After all of that, I’ve gone back to eating a carnivore diet. Over the past 3 weeks, I wrote about transitioning to a Paleo/Primal diet. It involved grieving, consternation, challenges, projects, mental anguish, emotional breakthroughs and physical concerns.
I ate some absolutely delicious foods that I really missed. I evaluated every day the changes in my thinking, my routines, my physique, my mind clarity, and a number of other details that wouldn’t be of interest to anyone but me.
I’ll be writing about lessons I learned from this experiment in future posts, I’m sure.
For now, I wanted to give my primary reasons for returning to a carnivore diet.
- I put on 10 lbs of fat in less than 3 weeks.
- I had many headaches – which I believe were caused by cheese, chocolate, dairy and lots of carbs.
- I discovered I have absolutely no control over eating most foods – including those listed in #2 above, plus most fruits, oatmeal, bread, cereal, and pretty much anything that tasted good except for eggs, meat and chicken.
- As a results of #3, I had near constant stomach bloating, gas pains, and a significant increase in calories consumed per day. Nothing I tried to do to control my eating was effective.
After 3 weeks, when I woke up with brain fog, a headache and a distended, bloated stomach for the umpteenth day in a row I thought: “I really miss how good I felt on carnivore.”
That was when I thought, “Well, why not go back to it?”
For a short time, I felt like a failure. After all, I spent many hours (and quite a few dollars) buying foods, stocking my kitchen and pantry, researching recipes, etc.
But pretty quickly I thought – no I didn’t fail. I tried something new because I felt what was working for me before was no longer working.
It was an experiment – not a lifetime commitment.
Did the experiment fail? Nope.
I thought about something I heard on a podcast recently. A research scientist was explaining how science works. He said, you come up with a hypothesis and then you design experiments to test your hypothesis. Most times, the experiment proves your hypothesis was wrong. So you make changes based on the results, create a new hypothesis and experiment again. If an iteration of the experiment results in supporting your hypothesis, then you repeat it. Then, others try to repeat it to see if they get the same results.
Experiments, by their nature, are designed to fail.
I thought about this in context of my 3 week Paleo diet. Across multiple iterations I had some very clear results (numbered above).
It also confirmed that many of the good results I’d been getting from carnivore were valid.
So, for now at least, I’m back to following a strict carnivore diet.
I’m grateful I did the experiment. Despite my disappointing results, I learned a lot.
I’ll try to limit my sharing about this to lessons that might be of interest to my readers.
The rest, which include plenty of navel gazing, I’ll spare my readers and keep to myself.
