Serena lives in southwest Virginia and has a history of being bulimic for 20 years and disordered eating for 10 years after that. Serena would binge and then not eat for the next two or three days to punish herself. Her mother is an alcoholic, and her father is a drug addict, “so it manifested itself in me with carbs and sugar, and you know, having eating disorders.”
Serena is an experienced dieter: “I’ve been vegan, I’ve been vegetarian, I’ve done 14-day juice fasts, I’ve done water fasts; I mean, I have literally done every diet you can think of. I also did restrict calories.”
She had always avoided beef, saying, “I probably hadn’t had beef in close to a year. Maybe a few times in a year, because I felt like it had too much fat, too many calories, too many ‘points’ for me…I restricted for years, and it got me nowhere; it got me mentally unstable as far as food goes.”
After recovering from a SARS-Cov2 infection, Serena experienced parosmia. This altered the smell and taste of all her foods and made eating challenging. She tried juice fasts and found that a water fast relieved it (until she ate food again). The only foods that tasted normal to her were sweets. Many people experience olfactory abnormalities during and after COVID.
As a result of her parosmia, Serena once ate 20 cupcakes in 36 hours, “which was, you know, the end of my rope.” She began researching and found the carnivore diet through Michaela Peterson, Dr. Baker, and Kelly Hogan.
“It helped my parosmia in the beginning… It’s still not healed by any means—there are still many things like coffee, garlic, onion, and peppermint; many things that I can’t even really be in the same room as without feeling sick. I still can’t eat roasts… somebody takes the lid off the pot and I just have to leave the room.”
She explains that her diet is expanding, saying, “I can eat chicken now, and I can eat hamburgers and steak, I can eat almost a full carnivore diet and feel really good, healthy, and happy.”
Serena has seen improvements in her energy, her hair is fuller, and her digestion is much easier with no bloating at all. Serena also finds that her carnivore diet has saved her sanity. “The idea that I’m free is still a little bit hard to believe, but it’s 100 percent true. I don’t worry about it, ever…it’s that ‘carnivore zen’, I think it’s the beef, there is such a healing power in beef that people just don’t know yet.”
Serena says, “This is literally the first time in my life, it’s been about a year, of being free from that; free from the shackles and chains of, you know, disordered eating and eating disorders…for the first time in probably 35 years I’m at peace. I’ll be 50 next year, and I feel like I’m 30,” and adds, “Beef is a miracle food.”
