7 months in, I became cold, gaunt, sleepless, hypothyroid, and lipids so high my doctor nearly came out of his chair. The fix was the one thing the whole movement tells you to fear.
Adding Raw milk and Honey can make carnivore actually sustainable but all those dudes are in a cult obsessed about being in Ketosis and a high stress state. They'd rather sell you sponsored crushed minerals powders to get electrolytes that milk and fruits will give you naturally.
I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to forward this to Dr Shawn Baker. For me do you mind telling me what particular protein(s) you were eating? The only thing that hurt me health wise in recent years was accidentally eliminating milk. Wracked my brain trying to figure out my gut problems until I realized I need milk to be solid.
Thanks so much for documenting that this happens to men too! I went carnivore about 16 years ago for about 8 months (what in those days was considered an extreme Atkins or Banting diet), and I had all the symptoms you had - sleeplessness, flat mood, muscle weakness (as well as cramps and bruising, I think you forgot the cramps) and the constant, aching bone-deep cold even in summer. Plus my skin was one permanent breakout and it went a sort of dull grey colour, and a lot of my hair fell out, and myriad fungal infections, although I don't know how related they were. Of course all the carnivore advocates always pile on me and say I was just "not doing it right" or I "didn't push through", but just like you, I kept it up for over 7 months and it had a horrible effect on me. I think it took me years to rebuild to real health, my muscle tone took probably about a year to come back and I suffered disclocations and tendon injuries in the ensuing months as well. Anything extreme is definitely not the answer!
This is the version of the carnivore story almost nobody writes, because the easy ending is "meat bad, I was fooled", and you refused it. The lesson you landed on, that it was never the food but the moment the food became an identity, is exactly right and far harder to sit with than either tribe's slogan.
What I most appreciated is that you kept your hedge honest on the lipids. The lean-mass-hyper-responder phenotype is real and documented, and whether that particular LDL pattern carries the same risk as ordinary high LDL is genuinely unsettled. Most people would either bury that uncertainty or weaponise it. You did neither.
One thing worth naming, and I mean it as a compliment to how carefully you wrote this: the mechanism that brought your LDL down when you added carbs back is the Lipid Energy Model, which comes from the low-carb camp's own researchers. So your recovery doesn't prove the carnivore physiology wrong. It confirms a prediction the dissidents themselves made. That's a sharper result than "the diet was bad", and it's the kind of thing that vanishes in the shouting.
For what it's worth, I come at this from the other side of the fence. Four years plant-based, then four years animal-based, and I'm still animal-based because it works for me. Which is the whole point, isn't it. Not poison, not salvation, just context: this food, this dose, this long, this person. Your body told you one thing and mine tells me another, and the framework that can't hold both is the one to distrust. Glad you’ve found what works for you, Simmo.
Interesting read, and I’m glad you found something that ultimately improved your health.
One thing I’d push back on is the leap from “carnivore was wrong for me” to broader conclusions about carnivore itself. What you’ve described is a real experience, but it may be an example of a diet that didn’t suit your physiology rather than evidence that the diet is inherently flawed.
I also think there’s a distinction between using symptom resolution as a clue versus assuming it’s the whole answer. If someone’s gut symptoms disappear on carnivore, it doesn’t necessarily mean meat is magical, but it also doesn’t necessarily mean the improvement was merely masking the problem. Sometimes removing foods that an individual poorly tolerates is part of fixing the problem.
The other challenge is that many of the issues you experienced, cold intolerance, declining performance, weight loss, poor sleep, can occur in people who are simply under-fuelling for a prolonged period, regardless of dietary philosophy. It’s difficult to know from the article how much was carnivore itself versus the way carnivore was implemented.
I completely agree with your broader point, though: no diet should become an identity. Whether it’s carnivore, vegan, keto, or anything else, once a framework becomes immune to evidence from your own body, you’re no longer running an experiment, you’re defending a belief.
The most useful frame is to stay objective and keep iterating. The goal is not to “pick a side”, but to converge on what actually works for your own physiology while remaining willing to update when the data changes. People like Paul Saladino are a good example of this in practice, where the stated aim is continuous testing and refinement rather than locking into a fixed doctrine. The value is in treating diet as an evolving hypothesis, not a final answer.
I mainly eat chicken, eggs and meat,no carbs I eat cheese I find bread just gives me indigestion I will eat some vegetables as I do like them I've cut my drinking down to two days a week
At my heaviest I was 17 stone I now weigh 13 iam 6 feet tall this has taken 3 years but I can maintain that weight easily
I walk every day as I deliver parcels I cycle and lift weights
I have had no health issues think it varies on what sort of person you are its not for everyone
If bread gives you indigestion, you realize that’s not the bread’s fault, that’s you, right? In my book, that’s a massive red flag something is systemically not right.
It’s likely the bread. Almost all “bread” is not really bread. It should only have 3 ingredients. Whst we sell for bread in the states would be illegal in europe. Like most of our food, it’s poison.
Try making your own bread. I only make my own because what is sold as bread in stores is poison. I know a lot of people that say bread upsets their stomach, or they can’t digest it and then they eat the bread I make and have no problems.
Sounds like a sensible call. For what it’s worth, the “repeats a few hours later” pattern with bread is often fructans rather than gluten, a type of carbohydrate in wheat that we can’t fully digest, so it ferments lower down and pushes gas back up (I have the same issue). A narrow, identifiable mechanism, not a sign the whole system’s broken. You’ve already done the smart thing: noticed the food, dropped it, and moved on.
Carnivores are the meat equivalent of vegans. Just as die hard cultists just on the opposite side. Has there ever been a culture where where all they did was eat meat?
The cult symmetry is the sharp part, and it's really what Simmo's whole piece is about: on both sides, the tribe gets louder than the body. One irony worth flagging though: the book you're reaching for is Weston A. Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, and Price's actual finding cuts against the all-meat reading. Price surveyed traditional diets and concluded the healthy ones were diverse and unprocessed, never built on a single food.
To answer your question, the closest historical cases are the Plains nations and the Inuit, who did eat near-exclusively animal foods for stretches of the year. The part that always gets dropped is that they ate the whole animal: organs, marrow, fat, and in the Inuit case the glycogen and gut contents as well. That's a long way from a modern plate of muscle meat. Same word, different diet.
I did a mostly vegetarian keto diet for 5 years and fixed all my health issues and lost weight. But it wasn’t sustainable in the long run. Introduced a minimum amount complex carbs and the weight came back immediately. Health problems are creeping up too. Want to go back to keto again but for me it’s so hard to transition into ketosis and I get discouraged. For now, I’ll eat less and move more. 🫤
Adding Raw milk and Honey can make carnivore actually sustainable but all those dudes are in a cult obsessed about being in Ketosis and a high stress state. They'd rather sell you sponsored crushed minerals powders to get electrolytes that milk and fruits will give you naturally.
Human beings are omnivores.. but we’re also adaptive. Eskimos do well on the carnivore diet in their environment but that’s unique.
An underactive thyroid makes most people fat.
Glad you got off it man. It was popularized because of Jordan Peterson and a lot of people were doing it
Meat = vaccinated. Vegetables = pesticides. It’s a lose / lose.
Be an opportunistic omnivore, it’s the way to go.
🎯
I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to forward this to Dr Shawn Baker. For me do you mind telling me what particular protein(s) you were eating? The only thing that hurt me health wise in recent years was accidentally eliminating milk. Wracked my brain trying to figure out my gut problems until I realized I need milk to be solid.
Fodmap is what I did to find out what didn't work for me.
Thanks so much for documenting that this happens to men too! I went carnivore about 16 years ago for about 8 months (what in those days was considered an extreme Atkins or Banting diet), and I had all the symptoms you had - sleeplessness, flat mood, muscle weakness (as well as cramps and bruising, I think you forgot the cramps) and the constant, aching bone-deep cold even in summer. Plus my skin was one permanent breakout and it went a sort of dull grey colour, and a lot of my hair fell out, and myriad fungal infections, although I don't know how related they were. Of course all the carnivore advocates always pile on me and say I was just "not doing it right" or I "didn't push through", but just like you, I kept it up for over 7 months and it had a horrible effect on me. I think it took me years to rebuild to real health, my muscle tone took probably about a year to come back and I suffered disclocations and tendon injuries in the ensuing months as well. Anything extreme is definitely not the answer!
Thanks for sharing this. Hits hard! And yes, They always resort to gaslighting! Every. Single. Time. Bloody cultists and their precious dogmas haha.
This is the version of the carnivore story almost nobody writes, because the easy ending is "meat bad, I was fooled", and you refused it. The lesson you landed on, that it was never the food but the moment the food became an identity, is exactly right and far harder to sit with than either tribe's slogan.
What I most appreciated is that you kept your hedge honest on the lipids. The lean-mass-hyper-responder phenotype is real and documented, and whether that particular LDL pattern carries the same risk as ordinary high LDL is genuinely unsettled. Most people would either bury that uncertainty or weaponise it. You did neither.
One thing worth naming, and I mean it as a compliment to how carefully you wrote this: the mechanism that brought your LDL down when you added carbs back is the Lipid Energy Model, which comes from the low-carb camp's own researchers. So your recovery doesn't prove the carnivore physiology wrong. It confirms a prediction the dissidents themselves made. That's a sharper result than "the diet was bad", and it's the kind of thing that vanishes in the shouting.
For what it's worth, I come at this from the other side of the fence. Four years plant-based, then four years animal-based, and I'm still animal-based because it works for me. Which is the whole point, isn't it. Not poison, not salvation, just context: this food, this dose, this long, this person. Your body told you one thing and mine tells me another, and the framework that can't hold both is the one to distrust. Glad you’ve found what works for you, Simmo.
Interesting read, and I’m glad you found something that ultimately improved your health.
One thing I’d push back on is the leap from “carnivore was wrong for me” to broader conclusions about carnivore itself. What you’ve described is a real experience, but it may be an example of a diet that didn’t suit your physiology rather than evidence that the diet is inherently flawed.
I also think there’s a distinction between using symptom resolution as a clue versus assuming it’s the whole answer. If someone’s gut symptoms disappear on carnivore, it doesn’t necessarily mean meat is magical, but it also doesn’t necessarily mean the improvement was merely masking the problem. Sometimes removing foods that an individual poorly tolerates is part of fixing the problem.
The other challenge is that many of the issues you experienced, cold intolerance, declining performance, weight loss, poor sleep, can occur in people who are simply under-fuelling for a prolonged period, regardless of dietary philosophy. It’s difficult to know from the article how much was carnivore itself versus the way carnivore was implemented.
I completely agree with your broader point, though: no diet should become an identity. Whether it’s carnivore, vegan, keto, or anything else, once a framework becomes immune to evidence from your own body, you’re no longer running an experiment, you’re defending a belief.
The most useful frame is to stay objective and keep iterating. The goal is not to “pick a side”, but to converge on what actually works for your own physiology while remaining willing to update when the data changes. People like Paul Saladino are a good example of this in practice, where the stated aim is continuous testing and refinement rather than locking into a fixed doctrine. The value is in treating diet as an evolving hypothesis, not a final answer.
I mainly eat chicken, eggs and meat,no carbs I eat cheese I find bread just gives me indigestion I will eat some vegetables as I do like them I've cut my drinking down to two days a week
At my heaviest I was 17 stone I now weigh 13 iam 6 feet tall this has taken 3 years but I can maintain that weight easily
I walk every day as I deliver parcels I cycle and lift weights
I have had no health issues think it varies on what sort of person you are its not for everyone
If bread gives you indigestion, you realize that’s not the bread’s fault, that’s you, right? In my book, that’s a massive red flag something is systemically not right.
It’s likely the bread. Almost all “bread” is not really bread. It should only have 3 ingredients. Whst we sell for bread in the states would be illegal in europe. Like most of our food, it’s poison.
I can eat it but I find a few hours later it will repeat on me, so I don't eat it
Thanks anyway
Try making your own bread. I only make my own because what is sold as bread in stores is poison. I know a lot of people that say bread upsets their stomach, or they can’t digest it and then they eat the bread I make and have no problems.
Sounds like a sensible call. For what it’s worth, the “repeats a few hours later” pattern with bread is often fructans rather than gluten, a type of carbohydrate in wheat that we can’t fully digest, so it ferments lower down and pushes gas back up (I have the same issue). A narrow, identifiable mechanism, not a sign the whole system’s broken. You’ve already done the smart thing: noticed the food, dropped it, and moved on.
Carnivores are the meat equivalent of vegans. Just as die hard cultists just on the opposite side. Has there ever been a culture where where all they did was eat meat?
Read Western A Princes book from 1930.
The cult symmetry is the sharp part, and it's really what Simmo's whole piece is about: on both sides, the tribe gets louder than the body. One irony worth flagging though: the book you're reaching for is Weston A. Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, and Price's actual finding cuts against the all-meat reading. Price surveyed traditional diets and concluded the healthy ones were diverse and unprocessed, never built on a single food.
To answer your question, the closest historical cases are the Plains nations and the Inuit, who did eat near-exclusively animal foods for stretches of the year. The part that always gets dropped is that they ate the whole animal: organs, marrow, fat, and in the Inuit case the glycogen and gut contents as well. That's a long way from a modern plate of muscle meat. Same word, different diet.
🎯
What were you eating? Were you getting lots of healthy fats from ruminant beef, butter and eggs, or were you eating lean meats like chicken breast?
The former yes.. I was doing it “properly”
Good for you having the guts to share this publicly. If more people did this, with all subjects, we’d all be better for it.
🙏
I did a mostly vegetarian keto diet for 5 years and fixed all my health issues and lost weight. But it wasn’t sustainable in the long run. Introduced a minimum amount complex carbs and the weight came back immediately. Health problems are creeping up too. Want to go back to keto again but for me it’s so hard to transition into ketosis and I get discouraged. For now, I’ll eat less and move more. 🫤
I do not condone this approach.