COVID to carnivore

 I have been only hitting the highlights of the past ten years of my Keto-carnivore journey because I want to get it up to more of a weekly or bi-weekly account of the present status and my transition to being a complete carnivore. I will from time to time flashback to what I went through to get here now and that will fill in some gaps. So let’s continue onward to the present day. 

When COVID came along I was glad that I was now self employed because working in retail I almost certainly would have got the virus. I know that because I dealt with heads colds three or four times a year probably from handling cash and being in a crowded environment eight hours a day. I went and got the vaccine when available and have had two boosters shots. So far I seemed to have either avoided it or had symptoms so slight I didn’t know. In any event I am still on an even keel.  

My main focus was on trying to not only maintain my weight but to get back under 200 lbs and try to build up some muscle to prevent sarcopenia (muscle loss)from setting in. I managed to stay sugar free 90% of the time but my daily carb load would vary between 50 too 100 carbs a day of non sugar carbs. Calorie wise it was about 15% of the total calories making me about 85% carnivore since that’s all that’s left. I had eliminated seed oils already, except when I went off the rails and gave in to something illicit. Since I had yet to deal with the craving of eating just for the serotonin high of eating my problem was consuming to many calories so that expenditure was the same as my intake. Partly it was because I felt that if I cut my calories my metabolism would drop and I would not be any better off and it would lead to frustration and falling off entirely and having to start over and get back on track. I tried all the different eating patterns and had some success with them but I found myself breaking my own rules and eating when I felt like it. 

One positive thing I accomplished was devising a morning exercise routine that I follow every morning without fail it sort of just starts the day off right  It’s mostly a stretching routine that has elements of calisthenics and Qigong, a type of Chinese calisthenics, along with some standing yoga exercises and Tai chi balance movements. It takes about an hour to do and I have been doing it for over a year and seen and felt the positive results of it. It probably is what made me stick to my way of eating and just kept looking for a path that would see me having the same success in my weight loss as I was having in my exercise routine.

How I finally came to carnivore and the results of that since about Labor Day, I’ll go into on the next post.

On to Ketogenic Eating

 So after my body adapted to this way of eating, no sugar and around 50 or so other carbs a day I began to lose weight. Water weight at first but then a gradual but consistent weight loss that ultimately totaled around 70 lbs after about a year. I didn’t really cut calories of the non-carbs. And I tried to add more exercise to my life which was easier the more weight I lost. I started walking to the fast-food places where I would eat, having as ketogenic a meal as I could. However the addiction to eating just for the pleasure of eating wasn’t being addressed so falling off the program became a limiting factor and slowly but inexorably I gained back about 40 lbs. You kid yourself into believing that if you can make a keto version of your addictive foods you can literally have your cake and eat it too. The reality is you still want the real thing and eating a sham version of your favorites only deepens your desire for the real thing. You just yo-yo back and forth with your weight going up and down five or so lbs and not making any real progress. More about that later.

The story continues

 Well, the neck issue resolved itself enough that it was no longer a problem though it left some weakness in my shoulder that may be permanent. I started taking blood pressure meds that at first had little effect, after a change in dosage they had a better outcome but it was only for a short time while they were in my body. At that point I got fed up and thought this ridiculous, high blood pressure isn’t the problem it’s a manifestation of the problem which is you can’t be 100 lbs over weight especially in your late fifties. Although I knew I had to lose some weight I had a long journey with diets and knew they just didn’t work. You would stick to it scrupulously with little effect till you inevitably would just give up. But I was willing to try again so I went to the internet trying to find something that showed me something I could try. At first I found the same clap trap that I knew was wrong and I knew exactly what would happen if I were to go down that same pointless path. But then I came across a video on YouTube from a doctor all the way on the other side of the planet in Australia called Doctor Phinney. The video had a title something along the lines of  Why Low Calorie , Low Fat Diets don’t work. It was a shock to find someone saying straight out what I knew to be true. The video was somewhat science heavy but I’m a science oriented guy and had little problem following what he said. Once it was stated outright I knew it was correct and knew immediately I would give up sugar entirely and start living in a sugar free lifestyle. I didn’t cut out all the carbs just the pure sugar and tried to keep all other carbs below about fifty grams per day. I didn’t cut the calories either, my feeling was just cut the sugar and then we’ll go from there. Cutting out the sugar was hard at first be cause I had both a psychological addiction to the pleasure of sugar and a actual physical addiction where I would get tremors and my brain was screaming at me that we need it we need it! I discovered I could placate my brain by using sugar free candies that would pacify the cravings until I would eat again. I went several days with a pocketful of Wethers sugar free hard candies always at hand and might go through a dozen a day. Within a week I needed them less and less and finally stopped carrying them at all. I lost a lot of water weight initially, which was not surprising but it also drained me off electrolytes and I experienced was is now called the Keto Flu where the lack of Potassium and Magnesium leave you weak and with very low energy. It does really feel like your coming down with something. Once I figured out what was happening and started supplementing them it quickly went away. The loss of eight hundred to a thousand kcals a day from no sugar was a caloric deficit and even without trying to control any other calories I began to lose weight consistently. The blood pressure problem also starting abating as well and over the next year I lost around seventy lbs. I’ll go into more details about that next time.

The start of it all

 So I set up this blog space a long time ago and after a few posts abandoned it. I never deleted it and decided recently to use it to chronicle my own transformation from a low carb and probably eighty percent carnivore to a complete carnivore. 

A brief history relevant to the subject at hand. When I was in my mid-fifties, I’m sixty five at this point in time, I began to experience difficulties with my health. I have been generally healthy with few serious health issues but I have always been over weight and much of that time as obese by definition. In my mid fifties my body started sending me memos that things were not going to continue on the same way. It was if my body was saying to me, ‘ Buddy, you may have good genes and all but we just can’t keep this up’. I was eating the standard American Diet with no smoking and no alcohol but a lot of sugar. I look back and estimate at least eight hundred kcals of sugar a day over everything else that I was eating. 

Part of the problem was I was becoming pre-diabetic from the high sugar intake and a lack of exercise was making high in body fat and low on muscular development. I looked big but rather than a muscular athletic build gone soft the reality was a skinny guy gone fat. One of the issues I was dealing with was high blood pressure and with it came edema, where my swollen lower legs would literally weep water out of them to the point I would put folded paper towels in my socks to absorb the water so wouldn’t have wet spots on my pants legs. 

I was having problems with a stiff neck and shoulders from a repetitive work issue that was stemming from having to work as a cashier sometimes for hours on end and the register was too low for my body, I’m six foot tall which is good to hide how really fat you are but you also fool yourself  that your not as fat as you really are. Well, something about the continuous stooping and twisting back and forth moving items through the register giving me muscles spasms. They were bad enough it was beginning to affect my work, so I went to Urgent Care to see about that and maybe do something about the edema, which I was still denying that it was a big issue, when it was in reality a urgent telegram from my body that things were going south. The urgent care X-rayed my neck and didn’t find any issues and prescribed prednisone and some muscle relaxer, but they were more concerned about the high blood issue and put me on some blood pressure meds and felt it would relieve or help with the edema. I think I’ll stop here and in the next post relate what happened and how it lead to me following a low carb diet.