Elizabeth’s Struggle with Diets
Elizabeth lives in Botswana. Before her carnivore diet, she had tried several diets, including vegetarian. “That lasted about six months before I became severely anemic.” She found that diets all had issues: “I tried detox diets and all these other things, and they just didn’t seem to work long-term.”
Discovering the Carnivore Diet During Covid
In 2017 she tried keto, and it was helpful, but it was “too much to do, too many things to prepare. I used to suffer from chronic fatigue. It was always an issue for me. I felt like I wanted to sleep but couldn’t, and then I’d wake up so tired.”
Elizabeth was very overweight, couldn’t breathe, and suffered from several conditions, including asthma, eczema, and IBS. She also had cystic acne, dizziness, and headaches.
“I was told, ‘lose weight and eat healthily,’ but we all have very different concepts of what healthy is, right? I thought healthy meant fruits, veg, keeping your proteins low, and low fat, the narrative that’s pushed quite a bit.”
During Covid, she found the diet online. She says, “I’m lucky; where I live, we have more cows than people! Getting any kind of meat or animal product was easy for me, so it was basically just to get started.”
Benefits of the Carnivore Diet for Elizabeth
After going on and off the diet due to work, in October, she finally committed to sticking to the carnivore diet continually. After three to four months, she began losing weight, and her cystic acne got better, along with all of her other symptoms.
Elizabeth eats mostly lamb and goat, with some organ meats and a little beef. She does enjoy locally sourced meat from her family hunting springbok, gemsbok, and eland. This fills the freezers every year with fresh meat.
“Once you remove sugar from your diet, you start craving more healthy food, in this case, different varieties of meat. My health is great, and my eczema is gone. I’m able to exercise a little bit. There’s a hill nearby, and it takes 18 minutes to go up and back, and I do that three times a week.”
“My asthma cleared up, so I have to check and make sure medications don’t expire.” Elizabeth’s IBS cleared up as well, and she is feeling much better than before. “I find that my skin is much better, I’m using far less moisturizer now, my digestion is so much better, my moods are more stable, it’s not a constant worrying of anxiety all day every day, now it’s very manageable. I’m looking forward to seeing what gets better next-it’s all downhill from here!… Yeah, I’m not going back.”
Elizabeth’s Recommendation for Motivation
She recommends that people “write down something that you really want to change in your health, something to keep pushing you, because sometimes it’s not a physical image. It might be getting off a medication or not having such a stressful relationship with food. Whatever motivates you!”
