Carnivore

Few nutrition approaches create stronger reactions online than carnivore.

To some people, it is healing everything from digestion to autoimmune issues. To others, it is reckless, restrictive, and completely unsustainable.

In this episode, I break down the real conversation around carnivore dieting without turning it into ideology.

For some people, removing highly processed foods, food additives, excessive fiber, and common digestive triggers can provide significant relief. Energy improves. Digestion settles down. Food noise drops. Simplicity increases adherence. That is real, and dismissing those experiences helps nobody.

At the same time, many people confuse symptom removal with full health optimization.

Just because inflammation drops or digestion improves does not automatically mean a diet is ideal forever for every person, every goal, or every phase of life.

This episode explores where carnivore can genuinely help, where people often misuse it, and why context matters more than internet tribes.

We also unpack the reality that many benefits people experience early on are not magic. They are often the result of removing ultra-processed foods, stabilizing blood sugar, simplifying food choices, improving protein intake, and reducing overall inflammatory load.

For some people, carnivore becomes a useful therapeutic tool.
 For others, it becomes another extreme identity.

The goal is not to belong to a dietary religion.

The goal is to understand your physiology well enough to know what actually works for your body, your digestion, your goals, and your lifestyle long term.

What We Cover

• Why some people experience major digestion improvements on carnivore
 • The role of food simplicity and reduced food noise
 • Why symptom relief does not automatically equal universal optimization
 • Common mistakes people make with restrictive dieting
 • The psychological side of turning nutrition into identity
 • Why context and physiology matter more than ideology

Key Takeaways

• Simplicity often improves adherence
 • Removing trigger foods can reduce inflammation and digestive stress
 • High protein intake changes appetite and recovery dramatically
 • Extreme diets can become identity traps if awareness is lost
 • Your food philosophy should support your physiology, not override it

If you’ve ever felt confused by the extreme opinions surrounding carnivore dieting, this episode will help you think about it in a more grounded and practical way.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to another episode of the rebuild. I'm excited to be here with you guys today. Listen, I've covered pretty much everything you can, and I will continue to do so on the psychology, the behavior side of getting your most optimal health outcomes. But today I want to talk to some uh something a little bit different, speak to a little bit something different, which is dieting approaches. And so over the coming probably tens of episodes, you're gonna see us talk about dieting styles, you're gonna talk about you know supplementation styles, a bunch of different functional health stuff on the actual physiology side. Okay. So, you know, this is gonna be a lot of fun because over time I'm gonna fix every single problem that folks have inside their health and fitness journeys. And so today I wanted to talk to you about the carnivore diet, right? And I will state this right off the gate. It's not magic. It's not magic, it's just elimination, right? So a lot of the times people will credit the carnivore for kind of solving everything. Like, oh, it took away my psoriasis, it took away my eczema. But the mechanism is usually just removing sort of the trigger, right? And so some of the things that the carnivore and many other diets have in common, we'll see things like uh removal of ultra-processed foods, seed oils, a bunch of added sugars, you know, a bunch of elimination of uh gut irritants like soluble fibers, gums, preservatives, and you know, alcohols, basically anything that people can take in that is gonna be a trigger. And so the high satiety because of having more protein and more fat than people are used to eating, plus meat just doesn't have that same dopamogenic effect that some of the sugars, carbohydrates do, you're gonna eat less by default. And so there's gonna be a calorie deficit present, which a calorie deficit is anti-inflammatory. Right. And so a lot of people think like I'm gonna go on an anti-inflammatory, inflammatory diet, excuse me, not realizing that just being less fat is anti-inflammatory. So if you have body fat to lose, the main goal is to be in a calorie deficit so that you can actually lose the body fat and then come back up to maintenance later. And then your body won't be inflamed all the time from carrying the extra body fat and or inflammation from not having, you know, optimal health. Right. And so the adherence always drives results, not so much the diet itself. One of the things we'll have to watch out for on the carnivore diet is probably athletic performance is going to drop. Now, cognition and athletic performance are not the same thing. And luckily for you guys, I've literally personally tried all these dieting styles, whether that be through uh myself and or with clients over the years, and I've picked up some really good patterns. And so honestly, uh a lot of folks on carnivore or other modified styles of a ketogenic diet, higher fat, higher protein, lower carbohydrates, especially if we're, like I said, not having irritants that you know are in most people's diets that they don't even realize are causing them, you know, brain fog and libido issues and gut health issues. What you're gonna notice is that the performance of the training, like if you're really trying to put on muscle and you're in a hyper hypertrophy-based program or uh endurance-based program, the carnivore diet for most people is gonna fall a little bit short. You're gonna just feel a little bit flat in the gym, you're gonna feel a little bit flat in your your endurance work. It's like you're you're gonna not, you're kind of just gonna be flatter. And cognitively, that's actually really good for not having the ups and downs, stay at work, dealing with the kids, high stress situations. And so you kind of take a trade-off there because on one hand, you actually feel cognitively very good, like ready to go. But then when you go to push your body um to its limits, it just kind of feels like you know, a spark plug's gone in the engine, if that makes sense for most people. I've seen uh some people adapt okay, but for most of the time, that's uh that's gonna be the case. Uh what you will see on the Carnivore diet a lot is it is one of the best ways. It's essentially the ultimate elimination diet. It's not something that I don't think that we should be striving to stick to, you know, perpetually. But a lot of digestive issues are going to be uh healed, not in in and in part because of the magic, but again, everything I aforementioned prior. Um, you know, it's probably gonna improve energy again because we're having uh less inflammatory foods and just feeling much better. One of the things we're gonna have to watch out for, um, especially uh like six months in, right? So I want to fast forward this for you because you've been thinking about trying it. Sometimes we don't realize that the body actually reacts on very long-term stimulus, but we're also short-sighted. And so someone will do a certain diet type, such as carnivore, and they're like, Yeah, I feel so much better, amazing, amazing. But then they get to month six and they're like, wow, I don't feel good now. Yeah, it's because we solved a bunch of problems, but then we created some new ones that just took time to bore their fruit. And so things like hormones and cholesterol probably are going to take a little bit of a hit, specifically thyroid hormone, um, carbohydrates, your brain runs on glucose, and so does your thyroid. And so if you restrict those long enough, it's not if, it's when, you start to feel a little bit flatter mentally. Your brain can at least switch over to ketones, and so that's a whole nother thing that I would be a whole nother podcast on breaking down the science of that. Um, but essentially your brain can get away with it. There's a backup method there. Your thyroid doesn't really have that same uh task switching ability, and so if you restrict, you know, severely under 50-75 grams of carbohydrates, you're probably gonna thyroid's gonna take a hit and you're gonna be able to, you're gonna have a harder time to lose fat because your thyroid isn't gonna be functioning great. And uh again, training performance takes a hit, and then the lack of fiber long term, I think, can be an issue for a lot of folks as well. And so I always try to take context uh context into things, right? If it's working, I want to understand why it works, right? So, you know, the elimination diet of carnivore basically just reveals some of the things that might need to be worked on when we're reintroducing foods because the goal is always to be reintroducing, right? Minimizing things is great, but I I think most people want a life of diversity, right? And again, I've seen this just so you know, carnivore is not new. It was called Atkins Diet for fat people when I was young. Uh, and before that, it was like in the bodybuilding space, it was called the Vince Geranda diet. It was basically steak and eggs, and he was like a famous bodybuilder in the 50s that made it very popular. And so it's always been kicking around. It's just things have life cycles. When you've been doing this as long as I have, I've seen seen the same three things come and go um multiple times, and so that's that's something to just pay attention to, okay? And so there's no diet for every single person or situation, every strategy can work for someone, and it's like how long, how often, and how sustainable is this? And the carnivore diet itself, I would say, is probably not very sustainable long term for most people. Now, I'm gonna be honest with you, I kind of like it. Um, and I eat what you would call like an animal-based diet, which is a version of the carnivore diet. So the carnivore diet is basically meat and organs, maybe some collagen, um, you know, and some bone broth. An animal-based diet is uh, you know, I eat a lot of my calories from things coming from from animal byproducts, so you know, cheese, yogurts, butters, meats of all sorts, um, preferably ruminants, eggs, uh, that's kind of and and the reason that I like that is because I just quote unquote like it. Uh, it's the palate for me, right? I'm I'm not into a lot of other things, and so that that's really easy for me. And uh, you know, but not everyone's gonna have that same palate. And so there's just a different strategy for everyone, right? And so if you've been thinking about trying the carnivore diet, if you're you know, um just looking to like drop some body fat, etc., it's probably going to work because of its restrictive nature. But I want you to understand it's mostly because you're just dropping off an entire macronutrient called carbohydrates, excuse me, that people have a hard time oftentimes managing, especially around sugary carbohydrates, etc. And you know, I think for most people this is the case. I think restriction works for a short period of time because we actually have it's simple, right? It's like, okay, no more carbs, the end. Again, you start looking at six months, twelve months, when you start looking at these diets, pretty much no one that talks about them does them long term. Even the people that really coined carnivore this time around. And I know some of these people personally from my walk in fitness. Um, Paul, Dr. Paul Saladino, I've done a podcast with him way back in the day when I used to have a different type of fitness podcast. Um, Dr. Sean Baker, I've done some Zoom calls with him. And there's a few other proponents of this, you know, carnivore style. They've guess what? They've over the years since I've watched them do this, they've all added in back some honey, some fruits, again, some milks, some dairy, some cheese, some let some um, you know, kind of low oxalate vegetables like cucumbers and greens. Guess what? Because they just feel better, of course. And it's like anyone with a with a functioning understanding of physiology could have uh anticipated that. The thing is, is they were trying to sell something, right? And it's it catches a lot of people. And so I'll leave you with that. And by the way, you know, this this rebuild, I I mostly do these podcast episodes for my clients because I just want to keep providing them value. I want to kind of be this ultimate resource and download my brain over time so that they never need another coach again. But if you don't have a coach and you're looking for someone to help you optimize a strategy forward for your best health, I would love to be that person. Send me a message and I and I would love to connect. Thank you so much for being here. And if you have questions, just shoot me a message. I would I would love to help direct.