What I’ve Changed My Mind On After Four Years Of Carnivore

What you’re getting yourself into

In the spirit of reaching optimal performance, I’ve made a few adaptations to the carnivore diet over the past few years.

“Carnivore is just another crash diet. It’ll be in the long-term where you suffer.”

I’m well over four years in, and I’ve yet to stumble on any symptoms from eating excess cholesterol or widening my broccoli deficiency. The smoke hasn’t hit me yet. But it could just be that I’m still coasting on the stubborn resilience of youth, and yet to pay the price at the tender age of 31.

Which, if you’re meant to believe the statistics of paleolithic life expectancy, would make me ancestrally ancient.

Whatever stumbling block lies shrouded in the further, be it a scurvy affliction or a neutered thyroid, I can only be thankful with my current lot in life. Because, as of now, I’m the strongest, healthiest, serenest, and most energetic I’ve ever been.

If carnivore ends in a downward spiral, it seems to be taking the scenic route to get there. The end will be biblical.

My goal with this diet hasn’t been to honour the memories of my ancestors by seizing the echo of their nomadic diet. It’s always been about peak mental and physical performance. It’s not something I compromise on. So if I’m still shunning carbs after four years, the body must be pretty adept at performing without it.

At the same time, with my priorities set up towards maximising performance, I’ve been more than happy to tinker with the diet across those four years. I haven’t been sticking to arbitrary carnivore tenants that someone dreamt up on a forum 15 years ago.

So I’ve done a few things that might break the sanctity of ancestral dietary wisdom. Like supplementing iodine and continuing to drink coffee. That’s fine, because as far as I’m concerned, carnivore isn’t a cult where members have to abide by entrenched rules under the pain of excommunication and doxing.

Thanks to my tinkering, I’ve changed my mind on a few things over those four years.

1. Organ meats are necessary for total nutrition

I used to be a shameless shill for Big Liver. It’s unbeaten in its nutrient density, and contains significantly greater levels of certain nutrients that might be a little lacking in muscle meat, like Vitamin A and copper.

The Benefits Of Organ Meats On Carnivore

But I’ve since become skeptical about its essential nature in the carnivore diet. The nutrient density is a blessing, and also a curse, if you overindulge to the point where you run into the side effects of Vitamin A and copper toxicity.

If the liver to muscle meat ratio of a cow is around 1:100, you probably shouldn’t be eating 100 grams a week, and if you hate the taste of liver, that’s a pretty good sign that your body doesn’t want anymore Vitamin A.

When you’re slamming capsules of desiccated liver, you miss out on this defence mechanism, making it even easier to go overboard.

But besides finding liver repulsive, here are some other signs that you may have acquired Vitamin A toxicity.

• Fatigue
• Headaches
• Drying and itchy skin
• Stomach upsets
• Joint pain
• Hair loss

Personally, I slammed liver for fun in the first year or so of carnivore, before cutting it out entirely after I found that liver didn’t give me a buzz anymore. And in hindsight, the bouts of insomnia I ran into around then, might have been due to Vitamin A toxicity.

Just 3.5 ounces of liver will take you over the toxic threshold for Vitamin A. Even eggs can be an issue as a decent source of Vitamin A that gets piled on top of major sources like liver and cod liver oil.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t eat liver. Just that you dose cautiously, sparing, and stop eating liver if you don’t like the taste or feel sluggish afterwards. Many influencers recommend eating a few ounces of liver a week, and that is a terrible idea in the long run.

2. Workout carbs are necessary for building muscle

This diet was always going to have my own spin, since I came into it as someone obsessed with hypertrophy. I wasn’t going to risk sacrificing strength, and I was worried about research showing that your muscle fibers could suffer localised glycogen depletion on a low carb diet. This is a problem, since glycogen depletion lowers mechanical tension, the singular ingredient for stimulating hypertrophy.

For this reason, I spent my first few weeks of carnivore adding dextrose to my workout drink, with what I believed to be decent results. But I did find it to be a delicate balance, as having over 50 grams of dextrose in a workout would sometimes result in hypoglycemic symptoms in the aftermath.

I didn’t really notice a performance drop off when I didn’t take dextrose, but decided I’d continue taking it anyway just to stay on the safe side and keep the glycogen tank fully topped up.

6 Reasons To Bring Carbs Back To Carnivore

But as I continued to drop my volume in training in the spirit of improving performance and progressive overload, I began to question whether those carbs were really necessary. Especially since my sets were often being wrapped up in 15 seconds, and the opening 10-15 seconds of a high intensity bout is driven by the phosphocreatine system, rather than glucose.

So I’ve since dropped workout dextrose altogether, and replaced it with 10 grams of creatine instead. I haven’t lost any strength in the process, but I did gain some, so there’s that.

3. Lactose and casein are the only issues with dairy

I’ve danced around with various forms of dairy over my carnivore tenure, in an effort to find foods that helped add more flavour and calories to my setup. I still think they are very valuable additions, as long as you can find products that don’t irritate your digestion.

Cheese, cream, and butter, for instance, have very little lactose, compared to milk.

Goat butter is made out of A2 dairy, which doesn’t have the inflammatory casein found in A1 dairy.

Raw milk has the lactase enzyme required to digest lactose.

Can You Eat Dairy On The Carnivore Diet?

But accounting for lactose and casein isn’t always enough when you’re digesting dairy, as there’s another potentially problematic compound that is also pervasive in other animal products.

Histamine builds up when a food is exposed to the elements, and there will be plenty of people, like myself, that struggle to break it down.

Here are some symptoms of histamine intolerance:

• Diarrhoea
• Bloating
• Nausea or vomiting
• Headache
• Runny or stuffy nose
• Shortness of breath
• Itching
• Rash or hives

This isn’t a problem exclusive to dairy, but there are a ton of dairy products with high histamine, especially aged cheese.

I have to be quite cautious with hard cheese, aged beef, smoked fish, and bone broth. All these options can be a dance with the devil.

Side Effects You Might Experience On The Carnivore Diet

4. Supplements should be avoided

Carnivore is an ancestral promise that beef alone will supply everything the body needs to reach optimal function. Just like it did over millions of years of paleolithic evolution.

But there is a little asterisk here. We aren’t living in a paleolithic environment. Civilisation has left a few scars in the landscape. One of them being the depletion of the likes of iodine and magnesium in the soil, and the inclusion of pollutants like bromide that block the absorption of iodine.

By all means, you should minimise the supplements you take on carnivore. But you shouldn’t blindly believe that you need to avoid them entirely. Don’t be a slave to some arbitrary rules that were never ratified by our paleolithic ancestors.

It’s only in the last year where I decided to finally look into iodine supplementation. It’s a staple now, while I also take magnesium glycinate and Vitamin D3 to complete my triumvirate of carnivore supplements.

Should you take supplements on carnivore? That depends on your context. There is no blanket recommendation that could be made here.

Why You Should Consider Supplementing Iodine

5. Salt is an essential nutrient

The “optimal” version of carnivore is typically said to be beef and salt. Our evolutionary food source combined with the master mineral for hydration. The keto flu that can arise during the transition to carnivore can often be attenuated by increasing salt consumption. So it gets parcelled in as an essential carnivore nutrient.

I’ve gone along with this for a while, and I’ve doubled down by adding electrolyte powder to my workout drink in order to ensure that I maintain optimal hydration and function.

Why You Should Be Eating More Salt

But recently I’ve been hearing more and more about long-term carnivores who abstain from added salt entirely with zero issues. In fact, they find that they simply perform better without salt.

This might seem like heresy for people that view salt as a performance-enhancing supplement that has always been a prized commodity over the span of civilisation. The word salary, for instance, comes from the Latin word salarium, which was the money paid to Roman soldiers so they could purchase salt.

But if you cast back the net to a time before civilisation, you will find very little evidence that our ancestors sought out salt licks to obtain what has now been framed as an essential supplement. And by very little, I mean none. Herbivores sought out salt licks, our paleolithic ancestors did not.

It’s easy to understand why, when you appreciate that sugar needs the presence and support of salt to be absorbed from the alimentary canal. The more carbohydrates you eat, the more salt you need. And civilisation basically amounts to a series of grain states.

What happens if you cut out carbs entirely? Adding salt might initially manage the symptoms of dehydration as the body transitions towards a fat-based metabolism. But in this situation, salt fulfills the role of a band-aid. Once the transition is complete, salt loses its benefits.

Continuing to overuse the salt can just make it hard to maintain optimal hydration, since you’re overriding the body’s ability to self-regulate by adding in quantities of sodium that would have been in vast excess to the evolutionary diet.

In other words, salt could actually be causing your electrolyte imbalances.

Once again, I’m not arguing that you should steer clear of salt entirely. Just that if you’re pounding the salt and the electrolytes, you might be an experiment away from finding an even better level of performance.

5. You can’t drink too much water

Water fulfills matching roles with salt on a carnivore diet, with both being seen as vital components with no limits. The more, the better.

But just how evolutionarily appropriate is it to need to drink a gallon of water spaced across the day. Our ancestors couldn’t just hug the river systems, and that constant need for water would have made us pretty fragile on land for a terrestrial species.

Unless water wasn’t their only source of water. If you haven’t heard of metabolic water before, it’s pretty simple to grasp. The breakdown of fat, which could come from your own stores, also yields water in the process. For every gram of fat, you get a gram of water.

But this doesn’t just mean that you don’t need to be dunking your insides with a gallon of water. Overconsuming water could actually be harming you. Because not only does it compound electrolyte imbalances by flushing them out as urine, it also blunts fat loss. Dry fasting would force the body to burn greater levels of fat in order to unlock that metabolic water.

The comparison between wet and dry fasting is understudied, but there are a few. One such study showed that dry fasting resulted in three times more fat loss.

The great thing about this, is that it dovetails nicely with the experiment of cutting out salt. In fact, those two are just two sides of the same coin. Raise your water intake, and you’ll need more salt to balance it out. Raise your salt, and you’ll need more water. Cut out salt, and you’ll do perfectly fine just drinking to thirst, and roaming the African Savannah for hours on end without needing to risk being chewed up by a crocodile or trampled by a grumpy hippo.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully this article will help illustrate the fact that finding your body’s optimal level of nutrition can be a process of tinkering that spans years. And such a process of evolution requires you to be open-minded, inquisitive, and amenable to change. If you treat the rules of carnivore as immutable gospel, then you could end up shooting yourself in the foot.

For me, the addition of iodine made a pretty noticeable difference in my energy levels, especially later in the day. Cutting out histamine-rich foods made digestion so much easier. Dropping liver resolved a lot of complications, insomnia being one of them. Removing salt and water has been less perceptible, but there have been absolutely no downgrades in performance.

You don’t have to execute these strategies. They are simply suggestions, gleaned from my four years of experience. I’m still very capable of making more adjustments as I go along, and for all we know, my next article could be announcing my realisation that mangos are necessary for peak performance.

I guess we’ll just have to find out.

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