Start The 30 Day Carnivore Reset

The Apex Reset

Lose fat by the bucket. Build a mountain of muscle. Wrap up your transformation in a matter of months.

Accept these aspirations and you’d be putting yourself in a fantasy realm of rainbows and unicorns. But this is exactly the promise that gets offered on a silver platter to every unsuspecting beginner.

There’s a shortcut epidemic running rampant through the fitness industry. People don’t just want results in half the time. They wanted it yesterday. It’s a symptom of the modern human brain, and it’s worth billions. The cutting truth is that the transformational programmes being sold to this market, however aggressive and ingenious, tend to end up in a complete waste of money and effort. 

There’s no greater culprit here than the realm of dieting. There’s a never-ending conveyor belt of flashy nutritional programmes that each claim to be the one to finally put an end to your losing track record at portion control.

When these dressed-up programmes inevitably fail to deliver on their promises to recharge your body and shift the blubber, that’s your fault. With more willpower, you’d be able to embrace the suck and battle your way to the finish line. 

Even the safety-first diets that preach portion control, calorie counting, and intuitive eating, they agree with this notion. Your ability to wage war on your fat cells comes down to whether you’ve got the mental punch. 

And here’s where they all get it wrong. Discipline, motivation, willpower, these are aspects of character that matter. But if you’re going to dive in and furiously plough your way upriver, you’re setting yourself up for ignominious defeat.

Brute force can work in this situation. You could simply lose weight by calorie counting your way down to 1000 calories, or cutting out everything except the salad. But manhandling the metabolism comes with consequences. Rampant hunger, a geriatric metabolism, lethargy, apathy, and everything else that gets lumped into the features of ‘proper dieting’. All of which means, if you somehow manage to blast your way to the finish line of 9 stone flashing up on the scale, you’re about to have a hard time keeping those numbers from swinging back up.

There’s a very simple reason, that’s also a little controversial. The modern diet, in its many forms, is broken. Whichever nutritional template you choose from of the pack, it’s inevitably going to contain a host of foods that the human metabolism has no business accepting. 

The Worst Mistake In Human History

To understand the gravity of this, we just need to bring this back to a critical point in human history, 10,000 BC. Since the first hominids decided to drop out of the trees and venture onto the African savannah, we’ve been continually evolving to adapt to the demands of our surroundings. Our ancestors lead a nomadic life, and the goal was one of survival. Search the lands for enough food and water to let them see the next day. 

They steadily came to the realisation that there was one food source that overshadowed the rest. Large, lumbering beasts that roamed freely across the savannah, and the continent-crossing steppe to the north. Mammoths, giant sloths, aurochs, woolly rhinoceros, and many others that would have dwarfed their cousins today. These were the megafauna, and they numbered in millions, the dominant group in the Pleistocene Epoch. At least they were until the humans came calling.

Our cave-dwelling ancestors staged a steady climb to the top of the food chain, turning from scavengers, to hunters, to apex predator. They became, in every sense, carnivores. The megafauna had no means of defending themselves against their new foe. As humans stepped out from Africa and ventured onto the other continents, vast sweeping extinctions followed. We might worry about our impact on global warming today, but in reality, we broke nature a long time ago. 

When they had no more mammoths to chase down, they had to find another way of getting food on their plates, or risk starvation. So we settled down and began to farm grain, commencing the first agricultural revolution, circa 10,000 B.C.

On one side, it was a step that allowed me to type this out 12,000 years later. But it came with a cost. We’ve brought in plant foods with terrible nutritional value, and a host of antinutrients. 

Plants Don’t Love Us Back

The problem here is that plants, bar the exception of fruits, aren’t really designed to be eaten. All living species on the planet have the quest for survival built into their code. Animals can run, potentially fight, but a stalk of cabbage has to sit there and accept its imminent fate. If that’s all there was to it, then that cabbage would be steadily wiped off the planet. 

That’s exactly why plants have toxins. They’re designed to kill, maim, or just dissuade curious predators. They don’t like getting eaten, and our metabolism suffers for it. We’ve compounded that problem in the last century by processing these plants further to strip any remaining value and adding a bunch of chemicals for good measure. This has fuelled an epidemic of metabolic dysfunction, where a handful of belly fat is only a side effect. 

This is why modern diets do a terrible job of whipping you into a serviceable summer shape. Whether it’s the sugar, the toxins, the chemicals, or just the empty calories, there’s always something that’s going to act as a brake on the breakdown of fat cells, and the building of muscle.

In short, you’re in trouble no matter what diet you turn to. But there’s an easy way to clamber out of this mess. Ditch the modern foods, and return to the evolutionary palette. 12,000 years of eating grain may seem like an awful lot of time, but that’s a mere snapshot in the human timeline. If our existence was condensed and laid out over a 24-hour clock, the agricultural revolution would have taken place at 23:54. It’s a blip in our evolution. There was one food that we adapted to get the most out of, and it wasn’t spinach. The megafauna may have been wiped out, but they still have some smaller cousins left over. 

We’ll leave out elephants because we don’t want to match our ancestors’ footsteps too closely and cause another extinction. In beef, lamb, buffalo, venison, there are still foods that mirror the nutritional makeup of the megafauna. These are the foods that drove us to the top of the food chain. 

The Power Of Red Meat

See My Article – How To Hit All Your Nutrient Needs On Carnivore

Could you survive on red meat alone? Despite there being no long term studies on Pubmed to reach for, there’s plenty of evidence when you know where to look. There are plenty of carnivores in the online community with a decade in the bank. In the relatively recent past, there are the accounts of Inuits and other hunter-gatherer cultures, who really might as well have just been called hunters. 

Then there’s the consistent evidence from digging up the remains of our distant ancestors who predate the last ice age. Tools for breaking into bone, slashing skin, teeth with no signs of cavities. We were meat-eaters, and if not exclusively, then predominantly. And we’re still here, so the carnivore diet can’t have gone too badly.

Here are the facts that we can play with. Red meat, along with several other animal products, is by far the most nutritionally dense and diverse food sources. They are as wholefood as it gets, since they date back to palaeolithic times. And they all lack a certain something that could be blamed for the brunt of our modern metabolic problems. 

We’re talking about the food that we rarely ate in our ice age days, ramped up during the agricultural revolution, and which we’ve now given the prime slot in modern times. Despite what your dietician might tell you, the five-a-day rules don’t hold water. The body’s essential carbohydrate requirements, that being plants, is a big fat zero. When you decide to factor in the toxins, antinutrients, chemicals, and heavy metals that get strung along for the ride, the plant package is a decisive net negative. 

The Plant Paradox

Plant foods, whether that be in processed form, grains, oils, vegetables, even fruits, are the biggest driver of inflammation in the body. Inflammation itself is a perfectly natural phenomenon designed to respond to acute spikes of stress. Think hefting up a heavy barbell, or waking up to realise that you’ve missed your third and final alarm. Acute stress can be uncomfortable, and it’s the type a healthy body can cope with.

But what happens if you repeatedly flip the switch, to the point where the pulses of stress never get a chance to settle? At this point you’ve got chronic inflammation, with a cascade of downstream results that can degrade and destroy the metabolism. Sugar is the biggest culprit, but that still leaves a host of toxins that each inflict persistent damage.

See My Article – The Hidden Dangers Of Plant Toxins

These are the big ones, but they still amount several amongst many. The uncomfortable truth is that the deleterious effects of your kale and crushed walnut salad are not always noticeable. Not to the point where you realise your mistake half an hour later. But the chances are that the metabolism is nevertheless under constant assault from an invasive species. Plants don’t like being eaten, and the body has to face the consequences. 

Your chances of building muscle and shedding fat take a sizable knock, given that both of them require optimal nutrition and recovery in order to take place. A state of chronic inflammation puts the brakes on both.

Unfortunately, we’ve decided to adopt the impression that these plants want nothing but the best for us, a shift that has been heavily influenced by government backing since the 1950’s.

Official guidelines have continued to promote the likes of grains, fiber, and vegetable oils. We’ve dug ourselves into a hole, and we’re still insisting on digging deeper. But there’s an obvious path out of this. The ancestral way, the carnivore diet.

Start The 30 Day Carnivore Challenge

Think of a 30-day diet challenge and all manner of crash diets are likely to pop into your head. But this isn’t one of those, there’s just too much science and sense backing it up. There are two simple steps that define the carnivore diet. 

1. Eat more, much more, red meat
2. Drop any food that’s made with plants

The game plan might look straightforward, but the potential here for a complete body upgrade can’t be played up enough. This isn’t the sort of challenge which you drop after a month to run off in search of the next thing to pique your curiosity. This is the diet that recharges and revitalises the metabolism, clears up the brain, and puts the turbos behind your fitness goals. 

So when you finally make your way to the end of those 30 days, you won’t be staggering across the finish line. Chances are you’ll be keeping many of those foods, and continuing to give others the cold shoulder.

If you’re prepared to build a body fit for an apex predator, head on through the button below to start the Apex Reset.