Amanda loses weight on the carnivore diet

Amanda’s Struggle with Weight Gain and Health Issues

Amanda is 33 years old and lives in Bellingham, Washington. She started gaining weight when she was about nine years old after experiencing trauma. 

She learned to cope using food, saying, “I watched my Mom be a size four and eat an entire bag of Hershey’s to deal with her emotions, so as I got older, I kind of learned, Oh, that is how you deal with your feelings, that is how you deal with the negativity in life, is eating.”

Health Issues and Diagnosis

She had PCOS when she was 16 and weighed “in the two twenties” during her teen years. As an adult, she developed depression and anxiety from being overweight. 

After she turned 18, Amanda developed a lot of pain issues. Her hands, joints, and skin hurt. She was diagnosed with scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia. She became diabetic in her late 20s and also developed fatty liver disease.

Struggle with Diets

Amanda was prescribed Metformin and told to “eat less and move more.” The nutritionists she saw recommended low-fat, high-carb diets, and she says, “I just was hungry all the time!” 

Amanda was very physically active, helping remodel houses: “I literally was digging post holes and moving dirt around. I think that’s the only thing that kept my weight down is I was very physically active.” 

When Amanda tried vegan diets, she found the oxalates made her inflammation worse, and she would awaken with her hands stiff. “I had a hard time waking up in the morning, opening my hands. It was like someone with severe RA or very like a lot of arthritis. I just couldn’t open my hands in the morning until I ran them under hot water and tried to move them around.”

Carnivore Diet

Amanda would eventually grow to 360 pounds before going on a carnivore diet. She found a nutritionist who admitted everything she learned in school was wrong.

Amanda was told to try a low-carb diet. “I had pretty good success on that. I lost like 40 pounds. But it still did not address the mental component of the binge eating for me.” 

Ketogenic diets resulted in Amanda reinventing sweet foods she enjoyed, using alternative flour and artificial sweeteners. These drove her binge eating to new highs. She started watching Michaela Peterson’s Arthritis and Carnivore journey and became inspired. Amanda went 100% carnivore and has lost 105 pounds so far.

Positive Health Effects

She stopped having edema in her legs, her urinary incontinence eased, her reflux had stopped, and she no longer woke up “choking on my own vomit.”

Her physician was against the carnivore diet at first, but after seeing Amanda lose 105 pounds and her husband lose 27 pounds while his testosterone rose from 250 to 650, he is now supportive of her diet and is asking how to broach the subject with his other patients. 

She says, “I take half my antidepressants now… I no longer suffer from anxiety… I haven’t had a panic attack since I started this… I used to say I wished I wouldn’t wake up tomorrow… Now I wake up excited for life and motivated!”