The Carnivore Diet

It all started when I was very young.  I was much taller than any of my siblings, even though I wasn't the oldest.  At 8, I received my first proposal of marriage.  My mother once asked the doctor about the early development, and he said it was something that sometimes happened to Norwegian children.  OK.  I excelled at school, which was assumed to be due to repeating the grade a few times.  I was treated as an adult at 11, and people were always angry because I wasn't carrying my weight and I seemed so woefully ignorant and acted like a child.  I remember a boy who was also large for his age.  Like me, he was Norwegian heritage, so maybe there's something to that.   The point?  Some things aren't the fault of anyone.  

And how does that tie into the carnivore decision?  Well, somewhere in this mix is an insulin problem, too much insulin.  It causes growth and weight gain.  It is related to estrogen problems, which is fed to cattle on feed lots to fatten them for market.  I complained to this once to a friend (male) who said that I should just go to a doctor and have my estrogen blocked.  Really?  The day after he had his testosterone blocked.   Ultimately, the cure is diet. 

Being female caused twice the problems with growth and weight gain, since estrogen is a growth hormone, and I actually had four times the normal levels.  

At 11 I stopped growing, I suppose because the combination of high growth hormone added to the infusions of estrogen from puberty turned my system on its head, and it decided to intervene by reducing general hormone levels. Soon with the growth spurts of all my peers, I was not a tall girl anymore and I had a new problem, which was physical bullying.   My older brother didn't physical abuse me, but he was thrilled that I had problems and said that it embarrassed him that people at school would discover that we were related, as if I could fix that.    

I did my best with diet, but it was never enough.  As a teenager I suppose I was saved by the fact that there wasn't enough food available for me to gain weight on.  As an adult I really faced a difficult scenario, eventually finding that if I didn't totally fast two or three days a week, I would gain two pounds a week.  Woe to any woman in America that gains weight.  The level of intense pressure on people, especially women, to be slender is unbelievable. But I did gain weight, and with it there was more physical and verbal bullying, apparently from people who imagined they were helping me to see the error of my ways and lose weight.  Or just men who hated women.  

I attempted to diet using all the wisdom the AMA has to offer, which is less than zero.  Reduce your fat intake and calories, they said.  That is actually a good way to gain weight, which is what happened.  After a few miserable tries at this, and being fatter for my efforts, I saw that there was a problem.  

What problem? one asks.  No one in a concentration camp is fat.  Really?  Wait till they get out and eat something.  Their lowered metabolic rate will cause them to gain weight in a hurry on fewer calories than what usually translates to weight gain.   

One thing that really helped me was an elimination diet.  A doctor encouraged me to test foods by eating them one at a time, giving me three foods to try each day, one at each meal.  After a while I settled on about twenty foods that worked well, but these had to be rotated so that I didn't eat the same food more than once every four days.  Might I add that this was a hyper vegan diet just by chance.  I have no special convictions about being a vegan.  Why?  I guess because Jesus ate animal food, and that was a good enough endorsement for me.  This diet did great things for my general health, clearing up all sorts of problems like rashes and sleep problems.  And btw, it was also low starch, since there were no grains that I could tolerate.  I ate beans and fruit mainly. Or just went hungry. 

Oh, did I try exercise? Yes, I knocked myself out with exercise.  It helped a lot, but eventually not enough.  

Why didn't I just stick with the elimination diet?  I did stick to it for a year and managed to function well all that time.  I just wanted to find a way that was less draconian.   Besides that, I don't feel this diet would have continued to work well indefinitely.  It was a good stop gap measure.  

So eventually I found the low carb diet.  This diet was miraculous for me and I did very well on it.  I feel that a lot of people would benefit from this diet, but I do think that there is a lot of individual variation with what works for different people.  Some people with kidney problems, for example, find a great deal of improvement in their health from a low protein diet.  I have even noticed that a low protein diet seems to do OK for me.  I would say that a lot of the improvement people with some health issues that many notice on a vegan diet is from the reduced efforts the kidneys need to make to operate on a low protein diet.  But I don't feel that everyone needs to go this route.  What I really found strange was the concept that some vegans have that a vegan diet is more "ethical".  Therefore a non vegan diet is evil.  I'm low carb scum.  OK.  New ways of bullying.  Why don't they learn to be ethical to people and not bully them?  

My journey went well for a long time, but then I hit a bump in the road.  I somehow came down with an illness for which I found no help at all from the medical community and was almost left to die.  Finally a clinic I visited went home for a holiday, leaving a skeleton crew to take care of patients.  The doctor that was left tried to brainstorm what could be done to help, for which I am eternally grateful.  "Have you tried fasting?" he asked.  He suggested a 30 day fast, and from that moment I was fasting, until 21 days later.  But that was OK because I was well again by that time.  And I was a lot thinner.  

So I began for a while to manage my life by fasting for a few days, and then trying to eat a low carb diet between fasts.  And that's how I limped along.  It annoyed me when people complimented me on how I had started to "take care of myself."  Let them fast for weeks at a time.  It's not fun.  A lot of people said this would never work.  Well, this did work.  

But one day I had fasting blood tests done that showed that I was prediabetic and headed for diabetes!  This was alarming.  I began to pay hyper attention to anything that anyone who had been diabetic or prediabetic had to say about what to do.  What did they say?  Eat a low carb or lately, ketogenic diet.  I think ketogenic was closer to my diet anyway.  And where did that get me?  Prediabetes.  I kept hearing shriller and shriller voices saying eat less carbs, and I had already only eaten 20 grams a day for several years.  

I decided to go on a sprout diet, because they were low carb and I thought I needed more produce, and sprouts were an easy source of fresh produce.  I didn't weigh myself at first, until I noticed that my clothes were too tight.  Yikes.  I had gained weight on sprouts.  How?

During the fasting I noticed something curious.  The general relief my system felt during a fast was so remarkable it could only be likened to recovery from poisoning.   Food was poisonous!  Could this be?  In fact, it actually is true.  Check out every single plant food.  They are full of toxins - oxalates for example in beans.  In fact, lima beans when improperly cooked contain cyanide, enough to kill people sometimes.  Kidney beans are the most toxic. But they're all like that.  My favorite is sulfarophane in cruciferous vegetables.  Broccoli sprouts contain 50 times the sufarophane of mature broccoli.  The sulfarophane in broccoli sprouts has been found to inhibit cancer and has been used to treat breast and liver cancer.  But more than a quart of these sprouts can be detrimental.  So there is a level of toxins that can do some good.  I liked the way that the broccoli sprouts reduced inflammation.   Tomatoes and other members of the nightshade family are famous for their toxic mischief, which explains the arthritis many suffer from eating them. 

Well, no wonder the diet road is so treacherous.  The food is poisonous.  There's only so much you can do about that.  You do what you can.  

Recently some have begun to condemn fiber which is found in plant foods.  I thought this was silly, but I saw a video that explained that fiber can't be digested by people, but if one's microbiota had gone off track, bad bacteria would eat the fiber, which could actually result in weight gain from fiber.  This was something to think about.  It would explain gaining weight on a sprout diet.  

So what should one do about the microbes going awry in one's gut and exploding the body by eating fiber?  There was no information on that.  Just be aware of that.  OK.  The only suggestion was to stop eating fiber.  This from someone who was famous for pushing seven cups of salad a day.  Fine.  

Meantime the Carnivore Diet was becoming popular.  No fiber, no carbs.  This was for me.  

Then another helpful video appeared on the horizon saying that for some, maybe even many, diet alone wouldn't fix insulin resistance.  This was a relief to hear.  So what would?  He said that it had been found that fasting every other day for three weeks would reduce insulin resistance by 68%. Oh really?  

So, that's what I'm doing now.  Fasting one day, the carnivore diet the next.  It's going OK.  I decided to take two tablespoons of nutritional yeast today, then read the label.  Oh horrors!  Five grams of fiber!!  All that sacrifice to avoid fiber and I wasted it on nutritional yeast?  No, I'll just be eating meat or fasting.  Forever?  No, I don't know how long.  Until this ship turns around.