The Carnivore Way Episode 1: Surviving the Japanese Earthquake + Tsunami, and Beating Blood Cancer With The Carnivore Diet

Welcome to the first episode of "The Carnivore Way", a podcast focused on YouTube content creators living the carnivore lifestyle and sharing their results for the world to see. 

In this episode we visit David Charles (@DCLearningToLive) to hear his incredible soty of survival, beginning with the 9 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and then surviving and eventually defeating his mutiple diagnoeses of highly aggressive stage 4 lynphomic blood cancer.

Strap in for a great story!

Carnivore Diet Planning Guide: https://4343867330708.gumroad.com/l/fqtjv
Website: https://www.carnivoresoldier.com
Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/6762077700490092
Discord Server: https://discord.gg/eqyzCqtwgd

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. If you’re seeking a sustainable and effective weight loss method, the carnivore diet might be the answer you’ve been looking for!

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

Carnivore Down Under DC Learning to Live

Larry: [00:00:00] All right. All right. All right. Carnivore Soldier coming at you from Austin, Texas. Today, we've got another new stream coming up. This is a new playlist on my YouTube channel and a new podcast called The Carnivore Way. And we're gonna be focusing on carnivore YouTubers. This carnivore YouTuber is from way down under.

I believe he's from Brisbane or Brisbane, as they call it, . And his name is David Charles. He's known as DC Learning to Live. And he's got an incredible story to share with us about fighting cancer through carnivore. So let me bring him in and we'll let him introduce himself. Hey, 

DC: David, how you doing?

Hey, Larry. I'm great. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Now, do you want me to call you 

Larry: David or DC? 

DC: Uh, David's fine. Or DC. Okay. Yeah. Either one's fine. Cool. Well, 

Larry: I gave him a little teaser, why don't you just introduce yourself first? Who you are? Did I say it right? Are you in Brisbane or Brisbane?

That's right. Yeah. Brisbane. [00:01:00] Brisbane. 

DC: Okay. You're in Brisbane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or just call it Brizzy for short. Brizzy. I like it. I'm all about the short. Yeah, the quicker the better. Okay, so my story started back in 2011. in Japan with my wife. , In a small town between the city of Sendai and the coast of Miyagi.

Miyagi is the prefecture, like state, in Japan. I was In March 11, we were hit by a nine magnitude earthquake and then the tsunami afterwards. That was pretty brutal. You know, this was an earthquake that lasted six and a half minutes almost. It was Six minutes, 15, 16 seconds or so it's like the longest six minutes of your life.

Larry: Listen, I got to break in because I've been in a big earthquake, but nothing that big. I was in the Bay area during the Loma Prieta earthquake, which was [00:02:00] 5. 6 and it lasted for 40 seconds, I think, or 36. And I got to tell you that was the longest 36 seconds of my life too, because, and I can't imagine yours is thousands of times more strong than that.

DC: Um, and it was a shallow one as well, which makes it more violent. And yeah, like you said, like most earthquakes only last 15 to 40 odd seconds. They don't last that long. And they do a lot of damage, of course, but this one lasted over six minutes. And it just kept rolling and rolling, it was crazy.

And in the days following it, like even the aftershocks, some of the aftershocks were over eight magnitude. Yeah. 

Larry: And you guys were in shock. Cause I know I was in shock from the earthquake and it's like PTSD. You go through a shock 

DC: period. Yeah. Yeah, you do. You certainly do. Especially how long it lasted.

It [00:03:00] just it just kept going. You keep expecting it to stop because, Japan has a lot of earthquakes. I was quite used to them. That only last a few seconds though. But this one just kept going and going. And then every on average, it just kept for the first couple of weeks after that, every five minutes, there was another aftershock and some of them, like I said, were over eight magnitude themselves.

It got to the, it got to the point, a friend of mine was saying, we were talking about it and he said, like anything under seven magnitude is not worth getting out of bed for, we just got, we started getting used to it, it was crazy. That's incredible.

Yeah, and yeah, then we spent the next few months we were we had, we had a little bit of preparation because of previous earthquakes. So we had a little bit of food and water and stuff like that, but then, all the food supplies and everything were cut off. So we were stuck for the next couple of months riding around on bicycles, trying to find food and water, and then [00:04:00] I was having some health issues, getting sick with colds and flus and things like that. I had a bit of abdominal pain, but it was, through those times, it's not like I had a lot of time to go see a doctor and get this checked out. And then I started when things started settling down and we did a bit of volunteer work going out, cleaning up some of the Tsunami areas and helping people in shelters and then tried to rebuild our lives and throughout all this, I had family in Australia telling me, you have to come back to Australia and you have to get about that stuff.

And I was adamant I was going to stay in Japan because that's where my whole life was. Well, 

Larry: let me stop you here. What was your life in Japan at that time? You and your wife, what were you doing? For a little before the earthquake. Yeah. I was 

DC: I was strength and conditioning coach. I also taught English to kids and up to university level [00:05:00] on as a side job.

But I had my own strength and conditioning business as well. My wife is a seamstress. She worked for a a bridal company. And so she went back to work after about three months and I was trying to rebuild everything that the business and and teaching and things like that. And this, this all went on till December of 2011.

And I got pretty much just got sick of my family telling me to come back to Australia. So I came back for a two week vacation over Christmas and I arrived in Australia on the 21st of December and the plan was just to stay for two weeks. But I had a flu when I arrived, when I got off the plane. So I decided to get a checkup.

And, they did a blood test and when the results came back that the doctor was a little bit puzzled and didn't know what to [00:06:00] make of it because I looked very fit and healthy. I was lean. I mean, the day I left Japan, I went to the gym. And so he felt around my stomach a bit and he said, look I think you should stay here and get this sorted out.

And by this stage, I was feeling a bit puzzled myself. So I called my wife and I told her, look I'm not sure I'll be able to go back to Japan on the scheduled I might be a little bit sicker than I thought. But she managed, to get three weeks off work and come out and see me.

To find out what was going on and the day she arrives, I got a call from hospital in the city. So I was staying at my parents place. It was about four hours drive in the countryside from the city. And they asked me to go in to the hospital that night. It ended up being the next morning, but we went into the hospital and, my head was spinning. Actually, I got there and about 10 minutes later, they rushed me into a ward and I was in a bed and [00:07:00] I had a team of doctors and nurses standing around me telling me, it could be this. It could be that. We don't know. We've got this large mass inside there.

We have to get tests done. It was crazy. There wasn't any yeah. It wasn't any questions asking me what I wanted to do or anything. It was just, okay, we have to do this. It's kind of like, buying a used car. They want you to sign on the dotted line as soon as you walk in the door.

Yeah. So it ended up being about a week's worth of tests and yeah, some of them quite. Quite painful, actually. But the diagnosis comes back very high stage for blood cancer follicular lymphoma. 

Larry: You said follicular lymphoma? 

DC: Yeah. So that was a bit of a shock. I was, I really didn't feel that bad.

I was tired and I was getting abdominal pain, but it was, it wouldn't last, But the diagnosis was that it's stage four, a very high stage for follicular lymphoma, which meant that all the lymph nodes in my body [00:08:00] were now malignant tumors. So that was real bright through my body. And midway down my aorta, I had a large tumor.

It was about the size of a football. And because of the size of it, it had crushed all the organs around it. In particular, my, my kidneys, it had killed my left kidney and my right kidney was down to 12%. Wow. Yeah, so if they gave me roughly 2 to 3 months to survive without treatment, and it was, that would be on the outside if my kidney survived that long.

And being down to 12%, they didn't really think that it would even be that long. Because it would either be my kidneys or the cancer that would kill me. before I could even have treatment, I had to get operations done on my kidneys. Try and put stint, they had put stints in to try and get them flowing.

They couldn't save the left one, but the right one came up, came pretty good. Now, the [00:09:00] kidney is doing pretty well, even on carnivore. From there, I had to do they, they started me on what was called R CHOP. R CHOP is a particularly heavy. dose chemotherapy is very violent. And that was yeah, that was really, that was probably the most painful one, actually, except for the transplant later on.

That was, it left your mouth like full of ulcers bad reflux. My stomach was full of ulcers. Was that 

Larry: from excessive vomiting? 

DC: No, no, it's from the actual chemotherapy 

Larry: from the therapy itself. Okay. But I know vomiting can cause that too. And people do get that from chemo 

DC: sometimes. Yeah. From the stomach acid.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, but no, it was actually from the chemo and all you can taste is chemotherapy. So basically the first two weeks of after you pretty much can't eat anything, it was it was like pretty much like fasting because you just couldn't eat anything [00:10:00] anyway, which is 

Larry: probably good.

It's probably a good thing. It's unintentional, but it's helpful, right? 

DC: Yeah, it was, it did turn out to be a little bit helpful because I, in the end, like about halfway through all the medications they gave me to deal with it including the steroids I actually started limiting it, cutting it out and stopping, stop taking a lot of the medications because I just couldn't keep them down anyway.

Yeah. But this one, like it had a lot of bone pain associated with it too as well. Like it felt like even just lying in bed, it felt like it was the weight of your body was crushing your bones, I couldn't move because it was just really painful. So it's about, out of, there was three weeks between treatments and about five days where I actually felt human, human enough that I could eat.

And, 

Larry: and when you were going through these treatments. And then you got more and more painful and you were getting sicker and sicker, basically. And did your mind [00:11:00] ever go to the point where... Question. Should I keep going or? 

DC: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. The first one wasn't so bad. They split it up over two weeks for the treatment.

After the first bag went through, actually I was she only had three weeks off work, so she had to go back to Japan. And that was tough. That was the toughest part, actually, for me, because When she went back, she just, she decided that she was going to move here to take care of me. Of course, I did give her options.

I told her if she wanted to stay there, I would understand because, there's no point. I didn't see the point in her losing everything in her life just to look after me sort of thing. I thought that would be selfish. Yeah. But I didn't even have to ask, she just told me to stop being stupid and said, yeah, it was not a problem.

That's awesome. Yeah, she was amazing, but we thought that [00:12:00] might be the last time we see each other at the airport, actually, because they didn't think, oh, it's going to survive long enough for her to get back. That's tough. Yeah. Yeah, that was really tough, actually. And then going through the treatment the the first one wasn't too bad.

The second one, that's when all the pain started. That's when you start all the violent vomiting and 

Larry: You're talking about the second round of chemo, the second type of chemo? Yeah. 

DC: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then by the third one, I'm thinking, Jesus, I don't know if this is worth it, in between, I'm having more operations on my kidneys.

I had nowhere to live because I was, this was all happening in Australia. We lost everything. So I lost my home, my business, career, everything. All I had with me was one backpack full of clothes and I was staying in friends and families spare rooms and lounge chairs, while I was being treated.

Yeah, it's tough. [00:13:00] Yeah. Yeah, you start to wonder, why, if I should even bother keep fighting this, 

Larry: Especially when they tell you your diagnosis is, I know this cancer I've seen your other interviews. I know they're saying the best you're going to get is you'll be, in remission or, not active for a couple of years and it'll come back stronger.

Yeah. And then each time you do another round, you'll have a shorter period between. The reactivation of the cancer, right? So it's going to get worse. And if you had that much trouble going through the first time. You had it. By the time the second time comes around, wow, I can't imagine what it was like to make that decision and do it again.

DC: Yeah, yeah, there's a point. That's the the thing that the original diagnosed when it's when they tell you it's follicular lymphoma, they tell you that the best you can hope for is a remission period, right? The more you treat it, the faster it comes back, the shorter the remission periods will be.

And [00:14:00] the more aggressive the cancer will be. And it's it's already very high stage four, so how can I get more aggressive? But that, that didn't really bother me the first time because I was thinking that there would be a remission period, 

Larry: right? You're gonna beat it.

You're thinking, and I'm sure you're in your head, you're thinking, I'm gonna beat this too. That's what I would be thinking. Yeah, that's right. I'm gonna make it happen. 

DC: Yeah, exactly. Like I said before, when I said I told my wife, look, if you want to stay in Japan that's fine. I'd understand.

One of the options I told her is that, look if you stay there, maybe I can beat this in a year or less and I'll come back to Japan, so I was still thinking that this was, this is a temporary thing, I know that they told me this was a permanent thing. This is always going to be there, but.

I was still thinking this is a temporary thing but the third, but the third treatment came around and I'm thinking this is getting really brutal, and I don't know if I can go all the way out to eight, which is what the plan was. [00:15:00] Wow. And five days, the five days before treatment, I start feeling good and you start thinking, yeah, I can get through this, I can get through this, and that's what it was like the whole time until, the fifth one, I was thinking, I started to get what they call white coat syndrome and just the thought of going back to the hospital would make me sick, yeah. Because I knew what they were going to do to me, so that was pretty tough. Obviously I got through it they did do the eight treatments and of course we had all these different scans along the way and tests and. All it did was it reduced it from a stage four down to stage two and, but my blood was clear which was good and my tumor had shrunk about 30%.

So it was still quite big but at least it had shrunk and then I started radiation and we had [00:16:00] 18 rounds of radiation just to target the tumor itself and try and shrink it down. And then they put me on a two year course of what they call a Rituximab sort of treatment, which is another form of chemotherapy, but every two months.

So every two months I'd have a treatment done. And that wasn't too bad. It didn't have the pain associated like that arch chop did. I wasn't sick, but the vi there was a bit of vomiting, but not too much. So I, after about three or four days, I felt fine. So that went on for about another year.

And then I started going back to the gym. I was thinking, okay I'm on top of this now. I'm starting to feel positive again. Yeah. And I was feeling pretty good actually. I didn't, I was feeling better than I had in a while. So I was being, I was thinking this is good. I'm going to be [00:17:00] fine.

I can go back to Japan soon. And then January 2 2014 comes around and two years to the day, they tell me I'm very high stage four again even while I'm still going through treatment, and this treatment was supposed to give me a longer remission period. So yeah, that was almost breaking point for me.

I was I can imagine. Yeah. That was really demoralizing after going through all that and then telling me I'm. Back to square one. So I I said to him, look, I don't know if I can do this again. How long would would you give me, how long do you think I could survive without it?

And again, it was down to, three or four months.

At the time, I really just didn't think of any other options. I didn't think I had any other options. So they put [00:18:00] me through a clinical trial for a drug called bender mustang, it's not actually a new drug, but it was it just hadn't been used in Australia. So they were doing a clinical trial.

Which gave me a few options. At the time I was having a lot of other problems because of side effects from the first lot of chemotherapy. So they, before the clinical trial started, they rushed me through into have a couple of operations to help with those side effects. So that was one good thing.

They told me this bender must team was a lot more mild than the, So it wouldn't be as as much vomiting. It wouldn't be that bone pain and things like that. So I thought, okay it sounds pretty easy. Compared to art shop, it'd have to be a cakewalk, and it was for the most part, it was a lot easier.

It wasn't as painful, [00:19:00] but from the first treatment. It sent my fevers skyrocketing, and they couldn't control them. I actually drove home after my... Because I didn't have anyone to drive me, I had to drive home myself after treatment. When I got home my fever just started skyrocketing. My wife told, called an ambulance because I was just going to go to bed and try and sleep it off. But if I'd done that, I wouldn't have made it through the night. Wow. Yeah, so at that point back in the hospital for a few nights and the next few treatments were exactly the same. They ended up keeping me in because of my fevers.

But treatment two and three. They filled up both my arms with blood clots as well, so yeah it's scary. Yeah, that was, it was really scary at the time really long, thick blood clots that went right down from my shoulder to my wrist and [00:20:00] my arms look like a 3D roadmap, so then they decided to put a port into my chest.

It's like it sits under your skin and they'd just plug it in and feed it straight into your heart. Which was scary at the time because they just filled up both my arms. So I'm thinking what's this going to do to my heart, yeah. 

Larry: But they had no choice cause they couldn't feed 

DC: you through your arms anymore.

Yeah, exactly. So there was just no option and they weren't going to try and they weren't going to stop the treatment. Oh so we did that. And again, after that, it wasn't so bad. The treatment just continued through that. It was still fairly mild compared to the art shop. It was a lot of fasting, like forced fasting, but the first week at least I couldn't eat because I couldn't keep anything down.

But throughout the trial, of course, we were having update scans and tests and everything like this, and it did nothing towards the cancer. Wow. [00:21:00] So it was 

Larry: ineffective. 

DC: It was, yeah, it was completely ineffective 

Larry: other than making you feel terrible 

DC: and clotting. Yeah. Yeah, it did a good job of, killing me, but not the cancer, a lot of the treatments, it's not just the, the chemotherapy, a lot of the medications they put you on afterwards like going right through all this whole period, this two years, we're all steroids as well.

Yeah, so they're pretty much driving my blood sugars up throughout this whole time which, as would be just feeding the cancer. Yeah, I was 

Larry: just told, and I didn't know this before, and it may be wrong, I was told from someone who's not a doctor, but that PET scans, what they actually do, Is they feed you a radioactive marker on sugar and they feed it into your system.

And wherever there's tumors, the sugar goes and starts feeding them. And that's how they can see the tumors because it's sugar activity. So it tells you right there that. These tumors thrive on sugar, right? Yeah. And I [00:22:00] didn't know that. 

DC: I think it's pretty amazing. Oh, it is. If you see it at a cellular level, you can see it actually absorbing the sugars.

It just, it eats it up. It just thrives on it. And this is a big problem. I threw that two year period. I was on steroid treatment all the way through, and I think that's what shortened my remission as well. Oh, you 

Larry: mean in between 2012, 2014? Yeah. 

DC: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cause I was still on every, I was still on treatment every two months.

And so they gave me steroids to help recover. And of course, right through the treatment the trials and later on as well. Then we got midway through this treatment. And they found that it wasn't doing anything, but they decided to keep going and we got the, we got to the end. So we went like the most treatments you're allowed to do on these heavy dose treatments is eight after [00:23:00] that, it's it, you pretty much just kill the patient.

So that, that's what they took me out to on both treatments. They took me out to eight treatments. Wow. And it did nothing again. In fact, it was just the cancer was thriving. So 

Larry: you're still in stage four and you're just weaker now. 

DC: Yeah, I'm just weaker. I just lost composition. Really, I just lost muscle and gained a lot of fat.

I was very bloated. That photo of on my page, you can see how bloated I was. Yeah, that was, it wasn't from eating. I hadn't been eating. That, that whole year I hadn't eaten very much. It's just from the steroids. It's 

Larry: inflammation and water retention and, yeah, your whole body's inflamed.

DC: Yeah, exactly. So they decided to do a heavy dose stem cell transplant. So this was, this needed another[00:24:00] line into my heart. This was a CV line and it has two rubber tubes plug straight into your heart and it's just hangs out of your chest and has two little adapters so that they can run three different.

Chemotherapy treatments through over a 24 hour period. 24 hours at a time for seven days. The first seven days of the transplant, I'm getting chemotherapy just pumped through my body. So it just, it completely destroys everything. And day three. I had an infection in the CV line.

And from there I just had all sorts of trouble. My heart trouble and breathing and they couldn't keep me stable. They couldn't I would stop breathing and they had trouble keeping me going for quite a while throughout the rest of the treatment. And, it was [00:25:00] pretty much cooked me from inside and it was.

It was a really tough time. I really wasn't there a whole lot after that. My wife was, she was coming in every day. I was, ended up being in there five weeks and my wife came in every single day with something that she, she would cook something in the morning, hoping that I could eat something.

Then she'd catch a bus in and sit there all day long and then until night and then go home and go shopping for me to do it all over again, for that four week, it was just amazing. That's, it really kept me going because it was, it really, when I was awake, when I could see her seeing her there really lightened my heart, it really made me feel.

Sure. A lot better about being there. I'd wake up, I'd have all these breathing machines on me, all these heart rate monitors and all sorts of machines on me and doctors and nurses and [00:26:00] standing around me. Through the infection, that I was quarantined. It was really rough. That was just the beginning of it, after the treatment finished, because I had been cooked so much inside, I had a lot of ulcers in my stomach, my brain was cooked, all my organs, I was passing and bringing up like thick layers of skin, because everything had just been burnt.

And I was, I looked like a red lobster actually for weeks after that, my skin on the outside was red. Yeah, long story short, I got home about five weeks later. So 

Larry: did it put you into remission again though? Were they able to get you back down for stage four? 

DC: Yeah, it brought me back down to stage two again. Okay. And you get back home five weeks later. Yeah, five weeks later. And it had dried. It had cooked me so [00:27:00] much that all my bones, my muscles and connective tissue was so dry and brittle.

I couldn't move. I was obviously I had to get home. I needed a wheelchair. And then I pretty much just swapped their bed for my bed. And that's where I stayed for the next two and a half years. Wow. And it took me that long before I could actually walk at a semi regular pace that I could keep up with my wife.

So we're 

Larry: talking 2017 is when you start walking again. 

DC: Yeah. And it was, we were just in a tiny little studio that was pretty close to the hospital. Because I had to keep going back to the hospital every week. And it was literally like two steps to my bathroom for my bed, and I couldn't even do that without help, and, for me, that was, I'm very active. I've always [00:28:00] been very active. That was a real struggle. Yeah, 

Larry: I know. I know after being I was an athlete all my life and then You know, being athletic, at least, and then being a soldier and military and being able to physically perform a lot once my body started tearing.

I couldn't do that. It was a big mental blow for me where I couldn't even run 2017. I injured. I understand I had a, what they call a profile. I couldn't run anymore. And so since 2017, I haven't run more than like a sprint. short sprint since 2017. But this month I, my, I've healed up enough.

I've actually ran two miles this week, which is amazing. I love running and I'm back. I feel like I'm coming back. So I know it's, I know what that mental thing is like. Nowhere near where you're, where you were at, but. Once you've been an athlete or you've been able to perform and you can't anymore, it's a big deal.

It is. 

DC: Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah that's remarkable. Yeah. The feeling when you come back to [00:29:00] the excitement when you get back into it too, that's such a great positive jump too, yeah, the endorphins. The high. Yeah, it feels amazing. It does. But, through all that period, I was, I couldn't move because the muscles and everything, I just didn't know how, my muscles just didn't know how to contract or relax again.

I had trouble breathing so that, eventually, I found a deep breathing exercise that would help me get at least that going. Yeah. And that made me feel a lot better to starting to move again which helped me get on with trying to walk and trying to move again later on. At what point 

Larry: in your recovery did you start craving meat?

I remember you talking in one of your interviews. I saw that you, your body instinctively started craving 

DC: meat. Yeah, that was immediate. That was immediate after the transplant. [00:30:00] When I could start eating again for the first time in my life, actually that was, I was really craving meat.

I didn't understand why at the time. I knew, I'm a strength coach, so I knew I needed proteins and to rebuild and to try and get my muscles moving again. But I really didn't think about it. I really didn't understand why at the time. But I would just. I could, the only meals I really wanted, like my wife would cook me some meat and I'd get hungry again.

Even in the middle of the night, I'd get up and I'd cook a kilo of steak. And, she started calling me the Midnight Chef because it was the only time I could. That was quite good. But, actually, that funny story, because I, through the transplant, because a number of times I stopped breathing, the nurses would come in and wake me up if I was sleeping because they wanted to check that I was still breathing.[00:31:00] 

Yeah. And for about three years after, after that, my wife would do the same thing if I was sleeping for too long, like a couple of hours sleeping, she'd wake me up just to make sure that I'm still breathing. It was funny at the time, but it was also annoying because I was trying to sleep, but anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. Now 

Larry: How long, I wanna skip ahead. How long have you been cancer free now? 

DC: They won't say that I'm cancer free yet. 

Larry: But you're in remission. 

DC: How long have you been remission? I'm in remission, so I've been in remission now nine years. Wow. 

Larry: So you smashed their record books and blown away anything they said.

And now what about that 

DC: tumor? Yeah, the tumor is gone. Gone. Oh, they 

Larry: didn't surgically remove it. 

DC: No, they can't. They can't do surgery on this tumor. So they had to shrink it down, but it didn't actually go away until much later after the transplant about that took a couple of years. Yeah.[00:32:00] 

But yeah, throughout that period, I noticed that I did notice that I was craving meat. So what I started doing was eating more and more meat. And I just figured I was going back to a more caveman sort of diet. A primal. Yeah, more primal. I didn't know about the carnivore diet or anything like that at the time.

But but I did still, my wife's Japanese, so we did still eat a fair bit of rice fruit and vegetables. The education is, eat your, you've got to have your fruit and vegetables, you need fiber, you need this, you need that. And all the experts are telling me, you need a high fiber and all sorts of stuff as well.

Some of the dietary advice you get from the hospital is just insane. Yeah. They literally feed you junk food while you're being treated. It's all thanks 

Larry: to the dietary guidelines set out by the Warren Commission. I think in [00:33:00] America from Ancel Keys research, it was all bogus.

And his six country study and all that bogus stuff he did. Pretty crazy. Exactly. And now we're all sick because of it. 

DC: Yeah, it's insane. 

Larry: Yeah, it's, it really is. 

DC: From there, I just my main meal was always meat, but I still had the side dishes, this the fruit, vegetables and rice.

That sort of thing. But we never eat out is one key thing as well. We don't eat any processed foods except, we did still have snacks, cookies and cakes and things like that. Sure. Even that, most of that my wife would make. Foods and 

Larry: low sugar, right? Yeah, 

DC: at the time I really didn't care because the experts keep telling me that, the most you can get is a short remission period and, it's coming back.

And I was pretty much just [00:34:00] living blood test to blood test. At first that was weekly. So when I when you get a blood test, you think it's always in the back of your mind, is it going to be back again? Is it coming back, so that part is the hardest part to get around.

Yeah. And eventually it. Went from a weekly visit and a weekly test to six months and I'm still at six months now. Yeah. And for a number of years, I was still just living six months at a time and I wouldn't even like the lease on our little apartment, I wouldn't even sign a lease longer than six months.

Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, because it just, yeah, it just wasn't practical to think long term so that the problem. The problem with that, though, is that when you're not thinking long term, you've got no goals. You've got no direction either. So there's no point planning like a life [00:35:00] ahead of a blood test.

That's what it was for us, but, I just kept eating more and more meat and feeling more, more and more healthier and better. It took me five years though before I could actually go back to the gym and I was, I think because I was, my education has always been lean meats, so I've always avoided fats and I think that's what happened.

I think that's one of the reasons why I got sick in the first place is because of what they call rabbit starvation, yep. Not enough fat in the diet, too high protein. 

Larry: That protein breaks down to sugars and it's akin to eating sugar. I know that they taught us about that in the army survival school.

So yeah. Yeah. Rabbit starvation is a real thing. It's 

DC: protein poisoning. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I've been eating clean for this nine years but I still have trouble with colds and flus, and they would last me months, a cold would last me[00:36:00] literally, up to three months, and it would always develop into a flu, and, sometimes it could make me that sick enough to actually put me back in hospital. Wow. 

Larry: Yeah. Your immune system was probably wrecked out too from, yeah, I know I've had people in my family had gone through chemo and their immune system usually gets wiped out or pretty weakened.

DC: Yeah, it's completely wiped out. One of the biggest setbacks actually was when I. When my after the about six months after the transplant, my immune system did start recovering. But then they gave me all these update like vaccine injections to supposedly help with my immune system. But that just crashed my immune system again.

Wow. That was one of my really big setbacks, and it took me about five years to recover from that. And [00:37:00] from there so I was always trying to find a way to improve my immune system. So I was always adding things to my diet turmeric and cinnamon and nutmeg and all these other herbs and spices and fruits and vegetables and stuff like that.

Because you go through. All this sort of you want to try anything that will help, but again, I still I was still avoiding fats and that was a problem. So I kept it in remission for quite a long time just doing what I was doing, but my numbers were still quite low.

My blood markers were really low still, even though I was still going back to the gym. And I was I would still get colds and flus would put me out of the gym again for a few months at a time. When I found Carnivore that's when everything changed. 

Larry: And when was that? How did that happen? How did you 

DC: find Carnivore?

My wife found it actually. Okay. [00:38:00] We actually she found it. A young bodybuilder, she said was, he said that he only eats meat. And then I found out and she said, Oh, I found all these other people. And yet they, they said they only eat meat. And my first reaction, honestly, my first reaction was bullshit.

Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, I said it's that's bullshit because I mean it's a gimmick because, athletes have been cutting carbs for decades long, trying to get lean, whenever they have a competition coming up, they'll cut carbs because, to get lean and he'll and faster, so it was nothing new and I was thinking, yeah, they're ridiculous, but then I found Dr Baker and I related to him because he's a lifter and yeah he's a smart guy. So I started looking at some of the research and I was looking at what they were doing with diabetes and things like that.[00:39:00] 

They hadn't actually done anything with cancer. But then I found, Professor Seyfried and others as well. And I'm thinking, okay they haven't actually done anything specifically with this, but it's worth a try, because I was pretty much stagnating. Where I was, I needed to change something because, it just wasn't going anywhere, so I had to change, I had to make a change. So I figured let's give it a try, and when was this? How long ago? I am in now. What day? 1 65 ish now. Okay. 

Larry: I'm on day like 2 0 6 now. So you're 1 65, so you're not 

DC: far behind me. Yeah. This, I figured. All right, I'm either gonna prove this wrong or prove it right That's what I did 

Larry: Yeah, I didn't believe either.

I was like, it's bs man. It's a scam. 

DC: Yeah for sure I was trying to find something. What are they trying to sell here? And 

Larry: Because no one was selling anything other [00:40:00] than t shirts There was no selling 

DC: going on, right? Yeah, that's right. And I was adamant. I'm not buying a dang t shirt. 

Larry: I'm not buying a shirt.

DC: But then I figured okay, if I'm going to do this, let's do it a hundred percent. So I stopped taking supplements. I I figured, okay, I cut everything straight down. To just meat and eggs and butter and the hardest part was getting my head around the eating more fats because I've been so hard.

Yeah. I've been so regimental in eliminating fats, trying to stay low fat diet my whole life. So that was, that took me some time. And even now I'm still increasing my fat intake. But. In the first three months I had I had to see my oncologist again and I had a blood test done and all my blood markers jumped on average across the [00:41:00] board.

Between eight and 10 points. Wow. That's huge. That's, for every blood test around about a week before my blood test, it was always a very stressful time for me because it was always, will it be back? Because the first two times I was diagnosed, I didn't feel sick, so Yeah. I just don't know when it's gonna be back. But after that I started getting excited and I'm thinking, okay, I can imagine this. Yeah this is going well. Over the years I've been doing research on all different ways to try and improve this working on my lymphatic system and my immune system because yeah, lymphoma is, it's called lymphoma because it starts in your lymphatic system, right?

So this is what I need to improve. And of course, your immune system is part of your lymphatic system. So then I started getting really excited [00:42:00] and for the last four years, I haven't had a local GP doctor because basically they're just drug pushes and here. Here they are just ridiculous, beyond belief, but I found a recently a guy who's coming out from Japan and he's very good actually.

So I started going and seeing him and now I'm having blood tests every three months because I am so excited to watch these blood markers go up. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, I had another blood test done and three months from the first one on carnival and my blood markers have not just jumped, they've actually just crept inside all of them right across the board, just inside a normal, healthy range.

It kind of points, 

Larry: I think Dr Baker is actually talking about this the other day, or maybe even today [00:43:00] that cancer is a metabolic. Disease or some doctors are saying that it, it's caused by metabolic syndrome or metabolic issues. So if you have a metabolic disease you're feeding cancer, and if you get rid of that, you can starve cancer.

And I think that's what's happening, right? 

DC: Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. It is definitely a metabolic disease, not a genetic thing. Which is what everyone keeps treating you for or telling you it is when I was first diagnosed, it's, they said this particular cancer is very rare in younger people.

I was only 38 when I was diagnosed or I was actually 37, almost 38. And yeah, they keep telling you how rare it is because you're so young and all this sort of stuff. Because it doesn't feel rare when you feel, when you get diagnosed. Yeah. But yeah, they said it's all, it's just, no one knows how.

How it happens. It's just genetics. That's the answer. You got 

Larry: [00:44:00] genetics will make you more susceptible or less susceptible of getting it, but it won't give you cancer, right? Cancer is something that happens based on you have proclivity and then you introduce something to it that can cause that.

So You get damaged mitochondria, 

DC: That can cause that can anyone that has damaged mitochondria is going to have something manifest and your genetics might determine what what a manifest, how bad, how fast, whatever. Yeah, exactly. But that's about it. But either way, the result, it's all the like these things are all down the line of where it starts is with your mitochondria.

It's yeah, that's why, it's really important to me to try and repair all that, especially after the damage that the chemotherapy has done. Oh, sure. It wrecked you. Yeah it's far worse than the disease itself. 

Larry: So I don't have to ask you why you started the carnivore diet.

Cause I know you stumbled backwards into it and then it started working. So that's why you did that. I would like to start focusing on your YouTube [00:45:00] channel because we're running low on time. We've got a great story here. You're in full remission right now, been for what, nine years? That's great.

And you're 165 days into carnivore feeling better than you probably have. Your workouts are probably amazing. What I want to know now is why did you start a YouTube channel? What prompted that and 

DC: why? Okay. The reason I started that is because people. I think people need to know that there are options for one not only for treatments of cancer and but other diseases as well, mitochondrial health but there's just so many people suffering from cancer right now in America, for example, 1700 people a day are dying from cancer, but they will tell you that, They are dying from cancer, but the thing is, most people are dying from the treatments, and they don't separate that number from how many died from the treatments and how many died from the actual disease.

Yeah. If this is something I can help prevent, I would, [00:46:00] that's what my goal is to help prevent that sort of thing. I also want people to understand that just because you're having a tough time, you're having a tough time now. These are, tough times are not permanent I have literally, I've been through multiple large earthquakes, tsunami, I've lost everything, lost my home, my career I had to move internationally.

I mean, these are tough times, going through treatments these chemotherapy treatments. That pretty much destroy your body. Inside out your organs, your brain, my brain was mushed for years. I, and still a bit mushy, but it's getting better. So that's another thing too, on the carnivore diet, you are increasing ketones.

I think that's, a lot of the biggest things that carnivores say are beneficial at the carnivore diet is that, that brain fog lifts. Yeah. [00:47:00] This is because we are, we're getting more ketones to our brain, we can think better. Everything is starting to fall into place, because we're getting the proper nutrients.

Yeah. And, If I can come back from literally from my deathbed to where I am now, I'm sure that anyone can no matter how tough you think it's, you think life is right now, if you just hold on, if you keep pushing forward you get back up and, keep walking, you will get there, 

Larry: Yeah, that's what I like. It's resilience, right? And that's that, it's getting knocked down and getting back up. That's resilience and you can't read about it. You got to take the reps. Now you got knocked down really hard. Not everyone gets knocked down that hard, but you're, everyone gets knocked down and you just gotta learn how to get up.

DC: You're going to have setbacks. Everyone does, 

Larry: even when you're on carnivore, you still get them. 

DC: It's not going to change. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't matter what [00:48:00] diet you are on, you are always going to have setbacks. So don't expect, like your whole life to be, all rainbows and unicorns just because you go carnival, but you're going to have setbacks.

But the thing is, you just have to take it, take the hits and keep going. Yeah, 

Larry: I think it's easier to, it's easier to bounce back up. Because you are physically in better shape and mentally in better shape and emotionally in better shape So I think once you've got carnivore established it is a little easier to be more resilient.

DC: Yes. Yeah. I think you don't have as much anxiety for a start. You don't have as much self doubt either because you are thinking better, right? 

Larry: Confidence is there. Yeah. Confidence. That's right. 

DC: Yeah. Before carnival diet, honestly, I don't think I would ever even think about starting a YouTube channel.

Larry: Me neither. I never did. I had a YouTube channel because I was a drone pilot. And I shared videos on it and shared [00:49:00] home movies with my family. So as my channel has been around for years and years, but I ever published anything on it until August 7th of this year. And that's purely driven by me and the confidence I have and wanting to get the message out to other people because I knew my immediate circle, I had shared it and people started benefiting and I started, and then they started sharing it.

And I saw like a ripple effect from people. I didn't even know. Who are actually doing it because I shared it with someone, they shared it with someone else. And I thought, wow, this is huge. What if I went and shared it, on a YouTube channel? That's what I thought. Maybe I could reach a few people and apparently struck a nerve with people because people started joining really rapidly and it's great.

I love having a community. It's like when I was a platoon leader in the army, I love my platoon. I like these guys. These are my kind of people. And I really like to surround myself with people. Who are like minded and goal oriented and help people achieve their goals. 

DC: Yeah. Oh, [00:50:00] you've got a great channel too.

I love the way it's set up. Yeah. That's the thing. We all have setbacks. I've had some really major setbacks in a really. Even after the transplant, different setbacks, through different treatments that they give me to try and improve things that did the opposite. But the thing is what's done is done.

All you can do is, okay, this is. The new starting point. This is where I have to, this is where I am now. This, I have to get away from here somehow. It doesn't really matter. To me, it was, it didn't matter how what I did. I just have to get away from this place. So I have to. Keep moving.

I have to doesn't matter. It didn't matter what direction away because it would have to be better than where I was, and a lot of people are like that. They don't have a direction. They don't have a goal. But just do anything, do something [00:51:00] that will lead. I look at it sometimes, it's driving at night when your headlights only let you see so far and then when you get to that point, you can see a little bit further, if you don't have an idea in mind, a goal in mind, just do something and it will, you will find a direction from the next point, you will find it.

Okay. The next point will be revealed to you. Okay, I can do this. So maybe I can try this as well. That's 

Larry: what I love about this way of eating though for me. And you have to have a big why your big why obviously was huge as your health and it was to change something because you were stagnant.

For me, it was like I was sliding down. Towards a painful death, probably a long and protracted sickness of being metabolically obese and sick and, all these diseases coming on. And so when I that was my why was to reverse that. And I that's when I thought I'd test it to see if it did.

But what's great about this [00:52:00] diet or this way of eating. If you don't have to wait for a long, like you, your first 90 days, you saw results me, my first 30 to 60 days, I saw results. I really started seeing things immediately, and I think if you really sell out and do it, you don't have to guess whether it's working.

It just starts working and that's pretty amazing. So it's the one thing I've ever done that's been like that. I've never done anything like that. That's actually been that much of a return that quickly. I don't think. 

DC: No, I'm the same. It's a very immediate reaction. It's a very reactive diet.

It, your body, it's so much more sensitive. I think that's a great thing to about mental health as well because you are so much more sensitive. You pick up more things, you just see things a lot clearer, body wise as well you're so reactive, if you have too much fats, for example, or you have not enough sort of thing, yeah, you'll know, the body will tell you immediately like that day not [00:53:00] years down the track because you're I think like on the standard diet, you're just not so sensitive to what your body is telling you.

Larry: So back to your YouTube channel, what are your goals for you have any, have you set those out yet? Or do you know what if you, what would you consider a successful YouTube channel? What would be a success in this venture for you? 

DC: The biggest success for me would be to help as many people as I can.

Actually I haven't really. Set out a big plan for that, because I'm still trying to focus on my book at the moment. Oh, yeah. What? 

Larry: Tell 

DC: me about your book. Okay. I'm editing it, editing the book now. I still have to put in more sort of results from the diet because I'm going to incorporate the kind of take some time, right?

Yeah. I have to whittle it down a bit because, the last 12 years, it's hard to fit all that into a book small enough for people to read. I don't, I don't want to give my thousand pages. But [00:54:00] yeah, it's called at the moment it's called not done yet because I'm not done.

And. Yeah, this is what I want people to see as well, is that it doesn't matter what the setback is. Doesn't matter how hard it is. You're not done until you say you are 

Larry: I don't know if you've ever stayed to the end of one of my videos, but at the end I have drums playing and I have a thing that has a semicolon and it says your story isn't finished.

And that's because, people think there's a period there at their life right now, and their story is done. But, I can tell you for me my, I'm starting to plan things. I was not planning things six months ago. Now I'm planning like long term stuff down the road that wasn't happening because my mind, my physical, yeah, like you, you probably don't wait six months to six months or three months or month to month.

You can start looking forward like this book. That's a big deal. 

DC: Yeah, that's the thing. Exactly the same, actually. Yeah, I've gone from planning like the most [00:55:00] at six months at a time to now I'm thinking long term, I'm thinking. Okay. That's awesome. Yeah, and I'm thinking about returning to Japan or moving to a different country.

I'd love to try living in America for some time. It would be really great. Yeah. Austin's great . Yeah. Actually, I love Texas. You guys are, Texas is wonderful. Yeah. Great beef. Yep. That lots of, I love barbecue. Oh yeah. The barbecue here is amazing. Yeah. So that's something I want to do.

I've actually, I actually now have, this is one thing that's kept me going through this last nine years is that I have things I want to do still. Yes. And the list is only growing now, whereas before it was, I was trying to limit it down because I didn't think I'd have that. The time or the chance it was like your 

Larry: bucket list before but now it's like an adventure list, right?

It's not the bucket list. Yeah. 

DC: Yeah. Now it's a life [00:56:00] list. There you go. Yeah, so that's a big change for me and You know The difference in the way I think and feel even going from where I was before, which would be more of a ketogenic sort of diet that helped get me in remission, but to carnival is a different world.

Larry: In Dr. Chaffee talks about this and the difference between I've done keto too. And I fell off both times and I had good results. Good, not awesome. Good results both times. I did when I was active duty trying to get ready for schools or get ready for military physical tests, and they actually worked.

But I think the difference and Dr Chaffee brings us up. So every 1 percent you deviate from a completely pure carnivore diet, you lose 10 percent efficiency or effectiveness in the diet. So if you do a 95 percent carnivore, you're probably losing 50 percent of [00:57:00] its effectiveness. And I agree with that.

And so we're doing keto. We're good. We're probably only getting 5 or 10 percent of the effectiveness of the diet. 

DC: That's right. In my opinion, in my experience too. Definitely. Like I said even though I was in remission on a ketogenic sort of style diet I still had immune problem issues and my blood markers were stagnating.

They weren't growing. Yeah, you weren't making gains. 

Larry: You're like, 

DC: yeah, it was just pretty much flatlining. And it wasn't until I went strict carnivore that all that changed. Yeah. And I was thinking better over the years. I was thinking better. I was feeling better. I had eliminated almost all of my medications.

I'd gone from 40 plus different medications down to one ketogenic. Yeah, no, 

Larry: nothing bad with keto. Keto is a good diet. 

DC: It's healthy. Yeah, that's right. Clean's. Yeah. It's like you're almost there. Yeah. But on, on [00:58:00] Carnival, on my, on completely zero medications and zero supplements. Yeah. 

Larry: And you're making gains every test.

DC: Yeah. And I'm making gains. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's been a complete reversal. Really. That's amazing. Yeah, it's just incredible. 

Larry: David, we're running out of time here, so I want you to tell people how they can get in touch with you or where they can follow you. I've got your YouTube page up here, but this is gonna be a podcast too, so you might want to tell them where to get a hold of you on your social media.

DC: Okay. Okay. So you can get me on Twitter Instagram and Facebook Facebook. It's all the same name DC learning to live. Facebook. We also have a page for, I've just started a page for people who have been affected by cancer. And we are looking at treatments and dietary supplementing and using it, Okay.

looking at it as a metabolic disease.[00:59:00] It's it's linked to my page there. You can find it. Is it? Is 

Larry: it a group 

DC: of Facebook? Yes, a group of Facebook group. Yeah. 

Larry: And then on YouTube, you're at D. C. Learning to live, correct? That's right. Yeah. And it's just the letters D. C. With learning to live.

Great. Yeah, you got some good videos on there and you can catch him also with some other guys like intentional carnivore doing interviews and On some groups with carnivore backwoods. I know you're making the rounds. You got a great story. You're gonna make difference in people's lives like for my channel I focus on veteran and and first responder mental health , because I think that, the standard American diet, the brain fog is causing people to commit suicide more than they were before this diet was introduced, because I think it's just moved the tipping point.

So if I could save one person with my channel, that's like my goal is and just like yours, if you could, help people like one person reverse their cancer, that'd be an amazing outcome for your channel. 

DC: Yeah, that would be [01:00:00] wonderful. That's a thing too. A lot of the depression involved, especially first responders and other is low cholesterol diets.

Yes, I've been proving like, studies from I've found recently studies from the 90s, 2013 2019 proving low cholesterol diets. Connected to a high rate of depression to the point of suicide. And that's what 

Larry: they feed us in the military, a low fat, low cholesterol diet. Yeah, that's right.

And high carbohydrate. It's 

DC: terrible. It's crazy. And this is something I saw a lot in Japan too after my sister actually, she took her own life when I was young. Oh my gosh. I'm sorry. Oh, that's okay. It's been a long time, but in Japan after the quake and the tsunami. So many people, in the hundreds were taking their lives because of everything they had lost through that period.

And a lot of them were also first responders. They [01:01:00] saw a lot of tragic sort of things. And, even when we went out to shelters and things like that, see all these people living in these shelters the damage, it was horrific after the aftermath, I actually have a photo book called the aftermath of three 11.

. Yeah. , I've worked hurricanes

Larry: in America where cities were just destroyed and we've been in there and everyone loses everything. Yeah. And the aftermath is total devastation. It's just like you were saying, if you haven't experienced it, pictures and movies don't do, they don't do it justice. You have to actually live it and smell it.

And it's pretty it's pretty awesome. But Hey, listen, I got to get going, man. It's been great having you on David. I'm going to drop you out, stick around for a minute. And we'll talk for a minute. I'm going to drop you out and say goodbye on the channel. And we'll keep going from here in a few minutes.

All right, hold on. All right, guys, that was a great interview. All I got to say is [01:02:00] stay strong and overcome carnivore soldier out.