Recently it has been pointed out to me that the Carnivore Diet has helped a lot of people in ways that other diets have not. I was skeptical, except what diet had I not tried? I was a vegan for a year on the advice of my doctor. Not only a vegan, but a vegan on a rotation/elimination diet. Did it help? Yes, but I think my diet was a short term fix, since it did help avoid some problem foods, but it didn't do a perfect job at nutrition.
At first my exercise was jogging or walking, having never heard anything of the benefits of resistance training. I really went to great lengths, going to a park near my home and jogging four miles a day. If I did that I usually felt great, so I did that most days. I even enjoyed that.
Eventually I was introduced to weight training, and achieved a nice toning, but to say, after months of effort, that I was making progress with muscle mass was laughable. Besides that, most people didn't think women needed muscle mass. This was discouraging. Yes, I was slim, and this seemed to make everyone ecstatic and deem my diet and exercise program a success. But what about my health? The entire focus of diet and exercise was weight, and most people thought that if you could just keep your weight down, you were healthy. In reality, there have been lots of healthy fat people.
The diets of conventional wisdom, high carb, low fat, low calorie, were almost suicidal for me. For example, I tried the Pritikin diet. That must have been the all time bottom of the diet barrel for me, and after four horrible days I moved along. The most success I had was with the Atkins diet, but after a few weeks I started having trouble sleeping and decided to quit.
This left me out in the wilderness on the diet and exercise road not knowing at all what to do. I walked down that treacherous road alone.
Not only that, blood tests showed serious vitamin deficiencies. I even took supplements, and yet after a couple of years the deficiencies were still there. Meantime, with my refusal to do the diet merry go round, and my lack of exercise motivation, I was gaining weight.
One day I met Dr. Michael Eades, and he said, "You should buy my book 'Protein Power.'" I thought, "When it comes out in paperback." One day it did come out in paperback, and I bought it and finally felt that I had found the perfect diet - the low carb diet. It allowed 20 grams of net carbs a day, and I really hummed along beautifully. My blood tests all were perfect too. I did find that I had to eat a lot more fat than he recommended though or I would feel like I was dropping through the floor. I don't think it was much different from the Atkins diet, and even now I'm not sure why it worked better for me.
This seems to be the problem with finding a diet though. What works for someone else doesn't work for everyone.
The diet that I was actually following was the Ketogenic diet. I had read a book about it around ten years ago that was aimed at children with epilepsy. This diet has been used for decades to treat and sometimes cure epilepsy, even before there were medications for it.
And so, while many people throw this diet and others similar to it like Atkins and Protein Power into the fad diet class, I am convinced that is a big mistake.
I did well for a long time on a ketogenic diet, but in the last five years or so it wasn't working well. For one thing, unless I fasted a lot, I was gaining weight. Besides that, my blood tests weren't right, and once again there were vitamin deficiencies, and anemia. Once I decided to eat mostly sprouts for six months. That caused weight gain and a severe vitamin D deficiency. How did that happen? I was taking supplements. I was sunbathing all summer. I took cod liver oil. No progress at all.
It was emphatically recommended to me by a well known doctor that I eat 30 grams of fiber a day. It was also emphatically recommended to me at the same time by a different doctor that I stop eating fiber.
And so I limped along on the same keto path not changing anything.
But wait. What had I done that had thrown the keto diet off course? More than a quart of sprouts a day. I was virtually living on sprouts. I thought this was great. My food bill was about $75 dollars a month, I had lots of fresh produce, I had lots of convenience since I didn't have to shop more than once a month and these sprout seeds store well too. Had I not discovered the miracle of how to have food in both hard times and easy times?
No one wanted to hear it. I thought this was the solution to world hunger.
It just wasn't the solution to Helene hunger. I came to realize that I didn't need as much fiber as some had led me to believe. Why? Because while people don't digest fiber, sometimes one's microbiome in the gut does, and translates that into lots of calories, carbs and even fat. Is that what I wanted? One of the very same gurus on Youtube who had been urging people to eat seven cups of kale a day was now telling people not to eat fiber.
So that didn't seem to leave many options. No carbs, no fiber. What's left? The Carnivore Diet. Or else a lot more water fasts.
I had started working out at the gym a few weeks ago, doing a routine called "the Slow Burn," that works well. It's not easy, even though it can be done in less than an hour once a week. In addition I started doing high intensity interval training, so far for four minutes a week if you add up all my intervals. It also doesn't sound like much, but tell my body that.
And I saw another video that recommended a water fast every other day for at least 24 hours. Then eat whatever diet you're on on days you don't fast. If done for 22 days studies had shown it reduced insulin resistance by 58%.
So I'm half way through the 22 days now. How is that working? I was doing very well, but then I had two big setbacks. Last Friday was my day to fast, and yet I had only done my high intensity interval training once. Some have insisted it's perfectly fine to exercise on fast days, so I went ahead with the program. Imagine my surprise to find that my blood glucose levels had shot up. I researched this on the internet, and sites like the Mayo Clinic were saying that this sometimes happened to diabetics and that if the blood sugar went to over 400 stop exercising immediately. Why did this happen? Because exercise causes the liver to put out glucose, but a diabetics pancreas may not put out the necessary insulin to deal with it. Oh, but don't worry, it will go away in a couple of hours.
It went away in about 50 hours, with fasting blood sugar readings of 114 first thing in the morning, when they had been in the 80s. Why can't anyone ever warn you? All the sacrifices of the past ten days set back to zero gain. Well, it was finally down to 98 this morning. Yay I think. I'm not even diabetic. I guess I play one on TV. Until I bought a glucose monitor I didn't know there was any problem, and now I find out I'm well on my way to diabetes, even with doing everything I knew how to do on my diet. What's really aggravating is that watching Youtube, Youtuber after Youtuber claims to have eaten the exact same diet I was eating and that that fixed everything. It fixed everything for them, but not for everyone. Besides that, when someone suffers from diabetes, or even dies of complications, they are blamed because of the lifestyle choices they made. I'm not the only person I know who has turned over every rock to find a solution to the metabolic aberrations.
OK, so I try again and don't exercise on fast days. I guess I can do that. Other than that I've had improvement - lower blood pressure and better sleep. Both of these were less great than on Friday. I have to keep telling myself that at least I'm finally going in the right direction.
I like the Carnivore diet. Some people want to also eliminate dairy or something else. At the same time including cruciferous vegetables. But that was the very diet I was eating that wasn't working that well. My plan is to completely avoid anything plant and eat anything animal that I like. Then fast every other day, probably for another 22 days. Oh, there was another glitch. I ate a Wendy's cheeseburger without the bun or lettuce, onion, pickles or tomato. For some reason that caused my glucose monitor readings to skyrocket too. OK.
And have I lost weight? Yes, at first there was a big drop, and now it's about a half a pound every three or four days, even with all the fasting. So it's painfully slow, but it's going in the right direction.
I enjoy this diet and love the steakos. One problem is that others have been raiding my steakos. These are hard to get, since I have to drive out of town to get the ones I like. Well, we do what we must. How much meat does one need on this diet? Surprisingly, about 1 1/2 to 3 pounds a day. Wow.
I have also been surprised to find that my muscle mass is really growing a lot, even this early on in my new exercise program. I've definitely put in some effort, but no more than other times that I saw very little increase in muscle and strength.
I've been reading a book called "Fighting Insulin Resistance With Strength Training," that of course I find fascinating, but I suppose I'm alone there. The author, William Y. Shang, M.D. stated that people are getting a lot less protein than they need. This is a critical problem for people over 60, like my poor sainted mother. I thought 75 grams of protein a day was a more than adequate amount, and my kale friend on Youtube says 50 grams. I can look at him and see he needs a few more grams of protein in his diet. I've been taking my Mom to the gym with me, in the hopes of helping her avoid the muscle loss of old age. But I would estimate she gets about 50 grams a day. How much does she needs, according to Dr. Shang? 98 grams!! At least twice what she eats. The body doesn't absorb nutrients as well when we get older, including protein, which is at least half the reason for the severe muscle loss of the elderly. So I decided to buy her protein drinks to supplement her diet. She's excited about having her wonderful milkshakes. Not Ensure though. Too much sugar and too little protein. I bought JYM Supplement Science. Will I drink my milkshake? Maybe. It does have some plant in it. In fact, several of them specifically advertised having fiber. That means plant.
One other thing that I like. My mineral levels are better. I don't have leg cramps from low potassium or magnesium even though I haven't been taking any.
Moooooo!
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