Reasons I'm no longer on the Lion Diet, and what I'm doing now // Carnivore Month 10 Update

all right guys today I want to do just an update video and just kind of get everybody up to speed on what I've been doing things I've added in things I've changed really since I've been on the lion diet um if you've been following my channel you know that I adjusted my macros throughout February in March I feel like I got fat adapted for the first time which I'm going to talk about in a little bit here and then I decided to try to go back to the lion diet but do it from a high fat context because I thought at the time that I just needed to go stricter for longer to really get down to that full Elimination Diet just ruminant meat uh red meat salt and water and see if that would clear up anything else but I'm not doing that anymore and I want to kind of just make an official video talking about why I dropped off the lion diet and why I'm adding in different things and you know just kind of where I'm at as of now so if you've been watching any of the live streams that we've been doing a couple times a week you've probably picked up tidbits of this along the way but again this will just be a formal update for everybody so you all know exactly what's going on so the first thing I wanted to talk about is the foods that I've added in and why I added things back in and why I'm not on the lion diet anymore and the main reason for that is that I started to not feel like I was getting everything I needed at about the week three Mark and this was the exact same time when I first did the lion diet in this past January where I started to have other food cravings for other carnivore Foods so it wasn't chips and candy and alcohol and anything else it was Seafood the first time in January it was right around 21 22 days I just felt like I couldn't get Seafood out of my mind but I pushed through to the end of the 30 days because I wanted to you know do the full challenge that I set for myself for that that month of January but then I ate seafood and in February I kind of started adding a bunch of things back in cuz I just was craving I was having cravings for other things but then I kind of went a little bit overboard with adding in too much Dairy I tried raw cream some raw dairy that I found here locally in Dallas area where I live and then as most of you know like my sleep got all whacked out so that's when I really started playing around with the high fat and I'll talk about that a little bit more specifically in the next point but once I got my sleep figured out and macros figured out I thought okay let me go back to the lion diet now that I know I just need more fat maybe I'll be successful and I'll be able to stick to it for you know 90 days or so just to really kind of clear out any inflammation and and move forward in my healing Journey so that was my intention with that however at that same time Point around 21 days 3 weeks is I started to not feel great on Lion I started to feel like I was just craving other things and this time it was for egg yolks specifically I make eggs every day for my family um eggs and bacon pretty much every single morning since I started the carnivore diet again officially back in last July but all of the sudden I just was looking at those eggs being like they looked so good I just was thinking about eggs all the time and I thought you know what I'm going to listen to that I'm not going to force myself to do 90 days on the lion diet just because that was my intention going into it you know my intention going into it was to get to the next level to understand more about my body and what it needs and maybe what it doesn't need and this was a clear indicator to me that it needed something outside of just red meat salt and water so I added in egg yolks specifically because that's what my craving seemed to be for like when I look at egg whites or looked at a whole egg like it didn't appeal to me it just was you know the Yol part that I was like I just want to scoop that out and eat that so that's what I started adding in and I've been eating pretty regularly now on average six yolks a day sometimes eight if I'm feeling like I really want that many and that's been going great so far so on that same token after I added in the the yolks I started thinking like well bacon looks really good you know and butter and so basically I added bacon and added butter back in um a few days apart just so I could have a little bit of space between just to see if any reactions happen but so far it's been fine and I felt much better so far just having that amount of variety for probably the last couple of weeks now I haven't been posting on Instagram very much basically since we had company um which was a lot of fun we went out to eat a couple times so I will throw in a few pictures of like what I ate while we were out um but I kind of just that was sort of a turning point where I I just felt like I'm kind of over the hyper tracking for a while I like to do that from time to time to see where I'm at and to really get a clear picture of what is going into my body and how much and when so that I can pick out Trends or patterns in you know my symptomology and compare that to you know a much more accurate and precise interpretation of what is going in and so I I really enjoy doing that from time to time and I find a lot of value in it but then I get to times where I feel like I just want to put cruise control on you know and just kind of autopilot it for a while and not be Super Hyper Vigilant about tracking every little thing and putting it into chronometer and posting it and so that's the reason why I haven't posted on Instagram so much and why I haven't been sharing a whole lot about what I've been eating and I wanted to do that in this video so I'm going to be putting up pictures as we go through because I have been you know taking some checking my ketones and glucose here and there and if I'm curious putting things into chronometer as well just to kind of see like what what additional vitamins minerals might I be getting from adding this specific carnivore food back in maybe that explains why I'm feeling more energy or feeling a little bit better when I add those Foods so I'm still curious and I still like to know some numbers but I'm kind of in that more half in half into intuitive/ sciencebrain mode right now so that's the reasoning for that the most recent thing I've added back in foodwise is chicken chicken thighs specifically cuz again I was just like thinking about them like I really want like that crispy skin air fryer chicken thigh um and so actually yesterday that's all I ate and uh well that in some bacon and then actually I did have some butter yesterday so I ate chicken thighs bacon and butter yesterday and I've had chicken thighs and bacon for my first meal today which was amazing and I'm just gonna kind of keep eating those as long as I feel like [Music] it um and that kind of brings me to this topic of what I'm calling the Tipping Point and I've been talking to my good friend Ellie over at nourishment redacted about this and she kind of helped me realize I come to this conclusion as well talking back and forth with her over the last few days about adding things in and the lion diet and just the different things that I've been trying lately and I really think that I finally hit this place where I've gone as far down the elimination pathway as I can I've been on the lion diet twice now and both times at almost the exact same length of time on that diet I start started craving different carnivore foods and so I feel like that is a good indicator that I don't need to be on just you know red meat salt and water that I definitely need more variety in my diet and that the symptoms that I'm still dealing with like some psoriasis some bouts of fatigue some bouts of digestive disturbance are not due to food intolerances or food sensitivities in my case specifically they're more probably along the lines of part of my detoxification process right the skin is your largest organ I think is it the largest or is really the digestive system I think it depends on how you measure it the surface area of the internal you know everything from mouth to the other end uh they might be pretty close but both of these systems are ways that the body eliminates toxins right and so it makes sense to think that that is probably what is happening given my history given my past with eating a lot of the wrong foods for the for the majority of my life um heavy alcohol use and just not taking very good care of myself even though I tried to for a lot of my life but you know just through part ignorance and part um just the lifestyle I was living and The Chronic digestive problems that you know were kind of underlying this whole experience all that combined means you know I've just kind of hit a breaking point I kind of hit a rock bottom so to speak you know when I started carnivore over again this last July so eliminating things got me to this point of carnivore that's how I got to the carnivore diet not because I even knew that carnivore was a thing I just was slowly cutting things out until I felt good and I ended up at all meat and the first time I was on this diet I didn't really overthink it I didn't eat high fat necessarily I just ate meat but I also drank a lot of alcohol you guys and so I think that's kind of leading me into the next part that I wanted to touch on today is that I was probably never really fat adapted the first time I was on Carnivore and I know that sounds crazy but if you think about it um especially somebody who drinks a lot of alcohol and I was only drinking liquor so like vodka soda vodka water no carb beverages right but alcohol breaks down in the liver number one it it's the first priority if you ingest it to be broken down down because it's a toxin and so whatever metabolic process is happening whether you're breaking down carbs or fat or whatever it is burning your own body fat all that's going to stop if you ingest alcohol so that the liver can detoxify and break that down and one of the byproducts of alcohol breakdown is acetate and acetate I learned this from the book Brain energy by Chris Palmer is one of the things that actually the brain can use for energy and so my theory is that I was never truly adapted the first time I did the carnivore diet because of the alcohol consumption that I was doing basically on a nightly basis and because I wasn't intentionally eating enough fat I was just eating a lot of ground beef chicken fish like and all those foods are great but I wasn't really adding butter I wasn't adding Tallow I wasn't really seeking out super fatty cuts of meat and even on that diet you guys my IBS went away I had zero digestive symptoms after about two weeks on the diet my energy improved my brain fog went away you know what I mean so like I had all these improvements even though it was not optimal but I don't think I ever really got truly fat adapted so I say all that because this time I think this is why I number one struggled to stick to carnivore um before I really fully went all in this last July I would kind of be on it for a month or so and then fall off the wagon I'd be on it for four to five six weeks sometimes and then fall off the wagon and I think it's because I was just really really struggling with perhaps some sort of insulin issue or uh a glucose issue I was having some hypoglycemic episodes something along those lines cuz I really struggled to adapt and I felt really kind of bad a lot of the time and so when I finally sort of Hit That Rock Bottom place and started again this last July I think I was still eating too much protein and eating too much food for my own personal physiology too often and that didn't allow me to actually get fat adapted because if you consume too much protein essentially for what your body specifically needs at that period of time um it's just going to raise insulin and you're you're more likely to be turning that into sugar and still relying on glucose in the bloodstream while you're still relying on glucose in the bloodstream but you know what I mean and your body is going to use that instead of tapping into your fat reserves and or producing ketones to be a substitute for that glucose so that's really my theory as to why I basically struggled so much the first 6 months on my carnivore Journey this time while I was still having cravings while I was still having low energy most of the time and you know I was feeling better in some ways and I'd have a couple weeks at a time maybe where I felt really good but it was just it wasn't feeling like I was really there yet I didn't didn't feel like I was in ketosis I didn't have that feeling like when I was first on Carnivore so that's what I think happened when I really upped my fat to like 80% back in March and I started tracking my ketones and tracking my glucose to see like am I actually making ketones like am I burning fat for fuel or am I not still and I noticed over the time that I've tracked that that my blood sugar My fasting glucose would be somewhere in the 80s mid 80s sometimes low 80s and now it's typically in the 70s sometimes even 60s if I'm doing one meal a day uh which is about 24 hours fasted so and my ketones have been high and so I really think that I'm finally fat adapted now and that leads me to the next point which is macros cuz you all know I was tracking macros pretty consistently there for a while and I was shooting for 8020 right but I feel like what I've just been naturally hungry for I've been eating lately has been much closer to 7030 sometimes 75 25 um but not not hitting 80% on most days with fat I would say but my sleep has been great my sleep has been just as good as it ever was you know better than it ever has been um in the past year I would say and I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore and can't go back to sleep type of thing um I feel genuinely rested when I wake up um my energy much better throughout the day you know so I I really think that I wasn't fat adapted before and I really had to go high fat cut my protein back and you know even just eat a little bit less for a while just to kind of like Get over that hump into being fat adapted into producing ketones and now I don't have to hit that 80% every single day to sleep well or to have good energy or to you know feel happy all those kinds of things I can go a little bit lower I'm still I would say high fat at 70% but um you know I don't have to be super strict with hitting that 80% fat every single day so let's talk about meal timing fasting that kind of stuff next because this is a pretty big shift that I've had since the beginning of my journey as well I talked about in the beginning how I was very concerned about hormones and stress and I'm glad that I didn't do any intentional fasting at that time CU I think mentally it would have been too stressful for me and and I just wasn't even sure you know if my body was ready for that at the time but I've played around with much shorter eating Windows lately in the past you know six weeks or so now and I've uh had a couple of weeks where I've eaten one meal a day instead of two and those two weeks I felt absolutely amazing to be honest um my ketones were higher than they ever have been I've had more energy um and just overall feeling like this is how I should feel right this is what should be my normal operating State this type of energy this type of mood this type of you know just the way that I was feeling But after those about two weeks went by I started feeling like you know I I'm hungry in the evening and I don't really want to eat in the evening cuz I know that can sort of disrupt sleep and you know I don't really want to be digesting overnight and things like that and so I've been playing around with some two meal a day days depending on just how I feel so I fluctuate back and forth some days I have one larger meal and some days um I'll have two moderate meals or sometimes two large meals if I'm feeling really hungry that day I'm doing my best not to put myself in a box when it comes to meal timing although it's it is again something I kind of like to keep track of and keep somewhat similar for you know at least a couple of weeks at a time so I can see how that's affecting me um cuz it's hard to tell sometimes you just do something for a few days you don't really know I've done one 36-hour fast in the last month when I just kind of felt like doing it um and I haven't really felt like that's appropriate for me uh since then and so I'm just sort of playing around with it seeing how I feel and seeing what works so anywhere from one meal to two meals is where I'm at currently okay we're going to talk about digestion skin and then two more things that I've added in more to my routine lately and then we'll be wrapping up for today so digestion you know if you've been following my channel you know this was sort of been the bane of my existence for the whole time this is why I started a health Journey this is why I you know this is one of the very bottom of the barrel root causes that I think are the cause of many of the other things that I've struggled with in my life and so this is always something I pay attention to and it's not something that is completely dialed in yet and I have again periods where I have normal bowel movements where they're normal they they don't hurt there's no pain there's nothing uh wrong with them and then I've been tending towards loose stools on the opposite side of that I know there's a few reasons that that that could be um it could just be a symptom of IBD of some form that I am still healing from um it could be too much salt sometimes too much salt can C or too much magnesium can cause loose stools and I do take significant salt in my diet and because it Tes Tes good and I do take uh magnesium in my daily electrolytes and that's sometimes two servings a day if I'm feeling like I really you know need the you know like for energy or for if I'm it's cuz it's hot out here and I tend to get overheated and so I'm drinking a lot of water and I like to add the electrolytes in and so it could be some of that um so I'm not 100% sure again it could be detox it could just be oxalate dumping it could be my liver clearing out same thing with the skin which is going to kind of tie right in here so these tend to be a little bit cyclical they tend to change depending on what time I am in my cycle I notice um usually leading up to you know the the beginning of my cycle um I notice a little bit more fluctuation in in how those both of those things are so there could be a hormone component to this so really my my strategy here is to stop stressing about these two things because uh Digest and skin because I think again from everything I've already talked about everything that I've learned so far in almost 10 months now I'll put I'll put the number of days or exactly where I'm at in here sometimes I forget month month nine close to 10 months I think I'm just on the right track I think I'm pretty much doing everything that I can uh in the right fashion for me specifically my health Journey the spot that I'm at one of the things that helps me immensely just all around is being in the sun and I've been in the sun lately I don't know if you can tell I have a little bit of a tan now which is nice I cannot explain to you guys how good and relaxing and just you know it's it's almost like it's a replacement for some of the things that I used to do in Past Times uh just to feel good you know to feel relaxed to feel happy to feel like I can get in touch with my emotions like all a lot of the negative things that I used to do in the past I feel like being in the sun has a similar effect you know but it's actually helpful and it heals my psoriasis I'll put up some pictures here I've been taking lots of of progress photos as I've been going along I've been adding some castor oil to my face routine so I wash my face with usually just witch hazel now um which I find very nice it takes off any makeup and if um I need a little help with that I use Tallow to take off any other makeup um but then witch hazel and then I just put castor oil and Tallow on my face and lately it's just been castor oil so uh I put that there and that seems to be helping a little bit but really it's the sun you guys the sun is amazing and I love it it just puts me kind of on cloud N I feel really good um and I was taking a vitamin D supplement 10,000 IUS a day for the past you know sever veral months and none of that happened when I just took the supplement you know so really it's just actually physically being out in the sun getting that light on my body and doing that often enough um is just really really helpful it it feels very anti-inflammatory to me it's healing my skin and just makes me feel great so that's something that I'm really grateful for that I have the opportunity to do where I live um a lot of the year and so I'm going to continue to do that and we're adding some movement back in um I know a few of you watched my first class that I put out here um I've always been passionate about yoga and really just functional training Mobility just a lot of the movement that helps us just feel better in our bodies during the day like do activities that we're already going to do anyway with more grace more ease more balance more strength and so I've always loved a strong approach to yoga I've done strength training in different other modalities and I have earned in the past and continue to maintain a certification as a functional movement specialist so I'm really excited to be posting more classes I think they're going to be really fun we meditate at the end do some visualizing um so that's how I've always liked to do meditation cuz I feel like I need to get that energy out that sort of add side of me it's like I need to move and and connect with my breath and open up and stretch and just and that helps me relax and actually be able to focus on relaxing and getting into that some of that mindset work that I think is so important and so I love to combine those two things and that's what those classes are about it's called a line with Nia the series is called that and so you can check out that playlist now on my channel and last thing is bath and then we'll wrap it up for today so one of the things I learned from living in Florida for a number of years and during that time I had several times when my psoriasis flared up pretty bad um and so I would swim in the ocean a lot salt water and I would be out in the sun a lot and that always seemed to take care of my skin issues for the most part and so I thought well I don't have an ocean near me but I do have a bathtub and I have salt and I can be just taking more of those baths and so I did one the other day and it was just Divine I enjoyed it a lot and it felt really great and my skin feels super soft and um it was a day after I had gotten some sun and so I was like ah I just feel like I just that feels really good and I'm glad that you know I can do both of those things so those are some things that I've added in that I'm going to continue to do and update you you know kind of hard to measure some of the impacts of those things but you'll see it as probably just in how I am in my videos as we move along so anyway that's kind of the update of where I'm at thank you for watching all the way through if you're here at the end and I appreciate all of your viewership your time and attention that means a lot to me your comments and um participation in the live stream so I will see you um at the next live stream whether that's Thursday or Sunday depending on when this goes up and I hope you all have a fantastic day let me know how you're doing down below and we'll talk again soon bye [Music] a [Music] [Music]

Channel: Neah's Way

Views: 21,868

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Id: X1-SVEVW2Ho

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2024