Should You Do A Strict Carnivore Diet? If so, for how long?

Should you do strict carnivore forever, or maybe there is a better path? What's up, ladies and gents?

This one's on the carnivore diet, but this could also apply to any diet, AIP, Whole30, autoimmune protocol, or elimination-based diet.

Carnivore itself is the purest form of an elimination-based diet. It is just meat, just animal products, right? And you can even take it to the nth degree where you don't even do dairy because dairy can have its things that you have to throttle, understand, and test.

Carnivore's good. It's just like a Whole30. It would help if you did it, eliminate all those things. But I think you should take it a step further, whereas Whole30.

People would do a Whole30; 30 days are up, and maybe they return to how they were eating. Perhaps they keep certain things out, like grains or something, but maybe they add all the other stuff like cheese, this and that, and tortillas or whatever.

With the carnivore diet, you do the same thing, but you should, for some time, maybe six months, slowly introduce foods in a way so that you can understand how they affect you.

You could start by adding grass-fed dairy to your diet. So you do strict carnivores for three days and grass-fed dairy for a couple of weeks. See how you feel. Try testing certain things, cheese, cream, whatever you're doing, and milk.

Maybe it works; perhaps it doesn't.

And you build a repertoire of the foods that work, the foods that are borderline, and the foods that you can enjoy all the time. You make that into your eating plan. So now you have a carnivore plus dairy, a specific dairy, eating plan.

Now you want to introduce something like certain fruits. So you do carnivore plus dairy and fruit, or you remove the dairy, and the next phase test is carnival plus fruit. Maybe you have some honey in there.

I know Saladino was talking about that a lot. He's made that popular. So carnivore plus fruit is very appropriate. If you wanted to add something to your metabolically flexible and ancestrally proper diet, it would be a carnivore-based diet with some fruit here and there and maybe some honey here and there.

That is closest to the natural diet. And, of course, you're closer to the equator. Your ancestors ate more fruit. The further you are away, the lighter your skin is, and the more likely you will do better on straight animal foods.

After you do the carnivore plus fruit, now you have a carbon diet plus fruit, you have a carnivore diet plus dairy, and you may mix them both in the next phase. Only do this for a week at a time, or every day you take one food, and you eat that with your main meal, perhaps a steak or whatever, have something on the side, and then see how you feel.

You could also test doing your second meal of the day, where instead of having animal foods, you do just the food you're trying. You may have a bowl of yogurt. You may have some cheese and maybe some salmon roe or something, or just straight cheese.

You're trying to test the different foods to determine what's perfect for you. You want to answer the question, do you need to do a strict carnivore diet forever?

A lot of us don't need to. Many of us may need to do our best in that way of eating.

It's definitely sustainable, but there is a case to be made for gut flora and variability, and just mental sanity, to having other foods in your diet.

So for me, I'm still through this tweaking phase, where I'm still doing primarily carnivore.

I'll have fruit here and there; not a big deal.

I'll have dairy as part of my carnivore diet. I'm optimizing for protein to get down to a certain leanness level while prioritizing strength and muscle building.

And if I want an almond flour tortilla ever so often, I might have that.

I might have that if I want some sweetened sparkling water drink, like the mango flavor from that Waterloo brand. And I'll have my Rebel ice cream occasionally, but I don't find myself craving many green plant-based foods.

We'll have salads sometimes, that's fine. It's never something that I'm like, feel amazing. I never feel bloated, especially if I make an iceberg or a mild romaine lettuce salad; it's okay.

It only fills me up a little. I could do some cucumbers without the peel to get a high-satiety food with low calories.

That's a perfect strategy if you're trying to lose weight and manage your appetite. And the more I do this, the more I get in tune and closer, closer to what my ideal diet is, and really what it is, is a flexible carnivore diet, or ancestrally appropriate, flexible animal-based way of eating.

That's a mouthful, but that's basically what we're after. Because, again, this is the most ancestrally appropriate way of eating. Our ancestors ate plants.

They ate honey, anything they could get their hands on, for the most part.

A lot of it, though, would have been animal foods. Those animal foods would have been cycled because they wouldn't have been successful in hunting every day.

The one thing about carnivores that is not exactly a replica of what our ancestors used to do, unless we're Inuit, or maybe the Plains Buffalo Indians or whatever, it's likely that we wouldn't have eaten meat every single day.

It doesn't mean you can't do it. It doesn't mean... I want to avoid going down the rabbit hole, but it does mean that you might run into problems if you do that repeatedly. So there could be a case for having some flexibility once you're eating.

But I'm getting closer and closer to what my ideal diet is, and it's going to include dairy.

It will include some fruit here and there if I want it.

I will have some salad from time to time if I want it.

I will have some sweet potatoes from time to time if I want them.

I'm going to have my Rebel ice cream from time to time if I want it.

I will have some rice from time to time if I want it.

Lately, we've been doing gluten-free pasta and shrimp pasta, and I made a garlic shrimp thing last night, and that's fine.

I felt bloated afterward, just like carbs. I don't want to do that every day, and I keep my carbs super low, but I'm finding that these things aren't creating any nagging issues.

And so I can have my approved list, and things that I know bother me, I put them on me disprove list. That's what the goal of the carnivore diet should be.

It would help if you got to that flexible animal-based way of eating through testing and then used that to sustain you for life.

And if you fall off here and there, you get right back on, and if you need a reset here and there, you do strict carnivores for 30 to 60 days, and bam, you're right back to where you started, and then you can begin the process again.

Let me know what you think about this, your experience, and where you're at on your ancestrally appropriate animal-based way of eating diets.