What you’re getting yourself into
The mechanisms of why a carnivore high in fatty beef and dairy kills your hunger like nothing else.
The ultimate goal of a fat loss diet should be satiety. Because if you check off that box, then you don’t have to rely on neurotic willpower to drag you over the line and reach a hallowed number on the scale that you then hold onto for a grand total of five days.
But satiety is a grossly misunderstood term. The P:E diet by Diet Doctor and Ted Naiman is a great example of that.
Satiety is the feeling of fullness and the absence of hunger after a good meal.
The Doctor and Ted will tell you that you should be eating high protein, low fat foods, and plenty of fiber to maximise your protein to calorie ratio.
Alongside racking up the volume of food on your plate, while minimising the calories, so you can hit those stretch receptors that line the stomach and force the body into admitting that it’s had enough.
In other words, satiety, as they define it, is high protein, high volume, low calorie density.
And low fat meats and veggies are the foods you should be prioritising if you want to maximise satiety and fat loss.
This is a ridiculous take once you take the time to think about it for longer than five seconds.
Hunger disappears when you meet your energy needs. That’s the essence of what satiety really means.
Protein is a terrible source of fuel, because it has to be converted to glucose, and the process is long and inefficient.
Vegetables are a terrible source of fuel, because they barely contain any calories.
If the body could be convinced that eating a bunch of sawdust and energy-depleted meat was enough to meet its energy needs, then it wouldn’t have made it through the last few million years of evolution.
Nature would have deemed us too stupid to continue existing.
Satiety requires fuel. Not volume. Not building blocks for tissue repair. It needs energy in the form of your two energy macronutrients. Fats and carbs.
Why Don’t You Have Both Fat And Carbs?
Carbs digest quicker, and burn quicker.
Fats digest slower, and provide a slower release of energy that can span 6-8 hours.
So it might seem like the sensible play here is to get a good dose of carbs and fats with each meal, so you can enjoy the satiating effects in both the short and the long-term.
But there are a couple of key issues with combining carbs and fats. And it’s not the Randle cycle, which is the mechanism where the burning of one substrate will inhibit the burning of the other. Because that is only an issue when PUFAs are combined with carbs, not so much when saturated fat is matched with carbs. So the Randle cycle is perfectly manageable if you pick the right fats.
The real issues are the following.
1. Carbs blunt ketosis – The spike in insulin provided by carbs neuters ketone signalling. Ketones have their own effect on suppressing appetite by lowering the hunger hormone, ghrelin. They also provide the brain with a superior, more efficient source of fuel, which prevents the risk of hypoglycemia that can prompt hunger signals.
2. Carbs blunt lipolysis – The insulin spike also prevents the body from liberating its own fat stores for energy. Which doesn’t mean you can’t burn fat when eating a high carb diet, but it does mean the rate at which you can burn those stores will be suppressed.
The second issue is especially key because it will greatly shift the dynamics of a calorie deficit.
To put it simply, you still need a calorie deficit to lose weight. Simply turning off the insulin pump by cutting out carbs isn’t enough. That’s why I’ve had no problems gaining weight on carnivore during my bulking phases. I just eat more fatty meat, and the weight creeps up.
But a calorie deficit, despite being necessary for weight loss, doesn’t have to translate to an internal energy deficit. Which would be where you’d experience the suppressive effects of weight loss, including lowered metabolic rate, satiety, and lethargy.
When carbs are low, insulin is low, and lipolysis is upregulated in a calorie deficit. The fuel being released from your own fat stores will compensate for the deficit and keep you in a state of energy surplus. As long as it’s saturated fat rather than PUFAs being released by your fat stores, those fats will dampen your appetite through their powerful ROS signalling.
If you’re perplexed as to what this ROS is, and what the core issue with PUFA signalling is, I’ll get to that in a short minute.
The point to understand first, is that by cutting out carbs, you’re allowing the body to ramp up the burning of its own fat stores, preventing you from getting tired and hungry even during a calorie deficit.
All the perks of fat loss, without the sides that are considered inevitable.
Mind you, this only works if the calorie deficit is relatively modest. If you’re trying to white-knucle a 1000 calorie deficit, then there’s no chance you’ll be able to liberate your fat stores at a fast enough rate to make up the difference. The leaner you are, the slower the rate is going to be, and the worse you’ll be at coping with large deficits and extended fasting.
Why Saturated Fat Makes You Satiated
And PUFAs keep you hungry.
ROS stands for reactive oxygen species, and it’s basically a form of oxidative stress. Saturated fat triggers high levels of ROS. This isn’t a flaw, it’s a function.
Because that ROS acts as a signal for the body to make the fat cells insulin resistant, preventing them from storing incoming fats, and increasing energy availability, thereby triggering satiety.
PUFAs, or polyunsaturated fatty acids, provide a weaker level of ROS that resembles that of glucose. The fat cells stay insulin sensitive, letting them hoover up the incoming fats, decreasing energy availability and keeping you hungry.
Saturated fats also create a bottleneck effect in the electron transport chain, which causes much of that fat to be burnt off as heat through mitochondrial uncoupling. This is the essence of what causes the meat sweats. Saturated fat literally turns your body into a furnace.
PUFAs, on the other hand, lower your metabolic rate by blocking the thyroid, suppressing glucose metabolism through pathological systemic insulin resistance, and suppressing fat metabolism by preventing them from being taken up by the mitochondria for aerobic respiration.
To add on to that, PUFAs also activate 2AG, which is the endocannabinoid receptor that drives overeating. In other words, it gives you the munchies.
This may seem like I’m painting a hyperbolic picture of PUFAs, but this makes a whole lot of sense when you realise where PUFAs are found in nature, and what their evolutionary role is.
Grains, nuts, seeds, fish, and insects are high in PUFAs. That’s why seed oils are even higher in PUFAs, because they’ve been artificially extracted from seeds.
These foods are available in the months preceding the winter, and are targeted by animals that like to fatten up for hibernation over the winter.
Squirrels eat seeds and nuts
Bats eat insects high in PUFAs
Bears eat fish and seeds
Hamsters eat grains, seeds, and insects
Birds eat insects and seeds
These animals all depend on PUFAs due to its ability to store fat, lower body temperature, and enable cell membrane fluidity at those low temperatures due to the liquid nature.
We don’t hibernate. But if we flood our body with PUFAs, we will be giving the body the perfect setting for overeating and fat gain.
Whereas by eating foods high in saturated fat, we’re raising the metabolic rate and triggering intense signals of satiety.
This is where the P:E ratio falls desperately short. It doesn’t appreciate that the type of fat you eat will have drastically different effects on satiety. If you combine PUFAs with protein and carbs, you’ll have the recipe for a disastrous diet.
But if you combine protein and saturated fat, you’ve got the perfect diet for kicking hunger to the curb.
You have the ability to make sustained weight loss effortless.
Guess what foods are high in protein, saturated fat, but low in PUFAs? Red meat and dairy. The hallmarks of a carnivore diet.ring from these hidden death crystals, therefore, is to stop eating high oxalate foods and wait to see if any signs of inflammation end up resolving.
Wrapping Up – How Carnivore Kills Hunger
There are a few more mechanisms by which a carnivore diet triggers intense satiety. Being dense and diverse in micronutrients will rectify any deficiencies that will be having their own independent effect on hunger. They’ll support optimal mitochondrial function, which is key for avoiding an internal energy deficit. With happy mitochondria, you won’t be low in energy production.
Ketosis itself actively improves mitochondrial production frome every conceivable angle by decreasing free radicals, improving antioxidative defences, triggering mitochondrial biogenesis, and increasing the efficiency of energy production.
If you could sell it as a pill, it would break the monopoly of statins overnight.
Then there’s collagen, which stimulates GLP-1, the satiety trigger that has spawned a new arm of the pharmaceutical industry. The tougher the meat, the more collagen it has. Ground beef is stacked in collagen, which is another reason why it’s the best cut.
The omission of addictive substances like sugar and wheat also makes a monumental difference, because there will be plenty of people that reach for these foods whenever they’re in a state of emotional upheaval or boredom.
So to summarise, here’s a list of reasons why carnivore is the ultimate diet for satiety.
Ketones suppress appetite
Ketones upregulate lipolysis and ameliorate or wipe out the energy deficit
Saturated fat increases metabolic rate and increases energy availability
Minimisation of obesogenic and hyperphagic PUFAs
Omission of addictive substances like sugar and wheat
Repairing of nutrient deficiencies that lower mitochondrial function
This doesn’t make carnivore foolproof as a weight loss agent, because you can still muddy the process by undereating fat and making high PUFA pork and poultry the bedrocks of your diet.
But if you prioritise fatty red meat, there’s extraordinarily little that can go wrong.
It’s certainly better than taking a GLP-1 drug like ozempic that gives you nausea, foul burps, 40% muscle loss, and potential permanent intestinal paralysis.
Read More Here
If you want to figure out the best way to set up your own metabolic revival, reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, or sign up to my coaching programme below for customised hypertrophy programmes and carnivore nutrition plans.
