Why Do I Follow the Carnivore Diet?

Fair warning, this is long. There is no TL;DR version.

I’m an entirely different person now from who I was before I became a carnivore.

Some people choose to eat the carnivore diet just to optimize their fitness performance, but are otherwise healthy on a mixed diet of meats and plants.

I am not one of those people.

I think I was pretty healthy as a kid. Then something happened around age 7 and I began to gain weight. To the point that I distinctly recall thinking I need to go on a diet by the age of 9 because I felt fat and out of place around my friends.

Then when I was 10 I spent the year catching strep throat and scarlet fever((Scarlet fever is a bacterial illness that develops in some people who have strep throat.)); every month. I took so much bubblegum-flavored penicillin that just the thought of it makes me gag. Eventually they just gave me penicillin shots in my butt until they took my tonsils out and that was that.

Nobody was talking about probiotics in the mid-nineties, or about how a year-long routine of antibiotics would affect the long-term health of someone. At least not in our small Wisconsin town.

My stomach bloated up during that time and while I eventually lost the fat I continued believing I was overweight because all I could see was this big stomach looming out ahead of me.

In my teens I became convinced animals were tortured for food, and went vegan on and off for several years. Conveniently, shortly after I developed severe anxiety, depression, and would experience 2 or more panic attacks a day. Doctors couldn’t explain why I was going through this and prescribed one anti-depressant after another, even Xanax at one point. I’d regularly experience cataplexy((Cataplexy is a sudden and transient episode of muscle weakness accompanied by full conscious awareness, typically triggered by emotions such as laughing, crying, or terror.)), and the whole experience left me feeling that suicide was a better option than hoping anything would change. I wasn’t even 19 years old yet.

My mom found a naturopathic doctor near us who focused on changing our diets, which helped significantly. It was with her guidance that I got the panic attacks to stop. I still experienced a lot of anxiety but it was much better than before, and no more cataplexy.

But as we began eating “healthier” I had a few episodes where my face would suddenly flush real hot and bright red. My skin would get itchy, and break out in small hives. Just like an allergic reaction; except I hadn’t eaten or been exposed to anything that could account for it.

Then, I woke up one morning and my eyes were swollen shut. Like bee-sting-to-the-eyelids swollen shut. Then it happened again a few weeks later; and again every few days or weeks. Inconsistent.

Until I began to pay attention to what foods I ate the day before and found I couldn’t eat dairy any more. So I stopped and my swollen eyes got better.

Then after a few weeks it started again, not as severe, but to a degree I couldn’t ignore.

And just like that, I started down the path of being intolerant to one food after another after another. Sometimes I’d have to add several new food intolerances in a month, other times I could go a year without having to cut something new out.

In my mid-twenties I went back to veganism. Whole food, organic, power-juicing, macro and micro counting, super health vegan. Doing all the “right” stuff. And I suffered severe b-vitamin deficiency((Despite supplementation; not all vitamin supplements can be correctly used by the body if you have other conditions or complications at play.)) and destroyed my immune system((People following vegetarian diets tend to have lowered levels of white blood cells, our natural defender cells. This is the case for vegetarian diets including vegan, lacto-vegetarian and lacto-ovo vegetarian.)) in the process. Of all the things I’ve experienced in my life, the only thing I would ever take back is having ever eaten a vegan diet.

After that I got sick from every bug floating around. Even caught Swine Flu (H1N1) back in 2005 and spent 3 weeks with a high fever, throwing up everything I tried to eat. Came down with pneumonia part-way through, then had an allergic reaction to the inhaler I was prescribed.

I’d get flu + bronchitis super-smash combo at least 5 times a year, guaranteed to be sick immediately after flying anywhere too. All of this required antibiotics to clear up; I’d tried holding out and let me tell you it’s no fun having bronchitis for 6 months…

For several years I hopped on the keto diet, which was really helpful because for a time I was able to feel less food-obsessed. I also had more baseline energy than I’d felt for years.

By the time I was 30 years old I mostly had it figured out what I could and couldn’t eat. What you would miss out on during those years in my twenties was desperation to figure out what was going on and why, what foods were safe, feeling hopeless that nothing was safe to eat, and a myriad of eating disorders that left me nutritionally starved, food-obsessed, and generally miserable regardless of what I ate.

But I wasn’t becoming more tolerant of foods, instead after a couple of years on keto my intolerances seemed to skyrocket. I was eating all of the plant superfoods that are popular in keto circles – spinach, kale, almond flour, coconut everything, dark cocoa powder, etc. Not understanding that many of those are the exact opposite of healthy and actually contain high amounts of plant toxins and anti-nutrients.

New food intolerances happened more frequently. Then I developed severe chemical allergies, to literally everything. Dryer sheets, air fresheners, floor wax, body wash, furniture. Yes, furniture which off-gasses toxins for decades.. I had to literally wrapped my mattress in thick plastic to trap the off-gassing so I wouldn’t have an allergic reaction while sleeping on it.

It was absolute madness.

In 2018 I was down to mostly tolerating chicken, fish, and cauliflower. Even the cauliflower was hit or miss some days. Everything else would make me sick – to what degree on any given day was anyone’s guess; surprise!

Carnivore Hail Mary

I’d been reading about the carnivore diet for almost a year on the /zerocarb Reddit sub and was fascinated with the idea of someone eating only meat. At the time it seemed like just another variation of keto diet; but slowly more and more threads about people using it for health reasons caught my attention.

It seemed impossible to do really. Most of the people on the /zerocarb sub talked about eating ruminant meats as your main food source (beef, lamb, bison, venison, etc). But I knew that eating hamburger made me react worse than most other foods, and I had no taste or interest in steak.

When you’re desperate you’ll try anything really… I felt like I couldn’t socialize because everyone’s house had some kind of chemical somewhere I’d react to. I couldn’t really eat out with people because most foods made me sick and I had to be that bitch at every restaurant over-engineering my order.

Then one day I just fuck it.

I’d rather be dead from eating only meat than be alive and sick and miserable every day for the rest of my life.

And in just 3 days of eating only beef I felt better than I had in years; if not a decade.

I was hooked and still am.