I have been a high-level athlete my entire life. I played Division I soccer as a goalkeeper on a full scholarship and played soccer in the Olympic Development Program, making my regional team – just one step below the US national team. I have always been active, and I used to think I had a great diet. Of course, playing sports, I was often encouraged, if not forced to eat a lot of pasta, rice, bread, cereals, oatmeal, etc., however, when I finished playing, I took a much more ketogenic approach and followed this way of eating for about 6 years. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really that ketogenic. I was eating bags and bags of vegetables daily with some lean protein, a little olive oil. Looking back at it now, two major issues were that I was blasting my body with plant toxins in huge quantities daily and I didn’t have a fuel source given I likely couldn’t digest the carbs from vegetables and nuts and I was not upping my fat. On top of this, I was overtraining. I would be in the gym over 2 hours a day – and not forcing myself! I wanted to be there. I never took rest days or de-load weeks or anything like that. I went on like this for years. I looked like the picture of health. On the inside, I was soon to find out I was a different kind of metabolically unhealthy – that is, I was extremely overtrained and under fueled and my body was running on fumes.
In January of 2020, I got COVID early in the game. Nothing was shut down yet and I had presented at a conference in Edmonton Ontario and flew back home through Montreal. We waited in snow on the runway for 2.5 hours assuming it was weather related. However, we were waiting for 35 Chinese nationals to clear customs and the “health check” which was a head temperature scan (this was before we even knew you could have COVID without symptoms). Long story, slightly shorter, I ended up with COVID with a 104.3 F fever that came down slowly over 11 days. When I was better, I went right back into my over training and under fueling ways. Several weeks later, I began having weird symptoms – being jolted awake at night, light headedness, costochondritis, GI issues, and extreme fatigue. I could not walk my dog 5 minutes from my home. I spent 75% of everyday just lying on the floor. It was a victory if I could get up, defrost some food, and eat it. This long-covid went on with better and worse feeling waves for over 20 months. Here I am lying down, fatigued, puffy and inflamed, exhausted all the time:
Finally, I decided to start researching long-covid and chronic fatigue in general and came to find papers about mitochondria of people with long-covid looking 30 years older than the age of the person. So then I looked into what improves mitochondrial health and found creatine, taurine, L-Carnitine, CoQ10. The common food that had all of the things needed? Red meat. Thus, first I began incorporating a lot more red meat and some things got better almost instantly. You can already see my eyes brightening here and less fatigue (May, 2022).
It wasn’t long after that I started wondering if I should really be eating so much red meat all the time, given our mainstream narrative, so back to researching I went. Here is where I came across people like Dr. Baker and Dr. Chaffee talking about the importance of eliminating plants and the toxins with which they come. I should also note I am a researcher myself and it took about 10 minutes to dig into the nutrition research on red meat, cholesterol and saturated fat to see how poor and flawed it is. So I eliminated all plants and went full carnivore. By August of 2022, ALL of my symptoms, including the most stubborn of them (the costochondritis) were completely gone. My energy was back. I started getting active again (but not to the extreme I was doing before – I have greatly improved in that domain)!
But I am still quite active and when I am my most active and outside in the sun during the summer, I have noticed I am prone to losing my period. So I have since adjusted my carnivore diet to be more animal based. I incorporate some honey and fruit seasonally and locally only. I go strict carnivore all winter and eat carnivore plus whatever fruit is available at my local farmers’ market between May and early October when it becomes available. This has solved my menstrual irregularities while allowing me to remain as active as I want to be and without flaring any of the past symptoms or issues and I am LOVING IT!
