Holly Bertone spent 13 years as the Chief of Staff for FBI Counterintelligence, studying the patterns, threats, and behaviors of spies. But despite her elite analytical skills, she couldn’t untangle the patterns destroying her own health.
At 39, Holly received a terrifying breast cancer diagnosis, undergoing a lumpectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation. Immediately following her cancer treatments, she was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s—an autoimmune condition that attacks the thyroid. By the time she turned 49, the metabolic damage compounded. Despite taking standard levothyroxine medication, the weight packed on overnight, and her fatigue became paralyzing.
“It was test after test, and the doctors just threw up their hands,” Holly recalls. “I was getting sick, I was emotionally eating, and they were like, ‘I can’t help you.'”
The Vegan Failure and the Diet Culture Trap
Desperate for a solution, Holly turned to functional practitioners who steered her toward a strict, whole-food vegan diet. For someone who had already avoided red meat her entire life, this seemed like the ultimate path to health.
In reality, it became a trap. While being “good” and eating plant-based smoothies Monday through Friday, the weekends devolved into severe emotional eating spirals filled with inflammatory vegan junk food, popcorn, and vegan ice cream. She also suffered from daily diarrhea and incontinence, making excuses that this was just her “new normal” after cancer. As a certified health coach, she felt like a complete failure. “Nothing in the certifications I learned steered me to eat more meat,” she says. “It was all about ‘balanced’ whole foods, but never the actual animal.”
The Counterintelligence Approach to Carnivore
Realizing the mainstream medical and nutrition systems had failed her, Holly applied her FBI profiling strategies to her own biology. Recognizing that her emotional eating was tied to a lack of nutritional safety and satiation, she began a strict 3-month experiment with the Carnivore diet—eating exclusively ruminant meat (beef), salt, water, and butter.
After pushing through a month of oxalate dumping, her body’s response was explosive. “It was almost like my body was making up for decades of not properly nourishing myself,” Holly says. The transformations were undeniable:
- HASHIMOTO’S IN REMISSION: By finally eating highly bioavailable animal protein, Holly reversed her autoimmune symptoms entirely, eliminating her extreme fatigue and cold intolerance.
- WEIGHT LOSS AND ANTI-AGING: She effortlessly dropped 20 pounds, returning to her competitive mountain-biking weight of 112 pounds at age 54. She also reversed her gray hair and eliminated the cellulite on her legs.
- DIGESTIVE HEALING: The daily diarrhea and incontinence that plagued her on a vegan diet completely resolved, leaving her with perfect, regular digestion.
Profiling Emotional Safety
Today, Holly works as an Emotional Eating Profiler and Coach (@holly.bertone). She uses her experience to help women understand that threats to our health aren’t just physical—they are psychological, driven by diet culture and nutritional starvation.
She teaches that when you restrict animal protein and fat, your body feels unsafe, triggering the survival mechanism of emotional eating and cravings. When you fuel properly with meat, the cravings die, and the emotional eating cycle is broken.
“I used to justify that I wasn’t supposed to have optimal health. That is a lie. Optimal health is our birthright. When you remove the threats and fuel with meat, you literally reverse the aging process.”
