Today's Tucker (Zero Carb Edition) - 31/07/09

Tomorrow, the full round-up, I promise! My mornings have been a blur of late, with long days of work, and events in the evenings... Thank goodness for a nice, empty weekend ahead of me! (Admittedly, it's already filling up quickly!)

Adding in more eggs today, and a teeny bit of cheddar cheese...

Breakfast: two fried eggs, bacon, and anchovies!


Lunch: two lamb sausages


Dinner: beef eye fillet (medium-rare, divine!), and cheeseburgers of beef mince and egg, topped with cheddar). Very happy to still have meat as the main event in the meal as I test my reactions to the other primal food groups (plus low-carb dairy).

Today's Tucker (Zero Carb Edition) - 30/07/09

Today was meant to be a weekly measure-up after two weeks of meat-only, but I barely had time to cook up breakfast and lunch, so tomorrow's weigh-in will have to suffice! But in the meantime, some overall feedback:

- Didn't really notice any changes, except for good energy levels - no fatigue at any point, although I haven't had much in the way of that for months now.

- No digestive issues: fewer bathroom visits, but no bloating or pain or anything uncomfortable.

Breakfast:


Lunch:


Dinner:



Yep, those are scrambled, fried egg yolks on top of the barramundi - adding eggs back into the mix! Then it'll be a little dairy, and I'll start adding vegetables back in come next Thursday.

Carnivore: Day 14

Today completed a fortnight of eating nothing but meat, and while I will do a proper measuring up tomorrow, I will say that I feel really good, my energy has been very stable, I haven't had any digestive issues at all, and have noticed some nice boosts in muscle tone and skin texture.

Skipped breakfast - cooked up some sausages, but packed them up to take to work, and only ate them when hunger finally kicked in (around 11am):


Snacked/lunched on a tiny tin of tuna in water, just in case dinner was to be delayed... Then headed into the city for a girly night at the movies!

Dined at Tomodachi at Melbourne Central:


A selection of sashimi.


Wagyu Beef & salmon roullade, on some greens which I ignored completely.

Hm, didn't end up taking in many calories today, but still managed over 50% fat, so hopefully things will be ok for my last meat-only day! Sure ended glamorously, if not with a resounding bang!

Carnivore: Day 13

Last night, I got a bit peckish, so I whipped up some lovely lamb chops, fried until rare:


So as a result, I wasn't in the least bit hungry for breakfast this morning, so I decided to fast through the day. Packed a couple of tins of tuna/salmon, just in case, but they remain untouched for another time.

Dinner: minced beef, bacon, and spoonfuls of lard!



Second course: chicken breast with skin (cooked up mainly for the boy's late dinner, and figured I might as well give it a try. Boring snoring.)



Long days for both of us here, no energy to type or even think... Time to read in bed!

Carnivore: Day 12

Weight: 79.7kg

Breakfast: a HEAP of bacon!


Lunch: leftover roast chicken


More after getting home from work, including picking at the carcass, with my teeth! Ahh, the rib meat is the sweetest!

Dinner - entree: sardines (for the first time in my life)


(Yeah... I don't like them. I managed to eat 3 pieces... Tasteless blech.)

Dinner - main: bacon and minced beef, cooked in a generous serve of bacon grease!


Now, that's definitely a winner!!

Carnivore: Day 11

A quick post, since I need to get some preparation done before tomorrow morning's classes, and I've spent most of the day otherwise engaged - family stuff.

Weight: 79.7kg

Breakfast: bacon, and minced beef in lots of bacon grease. Mince looks so gross in photos, but here's a sexy shot of bacon in all its glory:


Lunch took place as a small restaurant beside Lake Wendouree in Ballarat, where I requested a steak with bacon. The photo is on the boy's iPhone, so I'll transfer it here later, but suffice it to say that I was served a well-done sandwich steak, with a couple of pieces of burnt shortcut bacon. Oh yum.

Dinner - entree: half a crayfish tail with a little butter for dipping


Dinner - main: roast chicken - drumsticks, wings and skin!


Phwoar - I won't be hungry again for a good long while!

Carnivore: Day 10

Well, with an eye toward upping my calories and fat, I knew I'd have to do my best to 'indulge' whenever possible, since my dinner was pretty much out of my control...

Weight: 79.5kg

Breakfast: lamb forequarter chops (for which I have now found an organic supplier, woohoo!), smothered and fried in lard



Lunch: The boy was soooooo hungry (sugar junkie!) while we were out shopping, so he headed over to Grill'd while I took the opportunity to indulge in some salmon sashimi, ignoring the bed of carrot, of course:


Our shopping trip was devoted to my favourite items - meat & lingerie! Fear not, the following photos deal only with the more interesting of the two... :)


A quick breakdown of the haul:

Biodynamic/Organic Butcher - four lamb forequarter chops, 2 lamb backstraps, four beef sausages, and four lamb sausages. Also, as pictured in the lower-left corner of the image, pig fat! All minced up and ready to render :)

Fish market - tray of sardine fillets, rainbow trout fillets, barramundi cutlets, calamari rings, and 1/2 a crayfish.

Organic chicken market stall - 1kg skin-on fillets, 1kg drumsticks, and 1 spatchcock.

Supermarket - bacon and anchovies. They get less of my money each fortnight.

All that came to under AU$150, and should last at least a week. That covers all of my daily food intake, as well as the boy's dinners. Huzzah!

Ate some bacon after unpacking everything, to tide me over until dinner at the boy's work Christmas In July party. Good thing too, whilst the entree arrived promptly - -


(Prawns were tastier than overall dish's presentation would suggest - didn't eat the 'other stuff' of course)

- - the main took another ninety minutes to arrive!


Fairly nice rib-eye once it did arrive, specially requested sans sauce and veggies, though slightly over-cooked by my preference, but not nearly as well-done as some others. Some bizarre inconsistencies marked an otherwise charming evening, spending time with charming people. Look, here are some charming people now...


Don't we scrub up nice? And as you can probably ascertain, I haven't had the figure nor confidence to pull off a slinky evening dress before, and while my figure isn't yet perfect, I had a lot of fun showing some skin and not having to worry about the old bulges!

Finally, my ego received a thorough stroking from Ryan Robitaille, thanks to his recent Fun Friday Potpourri Post, where he linked to the wisdom of Dr. Michael R. Eades, the inspiring Mark Sisson, and... me! Thanks Ryan!

Carnivore: Day 9

On the basis of the last week's results, I have decided to up my calorie target to 2000, which in broad strokes means I'll just be eating until I'm full, up to three times per day. I'll be adding more fat (lard, etc) to help boost my count and my satiety. But it's important to note that I don't calculate any of my figures until after dinner, when I log all my food, so while my target has shifted, my regimen has not, so sometimes I'll miss that target. I hope to learn what 2000kcal looks like quite quickly - from last week, I suspect it's just what I've been naturally consuming.

Anyway, today was practically a perfect game in that respect, and boy am I full! (Oh, I ate dinner four hours ago, just by-the-by...)

Breakfast: two lamb forequarter chops - yummy, my favourite, and fattier than usual! Oh, I wish I could find an organic supplier of this cut, it's just divine. And super-cheap at the conventional supermarket. It'll have to remain occasional for now though, to avoid the growth hormones etc. :(


Lunch: a chicken breast/wing quarter from the roast chook last night. There weren't any clean forks in the staffroom, so I camped out and my desk and ripped it to pieces with my hands. :) No time to photograph it. I'll just assume you know what a chicken breast and wing, covered with succulent, seasoned skin looks like...

Dinner - Entree: I made grilled barramundi fillet for the boy, so had some for myself while my dinner roasted, and served with a few anchovies. It's not pretty, but it was damn tasty:


Dinner - Main Course: cooked up a whole pack of chicken drumsticks since our freezer is chockers and yet I'm picking up my pig fat tomorrow, ready to render it, so I needed to make a space. Coated the drumsticks in fat, and a sprinkling of thyme:


To my delight, some excess fat ran off and out of the drumsticks and fried up into tasty 'crisps' across the tray. Yum! I'll definitely have to try and replicate their wonder!

Tomorrow night I'm off to a cocktail ball, and I plan to wear a slinky black dress... A big step for me! Fortunately, it's very low-cut, so hopefully I can distract eyes away from my remaining bulges by popping a boob out if absolutely necessary... I'm hoping that whatever meat they serve won't be basted in sugar - I am planning to eat something before I go, not too much (to avoid the cobra-swallowed-a-mouse outline), but I'd still like to eat at the function. The boy has sent an enquiry into the matter, so fingers crossed... But going by the place's usual menu (there's no function menu online), there's rib eye and Filet Mignon and all manner of fish and veal and other meaty goodies, so I'll probably be ok as long as I can ask them to hold the sauce. Wish me luck (both for eats and for my first outing in stilettos in a long time!)

Seven Simple Rules For The Human Carnivore

Here is a simple how-to guide from the great Owsley "The Bear" Stanley, a zero-carb eater for over 50 years. This guide was originally published on Zeroing In On Health. After a comment about organ meat, I wanted to share The Bear's opinions on the matter, and this is a concise way to do so:


SEVEN SIMPLE RULES FOR THE HUMAN CARNIVORE

1) Eat only from the animal world (eggs, fish, redmeat and fowl and some dairy are all animal sourced foods, i.e.: meat).

2) Eat nothing from the vegetable world whatsoever. (Very small amounts of flavourings such as garlic/chillies/spices/herbs which may be added, are not ‘food’).

3) On diary: avoid milk and yoghurt (heavy carbs- lactose), use only pure (not ‘thickened’- heavy) cream (read the label), cheese and unsalted butter.

4) Don’t cook your meat very much- just a little bit on the outside- for flavour- blood-rare or bleu. For this reason I advise against eating pork.

5) Eat liver and brains only very infrequently- they are full of carbs.

6) Be sure to have plenty of fat of animal origin at each meal and eat mostly of the fat until you feel you have had enough- you can eat more lean at this point if you like- calories are not important, nor is the number of meals/day. Vegetable oils are not good food.

7) You do not need any supplements of any kind. Drink a lot of water and do not add salt to anything.

That is all there is to it.

DO NOT obsess over what you eat, follow the rules and it will become second nature, and you will not have to think about it at all. What you eat is a social conditioning, most people will never alter their diet from what their mum fed them as babies, only those rare individuals who have a strong will and desire for a normal-sized, healthy body can do it. Even the grossly obese have trouble with my path. You may feel low on energy for a few days or weeks, but as soon as you keto-adapt to zero-carbs that will pass and your energy will be increased.


GGP - So while I'm 'obsessing' in order to track this experiment, I actually feel much more freedom, since I can eat when I want, until I'm satisfied, without having to think about carbs or calories. Calories aren't calculated until I log my food in the evening, and is sometimes higher that I would let it run if I were truly obsessing. And the inverse - some huge meals end up being far lower in calories than my sated sensation would suggest! :)

Carnivore: Day 8

Weight: 79.4kg

Breakfast: part of a gigantic pork chop, which originally looked like this:


And then looked like this:


However, my stomach was not prepared for such a meal so early in the day, so I ate all the fat and some of the lean til I was stuffed. I think I put away about 150g, and the rest (another 250g) went into the bin.

Good thing I filled up well on breakfast, as I missed out on packing any lunch. The tuna that I had waiting on my desk for such an occasion mysteriously disappeared... Possibly eaten... By me... Last week...

Survived comfortably until dinner, where I fried up some beef eye fillets, and picked up a roast chicken (now I definitely have lunch for tomorrow organised!):

Carnivorism - The First Week

My breakfast today:
No, seriously.

I must admit, I expected going meat-only to be much more difficult than it has proved to be. My early pangs of wanting veggies and eggs passed quickly, and I have been happily filling up on meat for each meal, with some green tea to stave off the late-night munchies. (Context of green tea - I use one bag in my 1L+ pot, which tends to be refilled three times per evening. So the 'tea' is really just a bit of a taste to differentiate from plain water, which I drink during the day. Other than that one sad bag, it's just meat and water for me!)

There has only been one day during which I only ate one kind of animal, an event due only to my big sleep-in, and my limited choices at a restaurant. Every other day I've eaten from two, or usually three different species - four if you count my fish oil capsules :)

I have been eating considerably more calories than I usually do, and yet the scale reports otherwise...

Here's a day by day breakdown, with approximate figures via Spark People (same nutrition database used by FitDay, etc). I tend to over-estimate portions rather than under-estimate, but I do use a kitchen scale so meat is usually spot-on accurate. Then it's just down to fat/protein variation in the cut:

Day 1
Weight: 80.7kg (I weigh in every morning, so this is Weight Zero, start of week)

Calories: 2075
Fat: 127g
Protein: 232g

Day 2
Weight: 80.6kg

Calories: 2100
Fat: 171g
Protein: 134g

Day 3
Weight: 80.1kg

Calories: 1650
Fat: 131g
Protein: 110g

Day 4
Weight: 79.8k

Calories: 1783
Fat: 109g
Protein: 193g

Day 5
Weight: 79.7kg

Calories: 2816
Fat: 213g
Protein: 209g

Day 6
Weight: 79.9kg (taken late in the day, too cold to get up and weigh in at the usual time!)

Calories: 2300
Fat: 179g
Protein: 168g

Day 7
Weight: 79.7kg

Calories: 1629
Fat: 166g
Protein: 124g

Day 8
Weight: 79.4kg

Calories: 1400 (plus more from extra chicken skin, mmm!)
Fat: 108g (see above)
Protein: 147g


Tallied up, that makes the difference between my starting weight of 80.7kg and this morning's weight of 79.4kg a lovely 1.3kg loss! As I've said, my weight slipped down to 79.3kg over the holidays, a two week block of sleeping in all morning, eating small meals, and getting very little exercise, so some of that 'loss' may have simply been due to less food in my system, and maybe even a little muscle waste. I also tend to see that getting adequate sleep shows results via the scale, no matter how much I eat during my waking hours. So, given that the holidays are over, that I'm back at work ( and therefore considering a full seven hours of sleep quite good fortune), walking to and from work as well as walking, standing and lifting books/tubs all day, and eating plenty of food, it's safe to say that I most certainly have lost fat in this past week.

My 'ideal caloric intake for fat-burning zone,' so the Intarwebz tells me, is between 1450 - 1650kcal per day. As you can see, most days I was well over this figure. I have broken through the ceiling of this limit in the past, usually courtesy of nuts, and I can assure you that weight loss was NOT the result.

My percentage of calories from fat was 60% at a minimum, and - if memory serves - reached 75% on at least one occasion. This is right on target in my quest to align my intake with the advice of ZC experts. The only goal that seems to be inaccurately set at the moment is caloric intake - I will be shifting my target to around 2000kcal per day for the next week to see where that sends me, given it was my average over the past week. Note: I eat what I want, until I am satisfied, and log everything after dinner. So if I fall over or under my calorie target, I won't know it til I'm done eating for the day. This doesn't bother me at all - I'm not obsessing over this - but hopefully will not skew my results.

Measurements:

Too early to spot any real change, although I have lost perhaps 1/4" from my waist. Also, the cellulite on my thighs seems to have lessened significantly... I knew I should have measured them! But the whole area is much smoother, less obviously dimpled. This is very good news - I had all but given up on ever having legs that I felt okay with showing off, since my Mum is quite slim but still has dimpled thighs. Still a long way to go in that area - my thighs look like they're set to be the last place to slim down. Ah well, there are still four months until summer... :)

So, my plan is to continue this way of eating for at least a month. My body has obviously adapted to the carnivorous lifestyle comfortably - apart from the early variety cravings, I have had no physiological issues whatsoever, and preparing meals has not been a problem. Breakfast is usually prepared fresh, including leftovers for lunch if dinner had not already provided some. Today, in fact, I thought I had tinned tuna at work, but I didn't, yet I wasn't hungry until I had completed my obligations for the day. When I arrived home, I was still happy to postpone eating until the boy arrived and we could have our delicious dinner... Eating a big (if calorically small) breakfast probably helped, since today was a killer!

Next Thursday I'll complete another summary post - until then, I shall continue to log my daily eats. Deepest apologies if you are getting sick of photos of chops and drumsticks. So very sorry. I will try and find time to make the odd recipe, even if I don't get to taste my own creations. I wouldn't mind trying my hand at Tur-duc-ken... ;)

Carnivore: Day 7

Weight: 79.7kg

Breakfast: Bacon

Lunch: two pure meat sausages

Dinner: GIANT pork chop and crackling


Doesn't look so big? Well, that's at least 25cm long, and weighed in at over 400g when raw. If I feel hungry before bedtime, I'm taking myself straight to the ER!

Tomorrow will be the end of my first week as a carnivore, so I'll do the full measurements (not expecting any change though, since this isn't that different to my old WOE) and also a tally of my calorie/macronutrient counts per day, just for those playing at home.

Recipes: What's A Girl Gone Primal To Do...

...when all she's serving herself is meat, yet she craves and misses cooking up exciting primal food?

She cooks for her boyfriend! Ah, how progressive and feminist of me!

She also does this at 11:30pm. Normal, right?

Ok, so the boy needed some breakfast, and since I don't allow him to buy his overpriced and unhealthy "Norganics" (a brand, but really means 'not organic[s]') granola anymore, I make it for him. Easy peasy, and I'm also scaling back the amount of rolled oats I use every time, so he'll be fuller and have better control over his blood glucose and health. (Shhhh....)

Sweet-Tooth Granola

Ingredients:

Rolled oats
Chopped nuts (I use walnuts and almonds)
Dessicated coconut
Seeds (I use sunflower and/or pumpkin)
Egg whites
Sweetener (I use Splenda since he is such a sweet-tooth, but you could try dehydrated honey or maple syrup)
Ground cinnamon

Ratio that works - about one egg white for every three cups of nuts/coconut/seeds/oats.


Method:

Preheat fan-forced oven to 150°C.

Combine all dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.

Place egg whites in a small bowl, and beat until frothy. Pour over dry mixture, and stir until thoroughly combined.

Line baking tray(s) with baking paper, and spread mixture evenly over paper. Place in oven, checking every five minutes.

Once the ingredients begin to brown slightly, remove from oven and stir to break apart any clump. Replace in oven until golden - your nose may help detect the perfect toastedness of the nuts. :)

Remove from oven, allow to cool, and store in an air-tight container.

Serve with cream, fruit, or on its own! My boy loves it with defrosted blueberries (and milk, ick. At least I've rid the house of low-fat milk!)


Now, in the course of making the granola, three egg yolks were orphaned and set for the trash since I'm all-meat at the mo'. Instead, I decided to put together a tasty frittata for beau's lunch:

Primal Frittata Lorraine (or something)

Ingredients:

3 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
2T pure cream
50g bacon, cooked and diced
30g cheddar cheese, diced
1T dried thyme
1t butter/coconut oil
3 thin slices tomato

(This is to make one very generous serving, and I bet it would easily serve two people as a side or light lunch)


Method:

Preheat oven to 100°C.

Whip eggs and cream together until frothy.

On your stove's lowest setting, over your smallest element, melt butter in tiny oven-safe ceramic saucepan (well, it's what I did, and it worked perfectly).

Add egg mixture, thyme and diced bacon. Allow to cook gently, stirring to lift cooked sections away from the base and sides so that other liquid may set.

Once most of the mixture has set, add diced cheese and stir together gently. Top with the slices of tomato.

Remove from element, and place in oven. Bake until top of egg mixture is set.

Remove from oven, allow to cool slightly, and then carefully remove from pan. I had prepared myself for a disappointing extraction, as the ceramic pans sometimes do not favour eggs, but low sustain heat did the trick - check out my perfect bottom:


(Yes, pretty ordinary photo, but I couldn't resist the pun...)

Et voila (so sad that the only available lunch container ws a tad narrow for the perfect roundedness of the frittata):


Serve with crisp green veggies.

So that's what the boy is eating tomorrow - he now informs me that his work will be providing lunch for him tomorrow, but since it will probably be boring old sandwiches, he might eat the food I made for him instead. Oh, and he eventually remembered to say thank you. Men, huh? :P


(By the by, love, we're having pork roast for dinner. What, free-will? Never heard of it...)

Carnivore: Day 6

Too cold to spend time weighing in this morning - bed to shower, no stops!

Breakfast: minced beef with lard, served with bacon


Lunch: more mince

Dinner: lamb forequarter chops - very late dinner, after returning from a screening of Coraline


Feeling very full now! I need to prepare something for tomorrow's lunch, but preparing food is the last thing I feel like doing!

Carnivore: Day 5

Weight: 79.7kg

Breakfast: two sausages, and bacon


Lunch: two chicken drumsticks

Dinner: Porterhouse steak, medium-rare, fried in lard!




Loving it! Feeling great! Wooo! :)

Carnivore - Question From The Comments

Michelle said...

reading with interest. are you eating eggs? butter? whole health source advocates both for vit k2...? also, are you counting calories/how many are you eating? how do you figure out how many calories you need to eat on this type of diet? how long do you plan to do this? i found ZIOH a while ago but never truly went zc because i would get too bored after a few days. a life without salad? seems extreme! can't you get most of the benefits with VLC?

Hi Michelle!

Nothing but animal muscle and fat for this experiment. I know that technically it can be argued that eggs are 'meat' but the yolks do contain carbs so I am excluding them for now. I imagine they will become part of my diet again once I'm done with this, since my body loves them and I love the variety they offer. I'm not using dairy for the same reasons. I do believe that eggs and some dairy are fine, but I have read so much extolling the virtues of the meat-only diet, that I'm trying it for myself, for the benefit of others who may not have the willpower I possess (my Mum would call it stubbornness, whatever) :) I'm actually not in the least bit bored - Day 2 I was getting over it, but now I have no problem with veggie temptations. Variety in meat helps, I suspect.

450g beef provides the currently suggested daily requirement of Vitamin K, or so my online research tells me (and I eat 500g+ meat every day, easily, for this experiment). I eat high quality, organic meat to ensure I am receiving nutritious meats that have as much similarity to the goodness of wild animals as possible. So long as the animals are raised on their native diet (i.e. not grains!), they tend to be much higher in essential nutrients (whether taken in through diet, or produced by the animal) that factory-farmed meats, so the levels may well be higher than what NutritionData.com tells us :)

Calories - not worrying too much, but earlier on my weight-loss journey I established that if I sit on my bum all day long, my BMR is around the 1800kcal mark, making my fat-loss window between 1450kcal and 1700kcal without adversely affecting my metabolism. First two days of carnivorism, my calorie count broke 2000kcal, yet I lost weight after both days. My sleep-in on Saturday meant I had a small brunch and a huge porterhouse steak, resulting in a total count of 1650kcal. Yesterday, I almost reached 1800kcal. (And today, now that I'm editing post-dinner, I nearly reached 2100kcal, approx.) I'll include my calorie counts in my weekly check-in posts from now on, but I'm really not watching it. I'll eat when I'm hungry, til I'm full. I track my food with Spark People, which happens to count calories, so that information is available circumstantially. As an experiment, it is interesting, but it's not something I'd follow in the long run. Of course, that's one of the bonuses of carnivorism - it's very difficult to over-consume animal products without sugars/carbs, and it seems that most people don't see much in the way of fat gain no matter how many kcal they put away. With my background of being overweight, I wouldn't push it though, once I'm at my ideal weight.

Timeframe - open. Originally, when meat-only seemed totally boring, I was hoping for a full week. Now, I'm thinking more like a month. We'll see :) Of course, if my results (fat- and health-wise) are overwhelmingly positive, boredom will be an inadequate reason to end the experiment!

If I am to be honest, I never believed in 'salad' as a food. Vegetables, whether salad or cooked, are the side dish of flavours to support the meat. That was always my upbringing. Mum usually served us a few kinds of veggies with dinner, maybe some sliced tomato with whatever we were having for lunch... Going primal made me eat many more veggies than I had before, but I still never filled up on weeds, they were always to dress up the meat. I've never actively realised this before! While I was living at University, I was living on chips (the frozen kind, cooked in generous piles and scoffed with sauce) or pita bread with pizza sauce and cheese, served with celery. No wonder I was always sooo hungry! That was not a pretty time for me, weight- or health-wise. Not enough meat! And my partner's enjoyment of pasta served with nothing but pasta sauce from a jar has always made me gag a little. One of the reasons I learned to cook was because I was sick of him serving me 'plain' pasta so often! I immediately learned how to do stir-fries, combining his preference for noodles/pasta with my instinct for meat (and some veg). Much better, setting us both on a path for better health. But I'm wandering tangentially...

VLC is poorly defined. Is it Atkins Induction with two cups of veg? Is it animal products only? What I like about meat-only is that it's a clear end-point, from which I can choose to reincorporate various foods and judge scientifically my body's response to them, without too many confounding variables. It goes without saying that grains and refined sugars will never be part of my diet; I may ultimately resume the primal lifestyle since it works very well for me, with perhaps a little more restriction on the frequency of fruit and amount of veggies, given my recent learning. I'm not predicting the outcome. I like this journey of discovery and learning, keeping it as pure as possible, with me just along for the ride. :)

Thanks for the questions!

Carnivore: Day 4

A lovely, restful day, filled with tasty meats, and frying things in lard!

Weight: 79.8kg (yep, that's almost a kilogram dropped since the beginning of the all-meat experiment, but still not as low as my lowest weight - 79.3kg ten days ago, so is still within the realm of a fluctuation)

Breakfast: two pure meat sausages (I bought a bunch of beef sausages and lamb sausages from my organic butcher, who didn't label which were which, and I can't tell the difference! But either way, it's red meat, without any filler, and delicious!) fried in dripping!


Lunch: two chicken drumsticks, roasted in lard


Dinner: two lamb chops (a lovely, fatty cut, much like a forequarter) fried in lard


Reading today:

The most frequent question asked of me since beginning this experiment has been, without fail, 'but don't you need fibre?' From what I've read, nope, and certainly not in the quantities extolled by those supporting the ingestion of whole grains. Some starting points to read why - Dr. Eades' effective allegory poking holes in conventional wisdom, and Carnivore Health posts Lex Rooker's Q&A regarding all forms of fibre, right down to seemingly innocent leafy greens.

The Weston A. Price Foundation is a font of information, and I am slowly making my way through the wealth of knowledge presented on their website. Two good starting points relevant to zerocarb: Know Your Fats, and The Ethics of Eating Meat: A Radical View by Charles Eisenstein, thoughts which ring very true to my own ideology, especially growing up on a sheep and cattle farm.

Other than that, I've been spending time on the Zeroing In On Health forum, learning from more experienced peers. As independent as I am, it's very helpful to read the experiences and ideas of other carnivores. It's also an excellent boredom battler - when I'm reminiscing upon the fragrance and tastiness of my pumpkin soup, I can read a ZC'er wax lyrical upon the many virtues of the ribeye steak. Yum!

Carnivore: Day 3

Yes, third day of the meat-only diet. Slept in ('tis Saturday after all, the end of an exhausting week back at work) and awoke to a scale whose batteries had died! Awkward. Didn't want to eat until I had weighed in, as is the procedure for this experiment. So, we nipped down the street and grabbed batteries, and then swung by my butcher to pick up my pork fat. The damn shop was closed. Closes at 1pm on a Saturday, apparently. What is this, the country?? So no rendering of pork fat for me, sadly. Not til at least Tuesday. In the meantime, I checked out the 'spreads' department of the local Coles, and found myself some lard:


Not quite as primal as I would like, as I don't know how the 'animal fat' (so the ingredient list non-specifically states) was rendered - were chemicals involved? Was it overheated at any stage? And, most importantly, what was done with the crackling?! But anyway, it will do for the meantime.

So, arrived home, and inserted the new batteries - 80.1kg. That's over 1/2 kilogram down from yesterday. I'm not getting excited yet though, since I was weighing in at around 79kg just over a week ago, so my body is still adjusting to the early mornings and recovering from the nut binges. Nonetheless, it's good to see progress since so many seem to have gained weight on this diet. And it may help to note that Day 1 & 2 have both resulted in consuming more than 2000kcal each day. Given that my BMR is around 1800kcal without exercise, 2000 should not be an obvious goal for weight loss!

Lunch today (slept through 'breakfast')- 220g organic minced beef, worked into mini burgers, and fried with a small amount of lard:


Then we went out to a restaurant in Southgate to feast before taking in some culture - Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, produced by the MTC. While my associates ordered fish & chips, and bread and dips, I nabbed the 300g porterhouse steak (ordered rare, served medium-rare) and gave the chips and onion chutney to the others:


Still going strong, although the delayed lunch ended in some major grumpiness (note - I had eaten last the night before at 9pm, and today I didn't get lunch until almost 3pm. So that's an 18 hour fast; some grumpiness isn't uncommon!), and I was pretty moody when trying to order dinner at 7:30pm, when it was revealed that the menu online was not reflective of the current menu in the restaurant, and therefore my chosen dish was not available (and the meals were now incredibly overpriced). Noticed the irrational irritability, and felt my mood lift once the steak was in my belly. So that's the first 'symptom' if you like, although it's not one that is specific to zero carb for me. I hadn't noticed much in the way of mood swings while I was trialling intermittent fasting on the more low-carb primal diet though.

Roll on Day 4...