Recent changes

I’ve been at this carnivory lifestyle for years now, and I’m still learning how to improve it.

Here are two examples:

1. I stopped eating dairy products mid-November.

   I already knew I couldn’t eat cottage cheese or yoghurt, without experiencing cravings, but I also gave up hard cheese (which I didn’t eat a lot of, but sometimes at parties), butter, and heavy cream. I am slowly but surely dropping size. I’ve been worrying about these last 10 pounds for a couple of years, and now my regular pants are falling down. Go figure. I mean, Go, Figure! That’s without extra exercise (the running I talked about in August lasted only a few weeks, and even the weightlifting I usually do was mostly left out over the holidays) and without restricting calories by design.

   I interpret this to mean that dairy products were interfering with my satiety, perhaps because of the extra insulin boost they induce. Unfortunately, I haven’t had serum ketone strips for a while, so I don’t know if this corresponds to higher ketones or not.

   
   

2. I more fully embraced lard.

   I set aside the butter, and more recently I also set aside the coconut oil. (I didn’t use coconut oil when I started carnivory, but I have used it for a long time in the hopes of increasing ketones, and to enjoy in the Bullet-Proof-style coffee.) I have been known to eat mayonnaise from time to time, just because it tastes good on cold chicken, even though I would otherwise never touch soy or canola oil. I stopped doing that, too.

   You know what I’ve re-discovered?

   Bacon drippings. I’ve been dutifully collecting the stuff for years, filtering it through a paper towel, and frying with it. Still, it always would get to the point where I had more than I was using. But now I’m eating it.

   • With a little salt, I think it is just as good as mayonnaise for egg or chicken salad.
   • I blend it into broth, and a cup of that is every bit as delicious as a bullet-proof coffee in my book.
   • I still fry with it, but I add more than I used to.
   • I dip bites of leaner meat into it.

   I’ve shifted my attitude further in the direction of considering fat a food, and in considering plants to be suboptimal sources, even if they happen to have MCTs or high saturated fat content.

   Don’t forget that fat is actually an organ. Whoever said that skin was the largest organ in the body was wrong. Lard doesn’t just have a beautiful fatty acid profile. It has choline, a little zinc and selenium, vitamin E, and a lot of vitamin D.

   
   

   Oh yeah, and in stark contrast to butter and coconut oil, it is essentially free. It’s a by-product of something the family already eats, and my rate is still below the supply.