Thank you to everyone who has played a role in promoting awareness of the carnivore diet.
I’m now 42. For my entire life until several years ago, I suffered from crippling digestive issues that were completely fixed by a nearly carnivorous diet. I had constant gut pain; seriously evil diarrhea multiple times daily; socially disabling gas; and severe mental and emotional problems, which I believe were diet-related, as they all resolved with very-low-carb eating.
I had tried being vegetarian and vegan for some years, for ethical reasons. My husband went vegan, too (his choice, I swear). We lost our health — we had grey skin that bled easily, our nails cracked off, our hair fell out, and we were completely fatigued, with a strange feeling of heaviness in our limbs. People sometimes asked my husband if he had cancer. But the science said that we were getting all our micronutrient requirements, and blood tests showed that we weren’t deficient in anything our doctor considered important.
I gave up my stubborn ideology when I read David Gillespie’s “Big Fat Lies”, which explained that saturated fat and cholesterol are needed by every single cell for the integrity and strength of the cell wall and cell membrane. That single piece of information helped me understand how young and how manipulated the biological sciences are.
I am extremely grateful to the animals I consume. On carni, it struck me repeatedly how sacred the act of eating another living being can be. I hope that environmentally sound, healthful and humane farming methods become mainstream.
But what I would like to highlight here is how going from very-low-carb to carnivore helped me overcome a health crisis last year.
My husband and I got gastroenteritis after eating out. His case took a week to resolve, but a month later I was feeling worse and worse, with increasing stomach pain every time I ate. I cried in my doctor’s office, feeling desperate for help. She told me it was stress and prescribed me a proton-pump-inhibitor antacid, which I later discovered would worsen the acid-production cycle.
I tried carnivore instead. And I was better the next day.
I wasn’t fat, but over the next six months I lost 5kg (about 11 pounds), which took me down to weights I hadn’t seen since my teens. After the first month, I had so much energy! I have always gone to bed as early as I can, but on carni I was doing Tracy Anderson workouts at 10pm through sheer wired joy.
I’ve put all the weight back on after reintroducing dairy in an attempt to substitute it for alcohol (not successful!). I hope to cut both again soon. I come back here regularly for the inspiration to start again.
I’m incredibly grateful to meatheals.com for providing a platform for sharing people’s stories. Thanks to everyone who puts their experience out there.
PS: On carnivore I was rarely hungry, so it seemed a no-brainer to try intermittent fasting. I did so twice, each time for a fortnight, separated by a period of months. I had no trouble with the fasting aspect, but each time I seemed to trigger crushing, black depression that I hadn’t experienced for a decade, and which resolved as soon as I made myself eat more. I’d just like to put that out there for anyone who finds themselves on a downward mental spiral while experimenting with diet. Maybe it’s a female thing.
