A US Army Arctic Paratrooper Heals His Back Injury Through The Carnivore Diet

Mission Carnivore Episode 10: Join me as I interview Bradley, a former US Army Arctic Paratrooper and Intelligence Officer who started the carnivore diet while on active duty and find out how he lost weight, healed his back inury, and started lifting weights again.

Carnivore Diet Planning Guide: https://4343867330708.gumroad.com/l/fqtjv
Website: https://www.carnivoresoldier.com
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I'm a retired US Army Chief Warrant Officer living the carnivore lifestyle since March 22nd, 2023. I lost 30lbs in the first 90 days, and continued my weight loss beyond that losing another 14lbs in the following 60 days. I have become much healthier, both physically and mentally in the process and am now down from 280lbs to 232lbs with lean muscle. If you’re seeking a sustainable and effective weight loss method, the carnivore diet might be the answer you’ve been looking for!

Join me as I give a military veteran perspective on the carnivore WOE, find great recipes, learn tips and tricks, review carnivore movies, and gain insight on practical ways to fit the carnivore diet into your life! If you follow me, I'm going to be your "Battle Buddy", setting you up for success!

Prepare to be motivated and inspired as I share my success story, offering valuable tips and insights for anyone ready to embark on their own weight loss journey. Don’t miss out on this incredible transformation – hit that play button and let’s dive into the world of carnivore diet weight loss!

DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor and am not giving medical advice. This is simply a channel about my experience. Please consult your own physician if you have questions or concerns about nutrition, weight loss, or your conditions.

Transcript

Larry: 0:00

All right. All right. All right. Carnivore soldier coming at you from Austin, Texas. Today, we've got another episode in our podcast called mission carnivore, and this is the podcast and video series dedicated to first responders and veterans and how the carnivore diet has affected their lives. And today we've got a special guest, Bradley Brinka. Hey Bradley, how you doing man? Hey Larry,

Bradley: 0:23

thanks so much for having me on. I'm not a very long time listener, but a first time caller as it were. And I heard you on Dr. Anthony Chafee's channel. I think you were on there maybe a month or so ago. Yeah. And I was really excited to hear someone talking about carnivore from a military perspective. I think that's really sorely needed in

Larry: 0:40

this world. Yeah, I agree. I think the military perspective is a little different and it's nice to talk with other vets and first responders because like I said, we're the warrior class, right? We're used to talking amongst ourselves and not really taking it outside the community. I think a lot of issues like our health issues and our mental issues, it's easier to talk to other vets that have done it, that have been there. So, why don't you just tell me about yourself real quick? You can go ahead and just start like where you're from, where you're born, and then we can roll into your into your service. Yeah,

Bradley: 1:12

sure thing. So I live in Northern Virginia now with my wife and daughter we've been here for about two years, but I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Went to school there in Akron, grew up in Cleveland on the West side. I went to University of Ackman, did ROTC there as a young cadet. I commissioned straight into the Army as a second lieutenant after graduating. Commissioned as an armor officer, 19 series. So I trained on the M1 Abrams down at Fort Benning. And after that, I went to airborne school. And then I got stationed up in Fort Richardson, Alaska, called JBEAR. Up in Anchorage, in the southern part of the state. And I was there as an arctic paratrooper for the next three years, served as a skeleton leader, as a, as an XO learn how to survive in the cold. Learning to be a soldier is one thing. Learning to be a soldier in the cold is a completely different skillset that no amount of training will prepare you for until you experience it. I did my four years. I thought I was going to be in forever. I was going to be in, so I was, I don't know, a Fulbright colonel or general someday. I ended up getting out after four years. I found the army to be a lot of drudgery. This was 2016. So a lot of the deployments were starting to really dry up for the conventional units. Afghanistan was slowing down. There really weren't many conventional deployments to Iraq at that point. So I got out I saved up some money. I did some traveling for about a year. Went all over the Middle East. I did some volunteer work, some medical work ended up coming back the next year rejoined the army as a reservist this time. As I like to say, I stopped selling my body to Uncle Sam for money and started selling my brain because I became an MI officer instead. Became an all source analyst. Did that. It was pretty uneventful for the next three years. In the meantime, I was going back to school. I was going back to grad school. Studied Arabic. That was my A degree of focus, ended up becoming an Arabic linguist, passed the DLPT. I speak Iraqi Arabic, Syrian Arabic, really into languages and

Larry: 3:10

cultures. And the DLPT is the Defense Language Proficiency Test?

Bradley: 3:16

So there's a, reading version, there's a listening version, and there's a speaking test you can take. So I took all three. Such

Larry: 3:26

a slacker.

Bradley: 3:26

It's probably, you know, they do, there's incentive pay. They pay you money for learning a language, specific languages, like Arabic, certain Arabic dialects. They'll, the army, regardless of what you're doing, this, they were kind of unique. I don't think the other branches do this, but in the army, you could be a cook or a mechanic. And if you speak one of these kind of languages, they'll pay you extra tax free money every month. But just given how long it takes to learn a language, I'm, I'm not sure it's really worth it. Considering how many years it takes you to get to a level where you could maybe make 150 or 200 bucks more a month. But anyway, I did it, I didn't do it for the money. I just really enjoyed learning the language. And so a couple of years later fast forward to 2020, I'm still in the reserves and I get called back to active duty this time in support of a special operations mission. So I was an analyst supporting JSOC in Iraq in 2020 to 21, and it was, actually during that time that I started experimenting with certain dietary interventions, which I'm sure we'll talk more about. But in the years preceding that, I'll kind of go backwards a little bit. I had a lot of health problems shortly after I got off active duty. I started experiencing lower back pain, sciatica down my left side. I don't know how much I can attribute that to the airborne life, to kind of military life in general. I mean, it was obviously very hard on my body. But I was certainly not taking care of my health either, certainly in terms of the diet. My philosophy back when I was 22, 23 years old was that I'm young, I'm invincible, and I can drink as much beer and eat as much pizza as I want because I'm going to burn 1, 500 calories at the gym in the morning. And that kind of worked for a while, but it was ultimately not very sustainable. I went into the army, I was 215 pounds. By the time I got off active duty four years later, I think I had gotten up to close to 240. So I put on about 25 pounds in those four years. And that was in spite of running all the time. I was always at the gym. I was. I was always running. I was always in the, sauna and my philosophy was like, I don't care about nutrition. I just, it's a simple math equation, right? It's calories in calories out. I just got to burn off more. I want to lose weight.

Larry: 5:35

I was right there with you. Yeah, I was right there with you. I was doing the same thing. But, when I went back in, I was like 35 because I came back in 2004 when the war broke out and all I'd got, I did my first tour, 84 to 90 fast tech submarines, right? Came out, went to National Guard. After that, I already started my career. I didn't want to like give up my career, but I still wanted to contribute to the military, but I was totally with you because. I, when I rejoined, I think I was about 2 40 and my body weight just crept up the whole time until I was 50. I was at 50 years old. I was about 2 52, 2 53. And yeah, same thing. I thought calories in calories. I just need to row more. I need to run more. I need to You know, and cut back how many, how much and starve myself. That's what I thought. So I was with you. Yeah.

Bradley: 6:20

Yeah. And with the back pain, it had gotten so bad. By 2019, I ended up seeing a neurosurgeon and, I had three compressed discs. These discs were basically useless and they were causing severe strain of my sac nerve. And so my, the whole left side of my body was just always tingling and I felt like if I, if this keeps up, I'm going to get neuropathy, I'm going to lose feeling in that on that nerve. So there was a somewhat of a risky surgery that he proposed, a laminectomy where they go in, they remove, they don't do anything to the discs, the discs are still screwed, but they go in and they remove the back plate of your vertebrae. At the L5 S1 and I said, I've been so much pain, like anything is, it's better. I mean, hell, if he paralyzes me, at least I probably won't feel anything. I was kind of that desperate and the surgery was it was no fun to recover from, but it was very successful within maybe six months. My pain was 95 percent less than what it had been before surgery. So I was very happy with the result. But I had this kind of lingering stiffness in my lower back doing a sit up was very uncomfortable and I had a lot of scar tissue and I just thought, well, I'm just gonna have it for life. And that's a trade off. I was pretty happy with. And it was something I thought that you couldn't get rid of. Yeah, I was to find out otherwise when I, it was one of the unforeseen consequences of Yeah,

Larry: 7:45

I I had several injuries too, and I wish I would have been airborne, so I could have said my ankle injury was for like some badass night drop or something, you know, but, uh, it wasn't, but I still had the injuries, right? And like you and my back injury on my back was always painful. I could not deadlift like I used to. I couldn't do any of the stuff I used to do, but I tell you what, this is an amazing diet because when you remove poison from your body, And in large quantities, we were eating a large quantity of poison every day. I was anyway, thinking I was eating healthy to like quest bars and all this garbage. I thought, yeah, this is healthy. I'm doing the keto thing. That's pretty healthy. No not good enough. You got to get the seed oils, the sugar, all the processed food out. And once you do, man, the body does magic. I don't know about you. I feel I'm 50, almost 58 or 58 in May 4th. May the 4th be with you. At 58, I feel like I'm in my thirties, like early thirties. Like I feel like I'm sprinting, I'm lifting in the gym. I'm doing deadlifts, I'm doing squats, I'm doing all this crazy stuff that I thought for the rest of my life was done. I thought I'd never be here again. I thought I'd never run again. I couldn't even run. I had a walking profile. Because my ankle and my back and I thought, well, that's it. I'm never running again and man in less than a year, all this stuff happened. So you're talking about your back. Was that kind of your reason for experimenting with diet? What was your diet like before you found carnivore? What were you experimenting? What did you start with and why? And then how'd you

Bradley: 9:12

get the card? So I had tried some different diets over the years. The one I remember doing was some version of paleo, early on in my army career that was like eating nuts and kale and it was just like, you felt like a rabbit. But other than that, I never really tried other than the calorie restriction. That was, I had this philosophy. My thought was that like what you're eating, natural content doesn't matter. That's what I thought. But again, it's purely the math equation. Yeah. And so if I can just either reduce the calories or, increase how much I'm burning, then that's going to be the difference maker. So I ate a very high carbohydrate diet. I didn't really restrict myself. I. A lot of snacks. I have an insatiable sweet tooth. That's always been like my Achilles heel. I love chocolate. Anything. Anything sweet. Chocolate, M& M's, Reese's, you name it. I love it. I was like notorious for always having snacks. And when you're in the field, my God, just because of the garbage that we're eating with these MREs. Right. You get these absolutely crazy sugar. Sugar cravings and you just, all you want is like a bag of sour patch kids or sour Skittles if you can get them in an MRE. Your body just craves that because you're burning absolute garbage in the food that you're eating. You're not, it's really, it's weird cause you're overweight and you think, well, the problem is that I have too many calories or not burning them off enough, but really what you're suffering from. is undernourishment, is malnourishment in some sense. And that never occurred to me until I finally got around to Keto and then eventually the carnivore diet years later. I finally got tired of just banging my head against the wall, on that deployment in 2020, I was about six months into it and my weight was hovering around two 32 35.

Larry: 11:08

And how tall are you? I'm six three. Okay. You're my height. Okay.

Bradley: 11:12

And I was running. I got really into running after my back surgery because I'm like, well, I can't lift anymore. I'm never going to lift again, basically nothing heavy anyway, nothing more than dumbbells. So I'd kind of given up on lifting and I was like, well, I'm just a runner. I'm just going to do cardio now. That's how I'm going to stay fit. And what I found was that in order to keep my weight even without going up or to drop the weight, I had to do an insane amount of cardio. And it became like an arms race where you're doing increasingly more cardio. Your body is increasingly hungry. And so you're necessarily eating more. And in turn, you have to run more. Burn off that much more than you ate. And that's not sustainable because, you get to a point where you need to take a break. You can't run every day. You can't run seven miles every day, which is about what I was running at the time. Your shins get time flat footed. Like I'm not really well built for my shins are on fire. I'm like really sore. I'm like, this is miserable, but if I stop, I'm going to gain weight. So damn hungry. And I had a friend who told me about a ketogenic diet. And she had had some success with it. She had lost some weight and I said, I didn't think much of it. And then she sent me a couple of videos and I had all the time in the world on deployment. You're just stuck on this base with, you can go down a lot of rabbit holes on deployment. You have access to the internet and you're not that busy. And I watched a couple of lectures, I think a few talks by Gary Taubes and by Dr. Robert Lustig and a few other people like one of those low carb down under conferences. And they're talking about the benefits of doing a, either a low carb diet or intermittent fasting. And I was particularly interested when people were talking about diet from that kind of anthropological perspective. When they're talking about, different native tribes. What do the Native Americans eat, before? Before they adopted a Western European diet or the Inuit eating, in the early 20th century in these different African tribes. And it's like, well, they're eating all meat and they're not fat. And they, I think it's kind of weird. You never really didn't have a paradigm to where that made sense in my head. And I thought, well, I'm clearly not having any success with this whole calories in calories out there. So why don't I just give it a try? And so I went, I just decided on a whim one night on deployment. I said, you know, tomorrow. I'm not going to eat any snacks, no sugar, no Dr. Pepper, I have two or three of those a day. Yeah. I'm not going to do any of that. And I'm going to, I'm going to go to the D Fact. This is going to be a pretty dirty keto because you're,

Larry: 13:59

you're at an army D Fact. D Fact Keto, yeah.

Bradley: 14:02

It's D Fact Keto. I have no idea how well this is going to go, but I'm going to load up my plate. It was kind of a serve yourself type D Fact, so you can take as much as you want. And I took, All the meat I wanted, all the protein. I said, I'm going to take as much protein, as much fat, as much cheese, eggs. And back then I was still eating vegetables, so I would get like bell peppers. And I threw it in a big styrofoam container and took it away with me. And, some people talk about, when do you notice the effects of keto or carnivore? For me, I noticed that first meal, because I couldn't finish that plate of food. And I said, that's very strange, because normally I would get two or three plates. It's filled with carbohydrates and cereals and snacks, and I'd still be hungry at the end. And I made it maybe three quarters of the way through that plate of food. It was all like, beef and eggs and a couple strips of bell pepper and cheese. And I was stuffed within, 15 minutes. And I said, that's very weird. And I didn't feel any desire to keep eating, even a couple hours later. And I said, okay, well, we'll see how tomorrow goes. And the same thing the next day. I was kind of restricting the time that I was eating, too. So I was trying, I was combining intermittent fasting with this, very dirty, army defect keto. And I weighed myself for the first time after, 48 hours. I had lost 5 pounds. Yeah. I'm like, I didn't even run. I didn't do any lift. I didn't do any workout. Oops. I didn't feel hungry at any point, I said, this is very strange. And I think that first night, that was really my first introduction to satiety, like really understanding it. Yeah. And I got to thinking, I'm like, have I ever had a meal without carbohydrates? Like I can't even remember that time in my life where I would deliberately forego having bread or chips or something. Some kind of carbohydrate to go. I'm like maybe I don't, maybe I don't need carbohydrate. And within the first week I lost 10 pounds or so. And after that first week, I was really off to the races. And I said there's no limit to where I can go with this. I was like a true believer within seven days. And this is not even a full carnivore diet. God knows what they were cooking any of this food in. So I'm sure there were plenty of seed oils. I'm sure it was cooked in the cheapest stuff possible. But even in the extremely dirty keto, I was seeing results. I was seeing them faster. The baby fat on my face that I had had for my entire adult life, like it was disappearing. My face was becoming thinner. So it wasn't just the scale was changing because I'd seen that before yeah, I can, I could lose. I had lost 15, 20 pounds before as far as the scale is concerned, because I just ran myself into the ground during the summer and sat in the sauna a lot. But this was a different kind of weight loss. There was clearly like visceral fat that was disappearing that had never disappeared before. I was losing visceral fat on my belly. I was like seeing my ribs and my abs underneath. And you know, I'm not really, I'm actually doing way less physical activity than I had been doing for six months prior. So that was towards the tail end of the deployment when I started it. By the time I got home, three months later, I had lost 35, 40 pounds, probably in a very short span of time. I had gotten down at one point to about 190 pounds, which I had not been, I had not been that weight since I was in high school, like maybe my senior year of high school was the last time I'd seen that number, anything below 200. And what was remarkable about it is that it was sustainable. I didn't feel famished. I was, I felt full after every meal. But I think that the other critical factor, the reason it was working so well, is that all of those cravings, those cravings for the Oreos and the chips and all the, my favorite snacks and bogey bait when I'm on deployment, they disappeared within a couple of days of starting that diet. And I had never had those. I'd always had those cravings. They'd never disappeared. They could be, you could just eat enough and you would eat enough Oreo cookies where you don't want anymore. You're physically ill, but I'd never gotten rid of the urge to eat sugar without eating sugar. And so it was such a

Larry: 18:30

paradigm shift for me. It's kind of like a Thanksgiving. I like to think of Thanksgiving. This Thanksgiving is my first carnivore Thanksgiving I had. And every Thanksgiving before this, I would eat until my stomach was uncomfortably full. I'd actually unbutton my top button and loosen my belt typically every year. And this year I ate until I couldn't eat anymore, but my belly was never bigger. And I didn't get uncomfortably full. I just got to the point where I wasn't interested in eating anymore. I just stopped and it was crazy, but it's. It was the most comfortable Thanksgiving I've ever had, and it was great. So I hosted, so it was part of work.

Bradley: 19:05

It makes eating food way more pleasant. Yes. Because you, you don't feel bloated. And so you, there's a difference between feeling full and the kind of fullness that you described, right? Where you're just in a carb, carbohydrate coma, basically. Your belly's sticking out, you know, several more

Larry: 19:21

inches. And then you're hungry four hours later. It's like the Chinese restaurant paradigm, right? For real. And you're

Bradley: 19:26

hungry, and you have a headache, maybe. Yeah, so it was just such a paradigm shift. And I don't know why I was so resistant, I was just ignorant of it. I conceptualized this before I had tried this. And it just makes you, I mean it's very logical when you think about it. Our bodies are machines. And like any machine that runs on fuel, you have to have the proper fuel. It's like, yeah, can your lawnmower or your car run on, an inferior fuel, like vegetable oil, like maybe, maybe for a little while, like not very well, your chainsaw might work for, it might get combustion and actually, function for a little bit, but it's not going to function. Well, it's probably not going to function a very long time.

Larry: 20:10

Yeah. It's going to die early. It's

Bradley: 20:11

going to die early. It's going to gum up all the works and ruin everything. And our bodies are very similar and it's very logical in that regard. Our bodies evolved to use a certain fuel and if we're putting the wrong stuff in there. Even if it's edible and it keeps us alive for a while.

Larry: 20:29

It's not yeah, survival food. It's survival food. And so here's the interesting thing. When I was getting ready for schools, I went to Warren officer candidate school at Fort Rucker when I was 45, I was the oldest guy in the class. The average class age was 22. We had a bunch of pilots in there, a lot of street to seat guys and everything. So these guys are all running seven minute miles. So I had to get ready for that school. And I did keto because Carnivore just sounded like ridiculous. It was like, that's some kind of cult thing. I was like, whatever. And this is back in keto and I lost a lot of weight. Like you did. I experienced the energy increase and the weight loss. I did not experience healing because I think what Chafee says is pretty accurate that for every 1 percent you deviate from a pure carnivore diet or the optimum human diet, right? You're going to lose about 10 percent efficacy in that outcome of that diet. So I think. The keto diet I did was probably 85 to 90 percent carnivore. And then, you know, it was whole food for sure, but it wasn't, but I had seed oils and a lot of seed oils in there. So it wasn't even, it's probably in the 80 percentile. So I didn't get any of the healing benefits. I still had allergies. I still had all these problems, but I did get the weight loss and the energy increase, not nothing near like I had in carnivore. What was your experience when you went from that, when you lost that weight? Did you have any healing at that point? Or did you go to carnivore and find more and a better result?

Bradley: 21:55

Well, it was a gradual thing. I remember waking up one day and I'm like, you know, I, cause I had that lower back stiffness. I'd had that post surgery pain that had just been with me. And I think I, I got out of bed one day and I, you know, that kind of sit up motion on a bed and I'm like, huh, like I didn't, I didn't feel that normal stiffness that I usually do. And I just realized. It used to be where if I stood for too long, if I sat for too long, I'd kind of feel that discomfort and that old pain hit me. It was very dull, but I just stopped feeling it at a certain point. And this was maybe a couple of weeks into that very dirty keto. So I was seeing the healing results. Okay. Even at that stage, even, I didn't know anything about seed oils or what the, you know, how stuff was cooked and how the oils can be a big player, but even that dirty version was enough to start seeing the healing. I would say it really improved when I got back home and I could buy my own food. I was sourcing my own food of much better quality, much meat and in greater quantities. And it was a gradual thing, I was eating fruit for a long time still. I was eating some vegetables, I'd say for about six months until the end of 2021, I was still, it was still a whole food keto diet with fruits and vegetables. And I think at a certain point I'm like, I don't like vegetables that much. Would it really hurt me to just get rid of them? Like maybe they're not doing me that much good. And as much as I love fruit, I did realize that I don't have any sense of. Self control when it comes to fruit. I love pineapples, but I could sit there and over the course of a couple hours I'll just eat a whole pineapple. Yeah, and it seemed to be like almost a crutch that same kind of, Sweet tooth that was its last gasp was the fruit in some way and when I got rid of the fruit, I mean I You know with red meat, you know as you know with red meat or with eggs There's no like overeating. There's no addiction.

Larry: 23:59

Yeah, no cravings

Bradley: 24:01

You're not like you're not manically shoving the food in your face, right? I mean I challenge them. I know someone like dr. Sean baker. He eats. I don't know four pounds Yeah guys

Larry: 24:12

I

Bradley: 24:13

can't do more than maybe a pound and that may be two pounds if i'm like really hungry, but I challenge like Anybody, no matter what they weigh, like, go ahead and eat more than two pounds of red meat in a single sitting. Try to overeat it. You won't be able to. Your body will tell you that's enough. Um, I'm good. And this is the wonderful thing we treat our human body like it's stupid. The way nutrition in general talks about the human body. You see this in these idiotic guidelines where they say, Well, you can measure how many blueberries or how many things of lean protein you should have. The size of your hand. It's like. Does a lion sit there in the wild, is he got his paw out, is he measuring, how much red meat is he eating? No, he eats until he's full. There's no way that humans would have made it this far on the planet if we didn't have to think, if we had to think about it that hard, we never would have made it this far. So it's just such, it's so much more of an intuitive diet. Well, I eat when I'm hungry and then I eat until I'm not hungry anymore. And that's it. I don't measure anything. I don't weigh my food. I'm like, yeah, that slab of meat looks like it would hold me over, for the next 12 hours or so. And that's it. And I don't think about it.

Larry: 25:28

Yeah. And that's what I love to say that this, you know, this is the right way to eat just because naturally you don't need a calculator. You don't need an app. You don't need to blow and do something or pee on something to figure out if you're doing it right. Right. All you do. Is you eat, it's like Chafee, he just simplifies it so much, you know, eat when hungry, eat till satiated, eat fatty meat and salt to taste, drink water, that's all you do, that's it, boom, done, 100%, you want to do eggs, fine, you can do a little, organ meat, fine, you don't have to, so, who was your first doctor, or carnivore, actual hardcore carnivore, where you said, yes, I'm being carnivore there had to be a demarcation point where you finally said oh, okay, it's called carnivore, that's what I'm gonna do. Who was the guy that you first saw or read about? I

Bradley: 26:10

think it was, I think it was Dr. Baker. So this is about very early 2022. I gradually gotten rid of the vegetables and just stopped eating them and the fruits. I was kind of up in the air about, I said, you know, it's the new year. I've had this much success on the diet. I've gotten to like my lowest, I was still about 190, 195, I'd stayed, kept all the weight off for. Six to eight months at that point, but I felt like there was something missing in that. I'm like, well, I don't think I'm actually at my, at my optimum health yet. My optimal health yet. I was very thin. I was still running quite a bit. And I said, I know what I had said after my surgery, I'm never going to lift again. But, I see someone like Dr. Baker and I see these other, YouTubers who these different fitness channels, And I'm like, maybe with all of this protein and added fat, like I wonder if I really could get back into lifting again. And so the two went hand in hand. So I wanted to get back into lifting. I wanted to improve my strength because part of me felt that maybe the reason that I messed up my back so badly is because I was weak and I wasn't strong enough to sustain what I was doing on top of not having the right fuel. So I had seen Dr. Baker interviewed on, uh, workout show. I can't have a YouTube channel. Why is he just talking about this carnivore diet? He's 50 some years old and he's a world record holder and rowing. Yeah. And I said, well, it works pretty well for that guy. And, he had been in, he'd been in the military as well. He was an Air Force guy and he'd been very heavy at some point. So I saw him like, well, maybe I could maybe not be as insane as him, but I could do something like he did. And I put my mind to it in early 2022. I had basically cut out what little was left of non carnivore food. And it's been steady going for the past two years now. It's been about two years straight. And I've hardly deviated at all. There's been a holiday or two where I've eaten mom's cookies or brownies. I always regret it. I don't feel well after that. Yeah. But I know even on those days where out of some obligation or whatever, you just eat the birthday cake, fine, eat the pizza you'll be punished for it. But you know how to recover from it very quickly. It's like, okay, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna eat a steak when I get home and I'm gonna get some sleep. And I'm going to work out tomorrow and then I'll be fine. I'll be right back to my normal weight. And that's what I did. One of the things that sort of surprised me as I started very gradually like getting into lifting. I'm talking like lifting the bar and then maybe adding like 10 pounds to it. I was not aiming for any records. I was very nervous. I was very nervous doing a deadlift. God knows how many years at that

Larry: 29:02

point. I'm with you on that. I was too. I had back injury. Same thing. So, yeah.

Bradley: 29:06

But I was amazed at how fast I was like, wow, that was really easy. And I'd come back the next couple of days later, do it again at 10, 20 pounds. And within a few months, I was lifting more weight than I'd ever lifted before my surgery. And I said, this is crazy. And so a very unusual thing started to happen, which I had never experienced before. I started gaining weight, but I was not getting fat. And this was a new experience. So I was gaining muscle weight. The clothes were still fitting exactly the same. The pant size was the same. The shoulders were getting broader. Yeah, getting bigger muscles. We're getting firmer. Yep. They were growing out. And that was a very new experience I ended up packing on another about 20 pounds over the next year, year and a half or so. So now I'm actually back at two 15. I'm in two 15, which is the same weight as when I joined the military. But I look, my body composition is totally different than the 215 of 22 year old me. I look very different. If I had a side by side comparison of the picture, my face looks way more bloated back then. I look way thinner now at 215 than I did at 22. It's a very strange thing if you're not accustomed to it.

Larry: 30:25

Yeah. And I think I talk about this too. I, when I got out of the military the last year I was in, I could not meet standard. And I was retiring anyway, so I'm like, screw it. I'm not, I'm not going to fight my body. Cause I was just putting on weight and getting more and more out of shape. So I didn't meet standard my last year I retired out. I feel like right now today I could go back in and be a better soldier physically, mentally, emotionally than I was my last five years. At least I could walk right in and be better. And motivationally, my motivation levels are skyrocketing. I don't know about you, but my motivation level for every little task I want to do and I want to do it right. It's like I, that, that whole thing of procrastination gone now, where I used to have a lot of that in my life of little things. I just didn't, if something I didn't want to do, I would put it off, put it off. Now it's like I just go tackle stuff and it's part of your mind getting healed. I guarantee it is. That's why I say if I could get a whole platoon. of carnivores. Imagine them competing against other platoons in a company or brigade. It would be amazing, right? Because if you could get them all to commit just to see what they could get done, it would be, I would love to do it. Boards, everything, soldier competitions, whatever. I think it just makes a huge difference in everything we do. And my initial experience with the carnivore diet were so great that in the first 90 days, I decided to start this YouTube channel. That's how great they were. I'd never wanted to be a YouTuber. That was not on the plan. I have a career. I have a business on the side. I have a son I'm raising. I've got a busy life and doing YouTube was never in the equation. But I just felt it was just such a big difference. I had to get this out to as many people as I could, especially like I said, the vets. And lifting, like you said I'm doing deadlifts now, like I was in college again. It's crazy, man. And I thought I would never deadlift again in my life. And my back does, it doesn't, I don't even get a twinge. I get no, it's like I never got injured. That's what it feels like for me. When I lift, I feel like I never was injured. It's

Bradley: 32:20

crazy. I feel the same way. I have the only reminder that I ever had that pain, that I ever had that surgery. I've got a big scar on my back. And that's the only reminder that I ever had it. I remember working out years ago, I felt like I was always kinking my neck, throwing out my back. Doing stuff and like, Oh, I picked up the rucksack, the wrong way. And I threw it in the back or something. I don't do that. I don't even have to work out and I'm granted, I'm sort of a lazy guy at the gym, like I do my sets, I'm not doing them in any particular hurry. I'm not trying to do, I'm not doing any super sets and every 30 seconds. I'm really a lazy guy at the gym. I'm there to get my workout in. I'll take it a half hour, an hour. I don't know when it takes. But I don't feel sore after the work, even when I'm lifting like. The highest weights that I've ever lifted before for reps. I don't really feel sore in the morning. I don't have that same stiffness that I used to. If it's a totally new workout, maybe, maybe a little bit. If it's a muscle that's been activated forever. But if it's something I'm fairly consistently doing, I don't.

Larry: 33:27

Yeah, I changed my tricep workout. I changed it to one behind my head. And I did feel a little bit of tightness the next day, but that was it. And then it was gone. But one day I felt a little bit like just. And I went heavy. And before I was doing a lot of push downs and a lot of close hand bench press and I decided I'm gonna do some over the head stuff. French curl style. And I did feel that a little bit, but just because they hit a different area of the muscle hit further down, right? I don't know. It's crazy. And the other thing is when I work out, I don't, I run out of time. I don't get tired. It's like I could do more sets. It says I got stuff I gotta do, so I gotta leave. I don't know about you, but I never really get to where I'm totally exhausted like I used to be in the gym. Oh, yeah, same way.

Bradley: 34:06

I'm not trying to really get my sweat on so much as improve, I'm there to increase my strength. That's my goal. It's not to, and that's that's been another paradigm shift, I think, as a result of the Carnival Diet. Is it really changed my attitude towards working out. Yeah. I used to view working out as Almost a maintenance protocol to keep the weight off, right? It was like, okay, I have to do X number of minutes of cardio and sweat, X amount of, buckets in the gym. If I want to just stay the same weight or lose a little bit. And so I actually spend way less time working out now. I don't need to. If I did 30 minutes and I get all the sets in that I wanted to that's enough for me. Because it has, it's about, my goals for working out are totally different now. It's I'm doing this, So I'm stronger. So I'm more functionally capable of handling life's physical exertions. It's not about, losing another pound or two.

Larry: 35:01

No. Yeah it's functional fitness for me too. I'm getting older and I'm like, as Dr. Chafee says, I'm almost middle aged at 60. I'll be middle aged. I'm going to go to 120. Right. So that's the plan. So I want to make sure when I hit my middle age, I'm hitting with stride like I'm ready to roll. And it's interesting because, you look at military history. You know, that there were old soldiers who were frontline combatants in Rome and in Greece and, all these other nation states where guys were in their sixties and still fighting, probably because they were eating real meat and they weren't eating a bunch of garbage. And if you do that and you're got good, pretty decent genes and you're a decent athlete, there's really no reason you couldn't, you know, look at Dr Baker like you said, the guy's my age is a beast. So not unbelievable at all.

Bradley: 35:48

As part of that, I think what's really hopeful about this diet is that you can see phenomenal results at any age. I started it when I was 30 with a lot of health problems behind me. And I just feel so much more confident, I'm 34 now, going into the rest of my 30s and my 40s, I talk to my peers or people that are younger than me sometimes, and they say, oh, once you hit 27, it's all downhill, you start falling apart. Well, that's true if you accept that it really is, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. But I'm stronger, I'm healthier, I look better I'm more confident than when I was 18 years old. There's a few gray hairs now, but yeah, I am way better health than I've ever been as an adult and probably certainly as a child.

Larry: 36:31

Yeah, me too. And, I was gonna ask you what, when you got out, are you still in reserves? You got now you're still in, right?

Bradley: 36:37

I'm still, I'm still, I'm still reservist.

Larry: 36:38

So are you a major? Okay. You're a major. Cool. I was just curious. So I don't know if you follow Dr. Sean O'Mara. I think he's a veteran too. I know he's law enforcement. I think he's a national guard guy too, but he was a doctor and he's a sprint, the sprinting carnivore. Do you know when I'm talking about Dr. Amira? I have heard of him. Yeah. Check his videos out. I'm going to be interviewing him in the coming weeks. And he's got me sprinting now because you don't want to be a distance runner. You want to be a sprinter. He talks about the the evolutionary origin of sprinting. Either you're running away from danger or you're hunting. Right. And they have theories. Of how people back in the stone age days, they'd be hunting parties. They would run down the antelopes, and the antelopes can't sweat. So they get them in the middle of the day, and humans can sweat, so they can keep running. And they'd run them until they couldn't run anymore, and they were easier to subdue. And pretty interesting theories they have. So I know you like that kind of stuff you're talking about, the theories of the origin of things. He talks about that with sprinting. So I'm a sprinter now, and I tell you what, it has made a difference in my workouts. I incorporated sprinting and I'm only doing three to five sprints a day between. And I do a random sprint. He said, make it random. So I have a random timer. I do it between eight and 30 seconds each sprint. And I have a timer. When I hit start, it randomly picks a number between eight and 32 and starts the timer and I sprint until it goes off. And I get totally gassed, but anyway, check his stuff. Dr. Omar is pretty cool. I think you'd like that. So in addition to your physical health, because we know you've healed up a lot of physical injuries What have the changes in your mental health been? Have you noticed any and were you struggling with any mental health before you started this?

Bradley: 38:17

No, I was always very fortunate that I think metabolic dysfunction, which I certainly had, always seemed to manifest in a kind of musculoskeletal way. And that went back to my childhood. I had tendonitis all the time. I had osteoarthritis in my knees when 10 years old. I spent a lot of time on crutches as a kid. I think looking back, part of that was probably because I didn't have the proper diet. I was a growing boy. I was growing way too fast for my tendons and ligaments to keep up. And I think that kind of kept going into adulthood with the degeneration of discs, or back pain and sciatica that I was having. So it always seemed to manifest in a very physical way. But so I never suffered from anxiety or depression. But I will say even still, when I started the keto diet, and I think especially with the carnivore diet, is, I noticed just way more mental clarity, way more confidence. You look better, you feel better. And you're going to, I think, necessarily be more confident in terms of just mental cognition. The cognitive benefits were something that I was not expecting or that I was aiming to get, but I noticed even on a, a kind of loose keto diet, my concentration was much higher when I came back to grad school. I had one more year of grad school when I came back home and I could sit and write an essay or read a book for hours without taking a break. I was reading like hundreds of pages in a book a day. And I'm like, I never do that. It's some boring history book. Like usually I put this down after 20 pages, go do something else, get distracted. But the concentration that I was able to tap into, you know, I was writing my final, my thesis, my dissertation, and I was, I felt like I was using the diet and a little bit of intermittent fasting, which I was, I don't really do anymore so much, but back then I was kind of doing it like 24 or 48 hours at a time. And I would use that as a mental boost and said, okay, I'm not going to eat anything for two days. And that second day I'm going to use it to. To work on my paper, to work on my dissertation, and I felt like I was so in the zone when I would do that. On the carnivore diet, I feel like it's now just a kind of a constant thing. Unless I'm sick with a cold or a flu, which doesn't happen very often. I normally eat, during the week I'll have one meal a day. I don't, I just, I'll eat, I'll drink coffee at work. I'll come home, I'll cook a huge meal, eat it all, and do the same thing the next night. Then on the weekends I'll have Maybe two meals, at this point for the past two years straight, it's just been a consistent, steady state. I don't have like down days. I don't get the sads. I don't get random headaches that kind of, bring me down and I feel hopeless. I feel like I go on every day pretty much the same. Feeling confident, feeling strong, feeling like I know how to get through life, basically.

Larry: 41:22

Yeah I actually felt like less of a man when I couldn't make PT standard and I started putting on weight and I did. I did feel like less of a man, like I wasn't as capable as I was when I was younger. I was always the athlete. I was military a long time. I did a lot of stuff. And I tell you, I've got all my, I've got I don't know if you ever saw Austin Powers. I got my mojo back and I'm ready to roll. And I tell you what, I was reading something on it today and also not just your confidence in your mental clarity and such, but what I was reading about it, it's, it's from fasting that you get this too. And this is a fasting mimicking diet. So essentially you are fasting while you're eating this way your body is anyway, it thinks you are because ketones are high the whole time. Cause you're running on a fasted diet. So you're running in a fasting mimicking diet as Dr. Chafee points out. And some of the things you get is brain plasticity, which means you can, your brain basically can adapt to things better. And the concentration comes from that. And also people are breaking addictions to other things while they're on this way of eating. I don't know if you've experienced any of this, but I don't drink alcohol as much as I used to. And it's not because I was trying to quit alcohol. Cause I really wasn't. I used to drink a bourbon every night when I started this diet, I did for the first 90 days or so, and then I just, less and less, I'd forget to drink it and just go to bed and now I've only had a couple of drinks since November, with friends when they came over and I just have a bourbon with them and, and I've talked to people that their gambling addictions gone away. Pornography addiction has gone away. Addictions fade away and it turns out that they used to treat people with opiate and alcohol addiction a hundred years ago in the thirties. They used to treat them with water fasts, which exactly what we're doing. We're mimicking that fast in our diet. So I don't know if you've experienced anything like that, but I can tell you, I have, I have,

Bradley: 43:08

I've had a very similar experience. And this was another thing that was very surprising in the first, obviously the first thing that I. I noticed that I talked about earlier was losing the sugar addiction, which was like, I didn't think that was possible that you could get rid of an addiction simply by eating something else in its place. But I had been a smoker since I was 17. I was like smoking cigars. I was 17 years old and I kept smoking cigars. I smoked pipes and it was like a, not just a daily thing. I just smoked all the time, especially on deployment. So you got nothing else to do. And you would, you just sit in the smoke pit, at night or after the work shift to smoke for hours, either on your phone or reading or what have you. And when I started doing this diet I felt like I didn't enjoy smoking as much at first. That's how it manifested. I'm like, well, I don't know. I just don't feel like smoking. So the frequency went down significantly. And then at a certain point I blew through all the tobacco and I'm like, wow. You know, I'll go buy some eventually and I just didn't for a very long time. And I went back and I'd gone, I don't know, a year or so without smoking. And then I was back home in Ohio, back in the fall. I picked some up, I smoked for a little bit and it was like, it's nice. It's something social to do, I guess. I haven't smoked, I haven't smoked since, and I don't think I will go back to it ever. It doesn't bring the same it doesn't tickle the neurons in the brain like it used to. And I didn't have withdrawals from it. I didn't feel the need to smoke. It just kind of withered away, the desire to smoke. And alcohol has been very similar. So even when I was doing this diet, I was still drinking beer for a while. And I used to drink quite a bit, quite a lot, actually, especially when I was at active duty. I look back and I'm like, my God, that was the most unhealthy I ever was in my life

Larry: 44:59

when I was

Bradley: 45:00

on active duty, working out more than ever. But I'd come home every night and I would have a couple beers, have some liquor. And that, got less and less over the years, but especially on keto. I stopped keeping alcohol in the house completely. So I would only do it if I went out to a party or a special occasion or something. And then I gradually stopped drinking beer. I tell people I'll drink some tequilas and vodka here and there. And then even that has really faded the past year or so, to where I am perfectly content with not drinking. And even when I'm around people who are drinking, I'm like, well, I can do without it.

Larry: 45:42

It's fine. I've gone out and drank sparkling water when everyone else would drink and get a bottle, and drink that I've done that in the past, when I do drink though, it's usually around veterans. And it's like, when I go out with the vets, we're like, all right, let's have a bourbon and we'll talk. And, it's, that's very social. And I do have a bottle of bourbon here that a veteran bought me. And we drank a couple of glasses like a month ago and it's just sitting there. And it's fine bourbon, man. It's expensive. It's nice. I just have no desire, especially if not, if there's no one here, whereas before I would do it alone, it was just, that was the way it was. So yeah, I think it's an amazing thing that you don't expect one of those unexpected non scale victories. And I love those things, man. What other non scale victories can you think of that you had? Is there any others like allergies or headaches or anything that you could think of that just changed? That surprised you?

Bradley: 46:29

Oh, yes. So sleep quality. I guess looking back, I wouldn't have said at the time that I hadn't, that I slept poorly, but very easily distracted at night, I have to sit and fall asleep watching videos or whatever, and just way too much light exposure. And never really getting a significant amount of sleep, like, okay, I'll sleep five or six hours, I'm more or less functional if I do that. But something I have been more deliberate about on this diet, since I started this diet, even with a young child, it's actually still become easier than it was before. And when I do sleep, even if it is only for six or seven hours, I feel like the quality of that sleep is so much better than it used to be. So it's not even about the amount of hours per se, but it is the quality. It's noticeably different. And I feel like I fall asleep much faster. I wonder if part of that is because I'm doing a lot of really heavy lifting and. Actually really, even if I'm not sweating, that is really tiring for the pain and the body. So

Larry: 47:30

that be part of it. Yeah. I don't sweat as much as I used to. I dunno about you. No, I don't either. But I think body temperature regulation is optimized. Like everything gets optimized. So I think body, I wonder if the cold, I've not been in the cold since I've been on this diet, really? But I'm wondering if it regulate better there too. I imagine it would. I used to sweat at the drop of a hat. And it was terrible. And now it's pretty amazing. And then falling asleep. I sleep about 66 and a half hours a night, but I feel like I got over eight when I wake up, I go to bed around 30 every morning and I just wake up. And when I wake up, I spring up. I'm not like dragging my butt and I got to sit here for a half hour before I can get, I'm like up and doing stuff right away. And I feel like just doing stuff I don't know about you, but it's great.

Bradley: 48:15

Very similar. And I never feel the need to, I was never a big like nap guy. I didn't have to take my, my afternoon siesta, but I never feel the need to, I don't get the crash. I don't get that 2 PM, 3 PM. Like you see people, they have a big lunch and they're just dragging it. I never feel that way. Like the energy level is. It's consistent from the moment I wake up until it's time to go to bed and the energy level is really high until I like shut my eyes and then sleep in 10 minutes.

Larry: 48:47

How do you stay motivated to stick to this diet? Is it hard? Do you find it hard? What's your experience with sticking to this diet and not falling off?

Bradley: 48:55

Well, I guess in an abstract way, my motivation now, I have a young daughter. She was born in late 2022, and I want to be not just alive for, well into her life, but I want to be, vigorous and healthy and like physically present not just like a kind of a ghostly figure that, you know isn't, a thousand yard stare in a photo someday, but someone whom she has memories of doing physical things, throwing her up in the air and playing with her. So that, that's a big kind of conceptual motivation, but in terms of kind of the day to day of it, this is the easiest diet that I've ever been on. It's not hard. I think so much, I think we do people a disservice sometimes when we tell them that getting healthier, getting in shape is a willpower thing. You have to want it so bad, and if you fail, then that means you didn't want it hard enough. And I think it's not a willpower thing because if there's two reasons that people fail a diet or any lifestyle change when it comes to food, and there's two reasons, and they're both very closely related. Number one, you're hungry all the time, right? And your willpower, like that hunger is like older than humanity, right? It's like part of being an animal. And the idea that your willpower is going to overcome this. Biological need humans will like, if they're starving enough, they'll eat tree bark. There was the resort to cannibalism. Like your willpower is not going to ever defeat that kind of, instinct. So that's number one, you're hungry all the time. Number two, you're, you crave all this terrible stuff. And so they're closely related to each other. You're hungry and you're hungry for the really bad stuff. The genius of the carnival diet is that it neutralizes both of those problems, you're not hungry and then the cravings go away. And so that's what you've solved the two biggest problems. It's easy. Your body, at least for me, after a couple days of this, I was craving this food. Like what I really want. Like a lot of red meat, a lot of eggs, cheese. I still eat a lot of dairy. I don't have any problems with it. A lot of cheese. I didn't lack for willpower before this diet. I didn't lack for discipline, I was running all the time. It's not easy. But doing less work and seeing more results when I changed to this diet, it shouldn't be hard. Like it actually should not be hard to eat. And you shouldn't have to put much thought into it. And if you are, if you're miserable on the diet and if you're hungry all the time you're not eating enough or you're not eating the right stuff.

Larry: 51:34

Yeah, you're not eating the right foods. You need to eat food that will actually satiate you, that has fat in it. And that's the problem. And the thing is that the reason I, every time I did keto, I always felt great, I had the energy, I lost the weight and I thought this time for sure, I'm going to keep it. I'm going to stay on this forever. I always said that and it never happened. And I attribute that to the fact that you're managing an addiction. You're counting how many carbs you can eat per day. And the carbohydrate addiction is going to beat that. It's just like you're an alcoholic saying, I'm only going to have one shot of bourbon a day or something, right? And sooner or later, you're going to fall off and you're going to drink the whole bottle. You're not going to be able to just keep yourself because that's, you're fighting your addiction. The only way to do it is to kill the addiction, to remove the addictive substance from your diet. And then, yeah, and then it's easy, right? That's the thing. That's the truth.

Bradley: 52:21

I agree. This is why a diet of moderation is just a recipe for failure. It is. I could not, if I limited myself to 50 carbohydrates a day, I would fail. I would fail this diet, basically. It's like, oh, okay. You can have four Oreos a day. I would be a wreck. You have to eliminate it completely. And that sounds like really severe, it sounds like. Well, that's very extreme because it's all about moderation, but really it's. It's not good to moderate a bad thing.

Larry: 52:50

No moderating poison is bad, right? Moderating poison. How much cyanide would you like to have today? Like, none? How about strychnine? None? None of this stuff. I don't want any of it. It is a poison. And, the seed oils, the sugar, all that stuff's poisonous. You just gotta get out of your diet, and then your body will do, like we said earlier, amazing things that will surprise you. And like you said, I think people approach this and think, well, that's way too hard because they've failed at every diet they'd done before because every diet before has been restrictive. It has been restricting hours that you can eat or days that you can eat or calories that you can eat or carbohydrates. You can, they're all. And they're all not natural. Like you said, they're not a lion in the wild that ever did any of that. They never said, Oh, I better not hunt that elk right there because it's not the right time. I got to wait another day. That's ridiculous. That Elk's there. They're going to eat it. And they're going to, and they're gonna leave meat behind. Cause the jackals are gonna come in there and eat it. And then, the cave men are gonna come in and eat it. Whatever the pro mags, they're going to come eat all that. Yeah, you just eat when you're hungry and that's the thing. So I think we're, when you're fighting against. that are evolutionary. Or if you're a Christian, the way we were designed, if you're fighting against that, whichever you believe doesn't matter, you're going to lose every time. And I have, I'm proof. And I think almost everyone is. So they see this diet and they put it in that context. These diets are all hard and this one seems harder, but it's actually the opposite. It's a force multiplier. It's the easy way. And you just don't know it until you get there. It takes 30 days to find it, I think. Yeah. It's weird

Bradley: 54:16

because we live in this modern industrial age, but it's like, we've completely forgotten, how humans used to live. It's like, we have complete amnesia before anything before a hundred years ago, just imagining how people ate and how they lived, how they survived. And it's funny, we talked a little bit about like ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks. If you go back and read Homer, you read the Odyssey, you read the Iliad, Achilles and Odysseus are never sitting down and eating a salad. When they have their feast, they're having these big, hunks of lamb and the fat's melting off the bones. And then there's these like total feasts of gluttony of meat and fat and cheeses. And there's some bread in there too, and some wine, but they're not eating spinach, they're not eating cauliflower. Like these are warriors who are surviving off of meat. And you see it in the Bible too. You see it in scripture. You see it in old literature. You see it even closer to modern times. Someone like, I don't know if you've heard of Dr. James Salisbury, during the civil war. He, was a early proponent of what we would consider the invents of the Salisbury state partly as a solution as a proposed solution for union soldiers to, to, avoid getting all these diseases when they're on campaign. And it's such a tragedy that there's no institutional memory of that. There's total amnesia. And so we're left with this nutrition kind of regime. In the current military, that's a disaster for

Larry: 55:42

veterans health. It is. It's a complete disaster And I think you need to come on one of my Wednesday shows where we talk about this stuff because it's not an accident It's because the institutions are funded by corporations that have a financial interest in that not being the answer. A lot of corporations are different, the food side of the medicine side, there's a lot of funds in there and there's a lot of political power. And when you can go back to look at the British Navy in the 18th century, 19th century or 19th century, they actually treated, scurvy with a fresh meat diet. They have a fresh meat protocol because if you take grains out of their diet, they're not eating bread and same with Napoleon. He did the same thing. And you treat troops with scurvy with just fresh meat. They don't have the same vitamin C requirement they do when they have. Grains introduce their diet because they need, like Dr. Chaffee said, milligrams instead of nanograms and a steak or fresh meat, horse meat has plenty, has all the vitamin C you could ever need as long as you don't introduce this other stuff to your diet. So yeah it's pretty crazy. We have lost a lot of that. You can look at Otto Warburg and the Warburg effect for fighting cancer. He won the Nobel prize and, I don't get it where people don't go back and look at that. And, Gary Taubes is big on that. And they're all talking to these guys, love watching these guys talk about that. I wish we could just get that message out. And that's the purpose of this this channel here. And I'm so glad you came. I'm going to give the floor to you. For the end here. And I just want you to speak to any veterans that maybe your friends or maybe just some veteran that's just jumping on and looking at this saying, Hey, what is this? What would you recommend? They do if they want to approach this diet and, would you recommend they do that? And why

Bradley: 57:21

yeah. So I know that there's a lot of veterans out there. The guys that I knew while I was in the active duty guys, I know, friends I've known over the years who've since left the service who have struggled with, all sorts of physical ailments with chronic health issues, whether it's physical, whether it's severe mental stress, and sometimes, and it's often the case that they have many of these things at the same time. You usually don't just get one chronic issue. You get four or five of them together. And we tend to treat these as Yeah. It's totally isolated problems. So you go to a specialist, he's going to treat your mental illness, and this guy is going to treat your gastrointestinal problem, and this guy is going to treat your neurological, your back problem and your side of the nerve. And you think of these all as, a bunch of totally unrelated illnesses and issues that you're having when in fact they're very likely all related to each other and they're all stemming from metabolic dysfunction because your body's not properly fueled, it's severely inflamed. And the way I think about inflammation, I don't have a medical background, so this is a very crude sort of understanding of it, but, in effect genetics, is not your destiny. Genetics tells you what you're predetermined to be affected by. So, you can't change that. If I'm predisposed to gut issues, or diabetes, because of my family I can't change that predisposition, but I can change whether or not I actually have it and the way I think about information and metabolic syndrome is that it is a manifestation of what those predispositions are. So in my case, when I was not properly feeling my body, it manifested information that caused nerve pain, that caused all sorts of ligament issues, that caused bone issues, disc issues. And for other people, it seems to affect them very differently. It seems to be gut issues. They get ulcerative colitis, they get severe mental stress. And the hopeful thing for me about the carnivore diet is that you, it is deciding that you are not in fact, a slave to your genetics and that's not your destiny, that your health actually is something that can be manipulated by you in a very positive way that in a very short amount of time and a very short time span. And that's the thing. It's not a year's long treatment. There are people and myself included who, suffered for years. From all sorts of issues, whether it's the food addiction, whether it's physical ailments. And in a very short span of time, we remedied those and made them things of the past as I think you have done as well. And that to me that you can do that only through diet alone is something I think extremely empowering. It's not restricting. It's not extreme. It's something that's incredibly empowering to me that I have that level of control over my own life. And that's what I would say to, to a lot of veterans out there, because I think there's a lot of them who they've been in the service, they suffer from all these ailments and it becomes like a self reinforcing feeling of failure. The, the rate of obesity amongst veterans and active duty servicemen is like high, it's very high. It's 20%. That's not even counting the overweight, the love, the diabetes level is much higher amongst veterans than it is amongst the general population. Is that because veterans are lazy? Is it because we don't know how to take care of ourselves? We lived a lifestyle that was only sustainable as long as we kept up this kind of insane level of physical exertion. And as soon as we stopped that, we just start falling apart. So again, I think it's something incredibly empowering.

Larry: 1:01:09

And I think it's transformative and it's such a short period of time. The only thing I can think of from a veteran would appreciate is when you go into basic and you come out six weeks later, the difference in the person that came in and left. Right. And that's the kind of change that's literally the kind of transformation you get, but on a physical, emotional like you said, self empowering confidence, I mean, all that stuff. And you got a lot of that coming out of basic too, you know, that when you went in, you went back home. After basic, you were a different person and it was completely different. And that's what this is, that kind of thing. It really is.

Bradley: 1:01:41

I think you'd have to be prepared to, to, you have to be self confident enough to deal with the criticisms and deal with the weird stares. Yeah. I've gotten this from family, from most recently from my doctor, which is a funny story. They look at you like you're crazy. They see that you're clearly. Healthier, you're happier, you're more confident, you look better, your skin looks better, everything, you're tanning, but you're not getting sunburns, another weird thing about this diet. And yet they're like, well, yeah, I can see you've lost 35 pounds and you've never lifted more weights in your life, but what about your cholesterol?

Larry: 1:02:19

And it's weirdly

Bradley: 1:02:20

enough, I mean, it's been my experience that I've only gotten the kind of suspicious questions after I've gotten healthy, like then that's when people start asking you that. The probing questions about your health. Yeah,

Larry: 1:02:33

no one worried when you're eating, when you're eating a sleeve of Oreos, no one had a thing to say, right? But now they want to, yeah, now they want to know, wow, are you worried about heart attack? Like, well, why didn't you bring that up when I was eating a pizza the other day? You know what I mean? Are you sure you

Bradley: 1:02:47

want to eat the fat on that, strip steak there?

Larry: 1:02:52

Crazy. I'm actually

Bradley: 1:02:54

really curious, did you, have you gotten like any blood work or medical tests that you can compare? Yeah. To the past. Did you see any

Larry: 1:03:02

differences? Yeah. I go to the VA every year for my, I'm a disabled vet. So I get my VA service. And when I went last year, let's see, March 22nd is when I started carnivore. I went like 40 days into it to my annual. thing. And I had lost like 26 pounds 40 days after I started and I went in, I felt great. I look better. You feel amazing that first couple of months, like off the charts. Amazing. I felt like I was a teenager again. And I went in, I told the doc and she looked at my blood work, goes, yeah, it looks pretty good. It looks better before. And she said, I told her I was on carnivore. She's like, Oh, well, you know, you should really restrict your fats. I'm like, well, I'm not going to. And then she goes, well, I want to put you in for another panel in six months then, and we'll discuss. I'm like, Hey, that's great. That's perfect. I get another free blood work to compare to the last one. This is great. I said, yeah, let's do it. So I'm all excited. So then I go back and six months later, and now I'm no longer, let's see, I started at two 80. I was like two 50 something. Now I'm 230 something pounds. I'm 2 34. When I go in and I'm trim. I'm down from like a, I was a 44 waist tight. Wow. And now I'm like, I, when I went back in, I was like a 36 loose. Right now I'm like a 34 loose. I'm getting down to about a 32, like I was in college and, so my waistline just shrinking. I'm putting muscle on. I wasn't even lifting weights yet. Then I didn't start lifting weights till December. I started, I joined a gym and said, I'm going to see if I can lift like I did in college and started doing my exact same routine. I did when I played rugby and it's amazing what it does to your body. This is an anabolic. It is an anabolic diet. 100%. You're gonna put muscle on like you wouldn't believe. But so I went in and she looked at my blood work. And she goes I wanted to put you on some thyroid stuff. She goes, but your numbers are all getting better. They're trending better. And she still said, stay away from fat because she's just trained and it's ingrained and also in the VA they have to adhere to the standard of care because that's what they get graded on. So they can't really go off that, that script because that's the government line. And I get it. So I just ignore her. I'm like, okay, yeah, that's fine. I'm just doing my thing. We'll see. But I guarantee if someone, I want to put me on statins or something, which they don't because I'm good. But if they did, I would definitely ask them if they knew what the number needed to treat was for that. And what the, absolute risk versus the relative risk is. Of the actual taking the drug and the, of getting the disease,'cause they don't know, most doctors just don't even know what that is. And I pointed'em to people like Dr. Diamond or Zoe Comb, who has the number needed to treat. Do you, have you seen her stuff? She's got the number to needed to treat website.

Bradley: 1:05:38

That she Yeah I saw her interviewed, I think on Dr. Chaffey's.

Larry: 1:05:41

Yeah she's great. She's really brilliant. But listen we're up against the hard time here. It's been a great hour and 12 minutes now, Bradley, I'm going to drop you off, say goodbye to everybody, but stick around and we'll say goodbye. Afterwards. Okay. All right, Larry. Thanks so much. Thanks Bradley. Appreciate you. Thanks. Take care. All right. That was another great interview. Bradley's just really insightful, had a lot of good experience to share. If you're a veteran and you are thinking about this, I would just recommend you go ahead and try it out. This is something you can do without, going to a doctor. You don't have to sign up for therapy. You don't have to meet with counselors. You can just change what you eat and try it out. And I challenge you to do that because this has changed my life has changed Bradley's life and changed all these other veterans who I've interviewed. If you haven't seen, go check out or listen to the podcast mission carnivore, and you'll find out what I'm talking about. Anyway, that's all I got to say tonight, guys. Stay strong and overcome. Carnivore soldier out.