipes exactly, you can create some pretty impressive dishes using recipes from some pretty talented creators. If they use something you are sensitive to or an ingredient you are trying to avoid, you can always modify, substitute, or omit that part. I ended my first 36 hour fast this morning by taking inspiration from Reid’s chili recipe @thecarnivorouschef and Erin’s homemade version of Egglife wraps @carnivore.diva to make TACOS. My Mexican husband misses some traditional dishes now and then so creators like these guys keep us satisfied. I have zero cravings at this point in my healing mission and have no issue avoiding carbs even when they are literally right under my nose. But I do lean on recipes like this once in a while for variety. 

Check out the Carnivorous Chef on Instagram, YouTube, and all the other things. Explicit Warning: His content is straight food PORN. 100% would not recommend watching on a fasting day, if you are the type to fast. 100% would recommend if you think carnivore is boring – this guy will get you drooling and tingly in 0.2 seconds. He’s creative and clever! (use a potato smasher for breaking up meat = brilliant) His links are below! He’s also the genius behind some brand spanking new seasonings that I’m dying to try: the Carnivore Companion. 

Repurposed tater smasher = genius

I followed Erin Brooke’s recipe exactly for the wraps and they were perfection. Although, next time I may add a tad more water. I think I just measured a little less than was called for. Find her content on Instagram @carnivore.diva 

carnivore.diva’s egg wraps

The inspiration for the taco meat came from watching @thecarnivorouschef make chili. In my version, I did the following meticulous steps:

Bacon grease – you can use butter or tallow or whatever. I just happened to have a pan of bacon grease on the stove. This is just for anti-stick purposes. 

1 lb. of ground beef. I used lean, just because that’s all that was available at the store. But I didn’t need to drain it after cooking, so that’s a win for me. 

1 lb. of sweet Italian sausage. Again, it’s all that was available. I actually wanted just plain ground pork, but this was a substitution. I’m ok with it because there were no funky ingredients like corn syrup that is often included in sausage. 

I tossed in what I felt like was a good amount of the following spices. I usually don’t measure spices. It makes me feel adventurous. 

Slap Ya Mama

Smoked Paprika

Paprika

Garlic Powder

Onion Powder

OR…try Carnivore Companion Tacollagen. I haven’t tried it yet, but if it’s half as incredible as the videos the Carnivorous Chef makes, I’m sure it won’t disappoint. 

Smash it all together as it cooks with a repurposed Potato Masher like this one. Tada – taco meat!

I made the tortillas/wraps using this recipe from @carnivore.diva here: Erin Brooke (@carnivore.diva) • Instagram photos and videos

Egg White Pohttps://amzn.to/34QwZSvwder

Xanthan Gum

Finished product!

Yup, carnivore is SUPER boring and restrictive! I inhaled four of these – packed with protein and fat for fueling my…well my very lazy Sunday. But if I decide to be active, I’ll have plenty of energy!
As promised, here are the links to the Carnivorous Chef. My new BFF. He just doesn’t know it yet. 

YouTube: CarnivorousChef – YouTube

Instagram: Reid (@carnivorouschef) • Instagram photos and videos

Patreon: CarnivorousChef is creating Recipes for the Carnivore Diet | Patreon

Carnivore Companion: Carnivore Companion | Carnivore Diet Seasoning

Check out my Instagram here: Steph Scheeren (@thecandidcarnivore) • Instagram photos and videos
Thanks for checking out my blog, feeding my creative outlet!
xoxo~ The Candid Carnivore

PS: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no additional cost or risk to you. 

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The Importance of a Carnivore Community: Find Your Tribe

Your Friends and Family…

As with any major life change, one of the most important things you can do to ensure success is to find likeminded people who will support you. Family and friends can be great – or they can bring you down. They may say they support you, but if they don’t fully understand what you’re doing and why, they may not be the best people to lean on when you are struggling. They may unknowingly undermine your plan. They may fully knowingly undermine your plan while telling you they support you. Either way, no matter what you are trying to accomplish – be it diet, exercise, career change, addiction, or any major life change – you need to find ya self a TRIBE. 

Don’t be so independent…

It’s actually imperative that you do. I am not a social person. I am not one who asks for help. I can do it all on my own, damn it! I’ll read and watch everything related to my goal and I’ll do it my own damn self. Yeah!….No. I mean that is totally how I think. I’m stubborn and not all that bright sometimes, but I recently learned something huge. We NEED people. Like it or not. And believe me, I do NOT like it one bit. But when you find the RIGHT people…dang. Well, that changes every single thing. 

In my previous posts, I sort of outlined the path that brought me to carnivore. I have been eating 95% carnivore for a long time now. Honestly, I don’t know exactly how long for sure. These last two years have been so weird. It’s like 2020 was skipped altogether and 2021 was a shadow of 2020. It’s been at least of year of mostly animal products with very little of anything else. I finally gave up the keto treats and sugar free sweeteners just a few months ago. Still, something was missing even though I thought I was doing everything right. 

Carnivore Community

In November 2021, I gave in and joined an online carnivore community. There are lots of groups out there! There are social media groups dedicated to various interests that are free and available for anyone to join. But that’s the problem I found – anyone can join and cause conflict or give information that may not be entirely accurate or beneficial because it doesn’t cost them anything. People feel empowered to be just plain mean and judgmental, sarcastic and just outright assholes. But the community I discovered is a whole different vibe. 

When I tell you I love these people, I mean I actually feel connected. I’m literally tearing up writing this. We celebrate together, we cry together, we support each other in every single way. If someone is struggling, the coaches and the members band together to find a workable solution to whatever that struggle is. I’m an inherently shy person, so I have not yet shared or spoken during the live Zoom ‘meatings’. (Meatings – get it? Isn’t that clever?!) I do post in different areas, though. There are live chat areas, places to just post your thoughts, and those Zoom meatings where you can share in that chat section or raise your hand and talk to the coaches in real time, or you can watch the playbacks. 

Let me tell you – I feel so much joy! Maybe that sounds hokey or corny, but there is no more accurate way to describe it. This way of eating = joy. This carnivore community = joy. Having this tribe to support me = joy. Giving support and cheering on those in my tribe = joy.  My heart is full and I have direction. I owe that to all the meat and fat I eat and to the beautiful carnivorous souls in the Steak and Butter Gang! 

My Tribe

A little background on the carnivore community, Steak and Butter Gang: it was founded by the one and only Steak and Butter Gal, Bella. While Bella’s story looks much different than mine, what she has created in this online community is something I have never seen before. You can check out Bella’s story on YouTube – her channel is here: Steak and Butter Gal – YouTube. She was a vegan for several years with worsening health issues before she discovered the carnivore life. She has since healed many, if not all, of those health problems by eating only meat, eggs, and butter! 

Don’t worry, I’m not selling anything! This is not a sponsored post; I get nothing from this except the satisfaction of spreading the benefits of carnivore and hoping more people realize that our food matters. Eating what our bodies were built to process and use matters!

If you’d like to check out this community that I am so head over heels for, you can find them HERE!

It’s not a free plan, but having access to the zoom meatings, the coaches, and the community is worth way more than the $1/day you’ll spend. The value far outweighs the cost! The February group is open now. You won’t regret signing up, but there may be a time where you regret not having signed up sooner!

If you’d like to know more before committing to carnivore or to a group like the SBG, feel free to email me, comment below, or have a look at my Instagram page! @thecandidcarnivore 

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my post here. Please know that truly – I appreciate you, you can heal yourself, and living is greater than simply existing. 

xoxo

~ The Candid Carnivore

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MEAT BASED – HOW THE HELL DID I GET HERE?!

From around 230lbs trying to diet like a normal person, to low-carb/keto, to carnivore in 2020.

In the previous entry, I gave a life-long, chronological timeline of my history with food. I want to take small snapshots of each stage and give a little more detail into each. Now this goes against my nature to do this out of order, but I think my most recent experiences are probably why you’re here. 

So did I just decide one day that I would only eat meat? No. But also, yes. 

Did I get those results pictured above by being a carnivore? No. But also, yes. 

Lemme ‘splain. 

In the photo on the left, I was roughly 230lbs. I don’t have any photos of myself at my highest weight and I don’t even know for sure what that number was. Probably somewhere around 250lbs. I didn’t have a scale or a full-length mirror. Just a ravenous appetite, undiagnosed Hashimoto’s, and severe mental and emotional trauma. Though I had tried “dieting” like I did in the days of my anorexia and bulimia, my addiction to food and the damage to my metabolism held my weight hostage.

Paleo 

Somewhere around 2013 – 2014, when I had put my youngest daughter on a gluten-free diet for her Hashimoto’s diagnosis, things started to click. I learned, partly due to the enormous cost of gluten-free versions of foods she loved, that maybe we are all better off with just whole, one-ingredient foods. That lead me to paleo. The paleo diet is basically eating only things that existed in paleolithic times. Omitting sugar and processed food and adding some high quality vitamins made such an enormous difference in my life. But I still had a lot of Hashimoto’s symptoms, so my research continued. 

Weight-management Drugs

In addition to Synthroid (I’m not convinced really does much as it doesn’t treat the root cause) my endocrinologist prescribed a medication called Contrave, which was a fantastic tool to help me control that impulse to eat everything in sight. It was a miracle, at the time. On paleo, I still had intense cravings and would slip up quite often. But this new medication helped control that. I was truly amazed that I could see donuts from my desk at work and have very little to no urge to eat them. Before this medication, I would have inhaled at least one before I even realized I had left my desk. Food addiction is truly like being possessed. Your brain is on autopilot when it comes to food and yet you need food to live. It’s not like you can avoid food and people who eat. That’s not how this works. 

Low-Carb

Around that time, I was also looking at low-carb diets and thinking this may be even better. It was! One of the symptoms of Hashimoto’s for me was brain fog. Now I’m not talking about brain fog as in being a little forgetful, why did I walk into this room, did I take my vitamins. I’m talking about a fog so thick I would forget what I was saying mid-sentence, completely stop talking, and have no idea why the other person is looking at me like they thought I might be having a stroke. Low carb almost completely fixed that!! I knew I was really on to something then. 

As for the weight loss, low carb made a dramatic difference in that as well. But I have to admit, it was a whole combination of things that lead me to the 140lb photo above. 

    1. Low-carb diet

    2. Contrave weight-management medication

    3. Lifting weights and working out 3 – 4 times per week

    4. Consuming less than 1300 calories per day

Would I recommend this combination? Knowing what I know now? No fucking way. 

It is not sustainable. Low carb? Fine, do that. Contrave? At $120 per month? Nope. Lifting weights and working out 3 – 4 times per week? Yeah, why not if you have the time? Might be a bit excessive, but it doesn’t hurt either. Calorie restricting? A resounding fuck that. That, my friends, that eat-less-move-more advice is so very damaging! That is disordered eating. Were our ancestors sitting around trying to figure out how many calories they had left in a day? No! Did they eat like crazy every chance they got? Uh, yeah, they did! 

So why and how does this work? It doesn’t make sense based on everything we have been taught, right? That’s an explanation for another post. But here’s a hint: your body is hoarding the nutrient-void calories you have consumed and storing them as fat because you’re starving it and it doesn’t know what to do with the garbage you’re throwing down your throat like it’s a living dumpster. Man-made “food” is not fit for human consumption. 

Keto – Ketovore – Carnivore

For the last year+, maybe almost two years, I have been eating carnovire-ish. Meaning I had some slips, I used keto-approved sweeteners, some keto treats now and then, some veggies here and there. That was only making things more difficult as far as my addiction to sweet tastes. While I was mostly meat-based, or ‘ketovore’ (keto-carnivore), and I wasn’t eating sugar, the overly processed keto treats (curse you, Rebel Ice Cream!!), even those I made at home, only brought back that intense desire for more. It was best, for me, to eliminate anything and everything that did not come from an animal in its singular form, or at least as close as possible to it. 

Counting calories was exhausting and contributing to my tendency for obsessive behavior, too. So that practice had to go as well. Just. Eat. Meat. ALL the meats! No counting, no obsessing, no addiction. Just meat. And eggs and butter, of course. 

Today, three months into eating only animal products, as much as I can possibly fit into my stomach, I’m weighing in around 165lbs. And I am way ok with that. I know it will come off again when my body is finished healing. I’m stockpiling nutrition, healing my hormones, and feeling un-fucking-stoppable. Assertive. Confident. Powerful. 

How do I know I’m healing? 

  • My mood and my energy are borderline obnoxious – but in a really good way! 
  • My ‘beard’ doesn’t grow in within hours of shaving anymore. For context – I have hirsutism, which means I have a hormone imbalance that causes whisker-like hairs on my chin, jawline, and upper lip. This is typically due to PCOS, adrenal imbalance, or insulin resistance. 
  • I have about 2″ of gray roots and I don’t care – not because I’ve given up, but because I’ve realized that how I feel both physically and mentally are far more important than someone else’s idea of what’s attractive. I feel GOOD, I feel I look good, and I accept myself as I am in this moment. Will I ever dye my hair again? Maybe. But I’m not really concerned about that right now. 
  • I’m actually not really concerned about anything. Again, not because I’ve given up, but because my mental and emotional response has evolved. I have a better perspective now that my mood is better regulated. 
  • No longer taking Contrave – I had to stop when I had shoulder surgery. And let me tell you I healed SO quickly! How? 
  • Less inflammation, that’s how!
  • Zero carb cravings, zero sugar cravings, increased mental clarity and focus, better sleep…..

This is just the beginning!
It took nearly 50 years for me to get to this point. There is no sustainable quick fix for my health. And again, I’m feeling better than I have EVER felt! This is the long game – healing. 
Stop dieting because you hate yourself and start eating because you love yourself. Your body is made of fat and protein, so give it the building blocks it needs. 

xoxo

~ The Candid Carnivore

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Hello! Hi! Welcome!

 Hey there! Welcome! So happy you stopped by!

I’m guessing you are interested in, or are somewhat new to the carnivore WOE (way of eating). Me too!

Here I will try to keep my posts very concise and specific, so that you can easily search and find any scenario and situation that you may be curious about.

But before you dive into my posts here, I have a few disclaimers to lay out for you. 

1. I am in no way a medical professional and this blog should not be construed as medical advice. 

2. This is a chronicle of my personal choices and my results and discoveries along the way. 

3. As such, I am not asking for opinions or advice. I have a community for that. Questions and on-topic, respectful comments are welcome.

4. I do not require anyone’s approval – this is MY healing mission. I am on a MISSION of healing from decades of autoimmune and eating disorders.  

5. Negative Nellies, Disrespectful Dicks, and angry (hungry) vegans will be banned posthaste. 

6. Any links contained on my site may result in my earning a small commission should you decide to purchase via said link – however, there will never be any additional cost to you for my benefit.

Now, then. I’ll get started with my long, dramatic history with food, weight, and dieting. 

Thanks for coming and I hope you decide to stick around. Maybe even subscribe!

xoxo

~ The Candid Carnivore