Melissa has been fighting a severe sugar addiction for most of her life. She describes herself as a six-year-old stealing money from her father’s jacket pocket to feed her sugar addiction. She continued using tactics of “lying, cheating and stealing” to feed her addiction to sugar well into her teen years. Melissa said in 1981, she was introduced to Equal, an artificial sugar, and thus also added it to her addiction.
Melissa says her sugar addiction caused her to gain a lot of weight. In 1984, when she gave birth to her daughter, she weighed almost three hundred pounds. At that point, Melissa entered a twelve-step program for her sugar addiction. She said the program helped, and she lost approximately fifty pounds, but she could never become “clean” from her addiction. Over the years, she also developed incontinence from her bladder, arthritis in her knees, and experienced chronic back pain.
Fast forward to 2016, Melissa began to learn about the carnivore diet. She said she started soaking up the information she was reading and hearing from carnivore advocates like Kelly Hogan and Dr. Shawn Baker– to name a few. From 2017 to 2020, Melissa says she was meat and Equal based. She didn’t realize her addiction to the artificial sweetener was holding her back and causing her to still have intense sugar cravings. She spent those three years falling off the carnivore wagon frequently.
However, she kept picking herself back up and trying to conquer her addiction again and again. It was also during this time that Melissa was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. She ended up having a total hysterectomy. Her doctors wanted her to start radiation and chemotherapy treatments after her surgery, but Melissa refused. After all her research and what she had learned from the carnivore community, she knew cancer is fed by sugar. She told the doctors she would follow the carnivore diet instead.
Finally, on June 3rd, 2020, at sixty-five, Melissa stopped using Equal. She said her sugar cravings were gone within the first day, and “the heavens opened up.” After fifty-eight years of having a sugar addiction, she felt free. Melissa has been meat-only for nine months and says her arthritis and back pain are both gone, she is no longer incontinent, and she has more energy than she has ever experienced.
Today, Melissa says she eats prime rib strip steak almost every day. She also eats a lot of lamb and butter. Melissa tries to avoid cheese, she feels it can trigger her, but she does enjoy heavy cream in her coffee. And she tends to avoid pork as it makes her skin break out.
Melissa is also cancer-free, despite not doing radiation and chemotherapy treatments. She says her doctors try to take credit by saying they got all her cancer during her surgery, but she knows the carnivore diet is why she has been successful in her treatment.
At sixty-five years old, Melissa is excited to finally live a pain-free life. She loves supporting the community and feels like she has “total freedom” from her sugar addiction thanks to the carnivore way of life.
